Last Bastion

by Rachel Aaron

  "You'll be fried chicken," Sibyl said smugly. "I'm backed up to the cloud."

  I rolled my eyes and crouched down, pressing my plastic-covered head against the door so the cameras in my goggles could get a good shot of the spellwork at my feet. "Any clue what it does?"

  "Nope," she said after the picture scanned. "Zero matches returned from all spellwork libraries. Looks like a custom job."

  I grinned inside my mask. Custom spellwork was the hallmark of a serious mage. Probably an unsavory one since he was hiding down here, but unsavory magic sold even better than legitimate stuff, and Cleaners couldn't afford to be picky.

  "I bet he's got something good in there. Mages are always loaded."

  "Not always," Sibyl said. "I mean, you're a mage, and you're broke."

  "Leave me my hope," I begged as I rose to my feet. "It's been a really bad couple of months, so let's just assume this apartment is piled high with priceless magical objects of high resale value."

  "Whatever you need to tell yourself," Sibyl said. "But what do you want to do about the ward? This door's the only way in according to the blueprints."

  I frowned at the symbols by my feet. Deciphering spellwork had never been my strong suit, but this stuff looked like arcane chicken scratch. I couldn't even spot the variables that would tell me if this was just an alarm ward or something that would cut your head off if you crossed it. It felt strong, though. Now that I was standing right next to it, I could feel the ward's magic humming even through the soupy ambient power of the DFZ. Whatever this thing did, it did it hard, which meant my best move was to avoid it entirely.

  "Right," I said, stepping back. "Let's try the crowbar."

  The crowbar was a spell of my own invention. Unlike the deadbeat owner of the apartment I was attempting to loot, I wasn't a Thaumaturge who treated magic like a mathematical equation to be solved. I knew enough spellwork to get by--since it followed logical rules that could be written down, Thaumaturgy was the easiest form of magic to teach, which meant it was the one that every mage learned in school--but I could never wrap my head around the higher logic needed to be actually good.

  For me, magic had always been a feeling, a physical sensation I could trace with my fingers, like dipping my hand into a stream of water. If Thaumaturges used spellwork to build complex logic-gated irrigation systems, then I cast by splashing. As my tutors had lectured me countless times, it was a fast, reckless way to use magic (or, if they were being less polite, lazy and dangerous). To me, though, it had always been the only way that felt right. I still appreciated quality Thaumaturgy--my poncho was proof of that; the thing was covered in top-tier corporate spellwork--but when it came to casting for myself, all those rules and variables just got in the way. It was a lot simpler to do everything freehand, which was what I did right now, reaching out to grab two big fistfuls of the DFZ's ambient magic.

  As always, touching the city's magic in the Underground felt like dipping my fingers into oil-slicked water. Noisy water. The magic down here was full of car horns and voices and the rumble of engines mixed with the smell of greasy street food and wet pavement. Even the texture was different than the magic up on the Skyways: syrupy and thick, like trying to hold motor oil between your fingers.

  Such thick, slippery power would have been a nightmare to push through spellwork, but when it came to my slapdash casting, the viscosity actually made things easier. I didn't even bother with a casting circle. I just kept pouring the power back and forth between my cupped hands, adding to it in fistfuls until the magic in my hands felt greater than the magic radiating from the ward on the door.

  This turned out to be slightly more than I could safely hold, so I picked up the pace, squeezing the oozing magic between my hands until it was more or less the shape I wanted: a dense bar with a hook at one end, exactly like a real crowbar. The form was entirely for me. Magic didn't follow actual physics any more than dreams did, but casting was all about understanding. The whole point of spellwork equations was to prove to yourself logically why something would work. Since I'd never fully understood any spellwork, that method had never worked for me, but I knew what a crowbar did. I knew how to jam one into a door and wedge it open, so that was what I did now, jamming my magic between the ward and the door frame until the whole thing snapped with an explosive crack.

  "Whoa!" Sibyl said as I jumped away from the splintering wood. "That's one way to do it."

