Lackey, Mercedes - Serrated Edge 05 - Chrome Circle

by Chrome Circle [lit]

  "The other side of this rock wall sounds better all the time," Tannim said after a significant pause.

  "A little rest, first," Shar said firmly. "You need it."

  And I am not going to drive his car into another domain. If there's any trouble—I know who the good driver is in this car, and it isn't me or Thomas Cadge.

  * * *

  Chinthliss stalked off down the garden path, with Joe right behind him, and Fox making a reluctant third. "You really shouldn't do this, you know," FX said plaintively. "Lady Ako has some powerful friends. She could cause us a lot of trouble."

  Chinthliss did not reply. His stiff back said it all. As their feet crunched along the gravel path, Joe glanced from side to side, nervously. He could not believe that Lady Ako would let them go so easily after detaining them for so long.

  He was right. Two massive guards in fancy lacquered armor stepped, literally out of nowhere, to bar their path. It was really weird; they unfolded out of the air on either side of the gravel walkway, then stepped onto it with curved swords bared. Chinthliss stopped abruptly; Joe loosened his weapon in its holster.

  "I told you she could cause us trouble! We're doomed," Fox said from the rear of the group.

  With a growl, Chinthliss turned abruptly; Joe stepped out of the way, leaving Chinthliss face-to-face with FX. The kitsune backed up a couple of steps after one look at Chinthliss' expression of rage. The guards didn't move, and Joe opted to disregard them for the moment, in favor of keeping Chinthliss from disemboweling Fox right then and there.

  Fox held up his hands placatingly. "Hey, it was just a comment, you know? A little information? A bit of a reminder?"

  Chinthliss took another step towards him.

  Fox's hands transformed into a pair of fur-covered paws.

  "Wee paws for station identification?" FX continued, with a nervous, feeble grin. "Ah—please accept my apology for the social fox-paws?"

  The corner of Chinthliss' mouth twitched, although Joe could not see anything that would have been funny in that last sentence. But evidently the dragon did, and Joe breathed a little easier. Maybe Chinthliss wouldn't kill the kitsune quite yet.

  "I did not bring you along as my court fool," Chinthliss replied coolly. "Whatever capacity Tannim has you in. I brought you because you are a kitsune and Shar is half kitsune, and I assumed your knowledge of her would be useful."

  "What about the information Shar's mother could give you?" The sweetly feminine voice coming from behind Joe had a distinct edge to it. Joe turned again, and the two armor-clad bulwarks parted to let Lady Ako pass between them.

  "Your information would be damned useful, my lady, if you could just bring yourself to part with it instead of offering endless Tea Ceremonies," Chinthliss replied, his own voice honed to an icy sharpness. "Failing that, we will simply seek help elsewhere."

  "I have not been your lady for a very long time. You will not need to look elsewhere." Lady Ako made this a statement without a hint of apology to it. "There are circumstances surrounding this sad state of affairs that required you be detained." Her tone said, as clearly as words, that she did not intend to apologize for anything, nor did she intend to give any further explanation than this. She matched Chinthliss stare for stare.

  Finally Chinthliss broke the silence. "Fine," he said abruptly. "I suppose I'm going to have to assume this has something to do with internal kitsune politics, the secrets of which mere mortals are not free to plumb. As long as your little game is over with, I'll put off looking for that cab."

  He crossed his arms over his chest and waited, wrapped in dignity, for her to reply.

  She bristled. "Do not presume to dictate my actions to me, Chinthliss!"

  "I wouldn't dream of it," the dragon replied dryly. "Nor will I be drawn into an argument so as to permit you to delay us even further."

  Fox looked from one to the other of them, and finally held up both paws. "He's called your bluff, Lady Ako," the kitsune said bluntly. "You might as well admit it, and give us some real help."

  Lady Ako stared for a moment longer, then sighed. "He has indeed called my bluff. And the best I have is a pair of twos," she admitted. "All right; I can't seem to delay you any further, so we might as well get down to the business of actually finding them." She started back toward the building they had all stalked away from, and with a glance to the rear at the impassive guards, Chinthliss, Joe, and FX followed her.

  "I've had someone watching the boy's car since it came Underhill," she said, as they mounted the steps to the graceful porch, and a few kitsune sitting on the flat cushions watched them with covert curiosity. "Not actually watching it, you understand, but keeping track of it by means of the disturbance it causes in the magic-fields. Shar managed to cloak it somewhat, but that much Cold Iron was bound to wreak a certain amount of disturbance no matter how skillfully she shielded it—a disturbance of a distinctive flavor, as you know."

  "That makes sense." Chinthliss mounted the wooden steps of the building, keeping pace beside her. The steps creaked slightly under him, as if he weighed far more than his appearance would suggest. "But why track the vehicle instead of the people?"

