by R. L. King
He almost hurried down the hallway toward the restrooms, sure there must be a back door—but then it occurred to him that if these two were looking for someone, they’d have staked one of their number out there to watch for escapees. His alternative would be dangerous in one way, but possibly safer because they’d never expect it. In any case, he didn’t have long to decide: he could only hold the invisibility spell for another minute or so.
Before he could think about what a rash chance he was taking, he strode back into the bar. Giving the two figures—a man and a woman—a wide berth, he slipped past them and headed for the door. He was about to use another illusion to hide opening the door when it opened from the other side to admit a pair of women, deep in conversation. Stone held his breath until they passed, then slipped out the closing door into the street.
A quick look around with magical sight didn’t reveal any obvious watchers. Already feeling the invisibility spell beginning to slip, he hurried across the street and hid behind the boxes where Errin and Jeritha had waited. They weren’t there now.
He watched the bar’s door from his hiding place. Five minutes later, it opened again and the man and woman exited. With one last perfunctory glance around, they strode off down the street in the opposite direction from the café where Errin had told him to meet them.
He sagged against the wall, letting his breath out. That had been close—assuming those people had been looking for him at all. He had no way to know if it was true. Best to assume it was, though. The quicker they could get away from here and find a place to hide, the better. He only hoped Tanissa’s friend’s bakery wasn’t being watched too.
He gave it a couple more minutes to make sure, checked for watchers again, then strode off down the street as if taking a leisurely stroll.
Errin and Jeritha were at the busy café, seated in the back. They glanced up as he drew closer, trying to look nonchalant but he could see the relief in Errin’s aura. Jeritha had a muffin on a small plate, while Errin once again had only a glass of water. He noticed most of the tables were occupied, but the two near Errin and Jeritha were empty. The shop had no other non-magical customers.
“Thank the gods,” Jeritha said. “We thought they’d gotten you.”
“They might have if you two hadn’t warned me. Thanks for that.” He dropped into the chair opposite them.
“I don’t know if they were looking for you,” Errin said. “But they looked like they had more in mind than getting a drink. I figured it was better not to take chances.”
“Absolutely.” Stone perused the hovering magical menu on the table as if he could read it.
“Did you find the person you were looking for? Will she help?”
“Yes. She’s scared, but I don’t think she’ll betray us. We have to get to her, though. Do you still have the map?”
Together, with Errin pretending to be dull-witted but actually contributing most of the assistance over their earring communicators, they located the address Tanissa had given them.
“That will be tricky,” Errin said. “It’s fairly far into the private section. The good news is, if our IDs pass the checkpoint to get us in, there should be a lot less surveillance once we’re there. They watch more out here because it’s where most of the outsiders stay.”
“And they’re probably arrogant enough to think nobody can fool their detection methods, right?”
“That too.”
“We should go, then. She wants to meet us in an hour. Is that reasonable from here?”
“It will be close. We can’t use the teleporters, since neither of you two knows how to calibrate them. We’d better go.”
The checkpoint was several blocks’ walk from the café. By the time they reached it, only half of their allotted hour remained. Stone studied the small building up ahead, noticing the lack of a wall or other overt barrier preventing anyone from getting through by walking around it. Magical sight revealed the truth, though: shimmering magic extended from the street to form a dome enclosing the inner part of the city. “That’s quite a ward they’ve got there.”
“It is impressive,” Jeritha agreed, though she didn’t sound like she thought that was a good thing.
“How do we get through it? Is the checkpoint manned?”
“That’s where our identification comes in,” Errin said. “If you two were on your own you could just walk through at any point, or take the teleporter—the signet rings allow passage through the ward for residents. Non-residents and all non-magical people have to pass through the checkpoint.”
“They are a paranoid lot, aren’t they?” Stone watched two obvious mundanes disappear inside the building.
“As I told you before, the cities don’t trust each other at all. They’re constantly afraid of espionage—of somebody from another city finding out what they’re up to. And they know about the resistance movement. They don’t respect it much, but they’re aware of it. Come on—I’ll feel a lot better when we’re on the other side.”
Inside the small building, they found a setup similar to the one back at the original teleporter, in miniature. Instead of a soaring, two-story building with an atrium, stairway, and glass offices on either side, this one had only a single story. A series of high windows let in the midday light, and a cream-colored partition lined with graceful, moving abstract art blocked the view of the area beyond. Several openings in the partition revealed uniformed mages checking identification, and once again the line for unaccompanied non-magical people was longer than the others.
Stone strode to an empty line, with Jeritha and Errin close behind him. “Damned nuisance,” he muttered to the waiting mage. “If I didn’t have to take my servant with me, I wouldn’t have to put up with this.”
“I know, and I’m sorry,” the man said. He shot a contemptuous glance toward Errin, then focused back on Stone. “Do you have her papers?”
“Right here.” He handed them over, using the same impatient but resigned demeanor he used when he had to go to the DMV back on Earth. “Haven’t had to do this in a while—it won’t take long, right? I’m already late for a meeting.”
“No, no, assuming her papers are in order it will be fine.” The man examined the documents and studied Errin with magical sight.
