Tannim slid off the hood of the Mach I feeling rather pleased at how quickly he had found the entrance he'd been searching for. He was straightening up, his defenses momentarily down, when the mist-thing streaked out of nowhere and sank its teeth into his arm.
He never got more than a glimpse of it; his brief impression was of a long, lean creature about the size of a Great Dane, as white as the mist, and impossibly fast.
It was possessed of an obscene number of sharp, white teeth, thin as razor blades, most of which seemed to be scraping his arm bones.
Maybe it was a giant white shrew, or a wild dog or an albino weasel. More likely it was someone's worst nightmare. That was certainly the way Tannim felt when the thing's teeth met in his arm as it knocked him to the ground.
He screamed, unable to stop it, no macho posturing or stoicism—he screamed.
He didn't resist the fall, he continued it, rolling over on his back and kicking at the beast as hard as he could with both legs, feet planted firmly in the creature's belly.
The thing let go of his arm as the breath was knocked out of it in a fetid puff, and the force of his kick sent it sailing over his head.
Into the side of the Mach I.
The monster screeched like a chainsaw ripping through an oil barrel. For a moment, it hung over the front fender, body convulsing as it encountered some of the protective spells. It screamed again, and a crackle of energy arced across its body, a tiny display of fireworks that obscured whatever the beast had looked like. Not that he was in any shape to notice details.
In fact, he wasn't in much shape to notice much of anything, since he was lying on his side, eyes unfocused, trying not to scream loudly enough to attract another one of the creatures.
The thing hung on the fender for a few more moments, then it slid to the ground and burst into flame.
Within seconds, as Shar ran toward him out of the mist, hands ablaze with magical energies, it was gone, leaving nothing behind to show it had ever existed. Except, of course, for the ragged remains of his shirtsleeve, which hardly amounted to more than a few ribbons of cloth over the armor.
And the bleeding puncture wounds, where the beast's teeth had gone through the armor.
He clamped his teeth shut on his own pain and stared at the sluggish blood dripping down his arm in shock as the pain turned to numbness, though he knew that state was only temporary. The shock was not only because he had been wounded, but because he had been wounded through the armor.
Shar dropped to her knees beside him but did not touch him. "Is that arm broken?" she asked, her voice tight.
He shook his head, unable to speak, for now the pain began all over again, worse than before, and his arm felt as if he had—he had—
Ah, God this hurts!
With that assurance, Shar carefully picked his arm up by the wrist, and with one crooked finger, deftly made a slit along the joining of the top row of scales. The armor peeled back from his wounded arm, revealing a half-circle of wide, oozing punctures, all of them turning an ugly shade of purple around the edges.
"Is that poison?" he asked in pain-filled and masochistic fascination.
"No," Shar replied absently, "just fast bruising. Mother taught me some Healing; I'm not in her league, but let me see what I can do."
Shar's reaction was automatic and immediate: I've got to help him! Without a second thought, she dashed in the direction of the scream, war-magics ready and burning to be thrown, only to see Tannim go over on his back and flip his assailant against the fender of the Mach I.
That was the end of that; Shar didn't need to watch the beast convulse and burst into flames to know that it was finished.
She dropped down beside him and went to work, ignoring the blazing mist-creature, although she thought it was a species that she recognized. The beast, before it had vanished, seemed to be one of the guard creatures Charcoal had created, or else something cooked up along the same plan. Charcoal did that sort of thing on a regular basis, rather than recruiting other creatures to his service. In fact, when she was young, he had made a habit of going to pockets of the Unformed specifically to create such monsters and chimera, bringing them back to his own domains to serve as watchdogs. Madoc Skean had gone Charcoal one better, creating the Faceless Ones the same way. Both of them preferred the expenditure of personal energy in order to obtain servants that were utterly loyal. The only trouble with these little expeditions was that it was quite difficult to keep the new creations rounded up. They always lost one or two every couple of trips, leaving the creatures roaming the mist, waiting for unwary prey.
That explains why Father had a Gate set here, she thought, as she engaged the little set-spell that parted Tannim's armored scales and slit it along the top of his wounded arm. This pocket of the Unformed must be particularly sensitive. The mists were not uniformly psychotropic, and those who used them to create living creatures kept the locations of the best mist pockets as a valuable resource.
