Spirits White as Lightning

by Mercedes Lackey

  "SFX?" Bonnie asked Kit in the shorthand of long partnership.

  "Nope. True gen: Sidhe," Kit had replied. By now she was surrounded by reference books, in which she was looking up this and that esoteric factoid.

  "More of them?" Bonnie asked in disbelief, as though she were talking about tourists or butterflies. Dearly as Beth would have loved to chase down that remark, she was not to be given the chance. Bonnie had her workout bag over her shoulder, and was obviously on her way to the dojo. "Grins. Bang-boom. Later?"

  "Yeah. Gonna take 'em down to see Ray. Deep pockets for this one. Script done?"

  "Bang. Boom," Bonnie said. "Kiss-kiss." She waved to Beth. "Late. Toodles." Explanation delivered, she left.

  " `Ray'?" Beth asked, eyebrows raised.

  "Friend of mine," Kit said. "Tenant, too. Knows way more about all this stuff than I do, but that's not the point here. I know enough spelltech and psionics to figure out that side of it, but I know jack about computers. Meanwhile, we can decide what to do about dinner. Bon eats out on class nights, so we don't have to wait for her."

  * * *

  Over dinner preparations, Kit told the two of them a little more. Ray—Azrael Arcane if you were being formal—lived on the floor below Kit and Bonnie and built special-needs computer systems—and if Beth's project wasn't a special-needs system, Kit said, she didn't know what was. She'd inherited him from the previous owner of the building, and as far as she knew, he never left his apartment. He wouldn't be available until a few hours after sundown, Kit explained, so they made spaghetti and garlic bread, in between bouts of rescuing Hallow from Beltane and insuring that Mistwraith remained a white cat and not a tomato-colored one.

  Beth found herself relaxing, because now the big secret was out and nobody seemed to care—and Kory had the Sidhe knack of easy charm, which he exercised in full measure.

  "Is that name for real?" Beth said, returning to the subject of their evening's appointment following a luxurious dessert of strawberries in crème fraiche. Kit had wanted to serve them tiramisu, but the coffee and chocolate it contained would have been deadly to Kory.

  "It's on his rent checks. And you're a fine one to talk, Miss If-It's-Tuesday-I-Must-Have-A-New-Alias," Kit teased.

  Kit was one of the few people who Beth had kept in touch with following the Griffith Park Massacre, and one of the few who knew anything about the real situation of Beth's life, though of course Beth had been careful about what she'd told her. Now, she wondered if she'd needed to bother. Kit obviously didn't boggle at elves. "That's different," Beth said defensively. "I didn't have a choice."

  "Yeah, sometime you're going to have to tell me the whole story—the whole story—about that. It just seems a little too X-Files to believe—you know, the government being after witches?"

  "Psychics, really. And you're a fine one to talk. You don't even blink at seeing Kory, and you think a government conspiracy is too weird?"

  "Not too weird. Too done-to-death. You'd think even the government would be bored with conspiracies by now," Kit amplified, tossing strawberry hulls for the cats to chase. "If you want conspiracy theory, talk to Ray. He's up on all of them from Gemstone to Trapdoor."

  "Is he Wiccan?" Beth asked, because Kit spoke as if she knew him well.

  "He's . . . eccentric," Kit said measuringly. "But systems designers can afford to be. I think he can help you, and he owes me a favor. Beyond that, there are things that woman was not meant to know. It's late enough now. Let me go call and see if he's around."

  "Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice said," Beth commented to Kory when Kit had left the room.

  "I suppose it is presumptuous to ask sorcerers to be commonplace," Kory said musingly. "Like Bards, their lives are their art."

  "Eric's normal," Beth said, stung by the implication.

  "In Bards, such normalcy is eccentricity beyond compare," Kory pointed out inarguably. "I love and value him, but Eric strives for the commonplace as others quest for dreams and far enchantments—much as if I were to drive a taxi and live in Queens."

  "I'd love to see that," Beth muttered under her breath.

