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“Others—the more dangerous kind—are protection wards and spells that used to guard bank vaults, weapons’ shops, and jewelry stores, places where people were serious about others not getting in. Unlike the ads, those were designed to be mean, and now they got the power to back it up. But the worst of all, the ones that really ruin everybody’s good time, are the arsenals.”
“What . . . arsenals?” Louis-Cesare asked, looking like he didn’t want to know.
“A lot of the triads and such had arsenals in the dead zones. Thy needed someplace to put all the stuff they . . . creatively acquired . . . on jobs, or that they were planning to sell or use themselves, if the situation warranted it. There are disputes from time to time between rivals, and it’s always a good idea to have a reserve. Cheung had a storehouse in there himself, for emergencies, and for wards and weapons he was planning to trade to the fey.”
I started to get the picture. “But now, with all this free-floating magic . . .”
“They’re running loose. And sometimes the weapons encounter an ad with the arms and legs they lack, and merge with it. Making a hybrid with tons of power and a really bad attitude. The good thing is, they largely stay in the dead zones, ‘cause that’s where the magic clouds that feed them are located. But you’ll notice I said ‘largely’.”
“The monsters,” I said, remembering what Lily had said.
Zheng nodded. “They get out sometimes, and prowl around the streets down there. But most of them can’t fly—”
“Most of them?” Louis-Cesare repeated.
“—so elevated real estate has become real popular.”
“I bet,” I said.
“But what causes all this?” Louis-Cesare demanded
. “Wild magic is usually found in minute amounts in nature. It takes a thunderstorm and a witch who knows how to ride its power, or a talisman to make it usable. It doesn’t look like that!”
“It’s found on minute amounts on Earth,” Zheng corrected.
He sat back against the seat and poured us some whiskey. I had finished my tea, so I was happy enough for it, but I had a feeling that it was less hospitality and more a leftover from his human days. A here-you’ll-need-it kind of thing.
I took it anyway, because I did need it.
I wasn’t liking where this conversation was going.
“The shield that protects the city does double duty,” Zheng said, and since he didn’t sound as if he was changing the subject, I assumed this was relevant. “See, nobody else sits on top of a ley line vortex the way we do. It’s considered, well, insane. The thought, before we proved everybody wrong, was that no shield could possibly withstand that kind of constant pressure. That it would buckle for sure.”
“Why doesn’t it?” Louis-Cesare asked.
“Because it’s made up of the energy of the lines. And, yeah, I know, that’s supposed to be impossible, too,” he said, before Louis-Cesare could object. “That’s what everyone was always told: the lines are too powerful; try to tame them and they’ll tame you instead, and by tame I mean dust to ashes. But our vortex is different.”
“How different?” I said. “The one here is said to be more powerful than anywhere else, with more lines crossing and crisscrossing than at any other point on Earth—”
“Exactly. It’s ironic, but ours is usable because it’s so powerful. So many lines run together here that their energy gets jumbled up. Instead of pooling, like in other vortexes, it’s more like a volcano erupting, all the time. Only you ever see magma, the kind that floats to the surface of a lava flow?”
“I guess,” I said, not really seeing where this was going.
“It’s black, right? That’s because the crust is cooler than the stuff underneath. The same is true here. The ley line energy piles up, higher and higher, until it forces some of it closer to real space than anywhere else that we’ve found. And that kind of . . . cools it off . . . over time.”
“Cools it off?”
“Okay, technically thins it out might be better, but it wrecks the analogy. The point is, it’s like the crust on magma as it encounters the air. Hot and burning underneath, but cooler, and thus less dangerous on the top. That’s what we use, the very top most layer, forming part of the energy of the lines themselves into the shield that protects us. The rest goes into the phase that keeps us out of alignment with real space, and able to live without having to hide what we are. And the remainder, a relatively small amount—”
“You skim off for yourself,” Louis-Cesare said, looking like something had finally made sense.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Dory, Hong Kong
I tensed up, afraid that comment was likely to piss Zheng off again, not because it had been belligerent, but because it was true. No way was a city founded by pirates and gangsters going to miss a chance like that. But he merely shrugged.
“Of course. The gals back at Lily’s, for instance, that’s how we fuel them. That’s also why they get a little aggressive, from time to time. Smaller bits of power get flung off that thing,” he gestured with his glass at the wall of ominous whiteness, “that are too thin to see, but when they impact one of the girls . . .”