  "At least we don't have to worry about the other locks now," I said, nodding at the door, which had snapped in half from the pressure.

  "I know, right?" my AI agreed. "Who needs proper casting? Brute force wins again!"

  "Hey, I do better when I stick to what I'm good at," I said defensively. Then my face split into a grin as I turned the laserlike beams of my headlamps toward the room I'd just revealed. "Let's see what we've got!"

  Being a Cleaner is all about being an optimist. No matter how many apartments full of dirty clothes and rat droppings you cleaned out, there was always that chance that the next one would be a treasure trove, and like I said, I had a good feeling about this place. I dove at what was left of the door like a kid jumping into a pool on the first day of summer, knocking the broken wood out of my way as if it were brittle glass. The more I cleared out, the more excited I became, because the ward on the doorframe was even better than I'd expected. I couldn't see the individual markings anymore now that I'd broken them, but I knew from the burn mark they'd left in the wood that that thing had been seriously powerful. I'd popped it fairly easily, but I broke into apartments (legally) for a living. A more standard mage, one who cared about fancy stuff like preserving spellwork or being quiet, would have tried to unlock it and probably gotten themselves fried as a result.

  Fried and recorded. Now that the door was gone, I could see all kinds of wires running along the ceiling behind it. The entire front foyer of the apartment was rigged with cameras, sensors, and a tripwire leading to a bucket of cement that had been rigged to drop from the top of the coat closet door. If I'd come in normally, that thing would have crushed my head, which only made me more excited. Whoever had lived down here had clearly been hiding something good. The only question was had he taken it with him when he'd skipped town without paying his rent?

  Going by what I could see from the doorway, my guess was no. It didn't look like anyone had ever taken anything out of here. Once you got past the traps at the front, the entire apartment was stacked floor to ceiling with boxes. There were a few canyonlike paths that ran between the stacks, but otherwise the whole place appeared to be little more than a glorified storage locker.

  My heart began to flutter at the sight. Other than actually scoring a major find, this was my favorite part of being a Cleaner. Pulling out my wire cutters, I disarmed the entryway, cutting the tripwires and the power feeds to the sensors. When I was certain I wouldn't get crushed, shot, or garroted by anything automated, I crept inside, stepping into the canyon of boxes like an explorer entering a pharaoh's tomb. That was exactly how I felt, too. Like I was Indiana Jones--the good one from the original classic movies, not the ghastly seventeen-film reboot they did in the 2040s. I was about to dig into the first pile to see what I'd scored when the smell hit me.

  "Ugh," I said, stumbling back. "What is that?"

  It smelled like rotting meat left out on a hot day. Given that the temperature inside the apartment was over ninety (the AC was the first thing Collections cut off when an account went delinquent), my guess was that something had crawled in and died, but this didn't smell like sewer rat or mana vole or any of the other usual suspects. It was also strong enough to get through my rebreather, which meant it was rank. A person without protective gear would probably have been gagging from the moment the door opened. Even with my mask, my stomach was still doing the twist as I swung my light around to find the source.

  "Is there a kitchen?" I asked Sibyl. "Maybe the previous occupant abandoned twenty pounds of bacon in the fridge."

  "No kitche
n," my AI replied. "According to the blueprints, it's just this room, the bedroom, and the bathroom."

  "Well, it's gotta be coming from somewhere," I said, breathing through my mouth, which actually made it worse since I could taste the stench now instead of just smelling it. "Let's check the bedroom."

  According to Sibyl, the bedroom was to my left, but there were so many boxes in my way that I couldn't even see the door. After much pushing and one really awful encounter with a spider web that I don't want to talk about, I eventually spotted my target: a flimsy wooden door with yet another ward etched into its pressboard frame. Unlike the ward on the front door, though, this one was dark. No magic answered me when I poked it, which meant it was either not active or someone wanted me to think it wasn't active so I'd go through and get fried.

