Ra Page 14

  "We should have gone two-factor," Hatt mutters as he takes the laptop and types a very long phrase.

  "Agreed. I'll set something up once this is over," says Middleton.

  The door clicks.

  Wester pulls it open.

  *

  Picture a high, dark room. Only a quarter of the lights are on.

  The only person Hatt will allow in is Hatt. He makes it clear to the other two that the fumbling with key cards and the illicit access don't change that policy. He enters alone, closing the door behind him and descending a short flight of stairs to the lowered floor.

  A D-class circle is thirteen metres in diameter, mainly hexagonal, with an E-class circle nested at its centre and symmetrical embellishments spreading to what is conventionally called the "north". Laura Ferno is standing at the south pole of the figure, her staff held out in front of her oriented from west to east, at head height. Magical artifacts ranging in size from a two-metre-tall Chandra brancher to pea-sized driver dots are placed at points around the circle. In front of her and to one side, playing no magical part in the proceedings, is a music stand with a few sheets of written notes. Dangling by a lanyard from one corner of the stand is an ID card with Laura's name and photo on it.

  "Ar'un ar'ath il chuthi tra anh ha al luia kun kuan phal lif lithua ar'lath dulaku. Pan sulat'th chath esseli TSUAA TSUAA."

  The room is uncomfortably hot, even with the air conditioning pulling its weight. It is quiet aside from Laura's voice. A non-mage would be forgiven for thinking that nothing is happening. The room contains an almost entirely magical machine under construction, but the flux connecting the components together is invisible and inaudible.

  Hatt's not a full-time mage and it only takes a week or two of inactivity to lose one's edge, so the spell he uses to activate his monocle-sized pocket oracle is too simple to show significant detail or colour-coding. Holding it to his right eye, he sees mana flowing around the circle like iron filings following exotic magnetic flux lines. Most of the flux is at ankle level, but where it reaches the brancher at the eastern corner, the lines arc upwards and spread out across the ceiling. Some of the arcs descend again into other components, very much like electricity into dodgem car motors. The rest are being collated into yantras: mid-level dynamic spell components built from luminous mana. There are seven or eight of them gently orbiting in the ceiling, of which two or three are incomplete. While Hatt watches, Laura binds two of the stacks together, annealing their exposed interfaces and binding a word to the combination.

  There's a thin flux line running up one wall and across the ceiling. And suspended over the centre of the entire assembly, bathing the room in high-energy mana, is a point of light too bright for Hatt to look at.

  Laura is casting a very intensive, very complex, almost purely magical spell. From the volume of completed work visible, Hatt estimates that she has been speaking for seven to nine hours.

  Laura should have seen him out of the corner of her eye by now, but she hasn't reacted to his presence. Hatt goes to the panel on the wall nearest the door, alongside the fire extinguishers, and takes a Montauk ring down from its hooks. He takes a step towards Laura and stops because the room has suddenly changed.

  There's glass underfoot now. The walls and ceiling have become black glass as well, hexagonally tiled. The room has tripled in all of its dimensions. The air has dropped sharply in temperature. The magic circle, once flat underfoot, is rippling like a sea. There's a faint hiss of magic being spent. Laura's in the same position, holding her staff out horizontally, but her music stand is gone. And above her, barely visible outside of chance refractions of light, is a ghost. It is a human figure, upside-down and curled into a strange half-crouch. It is hanging on to one end of Laura's staff with one hand. The ghost is almost colourless and almost translucent, but blobs of colour are blooming inside it like paint dripping into water.

  Edward Hatt considers his options. He turns and looks at the door, now a long way behind him. He looks back at Laura Ferno. And he takes a step away from her, back towards the door.

  Now he's broken it. The walls and ceiling are gone entirely and it's even colder than it was before. The mountainous glass landscape of Kazuya Tanako's world spreads in every direction, starting with a deep vertical drop just a step in front of him, forcing him to stop walking. The door has receded a full kilometre, to the top of the next mountain. All Hatt can see of it now is the small neon green "EXIT" sign glowing above it.

