Chapter Twenty-Eight: Fun With Portals

+++++Anise+++++

Ezra's eyes flashed even brighter than usual, as they did when his emotions were not in check. "I thought we were friends!"

He was angry, and perhaps understandably so. They'd known the location of Rill and another dozen captured infernics for a week now. He'd carried out an audacious robbery (with Anise's help) that had embroiled the whole district and a good chunk of the city beyond in protests and riots. Emptied tenements, fire-gutted storefronts, smashed windows, and upturned carriages littered the roadways of the Old City. Ezra knew where Rill was and, despite their assurances that they wanted Rill back every bit as much as he did, neither Plenakton nor Teak were willing to commit any of their people to a jailbreak that constituted high treason, for it would bring the wrath of the entire establishment of St. Arbalest against them: parliament and the lord chamberlain, the constabulary, the mages, and every corner of the criminal underworld that wasn't pro-infernic (in other words, most of the corners). And, on top of that, Anise's help to that point had been entirely theoretical.

"I helped you steal the draughtsman's eye," she said.

Ezra waved his hand dismissively. "Yes, thanks for the distraction. But a fat lot of good learning where Rill's kept does us if we can't get to her."

Anise put a hand on his shoulder and tried to console him, but he pulled away, his frown turning to a contemptuous sneer that Anise didn't care for at all. "Look, Ezra, I want to help. Of course I do. But I'm not about to barge into a heavily-guarded secret facility, spells blasting. I'm a 5th elevation now, sure. That's pretty good. But if you think I could take on a single 7th elevation sorcerer, let alone a dozen 7th and 8th elevation ones along with their 5th and 6th elevation assistants, you've got another think coming. Do you remember how my uncle used his magic to lift you with hardly a second thought? Yes, I can see you do… well, keep in mind that the only reason that he didn't crush you like a bug is because he wanted to watch you squirm and suffer first. Rill is my friend, but I'm going to need a workable plan before I drop everything to help."

"You don't need us now that you're getting admitted to St. Arbalest's," Ezra said.

"I never needed you," Anise said. "I don't need anybody. I want to help, so stop sulking like a child and give me a plan I can climb aboard."

Ezra turned his anger away from Anise and paced back and forth for a minute, his footsteps so silent upon the marble floor of Jue's lecture hall that you might mistake him for a dark-clad spectre skulking in the dark (the first time Anise had seen one of those, it had scared the snot out of her, but they were mostly harmless). He muttered to himself, which spectres did not do, making an annoyed huff whenever a potential plan didn't pass muster.

"We have to get to Rill before they either kill her, move her, or do something horrible and permanent. And if we can't rescue her, I'd bring the whole facility down before I let those bastards have her. Look, I'm sorry. I'm just very… agitated."

"I can tell and I don't blame you," Anise said. "Do you have a plan?"

"You're good with devices," Ezra said. "I know it's not proper and ladylike to be handy, but I've seen you fix your uncle's carriage, build a scrub-broom, and trace out sigils like you were writing casual correspondence. You could build something that would let me tunnel into the facility, get behind all of their defenses, and get Rill out. A magical drill or something - I could power it all day long."

Judging from the way uncertainty flashed in his eyes, Anise didn't have to tell Ezra it was a bad idea. He was at his wit's end, though, and she felt for him. What would Anise have done if somebody had taken Franyi, implanted a thrall-plug in her chest, hooked her up to a horrible artifice, and intended to either keep her that way forever or kill her? Anise wasn't sure she'd take it even as well as Ezra had, and so she didn't point out that a tunneling device would make enough vibration and noise that it would alert the people guarding the facility many minutes in advance. She didn't point out how there'd be no escape route, since most of the tunnel would just collapse behind him. She didn't point out that the big mining trawlers that could burrow into the deepest mines for ore were the size of small houses and only moved a meter or so per minute, nor that they had nowhere near the resources to build such a thing. But…

"There may be a way," she said. "Wait here."

Anise padded down to her room, where Franyi was visiting for the evening, hunched over Anise's little desk to pore over one of Jue's many rare volumes. She leaned in to kiss Franyi's cheek and then nudged her to get her to come along. Finally, Franyi stopped by the library and retrieved the Lost Artifacts of Old Muyyinde book she'd returned the day before. Franyi had found it a few days ago, but Anise had read through the whole thing while her girlfriend was nose deep in her actual classwork. Part of Anise was glad that she no longer had to concern herself with the day-to-day nonsense of classes and wondered whether classes at St. Arbalest's (assuming she was even admitted) would be similarly tedious.

