George Martin - The Way of the Wizard

God, it was taking forever. For whatever reason Houndstooth had not thought it necessary to choose the express elevator. The artificial respite was giving her time to think. Too much time — her mind had been spinning at maximum speed, and now that it wasn’t getting traction on anything the thoughts were piling up on each other. She tried to count up points but kept getting lost. The formulae were complex, and some of the variables were still in play. But she would keep her seeding, anyway. Youngest number one since they’d been keeping records. Five months straight. She was a prodigy, a talent so out of scale that it would have smacked of witchcraft if it wasn’t witchcraft they were all doing in the first place.

She sighed, and Houndstooth gave her a searching look, possibly flirtatious, but she blanked him. It’s not that she was worried about it. It’s not like she was going to lose. She was just — it hurt to admit it — a little bit tired of the whole wargaming scene. Being a magician, it turned out, wasn’t so much like it was in books. You thought there’d be a Sauron or a White Witch or a Voldemort waiting for you when you graduated, but you know what? Those fuckers could never be bothered to show up. Didn’t get the memo.

Their final betrayal, their ultimate evil, was their refusal to exist. So there she was, a newly minted sorceress, spoiling for a fight, but there was nobody to fight and precious little to fight for. Wargaming wasn’t the adventure she’d been waiting for, and training for, and living for. But it was pretty much the only game in town.

And she was good at it. But they’d been at it for three weeks, with another four to go, and suddenly that seemed like a fuck of a long time, a hell of a slog. Crashing at a new squat every night, in a new time zone, living on junk food, five raids a week, awake twenty hours a day on speed. People got so obsessed with it. She hadn’t had breakfast this morning, and she was getting weak at the knees from too much adrenaline on an empty stomach. Where next? Vilnius, probably. Maybe Perth. There were a lot of Envelopes still left to open. This would keep her numbers up though. There would be an Artifact in the cube. But you know what it was? It’s that she was way too young to be this bored.

Ping , the doors opened. She gestured grandly — after you — because why not be as much of a bitch about it as absolutely possible? Houndstooth looked at her emptily, like a man cursed from birth, then walked over and buzzed himself in through the glass doors into the office. Give him some credit, he’d cased the security ahead of time. She followed.

It was an office floor. Fluorescent lights, gray carpets, incurious employees in cubicles. They looked up as she passed, then back down at their screens, unaware that they were in the presence of two living gods, two angelic emissaries from the secret world that lay all around them, if they only had eyes to see it. The silence was like chloroform. It was freezing, the air was conditioned to death.

She trailed after her quarry, ten paces back. He wouldn’t be taking her right to it, he wasn’t that scared. He probably didn’t know where he was taking her. Not a big deal. She could wait while he decided. There was still some time left to play with. This was endgame stuff. Queen takes pawn.

The civilians stared at their flickering, incandescent spreadsheets. A woman listened on the phone, a shoe dangling from her stockinged toe, a lock of chocolate-colored hair tucked in her mouth. The cubicles were like a maze. Funny how the walls were carpeted with the same stuff as the floor. Like just in case the room suddenly changes its orientation, Escher-wise, we can all walk comfortably on the walls. A soft labyrinth. Maybe there would be a plushy carpeted minotaur in the middle.

God, it really was cold in here. Houndstooth turned right, then right again, then left. What’s your hurry? A gaggle of office cuties excused themselves past her. She took a jogging sidestep.

Hang on, where was he? She’d lost track. She stopped and hopped up and down to see over the cubicles. Nothing. If only she were as tall as Rob. She listened. Silence.

She breathed out, and her breath showed white in the air.

No no no no no! She raised the opera glasses to her eyes. The entire floor was a forest of invisible writing, green and ochre, so dense as to be illegible. This wasn’t an office. And there were no civilians here.

She dropped to a squat and slapped the rough carpet, hard, with both hands, and shouted a phrase in Russian. A wave of force blew out in all directions. The cubicle dividers went down in a ring around her, as if they were fir trees and she were the epicenter of a Siberian meteor strike. Somebody shrieked, and a window cracked.

Well, she could only do that once. Wards, wards, wards — she threw them up one after the other, even as a tide of magical energy threatened to swamp her from all sides, neon scribbles in the air, trying to pick her shields apart and tear them down again. But nobody worked as fast as she did. It was a gift. In college she’d had to slow her hands down for her professors, they couldn’t follow. (And what was her hurry? What was she trying so hard to stay ahead of, exactly?) Everybody was probably expecting her to Pax out now, but she’d never done that in her life. This was survivable. It had to be. At least until it wasn’t. The cubicle walls began re-erecting themselves behind her, cutting off her retreat. But she didn’t want to retreat.

She blew on her knuckles and gave herself the Hard Hand — her right hand became big and heavy and tough and numb. She loved the Hard Hand. You couldn’t cast spells with it, but there were plenty of enchantments she could work with her left hand only. She advanced behind her huge, glittering right fist. Boom, she punched down the wall in front of her. A lanky kid with a shaved head yelped and went down under it. They were always surprised, right out of Brakebills, how much rough stuff people got up to. Whatever. We can all have a tea ceremony together later.

A wild wind was raging through the office now, and the air was full of reams of copier paper. Ward and shield, ward and shield, she moved ahead under a hail of fire — you could actually see the invisible curve of her shield in the air, outlined by the glow of the spellwork shattering against it. Mostly boring kinetic stuff, whatever. Some of them were doing computer magic, automated spells: weak stuff, but you could churn it out in bulk. Most of the casters were smart enough not to try to get too near to her physically, but a distractingly handsome blond guy stepped out of an office and squared off with her, tricked out with all kinds of martial-arts type enhancements. She slipped past him, leaving behind an image of herself frozen with fear, then belted him in the back of the head with the last fading moments of the Hand.

From their point of view she was speeding up and slowing down now at random intervals, and fading in and out of view. It made her hard to catch and hard to target and sort of queasy-making to look at. But other things were coming at her that weren’t covered by her general defenses and dismissals. Crazy atmospheric effects, fog and smoke and cold and plasma, radiation too, stuff even she wouldn’t have tried in a populated area. The carpet was slithering fast under her feet, flowing like lava, trying to upend her. And somebody had been choking off her air, gradually, for the past twenty seconds or so, and she couldn’t quite make out who or how. They must have been laying this trap since yesterday.

She had spotted the Matron now, watching from the corner office. The minotaur in the maze. Stupid — should have known she wouldn’t go down that easy. The cold was coming from there, and it was numbing her fingers, locking her jaw. That along with the choking. She’d almost forgotten about it. Her vision was going all gray and psychedelic at the edges.