Blood Engines(77)

 

“Well, fuck,” Marla said after a moment. “Let me look into this.” She went into the main part of the shop, where B and Rondeau were already standing by the place where the main door should have been. “Guess you overheard, huh?”

 

“Yep,” Rondeau said. “It turns out that B doesn’t know any special action-movie tricks for escaping a space-time pocket that’s been cut off from its real-world umbilicus.”

 

“I never did any of my own stunts,” B said apologetically, and Marla thought with something like exasperated affection that Rondeau’s sense of humor was rubbing off on him.

 

Marla stared at the wall of the shop, the blank wooden wall where a door should have been. “But we aren’t cut off from the umbilicus,” she said. “The Chinese guy didn’t cut the cord entirely. After all, we got in. It’s more like we’re in a—”

 

“Humane mousetrap,” Rondeau said.

 

“Exactly. Except no one’s going to repatriate us to a distant grassy meadow.”

 

“Can’t you throw a fireball at the wall or something?” B said.

 

Marla raised an eyebrow. “I could, though to get the energy I’d have to suck away most of yours and Rondeau’s body heat. If I did that, I wouldn’t accomplish much more than setting this place on fire.”

 

“No one wants to be trapped in a burning box,” Rondeau said.

 

“So…we’re fucked?” B said.

 

“Hey, it could be worse,” Rondeau said. “There’s plenty of stuff to eat here.” He prodded a jar on a nearby shelf, then squinted at it. “Okay, this is dried sea-horses, bad example. But there’s plenty of, ah, ginger and ginseng and mandrake and lots and lots of tea. Think of this place like a bomb shelter. When Mutex raises a giant Aztec frog-monster and ravages the city, we’ll be safe here.”

 

“Except that stuff can still get in,” Marla said. “And anything bad that comes in here can’t get out again, and we’ll be stuck with it. So it’s not much of a bomb shelter, really.”

 

“Hmm,” Rondeau said. “Okay, point. How do we get out?”

 

“There might not be a way,” she said. “Let me think.” She sat cross-legged on the floor and put her chin in her hands, staring at the wall. What would the Chinese guy have done? He was a sneaky bastard, fond of traps and hidden things. Also, he was greedy as hell—she remembered the way the apprentice (who was, almost certainly, actually the master in the apprentice’s body) had counted the cash, smoothing the bills out on the counter. This room was still full of magical objects, and probably lots of money, since it was more secure than any bank. The Chinese guy probably hadn’t had time to get even half his valuables before fleeing Ch’ang Hao’s ever-expanding fury. Would he really have cut himself off from this place, leaving his fortune behind?

 

Of course not. Which was further proven by the fact that he hadn’t severed the ties between this place and the ordinary world entirely. He could still get back in. And he would want to, since so much of his wealth was here. There was no point in his being able to get in, though, if he couldn’t get back out. Which meant there was some way to open this place from the inside. The Chinese guy would come back at some point, probably with some kind of serious magical firepower to subdue Ch’ang Hao. They could just wait for him to return. He probably wouldn’t expect Marla and Rondeau to be here, and they might be able to get the drop on him, especially since they now knew for sure that the one they had to fear was the young Chinese woman in boy-drag. Marla was reasonably confident she could beat the Celestial into revealing the way out.

 

But that was the brute-force approach, and despite prevailing opinion, Marla did have strengths other than, well, simple strength. The Celestial had fled in a hurry, so he couldn’t have done anything too complicated. The entrance was, in all likelihood, simply hidden. A briefly muttered spell showed her that there was no simple light-bending illusion hiding the entrance, the way there was on the other side. Which meant it was hidden somewhere else. “Okay,” she said aloud. “The door is hidden here, somewhere. This isn’t exactly a literal space—it’s as magical as it is physical, and its physicality is entirely dependent on magic—so the door could be hidden in anything, disguised as anything.”

 

“So it could be inside this jar of dried starfish,” Rondeau said, picking up a wide-mouthed mason jar.

 

“Yes,” Marla said. “So smash it open already.”