“The bag is mine,” Stone said quickly, before the mage asked. He took slow deep breaths, focusing on keeping his aura under control. It was all right that Errin looked nervous—that was probably expected—but he couldn’t afford to. Fortunately, channeling his contempt for this society as a whole helped. “I had her carry it, because—” He shrugged, as if to say why the hell not?
“Of course, of course. We just have to be a bit more careful today—got a notice that some…undesirables might be trying to get into the city, so we need to be on the lookout for them.”
Stone only tensed for a second, then relaxed and spoke in a bored drawl. “I hope you catch them. It’s pathetic when this kind of thing happens. They should crack down on it.”
“Oh, I agree completely.” He handed the papers back. “Have a pleasant day. Again, I’m sorry to delay your progress.”
“It’s not your fault,” Stone said with a scathing glance toward Errin, who shrank back under his scrutiny as if expecting him to strike her. He stowed the papers in his coat. “Come on,” he snapped to her. “I won’t slow down for you, so keep up.”
They didn’t speak to each other until they’d exited the building and headed off down a side street that pointed them in the right direction toward the bakery. “I’d rather not repeat that,” Errin said. She looked annoyed.
“Nor I,” Stone agreed. “Being forced to treat you like that—” He shook his head in disgust. “You’re brighter than the whole bloody lot of them.”
“Probably,” she agreed with an amused smile. “It’s all right—I just have to keep reminding myself why we’re here.” She glanced at Jeritha, who hadn’t spoken in a while. “Are you all right?”
The Traveler nodded. “That was c
lose. I didn’t want to say anything, but just as we got through the checkpoint, I saw the two from the bar coming in.”
“Damn,” Stone muttered. He checked back the way they’d come, but the street was clear. “You said you could see magic all the time—does that mean you can spot anyone trying to follow us invisibly?”
“Yes. And I’ve been doing that. But if we’d gotten there only a few minutes later—”
“Let’s not think about that,” Errin said, checking her watch. “Time’s ticking, and we’ve got quite a distance to walk yet.”
Stone pulled out the map and studied it, fixing the route in his mind so they wouldn’t have to consult it again. “Let’s go.”
The inner section of Temolan was even more beautiful than its outer counterpart. The buildings were all tall by necessity—even at the level of magic on Calanar, it wasn’t practical for a floating city to sprawl like Drendell did—and each one, though they all shared an overall consistency of design, possessed its own individual style differentiated by slight variations in paint color, unique carvings, and the delicate, multicolored magical vines crawling up their sides. The general style seemed to be that businesses—restaurants, shops, bars, and similar places—were on the bottom floors, with the upper ones reserved for residences.
Most of the streets ringing the city weren’t straight, but instead meandered in easy curves with shorter, straighter streets radiating out from the center. The overall effect was peaceful, mellow, and pleasant, especially against the brilliant, jewel-like blue sky, a few shades darker than Earth’s. Most of the other people on the streets ambled by in no particular hurry; occasionally a sleek, hovering ground craft would float past on one of the streets.
“I could get to like this place,” Stone said. “If it wasn’t populated by conceited bigots, I mean.”
“Careful,” Errin said. “Don’t look like a tourist. You and Jeritha are supposed to live here, remember.”
“Sorry, sorry.” He picked up his pace.
The other thing he noticed right away when checking with magical sight: magic was everywhere here, even more than it had been in the outer sector. Every building had multiple shimmering wards around it, and faint traces of magic hovered over the streets, the trees, the people. He saw no sign of anything as prosaic as a trash receptacle, even though the streets and buildings were so preternaturally clean and unweathered it almost looked as if they weren’t real—like a life-sized architect’s rendering of the city of tomorrow. He wondered if the abundance of magic would actually help disguise them: with so much ambient arcane energy, he imagined most of the Talented had become adept at filtering it out and noticing only what they needed to pay attention to. Sure, he and his friends would have to remain on their guard, but perhaps not as much as he’d feared before.
By the time they reached the address Tanissa had given them (after only two minor wrong turns), it was five minutes past the allotted time. Stone couldn’t read the elegant, looping script on the front of the pleasant first-floor shop with a large display window, but the hovering magical image of a delicious-looking loaf of bread and selection of muffins in front of it was enough to verify they were in the right place. He couldn’t see the shop’s interior through the window.
“Do you see anything?” he asked Jeritha over their link.
“No—I’ve been watching, but I think we’re safe for the moment.”
Taking advantage of that before it changed, Stone hurried over to the bakery’s door and tried it. It was locked, as expected, so he knocked three times.
Instantly, as if whoever waited inside had been anticipating their arrival, it swung open. The three of them slipped inside and it closed behind them.
Stone’s first impression of Tanissa was that she looked even more tired than she had during their brief communication on the orb. Not as if she hadn’t slept, but as if whatever she’d experienced since returning to Temolan had worn down her spirit. She still had the same short bob and sturdy figure he remembered, but the intelligent, kindly spark in her eyes was conspicuously absent. Instead of the white coat she’d worn at the clinic, she wore a blue blouse, dark trousers, and a short jacket with a few pins. No high-collared coat, Stone noticed.