  Hoping it was the former rather than the latter, I squeezed through the last of the boxes and grabbed the doorknob, which turned easily. But while the door opened, it didn't go more than a foot before hitting something. The obvious guess was more boxes, but this didn't feel like a box. It had too much give, and it made a strange clunk when the door hit it. Curious, I pushed harder, shoving whatever it was back until the crack in the door was wide enough for me to squeeze my head through...

  And see what was left of the dead body lying face down on the carpet.

  ***

  "God dammit, Broker!" I yelled into my phone. I was stalking back and forth in the mysteriously wet stairwell, too mad to care that my boots were splashing the unknown liquid up onto my legs. "You sold me a coffin!"

  "Calm down, Opal," Broker said, his drawling voice soothing, like a rancher trying to sweet-talk a sheep off a cliff. "It's not that big a deal."

  "Not a big deal? There's a dead guy rotting in my unit! Collections is supposed to check for this sort of thing!"

  "They did check," Broker said. "It says right here on the unit's record that they tried multiple times to contact the occupant. They even sent someone over to check in person, but he didn't answer."

  "Of course he didn't answer," I snapped. "He's dead! From the smell, I'd say he's been dead the whole thirty days his account's been delinquent. But that's not my problem. My problem is that you sold me a unit full of stuff that I can't sell. The DFZ might not have much in the way of laws, but inheritance is still a thing. I bid on that unit because it was small and I needed the money today. Now I can't touch anything until the city makes three good-faith attempts to contact dead dude's next of kin, which will take another month at least. Meanwhile, I'm stuck with a unit I can't use, and it's your fault!"

  "No need to get snippy," Broker grumbled. "We'll refund your bid, of course. Just give it a week to get through accounting and another fifteen business days for processing, and the full amount will be transferred back to your bank account, no problem."

  My scowl deepened. "How is it that you can take my payment instantly, but when I need it back, it suddenly takes fifteen business days?"

  "Hey, I just work here, sweetheart. I don't make the rules. But if you don't want to wait, you can go ahead and take your payment out of what's in the apartment."

  I frowned. "Is that legal?"

  "It's legal-ish," Broker said slyly. "Dead or not, he's still delinquent on his rent. The city has a right to that money whatever his next of kin says, and since we already recouped it when we sold the unit to you, I don't see why you couldn't take your share of the debt out of his heir's inheritance. We'll just write the whole thing up as a property lien. It's not like anyone's going to challenge it. I mean, the guy's been dead for a month and no one noticed. If he does have an heir, they clearly don't care. The unit will probably be put right back up for sale next month when Collections fails to find the next of kin, so think of this as your chance to get the good stuff early. Or wait for the refund. Makes no difference to me."

  From the tone of his voice, it clearly made a huge difference to Broker which one I picked. Approving a refund meant formally admitting that someone had messed up. Collection officers were supposed to verify if a unit was still occupied--or had a dead body in it--before putting it up for auction. Obviously, whoever had checked this unit had dropped the ball, which meant Broker had dropped the ball since it was his job as auctioneer to guarantee the units he sold.

  Sweeping those failures under the rug was undoubtedly why he was so willing to bend the usually intractable Cleaning rules into origami for me. A properly ruthless Cleaner would have held that over his head, but I had a debt payment due at the end of the week, and I needed my money. If Broker was going to let me pillage the best parts out of this unit without actually cleaning it for resale--the only work Cleaners were legally obligated to do after they won a unit--I was happy to oblige. I just hoped there was something in all those boxes that was worth the three hundred bucks I'd paid for the privilege of walking in on that horror show.

  "All right," I grumbled. "I'll take the unit."

  "Glad you see it my way," Broker said cheerfully. "I'm sending someone over to take care of the body right now. Go ahead and start digging through his stuff. Just do me a favor and don't touch anything that looks personal. You know, just in case they do manage to find someone who cares."

  I shrugged. "Fine with me. Not like there's a market for family photos."

  "You're a gem, Opal. See you at the next auction."

  I rolled my eyes at the tired old "gem" compliment and hit the End Call button.

  "So what now?" Sibyl asked as I lifted my poncho to slip my phone back into my jeans pocket. "Wait for the disposal team to come for the body?"