She couldn't help but notice Tannim's start of surprise at her ability to open his armor. But at the moment her greatest concern was with his damaged arm; if that creature really was one of Charcoal's "shrogs" (her father's "clever" name for a thing based on shrews and dogs—what an idiot), the wounds could and would go septic in a heartbeat, and there wasn't exactly an emergency room with antibiotics handy.
She sank quickly into a Healing trance, held her hands around the wounds, and forced Healing energies into his cells. She worked from inside out; that way she wouldn't Heal the wound only to leave the infection still active inside. There was no telling if there were any more of the creatures nearby, nor when they would appear if there were more, but Tannim's injury had to be dealt with now.
As she penetrated his defenses, she realized something else.
There was something very erotic about this; it was the first time that she had Healed anyone other than herself of a serious injury. Shar had closed up other peoples' cuts and soothed abrasions, but this was deeper, much deeper. She was aware of him in a way that she had never experienced with anyone else; the touch of her hand on his arm sent pulses of sensuous electricity through her arms; she felt what he felt directly, from the tiny ache where he'd hit the back of his head, to the caress of the silk-smooth armor over the rest of his body, including the places where it was so closely fitted that it held swelling down.
Hmm. They didn't allow for it to expand much, did they?
She had never been so aware of a male in her life, or on so many different levels. Not the level of telepathy; neither of them were telepaths. No, this was on a visceral level, where the instincts lived. Was this how an empath felt? Small wonder most of them got into Healing of one sort or another and pursued all Arts of the body.
She wasn't good enough to mend the bites completely; she cleaned out the sites of possible infection, dulled down the pain, and stopped the bleeding. Then she accelerated the cell growth as much as she had the skill and the power to do. In another day, he would have a half-circle of mostly healed punctures, and in two, a half-circle of tiny scars.
She got into the car for a bottle of water and washed the blood off him with it, then got a pad of gauze from the first-aid kit. Figuring that nothing preventive was going to hurt, she dabbed each wound with a spot of antibiotic salve, then wrapped the arm in a thin layer of gauze and resealed the armor over the whole.
It was only when she looked up from the final motions of sealing up the scales that she looked up to see his expression of complete disbelief.
"How are you doing that?" he asked, voice a little harsh from the screams, but harsher still with suspicion. She would have been a little hurt by that suspicion if she hadn't been well aware that she would feel the same if a secret of hers had been uncovered. "How did you know how to unseal my armor?"
"Very rapid deductive reasoning," she replied as she let go of his arm, and he flexed it to test it, wincing at residual pain. "You're Chinthliss' pupil, there are only a limited number of ways you can seal armor like this, and I know all of the ones Chinthliss uses. The easiest would be the most logical, since you're obviously going to have to get in and out of it at least once a day, and you might have to get into it when you're hurt. Like now. So I tried the first spell, and it worked."
She tilted her head to the side and waited for his reply. It wasn't long in coming.
"Oh—" he said, "but—Chinthliss told me that no one had ever had armor like this."
"He was right," she told him. "No one has. Most people simply work spells into standard armor. A few more have enchanted Kevlar, or something else high-tech. No one has ever combined anachronism, high-tech, and magic to make something like this. But there are still only a limited number of ways armor like this can be opened."
Tannim sighed explosively. "Well, damn. And damn it again; he told me the armor wouldn't stop everything, but I'd gotten kind of used to it doing just that."
Shar nodded, with sympathy this time. She recalled the time that she had first discovered that she was not invulnerable in her draconic form. It had been a painful revelation. Literally.
"It's not going to stop everything—maybe in your world, but not here. Any time you have a situation where there's a seam, there's a weakness," she told him. "I still have scars on my ankle to prove the truth of that."
"I'm sorry," he said, as if he meant it. "You shouldn't have scars anywhere."
She held her breath, and looked up, to meet his intensely green gaze. "Oh," she said, unable to think of anything else.
What are you doing, Shar? You're a kitsune, you're supposed to be unpredictable, wild, willful. What are you getting yourself into?
Just because you've always found this man fascinating, intriguing—just because he's the only male you've ever imagined trusting at your back—and at your front—that's no reason to sit here like a love-struck ninny, gazing into his eyes.
That's no reason to want to kiss him. Or to pull him right down next to you on this relatively soft ground and finish stripping off that armor.
Like hell it isn't!
"Bloody hell!" said a voice just above her head. "What was that 'orrible screeching?"