Ezra shot her a pained expression when he saw the thick book, perhaps correctly assuming that he was about to be subject to a discourse on academic magic. Though, Anise suspected, if Ezra had daily access to a library like Jue's, he'd be an expert on a dozen disciplines of magical theory within the month. She'd give her… she'd give a lot to have a memory like that. And Ezra was pretty much correct about the discourse. Anise cracked the book open…

"So… in the old Wistreik Empire, there was a span of about a century where there were three sorcerer-kings, all paying obeisance to the high emperor. As you might imagine, there was quite a bit of jockeying for position and, should any of the kings have elevated, they might well have jockeyed to supplant the high emperor. And the nobles beneath the kings similarly competed with one another. In that environment, a cottage industry of spying magic and artifices came into being. They didn't really have sigils like we have on modern safes and locks, so you could just magic your way through a wall using a special device called an arkanystor, an arcane portal."

She let Ezra peruse the little schematic of the portal for a moment, his fingers tracing along the sinuous contours of the circle, over which an elaborate network of arcanite integrators had been woven. "It says here the portal would only remain open for a few minutes at a time and projected for between half a meter and one meter."

Anise nodded. "Right… so useful for popping through walls to have a peek inside but not for tunneling through a hundred meters of dirt and rock. But they also didn't have a draughtsman's eye back then. That's a much more recent invention…"

Franyi gasped. "You could chain them! If you chanted portals rapid-fire right on top of one another, you could keep pushing your arcane portal back another meter. The only problem is… well, as soon as the first portal fails all of the ones behind it would collapse. So you'd have to chant them very quickly to fit in the hundred-plus it would take to tunnel into the facility from… well, I suppose it would have to be from a basement somewhere on the St. Arbalest's campus."

"Or St. Quillia's," Anise noted. "There are some buildings on the women's campus that are about equidistant from the… uh… whatever we're calling the infernic prison thing that they're keeping Rill in."

"We…" Ezra choked up. "We can do this?"

Anise nodded. "If you know where to get your hands on two kilos of pure arcanite and recreate the diagrams of the draughtsman's eye, I think we can."

And, of course, Ezra wrapped her up in a great big hug and sobbed into her shoulder. Classic Ezra.

+++++Ezra+++++

Having a near-perfect memory wasn't the same thing as having a perfect understanding. Ezra knew this well from his experiences as a budding (but so far pretty successful) information broker. He could look at just about any schematic or page of text and have the whole thing memorized if you gave him thirty seconds to scan it. A minute if the schematic had a lot of fine detail. His hand-eye coordination was nearly perfect, too - something that you didn't really appreciate until you could draw a perfect freehand circle by eye. It was important to stand right over the paper, though, or else you'd get a little perspective error added in.

Ezra had burned all of Fenrik's plans but had given half of them to both Teak and Plenakton, whom he considered to be criminals of principle, even if those principles occasionally validated doing horrible things to people with sufficient cause. The other half he held in his memory bank, both to keep the crime lords interested in his continued well-being and to get them to follow through on their promises to help rescue Rill.

He was used to waking up alone again, and he hated that fact. He would wake up in his little room in Plenakton's secret stronghold deep in the Old City tenements… it was a nice room, with well-tended plaster walls and a little grimed-over skylight. He'd wake up warm and content, the room's little alchemical radiator still pumping out just enough heat to ward off the outside cold without overheating the room, and stretch and smile for all of about three seconds before the crushing realization pounded misery right back into him. Rill was still captured, and every promise to help him get her back had turned out to be a whole lot of perfumed air with a follow-through that stank like Chartham. She'd been taken from him and imprisoned and re-enslaved, her body a mere commodity for research and possibly energy. And what had Plenakton and Teak done? Ask when they were going to get the other half of the plans, of course. That was all they cared about.

Stolen story; please report.

"How close is it?" he said.

Anise glanced up at him with tired eyes. She'd pulled another all-nighter, or close enough. She and Franyi had brought little cots into the long-unused basement workshop at St. Quillia's. This was their current base of operations, because it was the closest underground facility they had access to - one hundred fifty meters as the kao-etema burrows from the facility where Rill and the other captured infernics were being kept. One hundred thirty meters over and seventy meters down, any entrance or exit closely guarded. Though, Ezra was guessing, they didn't expect anybody to burrow through a sixth of a kilometer of solid bedrock.

"We're almost done," Anise said. She stood and cracked her neck, her shoulders hunching up.

"Uh… do you need a massage?" Ezra was, in his own opinion, pretty good at massages. Actually, the word he used was yojea-mikʼo or 'relaxed touch', as Unilog didn't have a word for massage.

"Massage?"

