Wizard (The Key to Magic) (13 page)

If he tried stations at random, he was just as likely to lose his way and wind up leagues in the wrong direction as he was to find his target. Each station that he travelled to would multiply the number of possible destinations and quickly produce a return route too complex to keep track of.

An exhaustive, methodical exploration of the branching port routes could take days and there was the very real possibility that he could visit every single station in the city and not find the Headquarters. With the significant difference in airborne and earthbound perspectives, he could be staring at one of his fuzzily remembered landmarks this very minute and not recognize it.

Simply asking directions of a passerby seemed reckless. Doing so would confirm that he was foreign to the city -- he had already earned a few curious looks obviously because of his general unconventional appearance -- and also might incite suspicion both in those that favored the Faction and those that did not. It would be as if he had asked directions in the Lower City to the nearest post of the Viceroy's Guard.

It seemed that he must resign himself to a long, tedious, and perhaps fruitless search. Finding his way about would be much simpler if there were a map.

He frowned. Why had he assumed that there was not? Regular patrons of the system would be familiar with their customary routes, but even seasoned travellers would need a guide were they minded to travel to an unfamiliar section of the huge city.

With impatience driving his pace, he returned to the station, climbed to the narrow outside terrace and examined the exterior face of one of the wide, rectangular columns. No location would be more convenient to potential patrons of the station and the flat surface was a perfect place to affix a large map. Of course, these ancient magicians would hardly use anything as unsophisticated and impermanent as pen and paper. He delved the column.

As he had suspected, the outer, stone-seeming surface was but a facade. The heart of the column was a steel post one armlength wide and half an armlength deep. Within the post resided a number of spells, only one of which he was able to identify: a lamp.

He thought a moment, then said, "Map."

A series of multi-colored and slightly glowing lines and shapes winked into existence on the face of the column at a height convenient to his gaze. Though as wide as the face, the map was only an armlength and a half tall. Predictably, the annotations were in the indecipherable flowing script, but it was easy to see that the circles with the interconnecting spokes represented the port stations. The brown circle at the center of the map had a flashing eight-pointed star enclosing it and he took that to be an indication of his present location, Ball Harbor. Only ten stations were shown, but the spokes from the roughly circular rank of outer stations projected beyond the borders of the map.

"Investigative Section Headquarters."

An orange line crawled along one of Ball Harbor's spokes on the left, transformed the blue circle of a second station to orange, then crawled along one of that station's spokes toward the lower left corner. When the line reached the border, the area shown slid up and to the right until a third station came into view and also changed color. This process continued through two more stations. At the final one, the line stopped and the station symbol became overlaid with a spinning red square.

So, he was only four stations away from his goal.

Five spokes radiated from Ball Harbor, one of which had to be Lordis Bay. With the stations' maps as reference, he would be able to identify the others using a process of ease-dropping and trial and error. If he had any luck at all, he should be able to work his way to the fourth station in short order.

Happily, he had more luck than usual, and only made ten fruitless ports in total before reaching his destination, Long Shoals.

When he exited the rotunda there, he faced an open boulevard a hundred paces across. Oddly, while there were some pedestrians moving determinedly along the near promenade, there was no traffic of any sort on the thoroughfare itself and the far promenade accommodated only patrolling armsmen in yellow livery. Behind this picket sat a soaring black structure isolated by plazas to the left and right from the lesser towers nearby.

Acting as if he knew where he was going, he took off without delay along the adjoining promenade and studied the stronghold of the Investigative Section out of the side of his eye.

It was immediately clear that getting in would be a significant problem. While he had never had any intention of going in through the front gate, the only apparent entrance was a single, plain, and not overlarge portal watched over by a score of vigilant armsmen sheltering behind what he would have called earthworks save that they were constructed all of metal. Head high, as wide as a man could stretch his arms, and fashioned of raw foundrywork, the bulwarks had the look of temporary measures, perhaps emplaced as a result of his escape. Though scattered, their positioning was such that all straight paths to the portal were blocked.

A thief's preferred method of entering any building was through its windows, but, though he had come out of one and thus knew that the stronghold did indeed have them, the glassy black face of the building showed none. He was not close enough to detect such, but he thought that the windows must be hidden from exterior view by glamours.

Having moved too far along the promenade to see the building without turning his head, he began looking for an alley that would get him out of sight. Once he flew up and gained the roof of one of the other towers, he should be able to find an undisturbed spot from which to spy upon the stronghold.

Taking care to match his pace to that of the other pedestrians, he went at least a sixth of a league without seeing any gap between the buildings that fronted the promenade. Like the vastly more modest structures of Mhajhkaei, the ground floors of these, those simply colossal and those unbelievably high alike, were given over to shops of one short or another and these formed a continuous strip of flashing magical displays and glass windows of impressive dimensions that revealed clothing, sundries, and all manner of unknown devices.

One shop that drew his particular attention had a two manheight tall sign affixed to a freestanding post. The sign itself was another wonder of light and motion, but the central rotating element, the insignia of Bebe's Savories, reminded him that he had not eaten since the Bazaar -- which, now that he thought of it, had to be
yesterday.

Without a conscious decision, he found himself standing in front of the expansive glass several paces to the right of the door, staring in at the serving area behind the counter and in particular at a prominently placed rotating rack crowded with brown, crinkly Savories.

The establishment was full of activity, with customers constantly coming in and going out the doors, which had a spell that made them slide open of their own accord when one approached. He thought for a moment of going in to have a sit, but the tables and chairs of the lobby were all in use.

The majority of the exiting and entering clientele did not give Mar a single glance, but one, a gray-haired man in maroon, smiled and nodded as he started by.