Tom Cadge had his nose stuck out of the open window; apparently he'd managed to figure out the mechanism to lower it. Both she and Tannim jerked upright; he with a curse as it jarred his arm, and she with a curse for a different reason entirely.
"Nasty piece of Unseleighe work," Shar said, as she got up off the ground and offered Tannim her hand. He was not too macho to accept it, or to accept her help in getting to his feet. "It bit Tannim," she continued, trying to sound matter-of-fact.
"I'll be all right," Tannim added hastily. Then, in an undertone, "I will be all right, won't I?" he asked Shar. A stray lock of hair fell over his worried eyes, and his complexion was pale. "I don't feel all right."
"Don't play any tennis with that arm for a little, and go have a Gatorade. You're just in shock," she assured him. "In fact, it might not be a bad notion to move the car just to that opening you found, and then sit there for awhile. The intersections of domains tend to be rather chaotic and stressed, and I think perhaps that the Mach I won't make as much of a disturbance there." She gave him a sharp look, as she noticed that he was leaning very heavily against the side of the Mustang. "I can drive, if you can direct me."
"I think maybe you'd better," Tannim replied honestly. "I really don't feel very good at the moment."
He went around to the passenger's side and opened the door with a little difficulty. She slid into the driver's side and found the keys waiting in the ignition. As soon as she settled herself, she cast another long look at him, and did not like what she saw. Pale and sweating, he was obviously still in a lot of pain, and very shocky. "Here," she said, fishing behind the seat for another Gatorade. "Just tell me where to go, and I'll get us there. You rest—and when we get there, you should take a longer rest."
"I'm not going to argue," Tannim told her, as he leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes. "Not at all. Forward, about two o'clock."
She followed his directions, murmured between gulps of Gatorade, through the absolutely directionless white mist. Finally, the rock wall of the boundary loomed up in front of them, gray and smooth, rather than craggy as a natural rock face would be. "Right," Tannim said. "I mean, go right, along the wall. You'll find it in a moment."
She did; in fact, she spotted the place where the opening was by the turbulent swirling of the mist ahead of them. The mist itself was no longer white or drifting; stained with pale colors and random shifts of light, it eddied and flowed restlessly. It still avoided the Mustang, however, which was comforting; anything that lived in it would probably be as vulnerable to Cold Iron as the creatures spawned in the quieter areas.
She parked the car and turned off the engine. "Rest," she told him. "The problem might just be a bit of shock; give your body and mind a chance to catch up with what I did."
He started to protest, then evidently decided better of it. "How bad are ye hurt, lad?" Tom Cadge asked with evident concern.
"Not too bad," Tannim replied, as Shar rummaged for a Gatorade of her own. "Been hurt worse."
"But we are not going any further until you are completely ready for anything," she told him in a voice that would permit no argument. "I never got a chance to tell you back there, but we've got more than one choice. We can try this unknown pocket of Unformed ahead of us, or we could try something that has—well, risk. The Gate goes to one of Charcoal's smaller domains. He might be there, he might not—but it's a place I know, and I can get to neutral territory from there."
He sipped his Gatorade, a lock of his hair falling over his eyes, as he sat in thoughtful silence. "So, the choice is the total unknown, versus a place where we know there's an enemy, one who may or may not be home right now."
She grimaced, but nodded. "If it were me—I'd go for the mist. I haven't been in that particular place for a long time, and Charcoal may have laid some nasty traps for the unwary in there. And anyway, even if he isn't there, his serving-creatures will be, and I don't think I could pass them anymore. But I thought you ought to know that the option is there; you have as much say in this as I do. If you think we should risk the known danger for the sake of a known way out—"
But Tannim shook his head decisively. "I'd rather take the unknown. You probably know Charcoal better than anyone else, and I'm strongly in favor of trusting an expert." He raised an eyebrow at her. "I take it that the rest of the destinations were equally unattractive?"
She smiled thinly and recited the other four destinations. His eyes widened for a moment at the mention of Red Magda and the Black Bard, confirming her guess that he just might know something about them.
And they just might know something about him, too. I rather doubt that they want to make certain he gets invitations to all their weddings and bar mitzvahs.
"The last possibility is to go back where we came from," she finished. "We could try the other settings on that Gate. The drawback is that if someone is following us, we might meet them."
"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 certainly 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.
The gap in the rock walls must have been larger than she had thought; when the rock disappeared on the left, there was no answering darkness up ahead to show where it might resume. Tannim turned the Mach I into the gap, still keeping the wall on the left. The mist was at its most turbulent here; the predominant color was a blue-green, but there were swirls of red, yellow, even purple.
