Inside Straight

by Mark Henwick

  “Explain jargon, soon as we’re done,” I said.

  Gabrielle glanced at Gwen, who nodded.

  Forcing myself to speak in whole sentences, I walked them through everything I thought or heard or saw, right up until we left Weaver’s house and I went somewhere else alone.

  I couldn’t recall any smell or taste or touch from the house. Talking about it took longer than the spirit walk had, and there was nothing new to add: Weaver had been there. He’d left quickly, taking some books, killing his colleague and leaving behind traps.

  He was a powerful enemy that we’d underestimated, but at least we had a true idea of what we were facing now.

  And Gabrielle had been right about my memories of the spirit walk—already they seemed faded, more unreal, more dream-like. Even the last part—the terror of being held in the earth, feeding on the decay of bodies.

  All the others kept on speaking.

  “That’s the way of the spirit world,” Gabrielle said. “Spirit jumping and spirit walking are projections of the aura into the surface level of spirit world.” She held her hands up and rubbed them together. “This world and the spirit world touch at the surface all the time. They influence each other, but they don’t actually mix a lot. Still, a projection into the spirit world, that has an effect. Think of it like putting your hand into a mountain stream. The water gets all turbulent around your hand and your hand gets cold. Take it out and the water goes back to flowing like it did before. Your hand gets warm again.”

  “You aren’t fully in the spirit world,” Flint said. “Your body stays right where it was, but your aura is there and it can be damaged, and you’d bring that damage back.”

  “But RiNo was different,” I said. “We were there.”

  “Yes. That’s the next level,” Gabrielle said. “The first level of substantiation. But they’re related; I was afraid when I lost control of the projection we were trying today, that you’d end up creating a substantiation.”

  She started pacing.

  “That jargon,” I reminded her.

  “The spirit world is different. It’s flexible. It’s none of the things we think it is.”

  I shivered at that phrase and Bian looked worried again. She touched me briefly on the arm.

  I gave her a smile and straightened up.

  Mustn’t zone out.

  Mustn’t see things that aren’t there.

  There wasn’t any way that Gabrielle could know that phrase was close to the one Speaks-to-Wolves had used to me: You are none of the things they will think you are.

  And maybe I’d imagined the whole churchyard scene.

  Gabrielle didn’t notice my reaction, and Gwen took over.

  “For this aura projection, you created an interpretation based on the spirit jump you did with the trees, Amber. You got sensations of a difference in the passing of time, which led to the way you saw buildings as impermanent structures, and which then translated into that sort of ghostly, translucent image. Like a dream. In the same way, you might start a dream from a single, imagined point and then justify and interpret everything you experience afterwards, based on that single point.”

  “For a substantiation, you need a convincing interpretation, a set of convincing rules, like a backdrop that will run itself for a while.” Gabrielle took it up again, so enthusiastic she couldn’t let Gwen tell it all. “It’s difficult to make it dream-like if you have a group because our dreams are so different. And even if you have a consistent substantiation, pulling other people into it makes it vulnerable. If we’d made the sky green when we kidnapped you in RiNo, we’d have had to fight against your belief the sky couldn’t be green. So we made it so much like the real world, or what it might have been, that you accepted it. As it was, you unconsciously sensed it was a spirit world and changed the way you looked to fall in with the way you think about the spirit world.”

  A Denver area empty of people and in a different season? Turning to my Native American side had seemed obvious to me.

  “But you actually move your whole mind and body into a substantiation, and unless you can construct a set of rules that redefine physics, physical laws still apply,” Gabrielle was saying.

  I’d missed something.

  “You said firearms wouldn’t work,” I pointed out. “They work on physical laws.”

  “Yes, that’s more complex—”

  A knock on the door interrupted us. It was Julie.

  “Diana would really like an update,” she said.

  “Yes, we should go back.” Bian got up quickly and guided us back to the library which held the elevator down to Skylur’s dungeon.

  The elevator took a maximum of three people at a time.