  "Because Shar is better than I at cloaking spells, and I do not know Tannim." Lady Ako held the scarlet-painted door open for them, and they all filed through—except for Chinthliss, who took the brass handle from her and bowed her inside. It seemed to Joe that she smiled faintly at the gallantry. "I knew that Shar would bring Tannim to his vehicle if she found a way to free him, because it represents a powerful weapon of defense," she continued. "And I know that Madoc Skean has no allies other than Shar who could do anything with so great a concentration of Death Metal. Further, I suspected that only Tannim would have whatever other devices were needed to make it work, such as a key. So it followed that no one but Shar or Tannim would be able to move it. Not long ago, my intuition bore fruit; the car moved, and as soon as it moved, Shar's cloaking-spells destabilized, making it easier to track. Since we saw no motive-spells working, it must have moved under its own power."

  Chinthliss stopped right in the middle of the white-paneled room. "It did? Where? And where is it now?"

  Lady Ako beckoned them to follow, past a room full of flat cushions on the floor, through a sliding paper screen instead of a door, and into the kind of room Joe had not expected to find here.

  It was a room full of computer equipment, mostly deep blue and bright red, with huge screens. There were at least a dozen SPARC stations and Silicon Graphics computers that they could see, with about half of them being used by creatures that were more or less foxlike. Some only had fox tails, some fox tails and feet, and some were humanized foxes as Lady Ako had been when they had first seen her.

  They were all dressed in varying costumes, from futuristic jumpsuits to the full kimono-kit that Lady Ako wore. The lady bent over the shoulder of one of the silver foxes in a pearl-gray jumpsuit; this one had long, flowing white hair crowning her fox-mask and cascading down her back.

  "It isn't that easy, Chinthliss," Ako said at last. "We know that the vehicle is moving, and we know in general where it is, but we can't tell specifically." She shrugged helplessly. "You simply cannot map Underhill; I have tried, with no success. You can go north, then east, then south, and find yourself facing north again. You can go up several levels only to find yourself four levels below the place you had started. The Gates do not connect domains in any kind of logical fashion. This room holds the closest thing anyone has to a map of Underhill."

  "They're somewhere in the predominantly Unseleighe region, my lady," said the silver fox, tapping the screen with one furry forefinger. "If they can just get into one of the larger domains, one where we can pinpoint them by what Gates they are near, I can give you coordinates. But now—well, the sensors and programs we are using only show that they've used Gates to make domain-jumps, but since we don't have those specific Gates in our lists, it can't locate them precisely." The silver fox looked at everyone assembled. "We have
magical sonar, and there's a lot of noise. We don't get a ping on them until they do something."

  "You see?" Ako held up her hands helplessly. "We can track the perturbation and know that they are moving. Once they reach and use a Gate that we have in the computer, we know where they truly are. But until then, we'd be jumping blind."

  Joe nudged Chinthliss. "Sir," he said hesitantly, "what about the trim-ring? Tannim used it to find the Mustang. Couldn't we do the same thing?"

  "I wouldn't do that if I were you, sir," the silver fox replied respectfully, before Lady Ako could say anything. She turned around to look Chinthliss right in the eyes. "That much iron and steel is warping the magic fields down there in ways I can't predict, and neither can the computers. We just can't model chaos that well. If you tried to use that artifact to create a Gate, you might end up tearing a hole in the fabric of Underhill. Or you might just end up Gating somewhere you wouldn't like. The odds of actually going where you wanted to go are pretty low. We could run a simulation—but if we had enough data to make an accurate simulation, we'd have enough to find the vehicle, too."

  "Laini is my best tech," Ako said, placing a hand on the silver fox's shoulder. "If she says it's dangerous, I'd believe her. And if she doesn't like the odds, I wouldn't take the risk."

  Chinthliss eyed both of the kitsune dubiously. "So what would you do if you were in our position?" he asked.

  Laini thought for a moment. "You might use the trim-ring as a magic-mirror, just to show you where they are. We use an optical link through a magic-mirror to connect to Internet from here. The Internet is great for hiding things and communicating with obscure locations on Earth—Underhill enclaves with outerworld fronts, allies, informants—just bounce encrypted files from one anonymous site to another. Anyway, we use a tuned laser beamed through two stationary mirrors—one here in Furhold, and one on the other side. If you use a magic-mirror, you get a super clear image most of the time. You might recognize something we could use, or get a photograph sharp enough that we could cross-reference it through our Silicon Graphics image systems here." She pointed one delicately-clawed paw—hand—at the crimson boxes whirring away. "We have thousands of subrealms identified and imaged, and some of them are mapped down to ten-meter grid squares with local magical data. We just don't know all the Gates that lead to them, because that takes a lot more than remote viewing. But we do have some."

  Laini looking thoughtful again and tapped at her silvery-black snout. She flicked an ear. "If you can determine a place, or give us enough data that we can find it, we might be able to plot a route that could get you there, using the Gates that we know of."

  Joe grinned. Now that's a little more like it! he thought. Evidently Chinthliss felt the same.

  "I didn't realize that you had an artifact," Lady Ako said, "or I would have offered all this a little sooner."

  "Is there somewhere secure that we can use to set up a scrying-spell?" Chinthliss asked. "You know what I mean by `secure,' I trust."

  "Of course." Ako smiled sweetly. "This is the embassy, after all. We have some very secure places. If you'll follow me?"