  When he turns back to face Laura, the magic circle is gone. Ahead of them both is a black mountain, a genuine two-trillion-tonne Everest of glass thrusting upwards out of the world's crust and all the way into the Death Zone, if Tanako's world has such a thing. Laura still holds her staff, but is now using it as a walking stick. She is carrying a woman over her shoulders in a fireman's carry, bent under her weight. The path ahead of Laura, winding along the side of the mountain and up a ridge to its peak, is almost vertical, and kilometres long.

  Hatt doesn't want to move again for fear of changing the scenario for something worse. "Laura," he calls out.

  Laura turns and regards him for a long moment. Hatt doesn't recognise the face of the woman she is carrying.

  "Will you help me?" Laura asks him.

  "Who is that?"

  "My mother."

  "...I thought you said your mother was dead."

  "Nobody is dead," says Laura, "as long as we remember them."

  "The way out is over here. You need to come back with me."

  "No," says Laura. "It isn't. Look again. The way out is on the other side of this mountain."

  "There isn't enough mana in the world to get you over that mountain," says Hatt.

  Laura says nothing. Hatt wonders how close to awake she is, and whether he's even conversing with a conscious person at this level. Somewhere on one of these planes, Laura Ferno's mind is running flat out, building her answer. But the mountaineering metaphor's too simple, with too simple an answer. Just endurance and strength.

  Hatt adds, "And you're taking my building apart."

  "Will you help me?" Laura asks him.

  "No."

  Laura says nothing for another long moment, expressionless. Then she turns and continues walking.

  Hatt reaches a conclusion. He clutches the Montauk ring and runs for Laura, through shells of metaphor. Gravity upends and the environment reconfigures over him like a tactile hologram. He ignores them and concentrates on putting one foot in front of the other. A safe, being cracked from the inside. A leashed bird of prey, picking frustratedly away at the knot of leather straps tied around its feet. A living dream as big as a continent, trying to end itself. The final dream, when Hatt reaches Ferno, is smaller than all the rest and so cold on Hatt's skin that it feels like being bitten. Laura's mother is lying on the floor now, and Laura stands over her, guarding her with her staff held in a defensive position, bojutsu style. All three of them are at the end of a low, cramped, dimly-lit steel room. A shipping container?

  Laura isn't guarding her mother from Hatt. Her attention is fixed on something behind him. Hatt looks. It is an emaciated, stinking, vertically elongated human, with one too many faces and wearing nothing but thick layers of blood. Its eye sockets have no eyeballs. Its fingers are too long. It gawps, showing teeth like scalpels, and smashes Hatt in the jaw, hard enough to hurl him over Laura and Rachel, back against the far wall of the container. The steel is thick enough that there's more of a bonk than a clang. Hatt's dropped Montauk ring clatters and spins to a stop on the floor next to his head.

  It's at this point that Hatt realises that the ring was warm. The rest of his skin is frozen, almost to the point of cracking as he moves, and the walls are like dry, sticky ice, but his right hand, in which he was holding the ring, is still lukewarm. This is because inside the ring, none of this is happening.

  Laura attacks the monster, smashing it in the head twice, hard enough to shatter its skull on the first blow and scatter kidney-like organs
across the floor on the second. Headless, it still tries to thrash its way towards Rachel Ferno, until Laura lands on top of the thing's torso and snaps its arms using her staff and the principles of leverage. She breaks its chest open.

  Hatt struggles upright, his nose and fractured humerus healing rapidly. From his perspective, the observable universe amounts to just a few hundred cubic feet. Beyond the tiny red circle of light, there's steel in every direction except one. In that last direction, the other half of the container is thick darkness, out of which two more identical blood-things are already striding. Laura launches into them, but even as she does, a third appears behind them. Hatt can't see the far end of the container. There might not be one. There might be infinitely many more blood-things lined up in the dark. It's unwinnable. It is the darkest, inescapable corner of the nightmare.

  Hatt realises that Rachel Ferno's eyes are open. She's staring at him.

