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Zheng gestured at the white fog again, boiling maybe ten or so blocks away. “In there. It’s just floating around, like overflow from a faucet that nobody remembers how to turn off, because everybody who designed this city is dead. People know how to run the system, but not how to restrict it to a trickle until we get the rest of the pillars back up.”
“Then what are you doing about it?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Living with it. The theory is that the excess magic will become less and less of a problem as each pillar comes back online. They’ll be sucking up most of the overflow like sponges, just like before, and what little is left over will be grabbed by the government or hijacked by people like me.” He grinned. “Until then, we’re stuck dealing with the consequences—and so are you.”
“Us?” Louis-Cesare said sharply. “Why us?”
Zheng took out the little golden charm again, and weaved it in and out of his fingers. “This is the Chinese symbol for eternity. It’s also the calling card of a new triad that started up recently. Nobody knows much about them, except that they operate in there,” he nodded at the cloud again, “and that they deal in stolen power. The consul worries that they’re maybe selling it to the wrong people.”
“Are they?” I asked.
“Hard to say. If so, they’re keeping it quiet. None of my contacts have seen massive new amounts coming onto the market—”
“But if they’re selling it to the other side in the war, you wouldn’t,” Louis-Cesare pointed out.
Zheng nodded, looking vaguely surprised that there was a mind inside that pretty head. “Yeah, that’s the worry. But they could also just be stockpiling it, waiting for the price to go up as the war progresses. Like I said, it’s hard to say. Everybody skims some; it’s almost expected. But if they’re trying to turn it into a big-time operation . . .”
“Is there any evidence of that?” I asked.
“Not . . . directly, no, or we’d have already moved against them. Well, if they ever come out of there, anyway.” He grimaced, looking at the fog. “But one of the new pillars was sabotaged the other day, and some think that the new guys may have been behind it. Like they weren’t happy about the pillars going back up and ruining their business—”
He broke off as a two-seater rickshaw drew up alongside us. A window went down, but the expected blast of sound did not follow. The silence spell wasn’t linked to the windows, it seemed.
A bored looking official poked his head in. And then he saw Zheng and his eyes blew wide. He started bowing excessively, almost hitting the window frame in the process, and talking a mile a minute. I didn’t know what he said, but a moment later, we were being ushered to one of the inner circles of hovering vehicles, with an excellent view of the ring.
“I know one of the show runners,” Zheng explained. “He owed me a favor.”
“Meaning we get a good view?” I asked, as Louis-Cesare and I rearranged things, so that we could both see.
“No, we get the order changed.”
“The order of what?”
“Who fights the ‘monsters’. I want you to see the squad I’ve been using to poke around inside the dead zones. They’re one of only three groups crazy enough to go in there, and they’ve managed to narrow down the location of the Eternity gang’s headquarters to within a couple of blocks. They’d probably have found it outright by now, but they waste part of their time on this shit.”
He shook his head in apparent disgust.
“Can’t you use one of the other groups instead?” I asked. “To finish the job?”
Zheng made a moue. “Could if they weren’t all dead or in traction. Anyway, if you want to check out Eternity, these are your guides.”
The crowd gave a sudden roar that was so loud it rattled the limo, sending us rocking a bit in the air. I held on and watched as, down below, a small group of people emerged from under a covered walkway. It connected to one of the skyscrapers, where I guessed the green room was located for waiting fighters.
There were four of them, none of whom I could see very well from up here. But then, I didn’t have to, as a couple of large billboards suddenly flashed with their faces. Electronic confetti and fireworks went off behind them, as if they were sports figures being introduced, which was fair, I guessed.
They kind of were.
A woman was shown first, who looked vaguely Asian with slanting hazel eyes and long, straight dark hair. But she also looked partly something else, possibly European, with olive skin and a Roman nose that was a little too large for her face. She was pretty, though, and knew it, with the brilliant smile of someone comfortable in her own skin.
She had on a leather catsuit, which I thought a bad choice for combat, but the crowd seemed to like it. She blew them a kiss and they went wild again, sloshing us around on the sound waves until Zheng knocked on the partition to the front and said something to the driver. We stabilized, right around the time that the second face came up.
This one looked like a male version of the girl—black hair, warm brown eyes, and tall, maybe a few inches over six feet. He was dressed more casually, in jeans and a hoody, but with enough firepower draped over his person to count as a platoon all on his own. I smiled approvingly. This was a guy who brought a knife to a gun fight—and some throwing stars, and a bazooka, and a dozen more guns.
He was also the kind of guy who walked out alive from a gun fight.
The next couple of faces weren’t so nice, not that the crowd seemed to mind. A tall, gaunt man with deep set eyes and a sallow complexion was next, with greasy black hair that matched the color of his worn and potion-stained robes. If he’d had “dark mage” tattooed on his forehead, it couldn’t have been any more obvious. I was surprised that he hadn’t been rounded up with the others, but maybe he’d been smart enough to see which way the wind was blowing and join the right side.
Didn’t make him any less creepy, though.
