“Something’s not right,” she muttered. “It feels as though it’s…backdrop. Scenery. Something we’d expect to see.”
“What were you expecting?”
Her own words of only a few minutes before flashed back into Thea’s mind just as she stepped off a level step and found…nothing.
We’ll jump into that chasm when we get to it.
She caught herself on the railing by the crook of her elbow, did a graceful swing around, and scrambled back up the solid stairs where she had just stood, narrowly missing Terry, who was only a step behind her. They both teetered for a moment, then they steadied each other, and Terry turned to stare at her.
“What on earth…?” he said, sounding aggrieved.
“There’s nothing there. Nothing underfoot. I told you it looked wrong. It’s just illusion.”
“So what is there?”
Thea stared at the stair she had just tried to stand on. “It looks solid enough,” she said, uncertain.
“It’s in the way you look at it. It’s a common trick. They just…find what’s in your head, and continue it. Stop thinking about stairs.”
That was about as easy as being told not to think about elephants while standing at the elephant enclosure at the zoo. Stairs were all around them; they were in the stairwell of an office building. Thea could suddenly find nothing else except stairs in her mind. But she resolutely focused on something else—something completely unexpected.
The Walrus’s teeth.
She couldn’t help a small chuckle. When she looked again, what lay at her feet was no longer the FBM back stairs—it was a large, cavernlike space, with stairs coming in and out of it at crazy angles, some in a plane that was sideways to the one she was on, some frankly upside down.
“Whoa,” Terry said. “What are we supposed to do? Pick a direction, any direction? It’s like that Escher drawing they use in Ars Magica to teach improbability spells.”
“I feel dizzy,” said Thea, staring at the puzzle space before her. “It feels like I’m standing sideways.”
“That’s sideways. We’re straight. We just came straight down.”
“No,” Thea said, with dawning comprehension. “We’re sideways. And if we can figure out which way is really down, that’s the way the safe is.”
The stairs on which they had been descending now appeared to end only a couple of treads behind them, giving them no clues. Doorways opened off other stairs at crazy angles, leaving Thea’s head swimming every time she tried to orient herself.
“There is no up or down,” Terry muttered. “It’s all sideways.”
“What’s that?” Thea said suddenly, pointing to a dark object lying in the middle of one of the landings at right angles to them, apparently held on by Velcro.
Terry squinted at where she pointed.
“I have no clue,” he said. “It might be a feather. But then again, I have absolutely no idea how far that thing is from us. It might be a locomotive.”
“A black feather,” Thea said thoughtfully.
“I said it might be,” Terry said. “What’s the matter?”
“Raven feathers,” Thea said. “Corey and I have a history with raven feathers.”
Terry transferred his attention back to the object on the landing. “You think that way’s down?” And then he hesitated. “But this is your Trickster spirit, no? So he might think that you wouldn’t trust a hint, and that you’d go in the opposite direction, and go the wrong way. Or he might think that you might think that, and that feather’s the right way after all. Or—”
“Stop, you’re making me dizzier than the stairs,” Thea said. “But are you starting to come around to the idea that there is a Trickster involved?”
He glared at her. “That’s not fair.”
“I think we’ll go that way,” Thea said, coming to a decision.
“You sure—Heeey!” Terry yelped as she suddenly bent her knees and leaped off the landing they were standing on, sailing straight across the empty space in the middle of the whole puzzle and coming to rest in a half crouch on the landing they had been looking at.
Now that Thea was there, the perspective was quite different; it didn’t seem that far away. “It’s this way,” she said, bending to pick up the feather at her feet and running it through the fingers of her other hand. “Come on, jump.”
“This gets worse at every turn,” Terry muttered. He took a couple of running steps and leaped across to where Thea waited.
“Feel better now?” Thea said. “See, it is this way. Come on.”
The stairs led down from the landing, and then took a sharp right under an archway, vanishing behind it. When Thea and Terry arrived at the archway and stepped through, there was a brief buzzing sound behind them—and when they turned to look back, they found nothing but a dirty whitewashed wall.
“Whatever,” Terry said. “We’re here now. There seems to be no going back.”
“We’re fine,” Thea said, pointing with her feather. “Look there.”
In front of them, a short stretch of linoleum-lined corridor away, stood a set of heavy oak double doors. They were closed, with no less than three heavy brass bolts, all locked down with large, old-fashioned padlocks.
“Okay,” Terry said carefully. “I don’t suppose you’ve got a key for that?”
“I told you,” Thea said. “No keys are needed.”
She was typing on her keypad as she spoke, and Terry suddenly realized that the double doors were at his back.
Open.
With another set in front of him. This time steel.
Thea grinned and typed some more.
And then the steel doors were open behind them. And something that looked like a veil of pure energy rose ahead, crackling like high-voltage electricity and arcing tiny blue-white lightning.
“Ooh, that’s actually pretty,” Thea said, typing into her keypad. “Tesla would have liked that one.”
And then they were past. The open maw of a great dragon faced them instead, its glistening, foot-long sharp teeth surrounding an entrance into what looked like the back of a throat.