  I pushed the others forward, until there were only Bian and me left, and I took her arm.

  “We need to talk,” I said.

  Bian didn’t meet my eyes.

  “You’re worried,” I said, straight out.

  “Watching a spirit walk is scarier than I thought,” she said.

  “I wasn’t talking about that, and you know it.”

  Dealing with a Bian problem, I took a Bian solution and ran with it. I grabbed her and pinned her up against the wall.

  She’d been Athanate a lot longer than I had; she was stronger than me. Still, body mass and height counted for something. She struggled a little. Until she saw I was enjoying it.

  “You’re worried,” I repeated.

  Now I got the full-eye glare. “I won’t hold you to your word.”

  “‘Come to a pajama party’ is a phrase, not a word.”

  “Smart ass.”

  “Let me get this straight...” Keeping the pressure on, I shifted my body against her. I enjoyed that too. “You think the only reason you got the invite was because my inhibitions had been damaged by Weaver’s spell?”

  “It’s a reasonable analysis, isn’t it?”

  “It’s a guess and it’s wrong.”

  On top of the pounding heart and growing heat in my body, I was putting out Athanate pheromones by the bucket, and still wasn’t getting through, so I kissed her. Hard.

  Her awkward stiffness melted away. Lips softened and parted. Hands came up to hold my head and her legs lifted to wrap around my hips.

  The elevator whispered back up and she broke the kiss with a sigh and a small, relieved, cat-got-the-cream smile for me.

  “They can wait,” I growled. “That was only one issue I wanted to discuss.”

  “Consider me convinced by your argument on that issue,” she purred, kissing my neck. “On the other hand, we do have to go down, and Diana can probably smell your pheromones all the way from the dungeon. She’s going to know exactly why we’re late.”

  I laughed at her phrasing. “So? My inhibitions are damaged. Who’s going to blame me?”

  “Can’t argue it both ways, Amber. Come on.”

  Her eyes warned me she meant it, so I let her down. Hand in hand, we went and stood on the elevator platform. The clear doors slid out to surround us.

  I put my lips against her ear. Whether or not anyone was watching and listening, I was well aware Skylur had recording devices all over Haven. Just because I couldn’t see one in this elevator didn’t mean there wasn’t one. “The other issue was: what twisted your tail so much in your conversation with Skylur’s new Diakon this morning. Don’t like him?”

  “Her,” she corrected me. She kissed me again briefly and then her teeth nibbled deliciously at my earlobe. “You’re right,” she whispered, voice going all business again. “We do need to talk, you and me. I don’t trust your Hecate, for one thing. Maybe that’s because I had a bad start to the day. Or I should say we had a bad start to the day. We’re going to have orders from Skylur, and I just know they’re not going to be easy. We’ll need plans and backups and options. There are a lot of issues coming out of New York, but the biggest one for me is who he’s chosen for his Diakon.”

  “Not jealous, are you?”

  “No. The reason I
’m angry is his new Diakon isn’t Panethus. She’s frigging Basilikos.”

  Chapter 45

  I was so stunned by Bian’s news I kept losing the thread of the conversation when we were all seated down in the dungeon again.

  A Basilikos Diakon for House Altau?

  What the hell was Skylur doing?

  We had to speak about it, but not in front of the Northern Adept League.

  And I had to concentrate. Gabrielle was talking about the spirit world again.

  “...the kind of direction sensing we need to do to find Tullah is a whole leap more complex than spirit walking to Erie. It’ll need substantiation, and careful planning. It’ll need all the colleagues we brought with us to Denver, and we’ll need time to prepare. Even if Weaver’s already trying the same thing, we can’t skip the preparation.”

  “How long?” Diana asked.

  “We would be ready tomorrow night,” Gwen replied.

  “That’s a long time. Does Weaver need as much time to prepare?”

  “Yes, but he might have started earlier. Just as we might have started earlier, if we’d had this conversation yesterday,” she said pointedly.

