Queen's Gambit

by Karen Chance

  * * *

  In a few moments, we were back in the limo again, going where, I wasn’t sure. But I had a picnic basket and Zheng was finally talking, so I was happy. And he was talking a lot.

  “Look, you have to understand a few things before we get started. Like the fact that there’s two different Hong Kongs right now, and I don’t mean human vs. supe. There are a few areas around the portals that are okay; there’s some stuff in the financial sector that wasn’t hit too hard, either. But then there’s the stuff you’ve been seeing since you got here—areas devastated by the battle that are probably going to take years to put back right, and that’s after we get all the pillars for the shield back up. And then there’s that.”

  I hadn’t been paying much attention to what was happening outside the windows, since the back of the limo made for its own snug little world. But when he nodded to the left, I looked left, and then lowered the tinted glass to get a better view. It didn’t help much.

  Instead of a neon lit cityscape, I found myself staring at what looked like a tide rolling in—one of thick, white fog. It was so dense that only a few, blackened and burnt tops of buildings broke the cloud cover. Or whatever it was, because I hadn’t noticed any fog tonight.

  “What is that?” I asked.

  “A problem,” Zheng said. “And why our consul has me stationed here for the time being.”

  “Why does she care what happens in Hong Kong?” Louis-Cesare asked.

  “I’m getting there.” Zheng settled back against the expansive seat. “After the battle, life was pretty disrupted for a while. We had the dark mages who’d attacked us, and the traitorous dogs from the East Asian Court who had helped them, to track down. Ming-de and her soldiers were all over the place, ordering people about and contradicting the commands of the local authorities, creating mass confusion. There was looting going on, there were droves of people clogging the portals, trying to get the hell out, and there were mages crawling everywhere, attempting to get the shield stabilized or to collect their dead or to do investigations . . .

  “My point is, we were busy.”

  I nodded.

  “Then one day, out of the blue, we woke up to find that a third of the city looked like that.” He nodded at the swirling clouds of white. “Whole blocks were taken over by that stuff, and wherever it went, magic went haywire.”

  “What do you mean, haywire?” Louis-Cesare asked.

  “I mean huge clouds of free-floating, unattached magic, with no spells binding it.”

  “Like wild magic?” I said, talking about the naturally occurring stuff that the world throws out from time to time.

  But Zheng shook his head. “If by ‘like’ you mean in the vague ballpark of, sure. Otherwise, not really. You know how talismans store up power for months, sometimes years, to get enough for a single spell?”

  I nodded. Me and my bank account knew all about that. Magic was expensive, which was why most magic workers normally used their own. Any spell you had to buy that was worth a damn cost the Earth, not because the spell itself was that hard to cast, although some were harder than others. But because of the power that went into it.

  The amount of charms I’d expended staying alive in Hassani’s temple would have cost me . . . I didn’t even know. Years of hard work, probably, if I hadn’t had the senate’s reserve to draw from. And then Zheng said something that had me sitting up and forgetting my picnic.

  “Well, there are clouds in there,” he gestured at the fog, “that have enough juice to run a major ward for the next thousand years.”

  “What?”

  He nodded. “And the problem is, when one of those connects to a spell—any spell—one of two things happens. Either the spell blows up, overloaded to the point that it can’t maintain integrity anymore, or . . .”

  “Or what?”

  “Or that,” Zheng said, looking out of the side of the car again, but not in any particular direction, because it had started circling.

  Louis-Cesare leaned over and we both looked down, only at what, I didn’t know. It was big, though, maybe the circumference of an oil tanker, and was clogging a small street. It was round like a tanker as well, only not as long. In fact, it kind of looked like—

  “A soup can?” I said, noticing a familiar blank spot on a nearby billboard.

  We were nearing the edge of the billowing whiteness, but were still well out of the danger zone. Or we should have been. But smallish tendrils were creeping out of the main flow here and there, and one had snagged the billboard, curling around it like a fist.