"Massage… to soothe muscles? Can I touch your back?"

Anise shot him an odd look but nodded. He reached up to her shoulders and started working the muscles, feeling the tension and strain built up from hours hunched over an arcane portal. She tensed up at his unexpected ministrations for all of about two seconds before sighing and relaxing down to a sit. He was worried that she might take it the wrong way, but he really appreciated her work and, apparently, people didn't give massages in St. Arbalest. If Anise had any context, she might have thought it too sensual… even without a frame of reference, she might have objected if she hadn't been so weary. Instead, she just relaxed back into his hands, pulling her hair up into a bun to give him better access.

"This is… oh… that's nice. This is a massage?"

"A shoulder massage," Ezra said. "People do them all the time on Earth, and some people give them professionally. I took a massage class at my college once, and it's always a hit with the ladies…"

Anise tensed visibly. "A… what?"

"I just mean it's nice to give to people you're close to, and my partners liked it in the past. Rill likes massages, too, but the kind of rubbing you give to your lover is a lot more intimate…"

"This is pretty intimate…"

Ezra slowed his hands. "Should I stop?"

"No. Just don't, you know… don't do anything inappropriate. I guess I didn't know we were close… oh… closer to my neck, please."

Beneath his palms, he felt her tension ease and her muscles relax. If she was Rill, he'd have started to go lower, but she wasn't. Rill was still trapped deep underground a hundred and fifty meters away. That wasn't so far, but it felt like an immeasurable gulf. He needed to get back to her. Without quite realizing it, he'd gone farther down her back than he'd meant to and Anise was half asleep, making little groans whenever he worked out a knot with his palm or his elbow. She was stronger than she looked - beneath the softness of her skin was a surprising amount of muscle, and all of it had been incredibly tense. Now, though, Anise was nearly catatonic, snorting unhappily as he stopped the massage and stepped away.

"You need more arcanite to complete the portal?" he asked. From his vantage, he could compare the work-in-progress against the schematic in his head, and it looked like the fine meshwork of magical metal was about ninety percent complete.

"Perhaps a hundred grams more and we'll have enough. We can have it ready tomorrow."

"Really? Tomorrow?" Ezra said. His heart pounded. He thought of Rill. "Tomorrow?" he asked again.

Anise nodded. "The rest is done. We just need the integrator mesh and a really careful measure for the device bracketing."

"I figure we should make our move at night, so I'll talk to Plenakton and Lusha Dryad and get them to send the people they've promised me." He kissed the top of Anise's head, which smelled faintly of sweat and smelted metal. "How can I possibly thank you?"

"You can start with another massage," Anise said. "And then you'll promise to teach me how…"

+++++Ezra+++++

Arcanite was not cheap. In fact, it was costlier than gold. A kilo of gold was just under two stacks, whereas a kilo of arcanite was about six. Ironically, if arcanite had been a bit rarer, then it might have been worth less, because mages would have never gotten around to playing with the stuff to discover its magic-channeling capabilities. But there was enough of the stuff that mages lusted after it and corporations paid exorbitant amounts to develop the mines that churned it out in pea-sized kernels. Based on Ezra's hazy understanding of geology, that meant that most arcanite probably came from an ancient asteroid and the little rounded nuggets were from molten droplets of the stuff - such an impact would have had to generate enough heat to melt the stuff, which wasn't easy. And it meant there was probably a solid mountain of the stuff underground somewhere just waiting to be discovered.

In any case, it was costly stuff, but Ezra had enough money for it. He had stacks upon stacks… well, not quite that much. About half of the blue pal notes he'd stolen from Fenrik had been recalled. He hadn't even known you could do that until he walked into the Imperial Bank looking to cash one in and, when he overheard the bank management whispering about him in their office and sending somebody out the back to fetch the constables, Ezra figured it was time to be scarce. He bolted out of the bank about thirty seconds ahead of the constabulary clamoring down the avenue.

Fortunately, they'd destroyed most of Fenrik's financial records when they broke into the safe, and so the only notes he'd managed to cancel were the ones he'd personally memorized… and, while sorcerers didn't have perfect memories like Ezra, they were pretty damn good. Fenrik had memorized about half. That left Ezra with a lot less discretionary money, but it was enough to bankroll the arcane portal, given that Franyi and Anise were willing to work for free… well, they worked for wine, massages, and Ezra's constant praise. And, when they thought Ezra wasn't listening (which he always was), they would giggle and whisper about learning how to massage so they could massage one another erotically, as if Ezra hadn't yet considered the possibility of this. He wasn't nearly cruel enough to hamper their journeys of sexual discovery, so he let them think they were inventing a new sort of massage in their quiet moments alone.