  “Why can’t you use the substantiation you had before?” Bian asked. “The one you used to kidnap Amber?”

  “They don’t... persist. It isn’t there anymore.”

  Both Bian and I caught that hesitation, but Bian was quicker to ask. “You mean the spirit world just returns to the way it was, like you were talking about upstairs?”

  Alice cleared her throat. “That’s for spirit walks, and no, she doesn’t mean that exactly. What actually happens to substantiations is much stranger than that and more dangerous. Stronger substantiations consume weaker ones.”

  Bian and I spoke at the same time.

  “Stronger?”

  “Consume?”

  “Stronger means more consistent, or better constructed,” Alice said. “Or even larger. And yes, consume, as in the stronger absorbs the weaker substantiation, including everything in it, and grows as a result.”

  She ignored the glare she was getting from Gabrielle and pursed her lips. “It might serve you well to think of the spirit world as a sea,” she went on thoughtfully. “Firstly, that it’s full of predators that get more dangerous the deeper you go. Secondly, that you can start to attract those predators simply by stepping carelessly into it.”

  Gwen cut her off. “That’s part of the reason why we need to prepare carefully. The risks are manageable with the right preparation. No matter how important it is to find Tullah, we achieve nothing if our substantiation fails.”

  The Northern Adept League might be working with us for the moment, but it seemed to me there was a reluctance to share some of their arcane knowledge.

  “It’s also evident from the simple spirit walk we did upstairs that Amber is... headstrong to use for the focal point,” Gwen went on. “In a quick, easy spirit walk that doesn’t matter too much, but the kind of search we’re talking about might take hours, or days. People will get tired and make mistakes. That’s the sort of thing that can attract other, predatory substantiations.”

  “You imply these substantiations can somehow be aware of each other?” Diana picked up on that detail. “So could Weaver be able to use a substantiation to spy on ours, and to attack us?”

  Gabrielle let Gwen answer. “It’s possible, yes.”

  “Right. Let’s be positive and assume we avoid Weaver during our search, because it would be difficult for him to predict where we’re searching,” Bian said. “What if Weaver’s substantiation lurks around Denver, because that’s where we have to bring Tullah back to?”

  Gwen frowned. “Around Denver doesn’t mean exactly the same thing in the spirit world. He could lie in wait for us, yes, but that would mean he wasn’t searching. I’m not sure he’d do that. What’s more, you’re implying we’d use the substantiation to bring Tullah back.”

  Gwen shook her head.

  “We wouldn’t advise trying that. How to explain? We want a substantiation that’s quick and mobile and doesn’t attract attention. If we make it robust enough to pick up Tullah, let alone her parents and any others she’s with, that makes it much bigger, more noticeable, slower. What I’m advising is to find her and then go pick her up in that van you used to get here from California.”

  “Which can be shielded,” Alice said, and nodded agreement.

  Kane shook his head. “Depends on where she is. There are snowstorms over the Rockies again. Roads will be closed.”

  “Even if they’re not closed... driving a van through snow...” Flint left it hanging.

  “There aren’t really any other options,” Gabrielle said.

  But the look on Flint’s face was clearly so you say.

  “Anyway, maybe we’ll find her driving up I25,” Gabrielle said brightly.

  No one replied to her attempt to lighten it all up. Tullah had to be hiding and she was hiding well. The Empire’s Adepts had been looking for her, and they hadn’t found her. Weaver had probably been looking already, and he hadn’t found her. I didn’t think she was on the highway.

  “It’s not getting any less urgent, as we sit here,” Diana pointed out.

  It wasn’t, and I felt the ability to come up with a better solution was being held back because we didn’t really trust each other.

  I sensed Gwen’s frustration building that Kaothos wouldn’t speak to her, tempered only by our common understanding that the most urgent thing at the moment was to get Tullah back.

  It was like a playground seesaw: Gwen was still hiding her spirit animal. Kaothos hadn’t revealed herself. They didn’t want to tell us too much about the spirit world. Flint and Kane thought they knew things the Northern Adept League weren’t saying.