"This place makes me think of an explosion in a tie-dye plant," Tannim muttered under his breath.
Shar peered ahead into the psychedelic fog, every muscle and nerve alive with tension, and started when Tom Cadge tapped her shoulder.
"Please, lass," he said quietly, "can ye tell me where this magical chariot is goin'? All I know is we been someplace cold, an' now we're someplace else."
"Did you ever—ah—see any of the places that the Unseleighe Sidhe call `Unformed'?" she asked. She hated to ask it that way, but Cadge didn't seem to mind.
"Before they put out me eyes, ye mean?" He shook his head. "I heard tell of 'em, but I ne'er saw one. I didna see much but Lady Magda's Hall, an' not much o' that."
"Well, that's where we are. It's a place full of mist, and not much else, and someone with a strong enough will and magic can make it into anything he wants," she told him. "Somebody left something nasty behind the last time he was here, and it attacked Tannim."
"Mist?" Tom shook his head. "What can anyone be doin' with mist?"
"It's a special kind of mist," Shar replied absently. "Think of it like clay. That's how most of the domains were made in the first place, right out of the mist. Either one incredibly powerful mage, like Lord Oberon or Lady Titania, or a group of mages with a single plan in mind, would move into one of these places and turn it into what they wanted."
"So?" Thomas replied. "Is that where we are, then? One o' them mist places?"
"Exactly. There are often Gates in there, and that's what we're looking for." Shar continued to stare ahead as she talked to Tom; was it imagination, or was the color slowly leaching out of the swirling mist? "People can make small things out of the mist, too, so they'll come here when they need something and create it."
"So—if ye can make anything ye like, why don't ye make a Gate now?" Tom asked with perfect logic.
Shar sighed. "Partly because I'm not certain either of us is up to creating a Gate at the moment. Partly because this iron carriage that protects us also warps magic around it, and I'm not certain what the effect of making a Gate around it would be. Partly because a Gate is one thing you can't make out of the mist with any certainty at all—it would be like you trying to juggle a dozen sharp knives at once. And lastly, making a Gate makes a fearful disturbance; there are people watching for us, and they'll know where we are and what we're doing."
"Ah." Tom nodded wisely. "So I see. This workin' of magic, it just purely isn't like—like magic, is it?" He grinned, amused at his own wit.
"Precisely." She forced a tired chuckle since he wouldn't be able to see her smile. "Well, we're going to see if we can't find another Gate in here to take us somewhere nearer to our friends."
By now the mist had definitely gone to pastel. In a few more moments, all the color would be gone, and it would be time to stop the Mustang and see if she couldn't locate another Gate on this side of the wall.
But as the color leeched out of the mist, the mist itself thinned. Shadow-shapes appeared, not the moving shapes the mist itself produced, but stationary shadows, with solidity to them.
The mist thinned further as the Mustang rolled forward, and the shapes took on substance, color, and texture. "Are you seeing what I'm seeing?" Tannim asked quietly.
"I think so," Shar replied, while she cobbled together the most apt comparison she could come up with. "This is really weird. It looks like somebody's rock collection."
If it was, the collector had to be a giant. Ahead, behind, and on either side loomed huge slabs and boulders of polished, formed or crystallized stone, each piece as big as the Mach I or bigger. These slabs balanced upright somehow, defying gravity, even though their bases might be no bigger than a foot or so across. The impression of being in the midst of a rock collection was inescapable now that Tannim had pointed it out; no two of these huge "specimens" were alike, and they all appeared—at least to Shar's uneducated eyes—to be purely of a particular "kind" of rock. Here was a cluster of quartz crystal points, the smallest of them as long as her arm and the largest taller than Tannim—there a polished boulder of amethyst big enough to crush the Mach I—ahead a single giant violet diamond-shaped fluorite crystal balanced precisely on one point.
"This is bizarre," Tannim said softly, staring at the next rock, a milky yellow multifaceted crystal which balanced on a single point like the fluorite crystal now behind them. The one next to it looked for all the world like an irregular slab cut from a geode and polished on both sides. "Have you ever heard of anything like this?"
"Never," she said firmly. "But I'm not sure I like what it implies. Someone had to create all this out of the Unformed; that's the only way you'd get things like this, right? So that person had to not only be some kind of rock-nut, but he had to be a complete monomaniac."
