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Chapter 9

I watched out for trouble all the way back to Chicago, but it didn&039;t show up

The trip froh would be a difficult one if limited by strictly physical ether like tornados and trailer parks, and with similarly disastrous results Boats are probably the surest means of modern transport available to us, but it&039;s a bit of a ride froood wizard always does when the odds are stacked up against us: We cheat

The Nevernever, the spirit world, exists alongside our own, sort of like an alternate dimension, but it isn&039;t shaped the same way as the mortal world The Nevernever touches upon places in thein coies So, if point A is a dark and spooky place in the Nevernever, it touches upon a dark and spooky place in the real world - let&039;s say, the stacks at the University of Chicago But the space five feet away from point A in the Nevernever, point B, is only dark and sad, not really scary Maybe point B attaches to a cemetery in Seattle

If you&039;re a wizard, you could then start at the stacks at UC, open a doorway into the Nevernever, walk five feet, open another doorway back to the real world, and ee into the cemetery in Seattle Total linear distance walked, five or six feet Total distance traveled, better than seventeen hundred miles

Neat, huh?

Granted, it&039;s almost never as little as five feet you walk in the Nevernever, and that stroll just antuan, tentacular horror so hideous that it drives you insane just by looking at it The Nevernever is a scary place You don&039;t want to go exploring without a whole lot of planning and backup, but if you know the safe paths - the Ways - then you can get a lot of traveling done nice and quick, and with a minimum incidence of spontaneous insanity

Once upon a time, I would have refused even to enter the Nevernever except in the direst of eencies Now, the idea wasn&039;ta bus station Things change

We were back in Chicago before lunchti old building that used to be a slaughterhouse I&039;d parked the Blue Beetle, , nearby We went back toAbout two ot back, there was a knock at the door, and I opened it to find both half va onover his shoulder

"Who is the girl?" Martin asked, his eyes calm and focused past ain, too, man," I said "And don&039;t mention it I save people&039;s lives all the ti Molly the Female Once-Over - a process by which one woman creates a detailed profile of another wo, jewelry, makeup, and body type, and then decides how ht be Men have a parallel process, but it&039;s binary: Does he have beer? If yes, will he share withar country I&039;d just have to hope territorial scoring of my bark wasn&039;t next "Who is this?"

"My apprentice, Molly Carpenter," I said "Grasshopper, this is Susan Rodriguez That&039;s Marvin someone-or-other"

"Martin," he corrected me, unruffled, as he entered "Can she be trusted?"

"Every bit as much as you trust me," I said

"Well" Martin&039;s voice couldn&039;t have been any drier, but he tried "Thank goodness for that"

"I knoho they are, Harry," Molly said quietly "They&039;re froht? Vah," Susan said, standing right next to me, well inside my personal space perimeter It was an intimate distance She touched ers, but never looked away from Molly "An apprentice wizard? Really? What&039;s it like?"

Molly shrugged, averting her eyes, frowning slightly "A lot of reading, a lot of boring practice, with occasional flashes of pure terror"

Susan looked from Molly to me and seemed to come to soain "Did you speak to the Council?"

"A bit," I said "The duchess was at headquarters Spoke to her, too"

Susan drew in a sharp breath "What? She hasn&039;t left Mexico in hty years"

"Call Guinness She broke her streak"

"Good God," she said "What was she doing there?"

"Being co her to a duel in front of about a thousand felloizards"

Martinsound Susan&039;s eyes looked a little wide

"I wanted a piece of her right there," I said, "but she was operating under a pledge of safe conduct Council intelligence says there&039;s all kinds of vaot feelers out for any other word, but it will take a little time"

"We already knew about the mobilization," Susan said "The Fellowship warned the Council three days ago"

"Nice of the Council to inforet whatever else the Council knows in the next few hours," I said "You guys turn up anything?"

"Sort of," Susan said "Co around the coffee table, and Martin plopped the valise down onto its surface He drew out a manila folder and passed it to me

"Out of nearly a petabyte of inforan

"Petawhat?" I asked

"One quadrillion bytes," he clarified Helpfully

Susan rolled her eyes and said, "Several libraries&039; worth of in formation"

"Oh Okay"

Martin cleared his throat and continued as if he hadn&039;t been interrupted "We retrieved fewer than three hundred files Most of them were inventory records"

I opened the folder and found several sheets of printer paper covered with lists, and several raphs of any number of objects accompanied by identification numbers

"The objects in this file," Susan said, "were all categorized as h the photos more slowly A stone knife An ancient, notched sword A soot-stained brick An urn covered in odd, vaguely unsettling abstract designs "Yeah Can&039;t be sure without physically exaear"

I frowned and started cross-referencing nu to this, they were all checked out of a secure holding facility in Nevada and shipped as a lot" I glanced up at Susan "When was Maggie taken, exactly?"

"A little less than twenty-four hours before I called you"

I frowned at the tiie was taken"

"Yes," she said "About three hours after the kidnapping"

"Shipped where?"