  And, sure enough, what had been a simple, animated ad, suddenly got up from where it had landed in the roadway and ran down the street, ahead of a bunch of mages that tore off after it.

  They managed to get lasso spells on it, golden ropes of gleaming power that brought it down, just shy of an apartment block. It didn’t look like anybody was living there; in fact, I didn’t see anybody in the whole area except for the mages, and the kicking, screaming thing on the ground. Which was now trying to roll over and crush them all.

  But it made my heart skip a beat, nonetheless.

  “They run out of the dead zones, as we’ve started calling them, from time to time,” Zheng explained. “We’ve taken down all the magical ads and graffiti we can find out here, but occasionally one slips past us. And inside the fog . . . well, there aren’t too many people willing to go inside the fog.”

  “That’s why all the billboards were blank, or text only, on our way here,” Louis-Cesare said. Because I guessed he’d noticed, too.

  Zheng nodded. “The easy ones are the graffiti,” he continued. “Most of them are too weak to survive an infusion of that much magic, and just explode. Or the advertisements that somebody did construct well enough to take it, but which were designed to be fairly benign. They’re mostly just a nuisance.”

  I thought about the gun that Ray and I had devised, which had been based off of magical ads that we’d encountered during the battle for this city, and which we’d overloaded with power to help us out. I’d seen them slow down, and in some cases stop, a troop of war mages, the magical equivalent of tanks. I thought Zheng was kind of underselling the combat potential of animated soup cans.

  But he was already going on.

  “Others—the more dangerous kind—are protection wards and spells that used to guard bank vaults, weapons’ shops, and jewelry stores, places where people were serious about others not getting in. Unlike the ads, those were designed to be mean, and now they got the power to back it up. But the worst of all, the ones that really ruin everybody’s good time, are the arsenals.”

  “What . . . arsenals?” Louis-Cesare asked, looking like he didn’t want to know.

  “A lot of the triads and such had arsenals in the dead zones. Thy needed someplace to put all the stuff they . . . creatively acquired . . . on jobs, or that they were planning to sell or use themselves, if the situation warranted it. There are disputes from time to time between rivals, and it’s always a good idea to have a reserve. Cheung had a storehouse in there himself, for emergencies, and for wards and weapons he was planning to trade to the fey.”

  I started to get the picture. “But now, with all this free-floating magic . . .”

  “They’re running loose. And sometimes the weapons encounter an ad with the arms and legs they lack, and merge with it. Making a hybrid with tons of power and a really bad attitude. The good thing is, they largely stay in the dead zones, ‘cause that’s where the magic clouds that feed them are located. But you’ll notice I said ‘largely’.”

  “The monsters,” I said, remembering what Lily had said.

  Zheng nodded. “They get out sometimes, and prowl around the streets down there. But most of them can’t fly—”

  “Most of them?” Louis-Cesare repeated.

  “—so elevated real estate has become real popular.”

  “I bet,” I said.

  “But what causes all this?” Louis-Cesare demanded
. “Wild magic is usually found in minute amounts in nature. It takes a thunderstorm and a witch who knows how to ride its power, or a talisman to make it usable. It doesn’t look like that!”

  “It’s found on minute amounts on Earth,” Zheng corrected.

  He sat back against the seat and poured us some whiskey. I had finished my tea, so I was happy enough for it, but I had a feeling that it was less hospitality and more a leftover from his human days. A here-you’ll-need-it kind of thing.

  I took it anyway, because I did need it.

  I wasn’t liking where this conversation was going.

  “The shield that protects the city does double duty,” Zheng said, and since he didn’t sound as if he was changing the subject, I assumed this was relevant. “See, nobody else sits on top of a ley line vortex the way we do. It’s considered, well, insane. The thought, before we proved everybody wrong, was that no shield could possibly withstand that kind of constant pressure. That it would buckle for sure.”

  “Why doesn’t it?” Louis-Cesare asked.