Terry wrinkled his nose. “They didn’t have to be quite so realistic,” he muttered. “That thing is suffering from a thousand years of untreated halitosis.”
“Hold your nose,” Thea said, flashing him a quick grin. “And down the gullet we go…”
And then, with startling suddenness, the entire corridor appeared to end abruptly, with nothing in front of them except stars and faraway galaxies glowing dimly and double-spiraling in the distance.
“Thea,” Terry said, standing on the edge of this vista and staring at it with wide eyes, “how are you doing this?”
“There is nothing in front of me,” Thea said, “but air.”
“This cube could not be safer if it was on Mars,” Terry said. “Only you can get this far. You’re using Elemental magic. How many people can claim to—”
“If someone has a key—a real key, be it iron or just spoken word—nothing stands between them and the cube,” Thea said. “I’m not trying to hide it from the people trying to break the system, Terry. I’m protecting it from someone already in the system.”
“But what if…”
Thea lifted the feather she still held in her right hand. “I know,” she said. “There’s the name. There’s this.”
Terry looked at yet another barrier looming before them. “How many of these…”
“As many as they thought they needed,” Thea said. “I think it’s geared to how good you are at getting past them. Without a key, that is. At seeing past the illusions. Or weaving past them.”
“So the better you are at that, the more they fling at you?” Terry said, appalled. “We could be here until we die of old age!”
“Uh, no,” Thea said, smiling at something ahead of them. “I don’t think so.”
They were standing before a narrow door, its top half paned into nine squares of dirty glass, peeling paint hanging in pitifu
l strips from the stained and cracked wood beneath. A spiderweb hung from the corner of one of the glass panes to the edge of the lintel, and a small mound of dust and debris was piled up against the door at the bottom.
“Looks like that hasn’t been opened for twenty years,” Terry said.
“I know,” Thea said. “This is the only real one. The only one for which I don’t have a key.”
“All this way and you can’t open it?” Terry said. “Now might be a time to try some more of that Elemental—”
“That,” Thea said, “I don’t know how I would hide from anyone. If this was opened by Elemental magic—by any sort of real magic—it would be better than a fingerprint, I suspect.”
“So what, then…Wait a minute.”
“What?”
“Something my mother said. ‘You only need a key if you believe that there is something worth locking away.’”
“Um, yes,” Thea said, and then her own expression changed. “Oh, my,” she said. “Mrs. Chen said the same thing, really, last year—the best place to hide something is usually in plain sight.”
Their eyes met, in sudden comprehension.
“The only people the FBM would expect to get this far,” Terry said, “would already have permission to enter. Anyone else would have dropped by the wayside, and would probably still be throwing up somewhere at the memory of that dragon breath. It’s the illusion gates that are the key to this place.”
“And this door?”
“This door isn’t locked at all,” Terry said. He shook down a bit more sleeve, enough to cover his hand, and touched the handle. At Terry’s light tap it swung open, creaking just a little; the pile of dirt and the cobweb remained unaffected, leaning disconcertingly against nothing and attached to some point in thin air.
“Wow,” Terry said, hesitating. “I wouldn’t have believed…”
“You still sure that it would be safer here than anywhere?” Thea slipped into the room behind the ancient door, carefully kicking it open a little wider with her air-booted foot.
The place was much larger than it had any right to be, stretching away into deep shadows in the back, with shelves upon shelves of boxes and scrolls and books, and an entire wall covered by a bank of computer monitors, currently switched off.
“This is amazing,” Terry breathed, following her in and staring around.
Thea was typing something into her keypad, and as though in response, a small pale glow occurred somewhere far back in the stacks of shelves.
“That way,” Thea said, pointing. As they approached the glow, they saw that it was emanating from a closed briefcase, suffused in a kind of dull white light.
Thea reached out for the briefcase; the light wound itself around her arm like a tentacle, wrapped itself around her shoulders, and hovered around her hair and face, eerily lighting up her features. With the briefcase in one hand, she reached out with the other and gently laid the raven feather she still carried into the space that the briefcase had occupied. Then she looked up at Terry, her face wreathed in pale light.
“One last stop,” she said, “before we go back.”
And the shadowy safe, the deepest repository of all the secrets of the Federal Bureau of Magic, sank into utter darkness around them.
9.
“I SHOULD HAVE FIGURED,” TERRY said, after a moment of silence.
He stood beside Thea on the flat, hard ground that was the Barefoot Road. They had materialized at the foot of the mesa that held Cheveyo’s home; it glowed russet and dark gold in the honey-colored light cast by a sun low in the sky, hurrying toward sunset. From somewhere far away the cry of a hunting raptor came echoing out of the open sky. Except for the bird, they appeared to be alone. There was no other sign of life stirring in Cheveyo’s abode.
Thea shifted her grip on the briefcase. There was nothing extraordinary about it now, nothing to point to the treasure it contained. It had ceased to be luminous, or at least its pale white glow had faded into insignificance in the presence of Tawaha, the sun god who had once taken human form in these lands to speak to Thea.