"Rock is my life, man," Tannim said automatically, but the joke fell rather flat.
Mist writhed away from the Mach I as they passed the balanced slab and a round boulder of pink quartz appeared to the right. "To the exclusion of everything else?" Tannim hazarded. "Boy, I hope we aren't disturbing his collection, wandering around in here!" He ran a hand through his tangled curls worriedly.
"Why don't you stop for a moment, and let me see if I can find a Gate," Shar suggested, feeling as worried as Tannim looked. "If someone got in here to create all this, there has to be a way out. I think I'd like to find it before he finds us."
Tannim nodded, and stopped the Mustang between a colorful metallic cubic aggregate of selenium and a polished granite egg the size of a Kenworth. Shar got out, checking all around them with such caution that it felt as if every nerve was an antenna, tuned for danger.
Only when she was certain there was nothing within the reach of her senses or her magics did she take a seat on the hood of the Mustang and send her spirit out questing for the peculiar magical signature of a Gate.
"Want to try again?" Joe suggested, as the rather stilted conversation in the crowded room died into silence again for the fourth time.
Chinthliss looked at Lady Ako, who alone of them had not lost her outward serenity. She shrugged. "I told my underlings to come inform us if the Mustang made a sizable change of location. That would indicate a Gate-passage, of course. There's no telling, though, if they were able to locate a domain within the Unformed where we saw them. Elfhame Outremer is such a place; I'm certain the Unseleighe also have domains within the mist. I know that the Grand Bazaar is in the mist, and that it is not the only neutral hold to be in the center of the Unformed."
"Is that a `yes' or a `no'?" Chinthliss asked in open exasperation. "Oh, never mind. I want to see if your precious daughter is up to anything." He bent over the chrome trim-ring, and once again chanted until a shower of sparks drifted down from his hand and settled on the chrome ring. This time the lacquer tabletop enclosed by the ring fogged over with no help from Lady Ako.
The haze cleared, and Joe leaned over the table for a closer look.
Shar sat on the hood of the Mach I, her eyes closed and a frown of concentration on her face. Tannim stood beside the car in a protective stance, his bespelled red crowbar in his hands, watching warily to all sides. The Mustang itself was parked in front of a huge gray boulder, a rock as big as two cars put together and polished to a glossy sheen. The mist of the earlier vision was thinner here, but there was still nothing really identifiable about the place.
Joe looked up at Lady Ako to see her reaction. She was smiling: a satisfied little smile compounded of equal parts of approval and relief.
"It seems they truly are working together," the lady said with a faint air of satisfaction.
Chinthliss only grunted. "I should give a great deal to know how my foster-son's sleeve came to be so shredded," he replied.
Joe glanced back down at the little scene imprisoned in the chrome circle, and saw with a start that Tannim's right sleeve was hanging in rags. But beneath the shirt-sleeve was something altogether unexpected; armor of some kind, he guessed. Iridescent green, of tiny hexagonal scales invisibly joined together, it covered his arm as smoothly as Spandex from wrist to shoulder.
"Pretty," Lady Ako remarked, indicating the armor with a fingertip that did not quite touch the image. "I assume that this is your doing, this armor?"
"As much Tannim's as mine," the dragon admitted with a touch of pride in his voice. "I happen to think that it is very good work. Something must have attacked them, though."
"If so, it learned that he bites back," Ako observed. "Honestly, I do not recognize this place, although I will inform my techs with a description, and we will see if the computer has a match. What of you?"
"Not a clue," Chinthliss admitted, as Ako slipped what looked to Joe like a palmtop computer out of her sleeve and laid it on her lap, quickly scratching something on its screen with a fingernail before returning it to her voluminous sleeve. I always wondered what they used those huge kimono sleeves for. Heck, you could smuggle Mexicans in there!
"You seem to be having an easier time holding the vision this time, old lizard," Fox observed. "Got any idea why?"
Chinthliss shook his head. "Probably has something to do with the area they're in. Less instability, maybe. There's a lot less of the Unformed mist, anyway." He turned to Ako. "What's she doing?"
"I would guess that she is searching the area for a Gate," Ako told him. "Shar is particularly sensitive to the energies of Gates. Even if she does not recognize a setting, she can sometimes tell general things about the destination."
"No—" Chinthliss took his eyes from the vision in the chrome trim-ring for a moment to stare at Ako in astonishment. "Where did she pick up that trick? From—"
"Yes," Ako confirmed. "I myself do not know how she does this. It is not a kitsune gift."
