Cybermage, page 13
“You keep saying that. Do you see anyone about?”
He followed her into the corridor, looking both ways. The place was plush, polished wooden doors with gleaming brass handles opening off a wide passage painted a serene shade of forest green and upholstered in deep-pile carpet into which their feet sank soundlessly with every step. There were no overhead lights, but frequent wall sconces illuminated the place comprehensively, leaving no place for shadows to linger. The corridor stretched away in either direction, eerily empty; it curved away into a gentle arc on their left, and stretched out straight to their right until it reached what looked like an elevator bank at the far end.
“Which way?” Terry said.
“Down,” said Thea, after the slightest of hesitations.
Terry heard it, and instantly latched onto it. “You sure? And you aren’t thinking of climbing into an elevator, are you? You do realise that the first rule of breaking and entering is never to get into an elevator….”
“In case of fire, use the stairs,” Thea said.
“There may not be stairs leading to where you want to…”
“Then we’ll jump into that chasm when we get to it,” Thea said impatiently. “Come on, already.”
She was a couple of steps down the corridor before she realised that he was not following; turning, she saw him still hesitating by the door of the office they had just left, staring at it with an expression of dismay.
“Now what?” She followed the direction of his gaze and finally realised that he was looking at the shiny brass doorknob of the door of Humphrey’s office, still ajar–he had been reaching for it to close it before something froze him in mid-motion. And Thea realised, belatedly, what he had just thought of.
“This,” Terry said, voicing Thea’s own unspoken thoughts, “is fingerprint heaven. And if you get what you came for this place will raise an unholy hue and cry. They will start with the obvious–and we left a trail in that office, Thea, as blatant as we could short of sticking around and confessing.”
“Shh,” Thea said. “Let me think for a sec.”
After a moment she stuck her right hand into her pocket and pushed the door open a little further, so that she had an unimpeded view into the room. Then she shrugged her sleeve off the keypad, and typed a few words.
All traces of us. Weave.
Terry, craning his neck from behind her, was trying to read over her shoulder. “What’s that supposed to…”
Thea glanced at him briefly, indicating the office with a jerk of her chin. “Watch.”
He turned back to the office and sucked in his breath. In the dark room, still only barely lighted by the trace of outside lights, a glimmering golden trail had appeared–two sets of footprints on the carpet, a scrape of gold-glint on the side of the desk where Thea had brushed against it, gold on the handle of the Venetian blinds she had turned to let in whatever light she could, spatters of gold on papers in the inbox. Thea waited a few breaths to make sure that everything had showed, and then reached into the office with her hand.
The gold streamed towards her fingers, in ribbons, spooling off whatever surface it had managed to settle on; Thea wrapped her right hand around the ribbons of light, braiding them into a thin golden strand, coiling the strand in her palm as she wove, reaching for every speck of it that showed, from desktop, window, floor, doorknob. When she was done, she glanced at the supple length of bright gold braid in her hand and then closed her fingers around it and held it out to Terry.
“No fingerprints,” she said. “Here. You take this.”
“That was cool.”
“That was the first thing I really figured out I could do,” Thea said. “Back with Cheveyo.”
“Yeah, but… are you going to be sweeping up each footstep as we make it? That would be a royal pain…” He was staring past the gold thread in his palm at the traces of gold footsteps which had also glimmered into existence, just outside the office door, on the deep plush carpet of the corridor.
Thea rubbed her temples. “We’d need to walk on air for that not to show,” she said morosely. And then her head lifted sharply, as though something wholly unexpected had suddenly occurred to her.
“What?” Terry said, stuffing the gold braid into his pocket.
“What size shoes do you wear?” Thea asked.
“Eh? Ten, but what…?”
“Lift up your foot,” she instructed.
Mystified, he obeyed, lifting his right foot off the ground. A gold size-ten footprint glowed where it had just been.
Thea hesitated, for a long a moment, before she typed the next thing into her keypad, and then reached out with her hand, gathering the stuff she needed into her fingers.