“You planning on leaving the cube here?” Terry asked.
“It will be safe with Cheveyo,” Thea said. “At the very least, nobody will be looking for it here.”
“Uh,” Terry said, “the moment they figure out who took it, this is the first place they will look. And isn’t this where your Coyote friend actually lives?”
“But with any luck they won’t figure out who took it,” Thea said. “And besides, Coyote is watched here. Grandmother Spider and Tawaha said they would watch him.”
“They might have meant anywhere. That includes our own world.”
“Yes, but they have real power here,” Thea said stubbornly.
“Are you sure Cheveyo will take this thing?” Terry asked. “Did you actually ask him?”
“He always said I ask too many questions,” Thea said.
But she had hesitated a moment too long before she answered, and Terry picked up on it immediately.
“You’re still making this up as you go along,” he said. “Asking why the sky is blue is a question. Wanting to know if he’ll take on babysitting duties on a cube-bound wizard who’s technically been dead for fifty years is hardly the same thing. What are you going to do if Cheveyo says no?”
“You return, Catori.”
Cheveyo’s voice, coming from above and behind them, made both Terry and Thea turn sharply to look. Terry, who knew enough about the properties of the Barefoot Road to be aware that the fact that he was standing upon it with shoes still on his feet was blessing enough, stayed where he was. He looked back over his shoulder to where Cheveyo stood beside a rocky outcrop, leaning on his staff. Thea, not constrained by any such considerations, had turned and already taken a step toward her old teacher.
“I come to ask a favor,” she said. She thought she could hold his eyes, but under his shrewd, penetrating gaze, she dropped her own, suddenly uneasy.
“And so once again you come to my world with a burden that you carry,” Cheveyo said softly.
“This time, it isn’t just my own,” Thea said. She hefted the briefcase. “There is something, someone, in here who needs protection. Perhaps just for a little while, maybe for longer; I don’t know. But the place I took this from wasn’t safe. If the Trickster has found a way to slip past the defenses…well, I did not want this falling in the wrong hands.”
“And what do you say, friend of Catori?” Cheveyo said, turning his eyes on Terry.
“There are some things of which Thea seems certain,” Terry said. “But they are not the sort of things it is possible to prove beyond any doubt—not to me. Not to anyone in our world, I guess. At least not yet.” He paused, and Thea could feel his eyes resting on her. “But I trust her instinct,” Terry said at last, making his choice, betting on Thea and friendship and gut feeling rather than pure logic and cold hard fact.
Thea, suddenly aware that she had been holding her breath, allowed it to escape with a small sigh and threw Terry a quick, grateful look. Then she turned to face Cheveyo again.
“When you first came to me, Catori, you came bearing nothing but that instinct,” Cheveyo said slowly. “You had no way of knowing that it had been by your own choice that you were deprived of magic in your world, where magic matters so much. But you had your instincts, and your instincts were true—it was a time to hide rather than to reveal. Here, you could be protected. It was a place of awakening…but it was also a place to hide.”
“They think they have figured her out at last, in our world,” Terry said. “She isn’t hiding anymore.”
Cheveyo shook his head slowly. “True, but not completely true,” he said. “That light you have glimpsed—it’s something that escaped through the cracks. You are still locked away in your tower, Catori—the things you have done, you did in secret. Only a handful of people know of this; you are still hiding. And you cannot hide forever, least of all here.” His eyes were luminous with a da
rk fire, a fire that was vision and dream and certainty and wisdom. “I will do this thing that you ask of me, for a short while. If you would protect something or someone dear to you in your own world, it will soon have to be your own power that does it—and that choice is coming for you, in a nearness of days. But until then, I will hold your treasure. And I will keep it safe.”
Thea held out the briefcase without another word, and Cheveyo reached out and took it.
“Thank you,” Thea said. She had run through a dozen phrases expressing her profound gratitude in her mind, but in the end nothing but simplicity would do.
Cheveyo, one hand holding the briefcase, lifted his staff with the other in a gesture that was both blessing and dismissal. “Go, and pursue what destiny the Road takes you to,” he said. “I will be here when you return.”
Thea bowed her head in respectful acknowledgment, and turned back to Terry.
“Time we were getting back,” she said, giving him a small smile as she lifted her wrist and tapped at her keyboard.
“I thought you didn’t need that here, that the Road—”
They were back in the Nexus room, very suddenly, the mesas and the sunset and Cheveyo’s dark eyes just fragments of a dream.
Terry shook his head sharply.
“Anyone ever tell you that you’re weird?” he said. “How long have we been gone, anyway? It’s always hard to tell, in here.”
“Twenty-seven seconds,” Thea said.
“What? But you…we couldn’t…” Terry leaned over and stared in disbelief at the computer clock at the bottom of one of his monitors. “How?”
“We couldn’t very well have come back tomorrow midafternoon,” Thea said. “People would have wondered.”
“Sometimes you really scare me,” Terry said. “Thea, are you absolutely sure about all this?”
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