  "The doctor is in," Kit announced, returning from her call. "C'mon. I'll take you down."

  * * *

  After what both Kit and Kory had said, Beth thought she was braced for every possible sort of Earth-plane weirdness—or at least, for the sort of theatrics and eccentricity she'd grown used to from her New Age acquaintanceship. But Azrael's bizarrerie was of an entirely different order.

  There was a keypad lock affixed to his door in place of the usual sort of key and cylinder lock, and Kit tapped out a quick nine digits then pushed the door open into darkness. The hall lights illuminated a long hallway with floor, walls, and ceiling painted matte black. Kit ushered them in and closed the door behind her.

  "Don't mind this. The light hurts his eyes, so he keeps the place pretty dark." She led them down the hall and into the living room, which was lit by a faint red glow.

  It, too, was painted flat black, making Beth feel as if she were floating in a vast empty space. It was disorienting, but comforting, too—on a level far below consciousness, she was aware that nothing could harm her here. Despite its outré appearance, this was a safe place, a good place.

  As her eyes adjusted, she could make out more details of her surroundings, and spared a pang of envy for Kory's natural advantages—elf-sight could see everything as plain as if it were broad day. There were several computers racked against the far wall, but all the screens were dark; the green and amber status lights giving the only sign that they were powered up. She could make out a sectional sofa—also black—that lined two walls, and the window was covered with heavy blackout drapes, drawn against the mild summer night. Despite this, the air was cool and fresh—somewhere a very quiet air conditioner and ozone generator must be running. The only illumination came from a strip of red neon that ran all the way around the ceiling.

  "Hello, Kit. You must be Kory and Beth. Welcome."

  And in all this, he wears dark glasses, Beth thought in disbelief, seeing their host at last. The self-styled Azrael Arcane got to his feet and came over to them, leaning heavily on a silver-headed cane. He was indeed wearing dark glasses: square-lensed, faintly antique-looking things, whose lenses appeared entirely black in the weird scarlet light. He had long straight hair, as pale as Kory's—though in the neon it looked candy-apple red—that fell straight down his back, and was wearing an open-collared Poet Shirt beneath a dark suit of the Earlier Victorian period. He was barefoot. The whole effect was exotic in the extreme.

  He held out his hand for Beth to shake. Seeing the darkness of her skin against his, she realized what the eccentric lighting was designed to conceal—Azrael Arcane was an albino.

  No wonder it's so dark in here. If his albinism is acute, he's practically blind in strong sunlight. Well, that explains a lot.

  I think.

  Maybe.

  He shook hands with Kory as well, who had resumed his human disguise, and motioned them toward the couch. "Sit down, please. Kit tells me you need to consult about the specs for a special needs computer system. Environment or user?"

  "Environment," Beth said, remembering that Chinthliss could look perfectly human when he chose, and so would not need something that could be operated by someone the size of a small aircraft. "What we really need is a top of the line, newer than tomorrow system that's totally self-contained. No outside power source, no hookup to phone lines—" let Chinthliss figure out his local ISP; that part wasn't her problem "—and it has to be stable in . . ." She faltered. Just how did you describe the physical conditions of Underhill without describing Underhill itself?

  "In Between-the-Worlds conditions," Kit supplied smoothly.

  "You want to run a computer in a Circle without interfering with the raised power?" Azrael asked. "Why not just do your computing after you take the Circle down?"

  "We can't," Beth said quickly. "This is a sort of . . . permanent C
ircle." She looked at Kory, who nodded agreement.

  Now why didn't I come up with that explanation earlier? Not that Kit would have bought it for a New York minute. Elves would have had to come into it somewhere.

  But Azrael didn't seem inclined to pry, taking the explanation—and the parameters—at face value. "Well, it can be done, of course," he said, sounding puzzled. "But it will take a lot of space, and a lot of money, and it'll eat batteries like nobody's business. Your best bet might be a small gas-powered generator—"

  "This must be done without Cold Iron," Kory said. "As much as possible."