  "That could take hours," I said, walking back through the door I'd blown off on my way in. "If I had that kind of time to waste, I'd have made Broker give me a legit refund. No." I pulled my gloves back on. "We're going to get to work."

  Technically, AIs don't have actual emotions, but Sibyl was a top-of-the-line social companion bot, and she did a good job of sounding legitimately horrified. "You can't start digging through a dead guy's stuff while he's still lying on the floor!"

  "Why not?" I asked. "It's not as if he's going to complain, and I have a deadline."

  A hard one. I owed a very nasty individual a lot of money, and he wasn't flexible about payments. If I didn't have the cash by Friday, bad things were going to happen.

  "At least we have a lot to work with," I said, pointing at the wall of boxes. "There's so much here, some of it has to be good."

  "By what logic?" Sibyl asked.

  None, I admitted silently, but my AI already knew she was right, so I didn't bother bumming myself out by admitting the truth aloud. I just grabbed a box off the top of the pile and started ripping it open, peeling off the packing tape with a silent prayer to the living soul of the DFZ that something good was going to come out.

  ***

  Suffice it to say, my prayers were not answered. Two hours later--a hundred and twenty disgusting, sweaty, putrid minutes of digging through dusty boxes in a dead man's living room while said corpse was rotting not ten feet away--I had exactly zero to show for it. The best I could say was that at least it was interesting. Most of the boxes turned out to be full of scholarly books about ancient magical methodologies. Primarily different styles of alchemy, but there were several boxes on ancient Egyptian sorcery, plus a whole stack of books about extinct magical animals. Clearly, whoever our dead man had been, he'd been a fan of historical magic.

  I could relate. Before my life had gone to hell, I'd gotten my master's degree in magical art history and anthropology, which was a long-winded way of saying I studied old magical stuff left behind by ancient cultures. There was a surprising amount of it. In ancient times, the world had been very magical, even more magical than it was now. Then, for reasons only the Merlins knew, all that power had vanished.

  For nearly eleven centuries, roughly 1000 to 2035 CE, the world had been completely unmagical, a period we now called the Drought. During that dark time, all of those magical treasures--the enchanted swords and religious relics and
other venerated items of power crafted by ancient sorcerers and priests using techniques modern magic still didn't fully understand--lost their power and became merely pretty things. Some were preserved, coveted by various cultures and collectors as sacred objects even if they didn't actually work anymore, but countless more were lost to time.

  Time and ignorance. We'd never know how many precious treasures had been destroyed by people who couldn't tell the difference between an enchanted hammer of the gods and a hammer you used to build houses. Those objects that did survive regained their power just like everything else when magic had suddenly returned eighty years ago, but so many more were gone forever.

  Clearly, I wasn't the only one who found that heartbreaking. Our dead guy didn't have any actual relics, much to my dismay, but he had a truly impressive collection of archival photo prints. There were some very detailed pictures of ancient Persian alchemical tools in the boxes that even I hadn't seen before. They were all mass-produced prints, which meant they weren't worth the paper they were printed on, but it was still a lovely collection, and I ended up slipping several photos into my bag for myself.

  But while I couldn't fault the dead man's taste, books and photos didn't sell. After opening every single one of the three hundred and twenty boxes crammed into the basement apartment's tiny living room, I estimated the entire collection at around a hundred bucks, which was two hundred short of what I needed just to break even. There was nothing in the bathroom, either, so I was forced to move on to the only room I hadn't touched yet.

  The bedroom.

  "Excuse me," I said to the dead man as I squeezed inside. "Just here to look around."

  It was a stupid thing to say and more than a bit macabre, but dead or not, barging into someone's bedroom felt unspeakably rude. Rude and cold, because after two hours of digging through his collection, I felt like I knew the guy. He was a fellow historian, or at least an enthusiastic collector, and that deserved respect. Not "I'm not going to dig through your drawers looking for hidden lockboxes" levels of respect, but I felt I should acknowledge his presence at least.