  “Because it’s made up of the energy of the lines. And, yeah, I know, that’s supposed to be impossible, too,” he said, before Louis-Cesare could object. “That’s what everyone was always told: the lines are too powerful; try to tame them and they’ll tame you instead, and by tame I mean dust to ashes. But our vortex is different.”

  “How different?” I said. “The one here is said to be more powerful than anywhere else, with more lines crossing and crisscrossing than at any other point on Earth—”

  “Exactly. It’s ironic, but ours is usable because it’s so powerful. So many lines run together here that their energy gets jumbled up. Instead of pooling, like in other vortexes, it’s more like a volcano erupting, all the time. Only you ever see magma, the kind that floats to the surface of a lava flow?”

  “I guess,” I said, not really seeing where this was going.

  “It’s black, right? That’s because the crust is cooler than the stuff underneath. The same is true here. The ley line energy piles up, higher and higher, until it forces some of it closer to real space than anywhere else that we’ve found. And that kind of . . . cools it off . . . over time.”

  “Cools it off?”

  “Okay, technically thins it out might be better, but it wrecks the analogy. The point is, it’s like the crust on magma as it encounters the air. Hot and burning underneath, but cooler, and thus less dangerous on the top. That’s what we use, the very top most layer, forming part of the energy of the lines themselves into the shield that protects us. The rest goes into the phase that keeps us out of alignment with real space, and able to live without having to hide what we are. And the remainder, a relatively small amount—”

  “You skim off for yourself,” Louis-Cesare said, looking like something had finally made sense.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Dory, Hong Kong

  I tensed up, afraid that comment was likely to piss Zheng off again, not because it had been belligerent, but because it was true. No way was a city founded by pirates and gangsters going to miss a chance like that. But he merely shrugged.

  “Of course. The gals back at Lily’s, for instance, that’s how we fuel them. That’s also why they get a little aggressive, from time to time. Smaller bits of power get flung off that thing,” he gestured with his glass at the wall of ominous whiteness, “that are too thin to see, but when they impact one of the girls . . .”

  “But why do they get hostile?” I asked. “You designed them, right?”

  “Lily designed the bodies,” he corrected. “But the personalities were those of her friends, and some of those ladies have a temper. But mostly, they just get a little willful or catty or whatever. They’re not a problem.

  “Those are the problem.”

  I realized that we’d started moving again, and were now approaching some kind of stadium. I couldn’t see it too well, as it was on the opposite side of the car, but it looked pretty big. Although not compared to what was floating in cages beside it.

  “What is that?” I asked, staring at the nearest one.

  “What we came to see.”

  The car swung around, getting into a queue for admission, I guessed. A bunch of guys on bright red rickshaws were patrolling the airspace around the main event, probably to discourage freeloaders. The new position gave me a better view and answered a few questions, although not all of them.

  The “stadium” wasn’t actually floating, as I’d first thought. Even for a city with magic to burn, that would have been excessive. The base was five skyscrapers built around a small park, and the still functioning bridges connecting them. The roofs of the skyscrapers and the entire length of the bridges were crowded with spectators, but far more people had brought their own seats. Thousands upon thousands were crammed into vehicles of all descriptions, which filled the spaces between the buildings as well as the skies all around.

  Some of the flying stadium seats were small, including a ton of two or four-seater rickshaws. At the opposite end of the spectrum were levitating platforms holding hundreds of spectators in nicely slanting rows so that everybody got a view. And in between was every kind of vehicle imaginable.

  There were buses with twenty or more people on top, yelling and cheering. There were stretch limos serving as stadium boxes for the rich and well connected. There were people on things that weren’t technically vehicles at all, with the sofa I’d almost collided with earlier suddenly making more sense as I spotted dozens more just like it. Some people had even had their makeshift sky houses towed over to the event, so that they could watch in comfort from their balconies.