  Azrael glanced at Kit, and some unspoken communication passed between them. "You like a challenge," she reminded him.

  "Hm. Well, some of the new Lithium-Ion batteries have a pretty long life, or you might want to run it off solar; the new ones run on what comes through on a cloudy day. If you use solar cells to charge your LION pack, you can recharge while you're not using the computer. Is iron-free your only restriction?"

  Beth glanced at Kit, who seemed to know where Azrael was going with this and was able to translate. "That's all. We don't have to worry about planetary influences with the other metals."

  "And price is no object?" Azrael asked. "We're talking thousands, here. Several thousands—possibly several ten thousands, even waiving my usual exorbitant fees."

  Kit looked at them.

  "None," Kory said firmly. "And we will be happy to pay your fees as well."

  There was enough kenned gold on deposit in a special bank account that Elfhame Misthold used for its World Above purchases to cover almost any need, and when funds ran low the elves could always ken more gold. There was no fraud involved, for the gold was good—true metal, not faerie gold, to vanish when the spell dissolved.

  "No, this is a favor to Kit. Okay. If you can give me a day or so to make some calls, I can give you a set of plans for the cage, and a shopping list for the computer. Your best bet is probably to hit up Comdex next month and pick up something there. You said top of the line?"

  "The newest and most fancy," Beth said, on secure ground when it came to shopping. "But . . . what cage?"

  "A Faraday Cage, of course," Azrael said. "Named for the magneto-optic effect in which the polarization plane of an electromagnetic wave is rotated under the influence of a magnetic field parallel to the direction of propagation."

  Beth blinked, having gotten lost somewhere around "magneto-optic." Azrael smiled and took pity on her.

  "Michael Faraday was a nineteenth-century inventor who discovered that an electrical discharge, such as lightning, would flow outside and around a metal cage to go to ground. This is the reason airplanes and cars can be struck by lightning without harm to the occupants: they're a type of Faraday Cage. But when you build one out of copper or some equivalent neutral conductor and run a current through it, it cancels out all electromagnetic field energy. Cages of this type are used to shield delicate electronic equipment from stray EMF fields, and when J. B. Rhine was doing his ESP experiments at Duke University back in the last century, he discovered that his subjects' accuracy tended to skyrocket when they were placed in a Faraday Cage, leading to the theory that psionics—and, by extension, magic—involves some kind of manipulation of electromagnetic or bioelectric fields. What this means for you is that the computer's magnetic field and sphere of influence will stay inside the cage, and the magical energy will stay outside the cage, and never the twain will meet."

  "But won't that kind of insulation keep the computer from connecting with the Internet?" Kit asked.

  "Possibly. I couldn't say for sure unless I saw it up and running in its host environment. The simplest solution is just to run a copper ground to your landline, but it might need to be tweaked with. You'll probably need to run a few tests to see how well your system connects—it will, however, run without disrupting the magical environment, so long as it's in the cage and the cage is powered up."

  "Can it really be so simple?" Beth marveled.

  "Only in the sense that it can be conceived and described. After that, you're talking money—large cartloads of it, and that's where you run into trouble. Most magicians have more interest in the Great Work than in getting rich. Governments commonly have large cartloads of money, but have trouble attracting competent magicians. Magic is anarchic by its very nature—Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law doesn't get along very well with beancounters in suits. Any competent tyrant with any awareness of the Unseen World starts out by restricting access to it: Hitler didn't round up all the Adepts he could get his hands on in the 1930s—from astrologers to Freemasons and everything in between—just to be mean. He saw them as a threat to his power. Fortunately, these days nobody takes magic that seriously. Something to be thankful to the New Age fluffy bunnies for."

  "Some people do," Beth said, repressing a shiver.

  "Well, there's Sun Streak and Stargate and things like that, but those projects seem to be focusing more on psionicists, fortunately. So long as they're concentrating on natural Talents, and not on Adepts, they should lose interest eventually. And if they do decide we're a nuisance, probably all they'll do is make study of the Art illegal. We've been underground before. We'll survive."