  "Magic doesn't work here!" Laura cries, not looking back. She wants Hatt to help out, engaging the monsters physically. The nightmare is already so crowded with burst carcasses that it's hard for her to manoeuvre without slipping over. Her staff is too long: its far end clanks against the wall or ceiling. She tries to unscrew a piece of it to make it shorter, but she can't do it and fight at the same time. Another two waves and they'll both be dead for real. "Ed, help me! I'm trying to save her life!"

  Hatt rubs the kara on his wrist. He flips his Montauk ring up with one toe and catches it. He takes a step forward over Ferno's mother's body, and drops the ring smartly over Laura's head. And he takes his True Name back.

  "Eilo fib thalath dulaku. STOP."

  Laura fights him. She pushes Hatt away with a well-practiced flick of the bo, which Hatt simply rolls with, allowing himself to be thrown, sprawling. Laura pulls the ring back over her head, but it's too late. Tanako's nested world has completely switched off. Mana flux has stopped. The abstract yantras in the ceiling crumble and dissolve. The room is back.

  Flat on his back, Hatt stares up at the distributor lodged in the ceiling, now disabled and spinning down like the rest of the equipment in the room. "Are you done?" he asks aloud, and looks between his toes at Laura.

  Laura is bright red with anger and frustration. She breaks her staff into two pieces and holds them in one hand while gathering her paperwork from the music stand. She takes the mislabelled ID card and throws it at Hatt's chest. "This is yours."

  *

  No spell is clean. The amount of thaumic energy - mana - put into a spell is never the amount of useful work done by the spell. There is waste heat. And there is waste mana.

  High-energy spells have been cast by mages on the Hatt Group site for more than a decade. The total amount of waste mana produced amounts to hundreds of gigajoules. The waste mana is undetectable. Theory and simple arithmetic show that it must exist, and that it must obey the same laws as all other mana, but it is mageless. It is, therefore, useless.

  Installed below D12A, sealed in cement because there was no reason not to, is a bilge: a battery of two-metre Montauk rings. Montauk rings drain free mana out of the environment. Hatt had no way to prove that the battery was collecting anything, let alone to retrieve the collected mana in a usable, mage-owned form. But he lived in quiet scientific hope. He started his stockpile in preparation for a possible future in which it would be worth something. His private reserve.

  Laura Ferno broke into it and drained ninety percent of it using a mind-breakingly convoluted True Name aliasing technique which only she, her sister and her mother knew was possible.

  That wasn't even the hardest part.

  *

  Adrian Middleton's opinion is that Ferno should be removed from the site immediately, and everything else worked out later. Hatt overrules him. He dismisses Wester and brings Middleton and Ferno to his office. Middleton stands in the corner, observing.

  Laura sits upright in the middle, with her knees together. Defensive body language. No ID pass.

  Hatt starts with: "You have the bizarre dreams."

  "...Yes."

  "Like many mages, you end up in Tanako's world quite often. You know how to go there and come back."

  "Yes."

  "You see things there."

  "Yes."

  "Often, you see your late mother."

  "Yes."

  "Today, you were trying to bring her back from the dream. You were trying to bring her back to life."

  Laura says, "Kazuya Tanako's world is real."

  "It's not," says Hatt.

  "No. No. It's not a dream. It's not a shared dream. It's not a common dream state that mages share. It's a place where we can go. It's real. It behaves like another universe. If you put enough magic in one place, you can go there. My mum's there. The last thing she did before she died was to burn enough mana to burn those final events into the... the glass recording. It worked like a signal flare. It was a recovery beacon intended for me in the future. And if you put enough magic in one place, you can bring things back."

  Hatt says, "All of that is groundless, if well-worded, metaphor."

  "You showed it to me! You showed me that you can bring things back from Tanako's world—"

  Hatt produces the forged boarding pass.

  It's the same one. He produces it from thin air, without one word of magic. "It was sleight of hand. I was bamboozling you with unbelievable scenes to get you on my side. I don't pull the trick for everybody, but I did it for you. Watch my fingers. One... two. One, two. Do you see?"

