Blood Engines(78)

 

Rondeau heaved the jar against a far wall. It broke open, and starfish arms showered out. “Nope,” he said. “That’s not it.”

 

“Good start, though,” Marla said, grinning. This was it, she was sure—pretty sure anyway. The Chinese guy had hidden the entrance, which was really just a spell that had previously been made to look like a door. Now it had been made to look like something else. Smashing whatever it looked like would have the same effect as kicking down the door. It would open the way out. Ch’ang Hao had actually been on the right track with his furious breakage. “Ch’ang Hao!” she called. “Get out here! We’re going to bust out of this place!”

 

Ch’ang Hao lumbered out of the back room, and she briefly explained. He nodded, looking almost hopeful, and began methodically smashing jars and wrenching open tins. Rondeau was whistling and slicing up a dried alligator mummy with his butterfly knife, and B was gently pushing over long-necked jars of oil and letting them break on the floor. Marla found a jo staff propped in a corner, and though it was an inch too long to be the perfect size for her, it was good enough for her to assault some shelves and apothecary cabinets on the macro level, knocking them over and hammering them to splinters with the age-hardened wooden staff. After half an hour of continual smashing, Marla leaned on her staff and surveyed the wreckage. B was down to ripping open plastic bags of herbs and powders. Ch’ang Hao had thoroughly destroyed the back room, and was now in the process of removing the pendulum-blade from the ceiling and snapping it in half. Rondeau, whose attention had predictably wandered, sat in a corner, apparently reading a newspaper printed in Chinese. Maybe Marla was wrong. Maybe the door wasn’t hidden, after all.

 

“What about that vase?” B said.

 

“What?” Marla said.

 

B pointed toward a corner by the back wall, where a pile of wreckage formed a little mountain. Everything had already been smashed to bits over there.

 

“What—” Marla repeated, irritated, and then she saw it, a beautiful blue-and-white porcelain vase with a fluted mouth, standing on an unobtrusive blackstone pedestal. “I didn’t see that,” she said.

 

“I still don’t see anything,” Rondeau said, and Ch’ang Hao shrugged and shook his head. “What’re you going on about?”

 

“You’re worth your weight in eye of newt, Bowman,” she said, and picked her way through the smashed glass. She had to glance away from the vase to negotiate her way around a puddle of bubbling red sludge, and when she looked back, she didn’t see the vase. Marla swore under her breath. The Chinese guy had put a seriously strong look-away on that vase, the kind of magic only a big-mojo sorcerer could throw, but B had seen right through it. He was a far better seer than she’d originally supposed. “You’d better break the vase, B. It keeps slipping out of my vision.”

 

“Sure thing,” B said. He picked up a chunk of rough black rock—probably a meteorite, Marla thought—and threw it overhand at the vase from across the room, a distance of some twenty feet. The vase shattered, and light poured out, forming into a ragged oval that showed the streets of Chinatown beyond.

 

“Good hit!” she crowed. “We’re out!”

 

Despite the fact that the door was in the back wall now, it still opened onto the same place outside. Consistent spatial relationships were nothing more than a courtesy in this place. Someone familiar hurried past the oval opening on the street beyond, a slim man with a fur hat and a cane. Who was he, Marla wondered. Some henchman of the Celestial’s, off to tell his master she’d escaped? How had he managed to follow her today, from Dalton’s to Bethany’s to Chinatown? Before she could point him out to the others, the old man was out of sight, and Rondeau and B were pressing past her to look through the opening. Based on the way the man had eluded her earlier, chasing him wouldn’t do much good now, and she had other priorities.

 

“Damn, B, you’re an action hero,” Rondeau said.

 

“You did well,” Ch’ang Hao said, and Marla wondered if B understood enough to be impressed at such praise from a being as old and powerful as Ch’ang Hao. Thinking of which…

 

“Ch’ang Hao,” she said. “Now that we can get out of here, I need to ask you about that favor.” She explained, briefly, about the frog-eating Colombian snake. “Can you give it to me?”

 

“I can bring you any snake that lives in the world,” Ch’ang Hao said. “But it will take some time.”