As Mar was about to move away, the man turned back around as if on impulse and offered a warm smile. "I've seen that look in my own mirror a time or two. Here."

He handed Mar a few squares of paper. "Get yourself something to eat. And keep a watch out for the Compliance Officers. They make themselves difficult around here."

With a firm nod, the charitable man went on his way.

The four squares were light yellow, a fingerlength across, and inked with a cameo of a stern-faced woman imposed on a field of flowing designs incorporating the worm track Common writing. Thinking these to be the Faction flimsies that the young woman in the Bazaar had spoken of, likely some type of warehouse warrant, he made for the door.

Many of the customers in the queues used polished red cubes which were waved in front of a device shaped like an upright seashell to receive their food, but a good portion passed over flimsies. When he reached the head of his own queue, not knowing the value of the flimsies that the gray-haired man had given him or the cost of the Savories, he only ordered one -- with everything.

"Would you like a drink with that?" the waiter, an older woman, asked in wooden repetition.

"What do you have?"

"Beer, ale, tea, vegetable juice, fruit juice, Light-Me-Up, Cool-Me-Down, Set-Me-On-Fire, Stake-My-Tongue-To-A-Post --"

"I'll take tea."

"That'll be one and six."

When he offered but a single flimsy, she took it without reaction and returned three differently faced flimsies and seven square brass coins a little larger than a Khalarii'n iron penny. The tea tasted off, so when he went back for seconds and thirds, he had fruit juice, which also tasted off. When he was full, he still had enough of the Faction money left to purchase two more Savories. These he wrapped generously in the paper napkins that were freely available on a side counter and then tucked one in each of the pockets of his coat.

After walking another several hundred paces down from Bebe's shop, he still had not come across an alley but did encounter a ramp that led up to an elevated promenade. This spiraled around and through an irregularly shaped crimson tower and had half-circular terraces supplied with chairs and benches projecting at regular intervals. Most of the terraces had people chatting, eating, or sunning, but he found an unoccupied one near the top of the tower, swiftly cast Telriy's glamour all about and took unsteadily to the air. The glamour shell would not protect him from detection by magic, but it should keep him hidden from casual view.

He had to continually recast the overlapping glamours as he moved and this retarded his progress to a crawl. The flux that he was forced to infuse into his brigandine pushed the material to its ethereal limits and he worried that it might fail before he came near enough to the Investigative Section. He relieved some of the strain by casting weak spells on his coat and boots, but his flight remained erratic. He did manage to maintain a speed equal to a normal walking pace and returned to the vicinity of the Faction stronghold in about the same amount of time that it had taken to reach the elevated promenade.

A nook at the base of a tapering spire to the east promised barely enough of a flat surface for him to perch upon and he landed just as one of the seams in his coat threatened to split. After re-casting his tortoise shell of glamours, he began to probe across the ether toward the stronghold.

Straightaway he encountered a boisterous outflow of flux that could only have been cast off by a very powerful spell. Pressing through this current, he found the nexus of the expected modulation at the extreme end of his range and well short of the black stronghold. It was an ethereal wall of the same sort as the one that he had slammed into on the night of his escape.

It was clear that the Compliance Officers had strengthened their defenses. He certainly would not get close to the building through the use of brute magic.

The important question was: Would he would be able to succeed with a thief's finesse?

FIFTEEN

He decided to wait for nightfall.

It was not that he had any illusions that the cover of darkness would be of any aid against the Faction's magic, but night was a more natural and normal time to pursue skullduggery and it felt
good
to fall back into his old habits.

As the sun crawled slowly down the western sky, making the lengthening shadows from the highest towers slice the city into stripes of gray and gold, he considered the problem of the cumbersome glamour shell and began experimenting to marry Telriy's charm with the spell form that he had used to create air globes. He had little success until he hit upon the uncomplicated technique of weaving the two flux modulations together, rather than trying to force the charm to accept the semblance of the globe, and by the time the sun had left only a fading red sky in its wake, he was able to create a composite spell that would hide him from sight from every direction but also move as he moved. The ethereal presence of the spell had the impression of a lattice and he suspected that other spells could be looped into the interstices, but for now he was well satisfied that he would be able to fly at a reasonable speed.

Then, with the stars peeking, he paused to eat a cold and dry supper of Savories, relishing the greasy pastries in spite of the fact that he had no idea what sort of animal went into the sausage.

When the stars and the city's lights were in fierce competition and the latter clearly winning, he lifted off his perch, new glamour in place, and drifted as near as he dared to the ethereal wall. After confirming that none of the guards near the brightly lit entrance far below showed awareness of his presence, he began the delicate task of teasing a Key from the immensely strong modulation. He was particularly pleased with himself when he had it after only a few minutes of effort.

Complexity in physical locks was limited by their physical dimension and that size restricted by practical utility. Locks had to be handy and that meant that they had to be compact. A lock as big as a house might be nigh impossible to defeat, but it would also be useless for any normal task. Locks also had to be robust to withstand physical attack and that meant that their internal parts had to be relatively sturdy and thus constrained to be relatively large. These characteristics -- small package, large parts -- limited locksmiths in the number of possible mechanical patterns that they could employ.

In Mar's experience, this tended to encourage locksmiths to learn only a few standard designs and differentiate between them by the inclusion of a few minor variations of their own devising. For the most part, he had found these variations to be predictable and had further learned to associate related groups of variations with particular schools of the locksmithing craft. In effect, the smiths had
signed
their work. Previously when he had picked physical locks, it had been frequently only necessary for him to identify one or two pin sequences. From those he would be able guess the signature of the locksmith's school, which would in turn reveal the complete structure of the lock.