  Laura can't speak. Hatt hands the boarding pass to her, then opens a drawer and, from a thick pile of miscellaneous paperwork, retrieves a flat sheet of twenty more identical passes. They're just the same, waiting to be sliced up.

  He continues, "You can't bring physical objects back from a dream. You can't walk home from a dream."

  Staring at the boarding pass, Laura says, "But you can. I've done it."

  Embarrassed, for lack of anywhere else to look, Ed Hatt pulls the blinds open and looks out of his window.

  There's nothing he deems worth looking at. The sunny weather earlier that morning was a false start. Fat grey rainclouds are now moving in from every significant direction. It's shaping up to be a really miserable day. He closes his eyes momentarily, imagining his preferred panorama. "You know a great deal which nobody else in the company knows," he says. "Including a lot which, possibly, nobody else in the world knows. Like how you got the bilge mana to actually work for you. I'd love to know how you did that."

  Laura says nothing.

  "But you're also a security risk. And you're not doing the same job as the rest of us. We're working on magic-based spaceflight. You're working on something totally other. So—"

  "My mother can tell us—"

  "So we'll just have to crack the bilge mana problem ourselves. And the other problems. Because it's not worth it."

  "I can still do this," says Laura. "I know what I need to do now. I need the Ra codes."

  "What do you know about Ra?" Hatt asks.

  He immediately realises his mistake. He's given something away by not measuring his words properly. Laura spots the completely new expression that momentarily crosses Hatt's face before he can control himself. Was it alarm? For an instant, Laura considers the possibility that Ra is a deep secret of Hatt's, which she's not supposed to know anything about.

  No, it was amazement. Ra is a mystery which Hatt's been pursuing for some time. Just like she has.

  Laura says, carefully, "What do you need to know about Ra?"

  Hatt replies, "I need to know what you know."

  A pause. Laura says, "Am I fired?"

  "You were fired twenty minutes ago."

  "That doesn't answer my question. Am I fired right now?"

  Hatt glances at Adrian Middleton, who, in the corner of Laura's eye, shrugs. "You know my position," he says.

  Hatt chews for a moment. Eventually, he gives Middleton a reluctant, curt nod.

  Middleton opens the office door,
and holds it for Laura to go through first.

  She leaves, working out the rest as she goes.

  Daemons

  Nick Laughon teaches now. He's brand new at it, only a month into the job and still full of momentum. It's the first job he's had which uses any meaningful fraction of his energy each day. It's the first time he's ever gone to bed tired without serious exercise. It also means that he gets home earlier than most. Today, Laura is waiting for him.

  "Hello," he says, stacking a crate of unmarked red exercise books in the flat's nominal hallway and dumping a weighty rucksack on top of them. Laura's sitting in the living room, positioned to face the door directly. Between them on the coffee table is a glass filled with a colourless, effervescent liquid which Nick assumes to be gin and tonic. Basic signals given off by Laura suggest a relatively high gin-to-tonic ratio. The drink, however, is full. Laura sits behind it, not drinking it. Deliberately and purposefully not getting drunk. She is deeply unhappy.

  Nick last saw Laura more than twenty-four hours ago. Work has demanded that she stay ungodly late before, more than once, but for Nick to receive no phone call and for Nick to wake up still alone the following morning is unprecedented.

  "What happened to you?" he asks.

  "I lost my job," Laura explains.

  "What? How?"

  Laura doesn't move. "I stole the CEO's key card. I broke into a secure room in the site's basement. I broke into a secret mana accumulator which Ed Hatt had set up more than fifteen years ago and I stole something in the area of sixty megawatt-hours of mana from it. And then I burnt it all on a boondoggle. Ed Hatt caught me and shut the spell down. He fired me on the spot."

  Nick opens his mouth, but can barely vocalise. He is stunned. He rubs his temples. "Why? I— Why did you do that?"

  "I had a spell that I needed to try. This is— you know this has happened before. I have to try things. I can't let an idea fester. I have great difficulty... sleeping on things."