  And then there were the cages, given plenty of space by the crowd, maybe because they were rocking from side to side while the contents screeched and cawed and howled. Even with the limo’s obvious soundproofing, the ruckus could be clearly heard. As could the low-level roar of the crowd, the whir of hundreds of fan blades, and some Cantonese being broadcast either through a spell or a hell of a lot of loud speakers.

  It must be deafening outside, I thought, wondering how anybody stood it. And then I noticed a guy in a rickshaw with some Chinese writing on it, and a picture of earplugs underneath. Ray would like this place, I thought with a pang. They really knew how to merchandise.

  “When the Circle started to pull their people out of here for the war, it left us with a problem,” Zheng said. “Local mages and some reinforcements from the mainland had to take over patrolling the dead zones, but most didn’t know how. They were wardsmiths and spellbinders, not war mages, and this was not their skill set.

  “But there wasn’t anybody else, so the Circle started bringing some of the nastier things they captured over here, where the new guys got a chance to learn the techniques they needed to take ‘em down. Word got around and people began coming to watch, then somebody figured, hey, why not charge admission to help with the rebuilding . . .”

  “And, thus, a new sport was born,” Louis-Cesare murmured.

  Zheng nodded. “All the usual ground games—football, horse racing and the like—have been cancelled due to the possibility of the participants being attacked. The matches quickly became the only game in town. Now, it’s not just new mages learning the ropes. They still have some of that, usually as a warm up. But there’s also teams of crazy people who volunteer to take on the worst of the worst.”

  “And the city allows that?” I asked. “What if they get killed?”

  Zeng shrugged. “It’s volunteer only, so they know what they’re getting into. And mage squads are in place—the trainers and their students—if things get out of hand. But the purses for the victors are pretty substantial, as the better the show the more spectators it draws in.” He shrugged.

  “The Wild, Wild East,” I said, repeating something I’d thought earlier.

  Zheng laughed. “That it is. At least until we can figure out what the hell went wrong with the system.”

  “What did go wrong?” Louis-Cesare asked, whi
le I eyed up the creature in the nearest cage.

  It looked like an Escher drawing of some type of squid. I couldn’t be sure as it kept morphing and twisting in totally impossible ways that hurt the brain and crossed the eyes, while flashing in changing, neon colors that didn’t help. Graffiti, I thought, looking away before I was mesmerized. Guess not all of it exploded. And now some kid’s idea of cool had turned into something that could possibly eat your brain after it finished frying it.

  “That’s why I’m here,” Zheng said, answering Louis-Cesare. “Our consul isn’t too happy about a boat load of free-floating magic in the middle of a war. She wants me to find out why the system that worked for hundreds of years is suddenly bubbling over with extra power, and what can be done to stop it.”

  “And have you?”

  He snorted. “Do I look like a mage to you? I lived here most of my life, but that doesn’t mean I’m an expert on how everything works. Fortunately, I do know a few. They’ve been working with the Circle’s men to fix things, and their theory is simple: get the damned pillars back up.”

  “The pagodas that were destroyed when the city fell,” I explained to Louis-Cesare, who hadn’t been here. “They served as waystations for channeling the power of the lines into the phase.”

  “And they channeled a lot,” Zheng added. “They absorbed a ton of power, even though most of them were redundant. As we found out the hard way, one pillar can support the phase alone if required, but the designers put in multiple redundancies because if the damned thing fails, the city falls back into real space, taking out human Hong Kong along with it.”

  Louis-Cesare nodded. We’d been briefed about this in the senate, although judging from his expression, being here made it much more real. Try being in the battle, I thought, remembering.

  “But now that most of these pillars are down,” Louis-Cesare said. “That power is going where?”

  Zheng gestured at the white fog again, boiling maybe ten or so blocks away. “In there. It’s just floating around, like overflow from a faucet that nobody remembers how to turn off, because everybody who designed this city is dead. People know how to run the system, but not how to restrict it to a trickle until we get the rest of the pillars back up.”