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Instead of a neon lit cityscape, I found myself staring at what looked like a tide rolling in—one of thick, white fog. It was so dense that only a few, blackened and burnt tops of buildings broke the cloud cover. Or whatever it was, because I hadn’t noticed any fog tonight.
“What is that?” I asked.
“A problem,” Zheng said. “And why our consul has me stationed here for the time being.”
“Why does she care what happens in Hong Kong?” Louis-Cesare asked.
“I’m getting there.” Zheng settled back against the expansive seat. “After the battle, life was pretty disrupted for a while. We had the dark mages who’d attacked us, and the traitorous dogs from the East Asian Court who had helped them, to track down. Ming-de and her soldiers were all over the place, ordering people about and contradicting the commands of the local authorities, creating mass confusion. There was looting going on, there were droves of people clogging the portals, trying to get the hell out, and there were mages crawling everywhere, attempting to get the shield stabilized or to collect their dead or to do investigations . . .
“My point is, we were busy.”
I nodded.
“Then one day, out of the blue, we woke up to find that a third of the city looked like that.” He nodded at the swirling clouds of white. “Whole blocks were taken over by that stuff, and wherever it went, magic went haywire.”
“What do you mean, haywire?” Louis-Cesare asked.
“I mean huge clouds of free-floating, unattached magic, with no spells binding it.”
“Like wild magic?” I said, talking about the naturally occurring stuff that the world throws out from time to time.
But Zheng shook his head. “If by ‘like’ you mean in the vague ballpark of, sure. Otherwise, not really. You know how talismans store up power for months, sometimes years, to get enough for a single spell?”
I nodded. Me and my bank account knew all about that. Magic was expensive, which was why most magic workers normally used their own. Any spell you had to buy that was worth a damn cost the Earth, not because the spell itself was that hard to cast, although some were harder than others. But because of the power that went into it.
The amount of charms I’d expended staying alive in Hassani’s temple would have cost me . . . I didn’t even know. Years of hard work, probably, if I hadn’t had the senate’s reserve to draw from. And then Zheng said something that had me sitting up and forgetting my picnic.
“Well, there are clouds in there,” he gestured at the fog, “that have enough juice to run a major ward for the next thousand years.”
“What?”
He nodded. “And the problem is, when one of those connects to a spell—any spell—one of two things happens. Either the spell blows up, overloaded to the point that it can’t maintain integrity anymore, or . . .”
“Or what?”
“Or that,” Zheng said, looking out of the side of the car again, but not in any particular direction, because it had started circling.
Louis-Cesare leaned over and we both looked down, only at what, I didn’t know. It was big, though, maybe the circumference of an oil tanker, and was clogging a small street. It was round like a tanker as well, only not as long. In fact, it kind of looked like—
“A soup can?” I said, noticing a familiar blank spot on a nearby billboard.
We were nearing the edge of the billowing whiteness, but were still well out of the danger zone. Or we should have been. But smallish tendrils were creeping out of the main flow here and there, and one had snagged the billboard, curling around it like a fist.
And, sure enough, what had been a simple, animated ad, suddenly got up from where it had landed in the roadway and ran down the street, ahead of a bunch of mages that tore off after it.
They managed to get lasso spells on it, golden ropes of gleaming power that brought it down, just shy of an apartment block. It didn’t look like anybody was living there; in fact, I didn’t see anybody in the whole area except for the mages, and the kicking, screaming thing on the ground. Which was now trying to roll over and crush them all.
But it made my heart skip a beat, nonetheless.
“They run out of the dead zones, as we’ve started calling them, from time to time,” Zheng explained. “We’ve taken down all the magical ads and graffiti we can find out here, but occasionally one slips past us. And inside the fog . . . well, there aren’t too many people willing to go inside the fog.”
“That’s why all the billboards were blank, or text only, on our way here,” Louis-Cesare said. Because I guessed he’d noticed, too.
Zheng nodded. “The easy ones are the graffiti,” he continued. “Most of them are too weak to survive an infusion of that much magic, and just explode. Or the advertisements that somebody did construct well enough to take it, but which were designed to be fairly benign. They’re mostly just a nuisance.”
I thought about the gun that Ray and I had devised, which had been based off of magical ads that we’d encountered during the battle for this city, and which we’d overloaded with power to help us out. I’d seen them slow down, and in some cases stop, a troop of war mages, the magical equivalent of tanks. I thought Zheng was kind of underselling the combat potential of animated soup cans.
But he was already going on.