"Where do you want us?" Lusha Dryad asked.

"Half upstairs and half outside, ready to signal if we've got anybody incoming. I want Anise and Franyi safe and gone as soon as I'm through."

Lusha had arrived with seven other people from Teak's organization - three other infernics, two humans, a scriben, and a borrenkin. Silent, aloof, and vaguely menacing, all of them comported themselves with the bearing of seasoned mercenaries. Apparently, they had no issue with taking orders from an infernic. In Teak's organization, you either took your orders from Lusha or the scriben crime-lord himself, so that made sense. Plenakton had sent another half-dozen infernics from the 3Z to cause a distraction near the entrance to the lord chamberlain's subterranean research facility. They didn't even need to draw anybody outside. They just needed to create enough of a distraction for long enough to pull all eyes away from the deepest parts where Ezra would be entering.

"I want to be here to watch them work the portal," Lusha said.

Ezra nodded - it wouldn't do much good to disagree with the dryad. "And, whatever happens, get the two of them out of here and to safety the second that portal closes."

Lusha smiled affably. "Of course. Innocents need to be protected from the likes of us."

Ezra wasn't sure which he objected to more - being likened to an inveterate criminal like Lusha or the notion that Anise was an innocent that needed protecting. He didn't voice either objection, and neither did Anise. She and Franyi were too busy going over their device, running short tests with weak crystals before readying the device for the actual tunneling.

"Each portal we stack on top of the first one takes a bit off our time," Franyi said. She checked her calculations. "About half a percent, give or take ten percent of that… and that ten percent is pretty important. If we're unlucky, the portal might collapse a few meters before the edge of the facility… and, if we're lucky, you'll have a five-second window."

"So we might be able to get two or three more people through?" Ezra asked.

Lusha shook his head. "Nobody's reflexes are as good as yours, and you didn't ask me to bring expendable people. We'll keep your magistresses safe, but I'm not sending somebody in to get snapped in half the instant the thing closes. If you give me another day, I can provide some people who I might not be so broken up about losing."

Ezra shook his head. Absolutely not. They were getting Rill. They were getting Rill now. "Start the portal," he said.

He had to wait three interminable minutes before they did. It was still four minutes until the agreed-upon distraction from Plenakton's people and three minutes until Anise and Franyi had the aim of their arcane portal checked, re-checked, and re-re-checked. They started it up - Ezra had seen them run a dozen tests already, and he'd even participated in a few, portaling through walls and, eventually, to the empty basement of the alchemy building twenty meters distant. They were good test-runs, but each time he'd been able to simply step back through the portal to return to their makeshift laboratory. Now, though, there would be no return. Well… not unless he could rescue Rill in half a second or less. It seemed unlikely.

The portal hummed to life, a little green and blue glow marking the portal's initiation, followed by a little thum… thum… thum… sound. One thum every second or so as the machine repeated a spell that would have taken a mage a minute or more to cast. Ezra had absorbed portal spells from the thing, too, just as he had the draughtsman's eye, and he could cast a portal in about three seconds now… but they only lasted about two seconds after that. He didn't yet have the energy flow needed for powerful spells.

"Change the crystals," Franyi said.

She and Anise got to work, yanking crystals out and slotting new ones in as the arcane portal thum-med away. The device had two crystal banks, automatically drawing from the secondary when the primary was exhausted or had an incomplete circuit, and then switching back once the secondary exhausted. That way, they could power the thing indefinitely for as long as they had high-class charged crystals. The rate-limiting factor was how long they could keep the first portal open for… hopefully, long enough to 'tunnel' their way to Rill.

Thum… thum… thum… with each new portal, the view in the portal changed. For the most part, it was just variations of bedrock, with the occasional little pocket of air or trickle of groundwater. The whole room smelled of soil and Ezra had to step to avoid the expanding puddle of muddy groundwater that dribbled down the base of the artifice. Thum… thum… thum… with each casting, the portal grew closer to Rill. Ezra had counted ninety so far. Their estimates said it would be about a hundred in total - they'd managed nearly a meter and a half per portal, substantially more than the ancient versions of the device. When Anise and Franyi put their heads together, their artifice skills were solid.

"The stone just changed," Lusha said.

Ezra didn't need to be told - his eyes were fixated on the portal. The view through it had gone from a circle of unimpressive rock to a cross-section of cement reinforced with what amounted to rebar in St. Arbalest. It took two thums to get through that - the walls were incredibly thick. Then Ezra saw the inside of a dark room and felt the whoosh of stale air through the portal. He jammed his palm on the button to stabilize the portal and leapt through into the underground facility.