  Once again, Lady Ako led them all down a maze of corridors, this time with walls of white paper and bamboo rather than white-painted wood. How such a place could be considered "secure" was beyond Joe, but if Lady Ako said it was, he might as well take her word for it. At least no one would be able to eavesdrop on you here—you'd see his shadow through the walls first.

  Maybe that was what made it secure?

  At length she pushed aside a sliding door and led them into a room containing what was either a very small building or a very large box, lacquered in black, with graceful images of cranes and carp—and, of course, foxes—on the sides, formed in strokes of gold paint. "You will be secure enough in there," she said. "It will be a little crowded, but it is very well shielded."

  She opened a door into the box; it looked rather like a sauna inside, with benches against two of the walls and a low table in the middle. Somehow all four of them managed to squeeze inside; Lady Ako and Chinthliss on one bench, FX and Joe on the other.

  Ako shut the door; after a moment of darkness, a gentle, sourceless light came up all around them. Chinthliss placed the chrome trim-ring down in the middle of the black-lacquered table.

  Here we go again. . . .

  As all three of the others bent over the shining circle of chrome, Chinthliss chanted under his breath. A drift of sparks came from his outstretched hand and settled on the ring, exactly as if he had sprinkled glitter down on it. But these sparks spread and grew, until a skin of light coated the whole trim-ring.

  Mist gathered inside the ring, and all four of them leaned a little closer. "Damn," Chinthliss muttered irritably, "that tech of yours is right. The Mach I really is warping things all out of shape down there."

  Ako laid one hand over the top of his, and a second shower of sparks fell on the ring. The light strengthened, and for just a moment, a picture formed in the middle.

  It was the Mach I, all right; Tannim was in the passenger's seat, though, and in the driver's seat was the woman who'd shown up at the barn. There was someone else in the rear seat, too, and the whole car was surrounded by a white mist that eddied around the car as if it didn't quite want to touch it.

  Then the picture faded, leaving only the shiny black lacquered surface of the table.

  "Well, at least we do know that they're together," Lady Ako said into the silence.

  "But who was that in the rear?" Joe asked. "And where were they?"

  "The Unformed," Chinthliss growled. "There are only several hundred places they could be, with that Unformed mist around them. Damn."

  But surprisingly, it was FX who shook his head. "That's the bad part; don't forget, the Unseleighe and the Seleighe both have Gates into those pockets. So do the neutrals, for that matter. It's not a big deal; we just need a little more time. We just wait for them to Gate out of there, and see if we can identify where they came out."

  "Which means we sit here until the car moves again." Joe sighed.

  Chinthliss nodded abruptly, scowling.

  Lady Ako looked from one gloomy face to another, and finally ventured to speak. "I don't suppose," she said doubtfully, "that any of you would care for some tea?"

  * * *

  Shar stared at the swirling, pastel-colored mist and wondered if it was half as unsettled out there as she felt. Most disturbing was the feeling that things had gotten completely out of her control.

  Her reaction to Tannim being attacked was entirely out of character. If Tannim hadn't already slain that mist-creature, she would have reverted to Huntress-mode and leapt upon it to rend it with her own, sharp teeth right then and there. She never leapt to anyone's defense; she always assumed that they could take care of themselves. After all, no one was going to leap to her defense. . . .

  The strength of her own feelings had shocked her; more shocking had been the way she had automatically reacted on seeing that he had been hurt. She had never expended Healing on anyone else before. Not once. She was not a "natural" Healer as Lady Ako was; it cost her a great deal to invoke a Healing spell. There had never been anyone worth the effort before.

  And before my mind could weigh all the consequences, I found myself Healing him without even pausing to think about what I was doing. Very strange. Very unlike her.

  Tannim did not sleep this time, but he rested as Shar had ordered, slowly regaining color as he sipped at a Gatorade and nibbled at packaged crackers. After a glance at her, which she met with a smile, he fished under the seat and came up with a car magazine. His inquiring glance asked "may I?" and her answering shrug replied "be my guest." He immersed himself in its pages as she stared out at the mist, still sorting her thoughts.

  It was logic, she told herself firmly. Pure logic. This is his car, we need each other at top form to guard the other's back. I Healed him because of that. It has nothing to do with how I feel about him.

  And pigs were cert
ainly flying in tight formation over LaGuardia at this very moment.

  "Ready to switch places?" he said into the silence. When she gave him a measuring look, he grinned at her with a good measure of his old cockiness.

  "I would certainly not care to take the blame for anything that happened to your beloved car if I ran it into something out there," Shar replied dryly. "Please, Captain, take the helm by all means."

  But before popping any doors, they both checked the mist for the telltale swirls that signaled something hiding in it. And Shar noted with some amusement that both of them scooted around the car and into their new places so quickly that it would have taken a photo to tell which of them hit the seat first.

  She snapped her seatbelts in place. He quirked his eyebrows at her. "Paranoid?" he asked.

  "Of course," she retorted. "They are out to get us."

  "Point taken." He started the car and drove into the mist, heading for the place where the colors and eddying were the strongest.