Blood Engines(62)

 

“Come on, Rondeau,” Marla said. “I’ll lead, B in the middle, Rondeau gets the rear guard.” She sighed. “I wish there was an intercom or something. I don’t mind barging into sorcerers’ lairs, but I hope she doesn’t think I’m coming in heavy for war or something.”

 

“You could take her,” Rondeau said loyally.

 

“I don’t want to,” Marla said. “I want her to help me take Mutex.”

 

“Oh,” Rondeau said. “Right. Lead on, fearless diplomat.”

 

“Fiat lux,” Marla said, pausing to pass her hand over Rondeau’s and B’s eyes. Now she could see into the dark, though the view was grainy and oddly saturated, like a digital photograph given too much contrast. B and Rondeau could see better, too (though B probably didn’t need it), but there was no external light source, no hovering ball of light to reveal their position or create deeper shadows around them. Marla’s light spell only affected the vision of the chosen recipients, stepping up the receptivity of the light-sensing apparatus in the eye, tweaking the brain’s ability to interpret visual information. Langford the biomancer had helped her devise this spell. Marla hated the tinkerbell lights, floating balls of fire, illuminated auras, and all the other conventional light-producing magics most sorcerers used. This was a bit like having night-vision goggles on inside her eyes, but without the greenish tinge.

 

“Wicked,” Rondeau said, peering around.

 

“Huh,” B said. “Very nice.”

 

Marla started down the tight spiral stairs, which descended through a space the size of an elevator shaft. The stairs were metal—copper, actually—and had almost certainly been specially made, probably as a sort of magical nightingale floor, the metal conducting physical information about the intruders down into the sorcerer’s lair below. So much for worrying about showing up unannounced. If Bethany was down there, she was probably aware that she had visitors. Marla admired the craftsmanship, the nautilus whorl of the stairs spiraling down, the railing of delicately curved copper pipe, the steps embossed with raised starburst shapes to provide a surer tread. Marla didn’t know any details about Bethany, but she could infer a few things. Bethany’s magic would likely be chthonic, aligned with dark places underground, and thus entangled with the treasures of the Earth, metals and jewels. Judging by the stairs, she was probably a hands-on practitioner, a fabricator or artificer.

 

Or maybe she just had a lot of money to hire fabricators, and liked underground housing because it was cheap. Marla couldn’t be sure. Being a stranger in this city was a constant disadvantage. She needed some kind of scorecard to keep up with the prominent personalities, though there were fewer of them with each passing hour, it seemed.

 

The stairs went down a hundred yards, two hundred, the spiral tight enough to make her a little dizzy, which was also probably an intentional effect, making visitors more off balance. Marla finally sensed an opening in space, a widening of the elevator shaft into the contours of a larger room, though even her enhanced eyes didn’t penetrate very far into the darkness.

 

When she stepped off the last stair and her foot touched the concrete floor, floodlights burst on, dazzling her painfully, overwhelming the enhanced light-receptors in her eyes. “Nix lux!” she shouted, canceling the light spell and restoring all their eyesight to normal. B and Rondeau were cursing and rubbing their eyes.

 

That’s a drawback of the spell she’d never considered. Tinkerbell lights would have been better. She squinted, purple blots hanging in her vision as she scanned the area around them for threats. There were none, fortunately. The moment of visual overload had left them vulnerable to a surprise attack, but that didn’t seem to be Bethany’s intention.

 

“I don’t believe it,” B said, stepping off the stairs, still rubbing one of his eyes. “It’s a BART station.”

 

A blue-and-white sign on the white-tiled wall read “Tenderloin.” They were, unmistakably, on a subway platform, a long stretch of concrete bordered by tracks. The wall beyond the tracks lacked the ubiquitous advertising Marla had seen at other stations, and there was no bright yellow-and-black stripe painted on the edge of the platform to warn the clueless or visually impaired that there was a short trip to an electrified rail just beyond, but otherwise, it could have been any of the train stations Marla had seen since she got to the city.

 

“There’s even a map of the train system,” B said. “Just like the ones in all the other stations. Except this one includes Tenderloin Station.”