“It’s possible,” he said after a few beats. “Belshegar’s extradimensional nature provides a stable anchor point. My own existence as a summoned being means I can maintain the corridor’s internal consistency and prevent the walls from thinning.” He paused there, then continued. “It will require sustained concentration from both of us. And the objects must be moved in a specific sequence, from least volatile to most volatile. If anything disrupts the corridor mid-transport — anything at all — the consequences would depend entirely on what was in transit at the moment of disruption.”
Roslyn glanced at Malachi and saw that he was already looking at her.
“‘The consequences,’” she repeated. “Meaning what, specifically?”
“Meaning the artifact would experience an uncontrolled interaction with dimensional energy,” Malachi said. “For most of the collection, that would result in simple discharge. For some of the items in the basement vaults, it would result in something considerably worse.”
“Great,” she commented. “So we don’t let anything disrupt the corridor.”
Nobody argued with her, so she took that as agreement.
They started with the East Gallery. Roslyn had spent three weeks living alongside the artifacts in that room, and she knew their individual energies the way she knew the feel of a patient’s pulse. It was something that came from proximity and time, the kind of knowledge that settled into your bones before you were even consciously aware you’d acquired it. She’d watched Malachi tend the silver astrolabe, the bone dice, and the glass jar of trapped weather-working, had listened to his explanations during the morning sessions. Along the way, she’d developed a healthy respect for all of them and something closer to wariness about the jar.
She didn’t know how useful that knowledge was going to be today, but she held onto it anyway.
“The dice first,” Malachi said. “The probability field is the most likely to interact with the corridor’s energy, but the field is contained within a twelve-foot radius. If it discharges, it will discharge locally. We’ll lose the dice, but we won’t lose anyone.”
“Start with the most replaceable,” she replied with a nod. “Work toward the least.”
A corner of his mouth lifted. “An accurate summary.”
Connor and Angela stayed outside to maintain what remained of the perimeter and deal with any Gibsons who might wander by to see what they were doing. That left Roslyn, Malachi, Levi, and Belshegar to handle the actual work, which was fine, except that Malachi shouldn’t have been doing any of this at all.
She’d told him so twice before resigning herself to the reality that he was going to be involved no matter what she said. The collection was his, after all, and he knew it better than anyone alive. Suggesting that he should sit down and rest while other people moved his life’s work through a dimensional corridor was roughly equivalent to suggesting that he should stop breathing.
So she’d compromised. He could direct and advise, but he wasn’t supposed to do any significant magical work unless it was an utter emergency.
He’d agreed…but something in his tone had told her that he reserved the right to define “emergency” however he chose.
The corridor opened between the study’s far wall and a point somewhere outside the space she could perceive, a shimmer in the air that reminded her of the way she’d see heat baking off the highway when she had to run errands in Phoenix during the summer.
And she could feel it as well, thanks to a sensitivity she’d developed during three weeks of living in the same house with all those artifacts and a man who was himself a kind of contained power. The corridor had a texture to it, dense and humming at its edges, the seam between one place and another held open by the quiet, sustained effort of two beings who weren’t quite human.
Belshegar stood at one side of the corridor’s entrance, while Levi stood at the other. They weren’t touching, but there was something between them that seemed almost like a handclasp, a connection she could feel as a faint resonance in the air between their positions. Neither of them spoke, and neither of them appeared to be doing anything visible.
Which was kind of the point.
“Move,” Malachi said quietly, and Roslyn picked up the first object — the bone dice in their containment case — and stepped through.
The corridor felt like walking through a space that hadn’t decided yet whether it was there. The air was thick and slightly pressurized. Her ears popped on the second step, and then she was through. The receiving end of the corridor resolved around her, a bare room with exposed lath, empty floors, and the faint smell of dust and disuse. But the room wasn’t unprepared — she could feel the layered ward Tricia and Allegra had laid down across the floor and up the walls, a containment lattice meant to receive each artifact into an existing field of protection rather than depositing them naked into an unfamiliar house. The card tables were just where she’d set the objects until they could be moved into their permanent homes. The wards underneath were what would actually hold them.
She was in Jerome. Someone — probably Tricia —had leaned a trio of folding tables against the wall, and Roslyn opened them all up and then set the case on the closest one before turning back to fetch the next item.
Step through. Set it down. Return.
She found a kind of rhythm by the third trip. By the fifth, she’d stopped thinking of what she was doing as something frightening and started thinking of it as a problem with a very specific solution. Her magic was still mostly drained, but it turned out you didn’t need much magic to carry things carefully. What you needed was steadiness and attention, and at least she still had that.
Malachi stayed near the corridor entrance, reading each object through its containment field before it was moved, confirming that its individual wards were holding. He spoke quietly and continuously, giving her instructions and advisories, and she listened because he knew what he was talking about, and she knew he wanted her to come through this safely just as much as she did.
No trouble transporting the bone dice, and the astrolabe also wasn’t a problem. Twelve of the other East Gallery objects went through that strange corridor and were deposited on the card table without incident. By the time she picked up the glass jar, she was starting to develop a kind of cautious optimism about the whole operation.
But she knew at once that something was wrong. The jar’s energy felt different than it had that morning — more active, less settled — and she held it very carefully in both hands and sent a worried glance at Malachi.
“It’s reacting,” she said.
She’d barely finished speaking before he was next to her. He put his hand near the jar, not touching it, just reading it through proximity. The shift in his expression was subtle, but she could still see the worry there.
“The corridor’s dimensional energy,” he told her. “The weather-working inside is responding to it. The contained atmospheric pressure is attempting to equalize.”
