“So you aren’t really trying to save San Francisco.”
“It’s not my neighborhood, B,” Marla said. “I mean your city no harm, but—”
He laughed. “I hate San Francisco. I live in the East Bay now. I haven’t lived in the city for years, since I was in the movies. I have a lot of good memories of this place, but they’re all bad memories, too, if you see what I mean. Because just thinking about those good days reminds me of bad things.”
“I know what you mean.”
“So neither one of us loves this place, but we’re going to save it anyway.”
“Well, sure,” Marla said. “It’s not like we have to go out of our way to do it. We’ll save the city as a byproduct of killing Mutex.” She looked at Alcatraz again. It was looming. She could see the dock. “Besides, the place has its charms.”
“I guess I wouldn’t want to see it fall into the ocean.”
“And it’s not as if Tlaltecuhtli would just smash San Francisco and then go into retirement. Mutex’s power would spread, and it would get to us eventually, wherever we went.”
The boat bumped gently up against the pier, and the tourists began rising and milling about.
“Let’s go see a witch about a frog,” Marla said.
It was easy enough to slip away from the tour, though Marla was somewhat interested in what the guide was saying, about the brief American Indian occupation of Alcatraz Island in the early ’70s. She had more important things to do now, though, and she could always get Rondeau to fill her in about the history of the place later, since he’d absorbed everything in the guidebooks like a sponge sucking up water. She cast a look-away over herself and B, the effort of casting the spell making her ears ring a little. Maybe she should have snatched some spell components from the Chinese guy’s shop. All these little magics were starting to take something out of her, and it was harder to cast spells this far from Felport and the center of her power. Everything had a price, after all, and she was down to paying with the substance of herself. She should keep something in reserve for the bigger challenges still to come.
The island was a desolate place, fit to be little more than a roost for seabirds, but the views of the city and the Golden Gate (both the bridge and the landform) were stunning, and must have been heartbreaking for the inmates when this was a working prison. B led her up the stairs from the dock to the gatehouse—he’d been here before, and had a sense of where they were supposed to go now. He took her into one of the damp, gray cell-blocks, past rows of windowless cells. “We’re going to one of the solitary-confinement cells,” he said, whispering, and Marla felt his whisper was appropriate. There was a presence here, or just past here, located a short distance away in a dimension she couldn’t quite comprehend. In addition to that there were ghostly fragments of dead prisoners, and somewhere a wailing little-girl ghost that Marla assumed had been one of the Indian occupiers, or else one of the Native Americans from before the Europeans came, or possibly a tourist who’d had a tragic accident of some kind. She wondered if B could hear them, but upon reflection, she supposed he could sense them more clearly than she could herself. He’d shown his great acuity time and again, after all. She admired his calm and his attention to the task at hand all the more after realizing that.
He led her into a tiny cell with a toilet and a sink, the bunk long since gone. B took her hand, and they shut their eyes, then turned slowly together, three times, all the way around. They took a step forward in unison, then another, then another.
And another. And five more. The sound of the floor beneath Marla’s boots changed from heavy stone to something creakier. “Can we look yet?” she said.
“I think so,” B said. “We’ve walked past where the wall should be.”
Marla opened her eyes. They were in a long, dim corridor with a wooden floor and wooden walls, extending forward into darkness. Marla glanced toward a narrow arrow-slit of a window, and the faint, silvery light that came through it, but she stopped herself from stepping closer and looking through the aperture. She didn’t look behind her, either. It was better, in places like this, to keep your eyes on the path. “Forward?” she said.
“Onward,” B said. He didn’t let go of her hand as they continued. The corridor turned left at a sharp right angle, then extended forward again for another hundred yards or so. Then another sharp turn, this time to the right. Once, they passed a door, with a brass knob, heavily tarnished. B looked at the door, then shook his head, and led Marla on. She wondered what was behind the door, and realized, not for the first time, that there were mysteries piled upon mysteries, and that even an adept and initiate such as herself only saw a tiny fraction of the deeper world that existed behind and above the known world. The corridor eventually reached an ornate wrought-iron spiral staircase. “We’re supposed to go up there,” B said. The corridor continued on, leading to who-knew-what inner mysteries, but Marla only nodded and followed B up the spiral staircase, which passed through a rough-edged square hewn in the roof of the wooden corridor, into something like an elevator shaft. The walls of the shaft were still dark wood, though, and Marla was comforted that they weren’t ascending through pure formless void.