"That&039;s the question," she said "Assuie at all"

"Odds are that it isn&039;t," Martin said

"Yeah Your ti down all those other leads we have, Marvin" I spared hiure out what this gear is used for, maybe I can rule it out For all I know it&039;s htfully "I&039;ll do that first While I do, Molly, I want you to go talk with Father Forthill, personally - we have to assume the phones aren&039;t safe Forthill has some contacts down south Tell hi unusual Take Mouse to watch your back"

"I can look after ht"

"Your weapons, grasshopper," I said in my Yoda voice "You will not need them"

She frowned at me in annoyance and said, "You know, I believe it is possible to reference so other than Star Wars, boss"

I narrowed my eyes in Muppetly wisdom "That is why you fail"

"That doesn&039;t evenAugh It&039;s easier just to do it" She stood up and held out her hand I tossed her the keys to the Blue Beetle "Come on, Mouse"

Mouse rose from his position in the kitchen and shambled to Molly&039;s side

"Hold up a second, kid Susan," I said "So the back of ht They must have some kind of tail on one of us, and we don&039;t need to walk around with a target painted on our backs Maybe you and Martin could go see if you can catch our shadow"

"They&039;ll see us and pull a fade as soon as we leave the apartment," Martin said

"Oh!" Molly said abruptly, her eyes brightening "Right!"

I went out to get thearound the little backyard while Molly, Susan, and Martin, under cover of one of Molly&039;s first-class veils, slipped out of the apartave Mouse five minutes, then called him and went back down into the apartment

Molly had beatenSusan and Martin out of the view of any observers who had a line of sight to my apartment&039;s door "Hoas that?" she asked She tried for casual, but by now I knew her well enough to spot when my answer mattered

"Smooth," I said "Did me proud"

She nodded, but there was a little bit too ree: wanting, so badly, to prove my talent, my discipline, my skill - myself - to a teacher It took ht to come into focus, and to realize how inexperienced, how foolish, and how lucky I had been to survive ers intact

I wasn&039;t too worried about sending the kid on a solo mission It was pretty taht, but she could avoid the hell out of the - which here Mouse ca&039;s solemn notice If hostility loomed, Mouse would warn her, and hey-presto, they would both be gone

She&039;d be fine

"Don&039;t take too long," I said quietly "Eyes open Play it safe"

She beaht "You aren&039;t the boss of me"

I could all but taste the pride she felt ather talents useful to my cause "The hell I&039;m not," I told her "Do it or I dock you a year&039;s pay"

"You know you don&039;t pay ain"

She flashed erly up the steps Mouse followed close on her heels, his ears cocked alertly up, his derabbed his leather lead frootten it, but there were leash laws in town I suspected that Mouse didn&039;t care about the law My theory was that he insisted on his lead because people were e dog when he was "safely restrained"

Unlike me, he&039;s a people person Canine Whatever

I waited until the Beetle had started and pulled out to close the door Then I picked up Martin&039;s printed pages, tugged aside the rug that covered the trapdoor in the living room floor, and descended into my laboratory

"My laboratory," I said, experi it like that always makes me want to folloith &039;mwoo-hah-hah-hah-hahhhhhh&039;?"

"You were overexposed to Hammer Films as a child?" chirped a cheerful voice froot to the bottom of the stepladder, esture A dozen candles flickered to life

My lab wasn&039;t fancy It was a concrete box, the building&039;s subbaseravel and earth when the house was built Tables and shelves lined the walls, covered in wizardly bric-a-brac A long table ran down the middle of the room, alo hts and trees

My apprentice had a workstation at a tiny desk between two of the tables Though she had continued to add more andcontinued, so was neatly organized and sparkling clean The division between Molly&039;s work area and the rest of the room was as sharp and obvious as the lines on acircle, which was set in the concrete floor at the far end of the little room, a five-foot hoop of braided copper, silver, and iron that had set rand when I ordered it from a svartalf silversmith The materials weren&039;t all that expensive, but it took serious compensation to convince a svartalf to ith iron

Each ils and runes in fories to a far greater degree than any si of symbols, work so tiny and precise that only svartalves and ht, like static discharge but ht, blue, and green dancing and intertwining in continuous spirals

I&039; for a wizard - but once in a while, I canthat&039;s fairly cool

One shelf was different from all the others in the room It was a simple wooden plank Volcanic mounds of melted candle wax capped either end In the center of the shelf was a human skull, surrounded by paperback roht kindled in the skull&039;s empty eye sockets, then swiveled to focus on me "Too many Hammer Filhts at the Rocky Horror Picture Show"

"Janet, Brad, Rocky, ugh," I said dutifully I went to the shelf, picked the skull up off of it ("Wheee!" said Bob), and then carried it over to a mostly clean space on one of the worktables I set the skull down on top of a stack of notebooks, and then put Martin&039;s manila folder down in front of hi," I said I opened up the folder and started laying out the photographs Martin had given arded the at, here?"

"Metacapacitors," I said

"That&039;s weird &039;Cause they look like a bunch of ritual objects"

"Yeah I figure e for ritual object"

Bob studied the pictures and muttered to hi skull - he&039;s a spirit of intellect who happens to reside inside a specially enchanted skull He&039;s been assisting wizards since the Dark Ages, and if he hasn&039;t forgotten ic, it&039;s only because he doesn&039;t forget anything, ever

"They&039;re traveling in a single group I need to get a ballpark estih to tell fro confused when there are any fewer than four diether a few ti else? Descriptions or anything?"

I opened the folder "Just the inventory list" I put er on the picture of the stone knife and read, " &039;Flint blade&039; " I touched an old brick with crues " &039;Brick&039; "

"Well, that&039;s just blindingly useful," Bob runted "It&039;s possible that this is just miscellaneous junk If you don&039;t think it has a specific purpose, then - "

"I didn&039;t say that," Bob interrupted sourly "Jeez, Harry Ye of little faith"

"Can you tellor not?"

"I can tell you that you&039;re teetering on the edge of sanity, sahib"

I blinked at that "What?"