Size ten air cushion under right shoe.
“Other foot. Be careful when you put your weight on the right.”
He had wobbled a little even as she said that. “Weird,” he said. “What are you doing?”
Size ten air cushion under left shoe.
“Try walking.”
Terry took a couple of wobbly steps. “Feels like gel soles, actually,” he said. “What did you… hey… hey! I’m not leaving tracks any more!”
Thea looked at him, her expression equal parts astonishment and exultation. “I just wove air,” she said. “You’re wearing air overshoes… you’re literally walking on air. Their air, the air that was already here. Nothing that we brought in. We’ll be touching nothing now–leaving no trail. Why are you looking at me like that?”
“He was right,” Terry said slowly. “Humphrey.”
Thea had turned to close the door of the office, hand muffled in her pocket again. “Right about what?”
“You,” Terry said, and then hesitated. “Is it safe to talk?”
Thea, in the process of creating her own air-shoes, paused in her typing, glanced up at him, and typed in a few extra words. “Is now,” she said. “I probably should have done that first, before I did anything else at all…”
“You are an Elemental,” Terry said, with a grin so wide that it threatened to split his face in half. “For real. You just wove air. Not light. Not colour. Air. You change the world around you. No wonder you ‘know’ that nobody will see us, even if we do run into an entire company of security–you’re hiding behind air. This is wild. You know, I’m beginning to think you can actually do this crazy thing–you can come right into the FBM headquarters and walk out again with nobody knowing you were there…”
“Beginning to?” Thea said, grinning.
“I still think you’re over-reacting. The cube is safe, and sometimes a Miss Otis is just a Miss Otis…”
Thea’s grin disappeared. “Nuh-uh,” she said. “I’m not wrong about that. Come on, let’s go.”
Careful now, they pushed open the doorway to the stairwell with a cushion of air between Thea’s hand and the surface of anything she reached out to touch. They started down what seemed to be an unremarkable flight of stairs, bare concrete with institutional metal railings on the side; at first glance, looking down the middle of the stairwell showed nothing strange or untoward other than that it seemed to go down an awfully long way–but Thea kept glancing over the railing, frowning.
“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 colliding with Terry who was only a step behind her. They steadied one another as they both teetered for a moment, and then 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 which she had just tried to stand on, the tread that wasn’t there. “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 different–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, cavern-like space, with stairs coming in and out of it at several crazy angles, some in a plane that was sideways to the one she was on, some frankly upside down.
“Whoah,” Terry said. “What are we supposed to do? Pick a direction…any direction? It’s like that Escher drawing which 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 which they had been descending on for a number of floors 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 the landings at right angles to them, apparently held on by Velcro.
Terry squinted 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 began, but then, turning, caught her tapping at her lower lip with her index finger, her expression curiously smug. “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 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 leapt off the landing they were standing on, straight across the empty space in the middle of the whole puzzle, and came to rest in a half-crouch on the landing they had been looking at. Now that she was on that surface the perspective was quite different; it didn’t seem that far away.
“It’s this way,” Thea 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, took a couple of running steps and leaped across to where Thea waited. He was expecting to be thoroughly queasy, as the angles of the puzzle chamber changed perspective around him, but somehow his stomach felt oddly settled instead, as though he had finally found the right way up and was standing at an angle his body recognised.
“Feel better now?” Thea asked. “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, 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–very firmly 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. “There are places where no keys are needed…”
She was typing on her keypad as she spoke, and Terry suddenly realised 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, with 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-spiralling 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–there is nothing that 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, paint peeling from it and hanging in pitiful strips revealing stained and cracked wood beneath. A spider’s web hung from the corner of one of the glass panes to the edge of the lintel, and a small pile 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 who would be sanctioned to be here,” 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 of the unprepossessing final gateway to all the secrets of the Federal Bureau of Magic. It looked more like the weather-beaten door to someone’s twenty-year-old garden shed than any kind of defense against unlawful entry, but that was part of its protection. 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, kicking it open carefully 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, presently switched off.