"It isn't a dragon-talent either." He shook his head. "Evidently she is not simply a meld of kitsune and dragon; she is something more."
"As I have always maintained." Ako was too composed to beam with pride, but there was a great deal of pride in her voice.
Inside the chrome circle, Tannim walked a wary patrol around the car as Shar remained perched on the hood. There was nothing in Tannim's behavior that suggested to Joe that he was at all worried about Shar or what she might do. If anything, his prowling suggested that he was determined to protect her from anything that might come at her out of the mist.
That certainly suggested they had come to some sort of arrangement, an agreement of cooperation, perhaps.
The vision still wasn't clear enough to make out who was in the back seat of the Mustang. The figure was blurred, as if the focus was a bit out in that one spot, although the rest of the scene was clear enough.
"I can't see what is in the backseat," Chinthliss said with a frown, echoing Joe's own thought. "That's odd. Look, you can see the front seat itself clearly enough, so it isn't the Mach I's shields that are interfering." He glanced sharply at Ako, who only shrugged.
"I could not tell you who that might be," she replied. "Shar has no allies that she would trust in a situation like this. Perhaps it was someone they met along the way?"
"Maybe another prisoner of Madoc Skean," Chinthliss muttered. "Tannim wouldn't be able to leave someone like that behind. Especially not if it was a Seleighe Sidhe."
"Can you blame him?" Fox made a face. "I wouldn't leave a dead cat in the hands of that lunatic."
"Maybe if I—" Chinthliss held his hand over the trim-ring again, his eyes narrowing as he focused his magic. "I would feel a lot better if I could just see who or what that is—"
But his efforts were not only in vain, they undid everything else he had accomplished. As Joe watched in dismay, the vision flared, then faded, leaving only the hint of haze on the black lacquer.
Then even the haze faded, and only the shiny surface remained.
Chinthliss cursed, but Lady Ako remained philosophical. "You can only hold such a vision for so long," she reminded him. "And what good would it do you to sit here and stare at it? You cannot help them until you know where they are."
Chinthliss growled under his breath, but had to admit that she was right. "But I don't have to like it," he added. Joe agreed silently. At least, if they could watch, they had the illusion that they could do something.
"I can—" Chinthliss began, then pulled his hand back before he even began the spell again. "No. No point in wasting magic that we might need later."
"A messenger will come if the Mustang makes a large enough movement for a fix," Ako promised. "I gave you my word."
At that, Chinthliss actually smiled. "I do not recall that you actually gave your word before, my lady, but now that you have—I am inclined to trust you."
Ako looked at him in some surprise, and Joe thought, she also looked a little hurt. "Have we grown so far apart, Chinthliss, that you no longer trust me without my given word?" she asked softly.
Chinthliss blinked, and turned to meet her gaze completely. The two of them stared deeply into one another's eyes, unable to look away.
Joe cleared his throat, and they both jumped and looked at him as if they had forgotten that he and FX existed.
Maybe they did forget we existed.
"Can we—ah—take a break, lady?" he asked carefully. "All that tea—"
"I don't—" Fox began, and Joe jabbed him fiercely in the side with an elbow. FX emitted a strangled grunt and fell silent.
"Certainly," Lady Ako replied, ignoring FX. "Saski can show you where everything is. Can't you, Saski?" Now she smiled at FX, to his obvious discomfort.
"Yes, Lady Ako," FX managed. Joe slid the door to the little room open, and he and Fox climbed out. The door slid shut again as soon as they were outside.
"What did you do that for?" FX hissed angrily.
"They wanted to be alone, dummy," Joe replied scornfully. "Jeez, man, couldn't you see that? Don't you remember what Chinthliss told us about him and the lady and all?"
"Of course I remember! That's why I wanted to stay there and watch!" Fox told him. "And—ow!" he exclaimed, as Joe elbowed him again. "What did you do that for?"
"Because you're rude, crude, and not even housebroken," Joe told him, shaking his head in dismay. "Man, I can't take you anywhere, can I? Why don't you show me what passes for a bathroom around here. I really did drink too much of that tea."
Fox sighed and cast a longing look back at the closed doors of the little room. "Oh well," he said philosophically. "We'll figure out whatever they've been up to when we get back anyway."
"You're impossible," Joe retorted.
Fox only snickered.