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“Ming-de has agreed to take us with her when she makes her exit, which will be very soon. I do not know how she will react to having an unknown mage on board.”
“Not help him—get him! He has the Codex!”
Mircea’s gaze sharpened. “You’re certain? You saw it?”
“I didn’t need to,” I said viciously. “He’s trying to leave. And there’s no way he’d do that unless he already has what he wants.” Somewhere, under that monster of a cape, he had it on him. And now he was getting away with it.
Mircea was looking at me oddly. “You know this mage?” I did a double take, then remembered that Mircea hadn’t seen Pritkin without the hood up on the cape. That was good as far as the integrity of the timeline went, but it meant that he didn’t know the conniving, devious, dangerous son of a bitch we were up against.
Before I could answer, there was a flash of red light and a crack that was audible even over the sounds of battle. And between one blink and the next, Pritkin simply vanished. “What the…He’s gone!”
“Stay here.” Mircea jumped over the railing, wading through the carnage to where Ming-de had just emerged from the house. Her thronelike chair was back in hover mode, gliding serenely through the chaos, her fans cutting a broad swath in front of her while her guards hacked and slashed at everything on either side. But the fans apparently recognized Mircea, because they let him through to talk with their mistress.
In a moment, he was back, using a knife he took off a passing mage to pry at one of the orbs in the dragon’s claws. “What are you doing?”
“I promised to take you through the ley lines. It seems I will keep that promise sooner than I had thought.” With a flick of the wrist, the orb came loose in his hand. Ming-de floated gently up the ramp, which pulled in after her. The whole ship began to shake, and slowly rose off the ground, like the hot-air balloon it wasn’t.
“Wait!” I raised my voice to be heard over the sound of a couple dozen spells hitting the barge all at once; it looked like the mages weren’t too pleased at Ming-de’s early exit. “I don’t understand!”
“I will explain later. But if you wish to catch the mage, we must move quickly.”
“But ley lines are massive energy sources!” The way the pixie had described them, they were a cross between a volcanic eruption and a nuclear reactor. “We can’t go in there!”
“I assure you, we can,” Mircea said, putting an arm around my waist as the shuddering barge cleared the rooftops.
“That wasn’t what I meant,” I said shrilly, as he jumped up onto the narrow railing around the barge, balancing us there with a complete lack of appreciation for little things like rickety construction, pissed-off war mages and, oh, gravity.
“Hold on.”
I shook my head violently. “No, see, every time you say something like that, we end up doing something really—” Mircea crouched slightly and his muscles tensed. “Listen to me!” I shrieked. “We can’t—”
And then we did. Mircea jumped into what for a second was only thin air, then we were swept sideways into a rushing maelstrom of light and color, like being in the middle of bloodred rapids all pelting madly for a waterfall the size of Niagara. Flashes of blinding light exploded all around us, while molten channels of pure energy raced alongside and arced overhead. There was so much for my mind to take in that it was a moment before I realized we weren’t frying.
“We do not have shields like the mages,” Mircea said, looking euphoric, “but entering a ley line, even merely skimming the top, without them is madness. The energy forces would consume us in an instant.”
“Then why aren’t they?”
He pointed out a faint golden bubble of energy glowing softly all around us. Next to the pulsing swirl of the ley line, it was almost invisible. “The stronger mages can use the lines for rapid transport over short distances with merely their personal shields. Longer journeys require something more substantial.”
I stared around, amazed, as the energy stream rocketed us forward. “How did you even know this was here? There was nothing visible.”
“Not with the eyes, perhaps. But you could sense it, too, if you knew what to look for.” I was impressed for a moment, until Mircea suddenly grinned. “Or you can do what most of us do, and carry a map.”
“But you don’t have a map.”
“I lived in Paris for many years; I long ago memorized the lines’ locations,” he admitted. “I used them all the time.”
“You carried around something like that?” I gestured at the orb in his hands. The thing was as big as a soccer ball.
“There are pocket-sized shields, although they don’t give such a smooth ride.” A particularly large eddy in the electric current sent us spinning off to the left for a moment.
“Smooth?” I asked, clutching his arm to keep from falling.
“Oh, yes.” Mircea caressed the little sphere lovingly while somehow bringing us back into the center of the stream, where it was slightly calmer. “I will hate to have to return this.” He grinned at me again, obviously exulting in the wild ride. “It’s more than a shield. It can also help you find the lines, by glowing brighter when one is near, and can open a fissure if placed directly in its path.”
“But how are we supposed to find the mage in all this?”
Mircea pointed to a whirlpool of light up ahead. “Someone exited the line there, not long ago. I did not notice any other ley-line activity before his, did you?”