  "Except for the people who get caught," Beth said tightly.

  "That's right," Azrael said levelly. "Except for those who get caught. But I'm sure Kit warned you both about my hobbyhorse, and I don't think I'm going to transgress the bounds of hospitality by riding it tonight. You'll forgive me, I know." He smiled at them engagingly, and Beth found herself liking him more and more.

  "I think—in the long list of people the government is likely to build internment camps for—that occultists come way, way down the list," Kit said.

  Beth and Azrael exchanged glances of wordless disagreement. Both of them thought that Adepts were much higher on that list than Kit seemed to—and when you came right down to it, it didn't matter if they were at the top of the list or the bottom, if they were on the list at all.

  "Well, that's enough for tonight, ladies and gentleman. I've got places to surf and people to annoy. I should have that stuff you need by tomorrow night, and after that, it's up to you," Azrael said.

  "That seems fair," Kory said.

  "More than fair. You've been a great help. Are you sure there isn't anything we can do in return?" Beth asked.

  Azrael smiled. "Sure there is. When you get it up and running, let me know how it works, okay?"

  "We will," Beth promised.

  * * *

  After Hosea left to go and clean out the basement room, Eric paced around the apartment, still edgy. There was no real point in trying to go back to sleep—not with the adrenaline surging through his system. He fielded a couple of calls from friends who lived in the building—mostly they wanted to compare notes on what he thought had happened. Finally he decided he might as well get his stuff together and go on over to the school. At least at Juilliard, he'd face a different kind of annoyance. And maybe he could shake his feeling that there was trouble on the horizon—distant still, but surely coming.

  Must've picked that up from Jimmie. But the Guardians are supposed to have some kind of Distant Early Warning System, and it doesn't seem to have gone off. Every attack of the blue megrims doesn't have to herald the end of the world—I guess it's true what Freud said: sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

  He was on his way out the door when the phone rang again. At first he just looked at it, unwilling to answer it and field yet another set of vague yet apprehensive questions. All the psychics in the building knew perfectly well that there hadn't been trouble with the boiler this morning, but even if he wanted to tell them the whole truth, he wasn't sure what it was. So far, this morning was a story without an ending. None of the Guardians, or Eric for that matter, knew why the building wanted Hosea, or for what—and Eric wasn't sure if the discovery that Guardian House could act independently of the Guardians wasn't the creep-worthiest part of the whole thing.
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  After the fourth ring, though, he turned back to answer it. Might as well do his damage control now as later.

  "Eric? I was afraid I'd missed you!"

  "Bethie?" She wasn't quite the last person he'd expected to be calling him, but she was certainly in the bottom ten. "Where are you? Is everything all right?"

  "We're at Kit and Bonnie's up in Inwood. Everything's fine, actually, for a change. Kory and I are off to Comdex tomorrow to buy a computer system for a dragon—we took Ria's advice, and it worked out great!"

  She sounded happy and excited. Beth was in better spirits than Eric had seen her for quite a while—more like the old, pre-everything self, bubbly and effervescent.

  "Wait—wait—wait—slow down. You're buying a dragon?"

  "A computer for a dragon," Beth corrected, laughing. "His name's Chinthliss, and he can help us—Kory and me—figure out how to have kids. He's a friend of someone named Tannim, at Elfhame Fairgrove, he says—you know, with the race cars? All he wants is a computer system that will work Underhill, so he can surf the net, and Kit's friend Azrael figured out how to make it work—all you need is a Faraday Cage and some really big batteries—this is going to be great!"

  Beth was burbling, and well she might, if this Chinthliss had solved the problem of her and Kory's future offspring. How had that been Ria's idea? He'd have to ask her.

  Are you sure you can trust this Chinthliss? Eric wanted to ask, but kept himself from asking. She'd said Kory was with her, and Kory would cut his own throat before he let Beth wander into any perils Underhill. If the two of them had cut a deal with this dragon, Chinthliss must be all right.

  "So where are you going to find this computer?" Eric asked, when Beth ran down a little.