Karen Chance: Embrace the Night

"You mean this is a mages' graveyard?"

"Possibly. The limestone pits were dug by the Romans. They were there for centuries before the Parisian authorities decided to make use of them. Perhaps the magical community had the idea first." From up the ladder came a sudden rain of stone and rubble. It sounded like our pursuers weren't giving up. "Can you shift us here?" he asked, pointing to a vague squiggle on the map.

My new job had more downsides than I could count, but there were a few perks, too. Well, one, anyway. The power that came with the office of Pythia allowed me to move myself and one or two others around in space and time. It was a damn useful weapon, and so far my only one. But it had its limitations. "I can't shift unless I know where I'm going."

"You've time-shifted before to places you've never been!"

"That's different."

There was a sudden avalanche, and a spell crashed into the floor behind us, igniting a storm of violent white light. It hit the skulls, causing them to crack and splinter, then bounced off the opposite wall, slinging stone fragments everywhere like flying daggers. Pritkin shielded me from the worst of the blast, then grabbed my hand and towed me down the corridor.

Since I didn't go bouncing off any walls, I assumed he could still see something, but to me it was a headlong plunge into nothingness. He'd clicked off the flashlight, I suppose to make it harder for our pursuers to track us, but without it the tunnels were so dark I couldn't tell whether my eyes were open or closed. "How different?" he demanded.

"The power lets me see other times, past places. Not the present," I explained, flinching. Afterimages from the blast were making reddish shapes leap in front of my vision, and I kept thinking I was about to plow into something. "If I want to do spatial shifts in the here and now, I have to be able to visualize where I want to go." And a shaky line on a bad map wasn't even close to good enough.

The corridor abruptly narrowed, to the point that it was impossible to continue side by side. Pritkin went first, pulling me along at something approaching a run. It was hot, the air was close, and the ground underneath our feet wasn't anything like level. It was soon obvious why someone would put a treasury here; without clear directions, you could wander around for months and never find anything.

Pritkin stopped, so suddenly that I ran into him. He spread the map out on the wall and handed me the flashlight. I clicked it on and saw a much less organized scene than before: bones had tumbled out of the walls and littered the floor, and in some cases they were mounded up in piles with no effort at arrangement at all. Unlike the ones in the main corridor, these looked like they'd just been thrown around any old way. I'm not usually sentimental about the dead—I meet too many of them—but it still seemed wrong. Friends and enemies, parents and children, all jumbled up, with nothing to give a history, a date of death, even a name.

"It would help if you shone the torch on the map," Pritkin commented caustically. I obliged, and the beam lit up his face, too. Its expression wasn't reassuring. "Are your ghosts here?" he demanded.

"No. They wouldn't follow us beyond the cemetery limits." And it felt like we'd left those behind a while ago.

"What about others?"

"Why do you want to know?"

"Because this map is less than adequate! Some directions would be helpful."

I shook my head. "These bodies were disturbed. I think they were brought here from their original resting places."

"Meaning?"

"That their ghosts would have stayed behind." Not to mention that if it was mages buried here, they wouldn't have left ghosts anyway. Supernatural creatures just didn't, as far as I knew.

"But their bones are here."

"Doesn't matter. Spirits can haunt a house, even when their bodies aren't there. It's all about what was important to them in life, the place where they felt a connection." I looked around and repressed a shiver. "I don't think I'd feel real connected to this place, either."

Pritkin finally settled on a direction and we took off again, sliding through gaps in the rock that, at times, were barely big enough for me. I don't know how he got through, but based on the muttered comments that drifted back, it wasn't without the loss of some flesh. Finally we came to a slightly wider corridor, meaning that we still had to go single file but could pick up speed. For a minute, I thought we'd succeeded in losing our pursuers, but as usual, Murphy's Law caught up with us.

We came barreling around a corner only to run almost directly into a party of dark shapes. There were yells and bullets and spells, with one of the last exploding against Pritkin's shields, popping them like heat on a soap bubble. "Run!" he snarled in my face. I heard rumbling, like distant thunder, and then the ceiling came down with a roar that consumed the world.

It took me a few seconds to realize that I still wasn't dead. I was in a crouch, my hands protecting my head, expecting an attack, but the corridor was as silent as the tomb it was. The only people besides us were cemented into the walls or buried under the pile of rubble that their own spell had brought down on their heads. I collapsed back against the floor, breathing raggedly, and tried not to scream.

After a minute, I felt around for the flashlight and my hand closed over a cool plastic cylinder. I clicked it on, relieved to find that it still worked, and saw Pritkin lying on his side. He wasn't moving, and he had blood smeared through the stubble on his chin, bright and frightening. Murphy and his little law can go to hell, I thought furiously, shaking him frantically.

"Would you kindly stop doing that?" he asked politely.

I stared. I wasn't entirely sure, but a polite John Pritkin might be a sign of the apocalypse. "Did you hit your head?" I tried to move closer to get a better look, and my knee accidentally knocked a shower of stone pebbles onto the oozing gash on his forehead.

"If I tell you I'm all right, will you stop trying to help me?" Every muscle in my body relaxed at the familiar tone, all ruffled feathers and crisp impatience. That was better; that was solid ground.

"So, still alive?" I croaked.

"Damn right."

He just lay there, though, so I shone the beam around, giving him a minute. It took a few seconds to realize exactly what I was seeing. Pritkin had apparently gotten his shields back up, because they glowed blue and waterlike, rippling slowly in the yellow beam. But the cave ceiling wasn't above them anymore. Or, to be more accurate, it was there—it was just no longer attached to anything.

Huge, half-quarried blocks, some still bearing ancient chisel marks, lay on top of the suddenly very thin-looking shields. Every time they flexed, small showers of rubble and grit slid along the top and trickled down the sides, making soft shushing sounds in the quiet. The larger pieces had nowhere to go, but they moved enough to make it obvious that they weren't anchored to anything. Even the smaller, cobblestone-sized chunks would hurt like hell if they fell on us, and I didn't have to wonder what the larger ones would do. Two mages were giving gory proof of that barely a yard away.

I could have reached out and touched them, where they lay caught between the shield and the cave-in. Their bodies were oddly contorted, trapped in the stone and rubble like ancient fossils, their open eyes shining in the reflected light. Except that fossils don't usually come complete with evidence of how they got that way, at least not in Technicolor brilliance.

The red-streaked white of newly shattered bone stood out starkly against the mellow gold of the older specimens. One hand rested against the blue of the shield, caught in a gesture of defense, as if human strength could stand against the weight of a mountain. It made me wonder for an insane moment if it would leave a red outline, if the next time Pritkin raised his shields, it would manifest, too.