She tilted her head, studying the three newcomers with wary care. “Stone…?” she ventured.
“It’s me, yes.” Stone dropped the illusion for a moment so she could see. “It’s good to see you, Tanissa. I was concerned when I heard you’d been called back here.”
“How did you know that?” She looked around constantly, as if expecting someone to burst in on them.
“I went back to the clinic to ask for your help, but Byra said they’d come for you. Are you all right?”
She let her breath out. “Define ‘all right’. Did they hurt me? No. It’s probably my family’s doing—they’re influential enough to pull strings, so everyone treats me as mildly eccentric instead of actively dangerous. They can’t imagine why anyone would want to waste their time in Drendell healing the Dim when they could live in splendor here.” Her voice dripped with bitterness. “So here I am.”
“I’m damned glad you are. We’re in trouble, and we need your help if you’re willing.”
For the first time she seemed to notice Errin and Jeritha, and her eyes narrowed in suspicion. “Who are these people?”
“I won’t tell you their names—probably safer. But they’re working with me. I trust them completely.”
She studied them for several moments, obviously using magical sight. “So what do you want me to do?” she asked. “What kind of trouble are you in? And how do you have magic?”
“Long story. I always had magic—something just happened to…short-circuit it for a while. It’s back now, though. And as for the trouble we’re in—do you remember the man I was looking for? The one you said was a legend or a ghost?”
“Yes…”
“Well, he might be a legend, but he’s not a ghost—not yet, anyway. That might change. Have you heard of the Underground?”
Her wariness intensified. “I’ve heard rumors.”
“We were there. He was there. The Talented raided it, and they took him. They’re holding him prisoner now, and we need to get him out.”
“Wait a moment.” Tanissa paced, her aura radiating stress. “You’re saying this man who’s rumored to be one of the most powerful mages on the planet got captured?”
“Someone he trusted betrayed him. Apparently this comes from the top levels of the Talented’s power structure. Anyway, yes, it’s true.”
“So…what do you want me to do? I’m not a fighter. I’m a healer. I wouldn’t know how to—”
“We know where they’ll be taking him tonight. But our contact—the person who was going to give us a place to lie low until then—was killed, and we’re not entirely sure how to get where we’re going.”
“So…you need a place to stay? You’re not asking me to go with you?”
“No. I wouldn’t ask that of you—I certainly wouldn’t turn it down if you offered, but I understand that’s too much to expect. If you could let us stay somewhere until tonight and help us figure out where we need to go, that’s all I’m asking.”
Still, she looked skeptical. Fearful. She glanced at the door again.
He gripped her shoulders gently. “Tanissa—please. I know you hate it here. I know you care about helping non-magical people. This is a way you can make a difference.”
Her shoulders trembled under his hands. She looked at her feet for several seconds as Stone and the others remained silent. Then her gaze came up, decisive now. “All right. I’ll help you. But—”
“But what?”
“You said if you were successful, I could come with you. Away from here. Did you mean that?”
Stone exchanged glances with Errin, who looked surprised but recovered quickly.
“Yes,” he said firmly. “It might take a bit of time—the way we got here was a bit…unconventional, and we don’t have room fo
r another person. But—”
“We’ll find a way,” Errin said. “I promise—we’ll make this work.” To Stone, she added, “I might be able to make a few modifications. It won’t be comfortable, but we’ll get there.”
“I don’t care about comfort,” Tanissa said. “If it means I can get out of this gods-forsaken hellhole to someplace where people aren’t insane, I’ll do whatever I need to do.”
“All right, then,” Stone said. “Thank you, Tanissa.”
“Don’t thank me yet. I’m still nervous about this. They haven’t bothered me much now that I’m back here, but I know I’m still under suspicion. We’ll have to be careful. I can’t take you back to my place—I’m sure they’ll be watching it. Probably the best thing is to stay here until tonight. It won’t be the most comfortable place, but at least there are good things to eat.”
43
Stone knew he should sleep—he hadn’t gotten more than a brief rest since the previous night at the Underground—but his mind stubbornly refused to calm down and allow it. Finally he gave it up, left the bakery’s back room, where Jeritha and Errin were dozing on a couple of sofas, and drifted out to the front of the shop.
Tanissa sat at one of the tiny tables, picking at the remains of a small, yellow-frosted cake. She didn’t appear to notice Stone, or at least didn’t acknowledge him. Her expression as she looked out the shop’s front window was pensive.
“Are you all right?” he asked gently.
“I don’t know. Just…thinking.” She indicated the cake. “Want one? My friend really is a wonderful baker.”
“Thank you, no.” He’d already had a muffin and a glass of cold tea earlier; he hadn’t had much of an appetite even before that. “Don’t let me stop you, though.”
She chuckled. “I’ve always had a sweet tooth, ever since I was a little girl.” She tore off another chunk of the cake. “Especially when I’m stressed about something. Probably why I don’t match the Talented ideal of what the ruling class should look like.”