  Neither side willing to play nice.

  And down at the end of the dungeon, the lips on Anubis’ dog-face seemed to be drawn a little tighter, as if he were watching me and snarling.

  Keep away from magic.

  As if we had any alternative. We couldn’t find Tullah any other way.

  Gwen brought it to a close. “If we’re agreed this is how we’re going to search, it means we should start preparing as soon as possible, and we’ll contact you if we come up with a better plan.”

  There were nods around the table.

  Maybe Gwen sensed the same thing about trust, because she went on, “Before we go, I should say something else. I hinted to you this was not only about the dragon, but also about your enemies.”

  “We know Basilikos hasn’t been defeated,” I said.

  “I understand, but it’s not really old Basilikos or the new Hidden Path party that I’m talking about,” Gwen said. “It’s the individuals themselves.”

  “Matlal,” I said, since his name had come up today. “Vega Martine.” As I said it, I remembered others who connected to those names: Mirela Tucek, who’d disguised herself and her troop of Carpathian ninjas as nuns in the Convent of Saint Vasilica outside Taos, and who’d been the one to free Matlal; Colonel Peterson and the survivors of Ops 4-16, the evil shadow equivalent of Ops 4-10. “Tucek and Peterson,” I concluded. “We know they’re still alive.”

  “Yes, and from today, maybe you should re-evaluate how dangerous they are. They were working with that psychopath Noble. They were behind the collapse of House Romero in Albuquerque. They were behind the corruption of the Taos Adept community, which gave Amaral the means to capture Diana. They were one of the clients of Forsythe’s sick trade in children. And those are only the schemes we know about.”

  “Yes, but what are you suggesting we do? Matlal is in Mexico.”

  “I’m suggesting that country boundaries mean nothing to him, and if they mean anything to you, you’re giving him an advantage which he will continue to exploit. Amber, I understand the concern that the majority of Ops 4-10 operations were illegal because they took place in secret, in countries the United States wasn’t at war with, but did you not get the job done? Are you
not capable of doing the same, more secretly now?”

  Ops 4-10 had gotten those sorts of jobs done. House Altau had enough Ops 4-10 and Athanate and Were allies that we probably could do something similar. But what if it went wrong?

  “I can’t give you any insight into what Matlal’s plans are,” Gwen broke into my thoughts. “But I hope I’ve made you rethink the level of threat posed by him and his allies, down in the Yucatan.”

  “You know where he is?”

  “Not exactly, but I can tell you someone with significant levels of power is experimenting with the spirit world down there, and we,” she laid heavy emphasis on the word, “are going to have to do something about it.”

  She sat back, and there was a finality about the comments. She’d given us information without asking for anything back. We’d have to come up with an equivalent.

  Diana stood up. “We must let you go and prepare. We’ll see you back here at Haven with the rest of your colleagues tomorrow evening.”

  We were still awkward with each other. Hands were shaken. Tight smiles exchanged.

  Gwen’s eyes lingered a second, and I wondered if she was going to ask me if something happened at the end of the spirit walk that I hadn’t shared with them.

  Or I could share it, and show I trusted her.

  Then the moment passed.

  Alice escorted Gwen into the elevator, and next trip Bian went up with Gabrielle.

  Chapter 46

  “What the hell does Skylur think he’s doing?”

  Not how I should be talking about the head of Panethus to his oldest friend, but I’d bottled this up throughout the conversation with the Northern Adept League and it had to come out. No matter how close Skylur and Diana were.

  Diana walked around the table and lifted me into an embrace before replying.

  “I don’t know, Amber, but I trust him absolutely. Whatever persuaded him to take this decision will be for the benefit of Emergence. I know that in my heart.”

  I breathed in her soothing marque and let it fill my senses. I wouldn’t say my fears disappeared, but with Diana holding me, the situation didn’t feel so bad. Our hearts automatically fell into rhythm.