Jake's Women (Wizards) (20 page)

I took my mobile phone out of my pocket. “I’m going to try something that I don’t think has ever been tried by a wizard. I’m going to call a phone on another continent and see if I can hop to it.”

Fluffy shook his head in mock sorrow. [The old dumb Jake has finally died. For better or worse the multiverse will have to live with the consequences.]

“I’m sure I can keep on making mistakes, my friend. That doesn’t seem to have anything to do with intelligence.”

[If anything, your imagination has got you into even greater trouble in recent times.]

35.
      
Through the Looking Glass

I dialed the number and listened. After some rings that sounded nothing like the rings I was used to, the answer phone kicked in and I attempted to hop to the destination.

I was disoriented for a few seconds as my consciousness seemed to be bouncing all over the place. Bursts of energy raced ahead of me while other energies slammed into me. I wasn’t in the real world and I certainly wasn’t in hop space, or not fully. I was following a pale yellow energy thread that was the echo of the bright white energy I was crashing through.

None of it made any sense. Something in my head told me the yellow energy led to my destination. It was a tortuous trail, the yellow almost vanishing as it performed loops that somehow made it brighter. Where it went I went too, through filters and amplifiers that stretched, squeezed and boosted me every bit as much as they did the yellow light.

I performed a million loops that made me dizzy before darting forward with increased vigor. There was no sense of size and I had no body. My consciousness was operating on its own and I wondered where the real me was. Was I in hop space or was I still sitting in the Bat Cave staring down at my phone?

The yellow light disappeared into a matrix of tiny lights. About half the lights were dark; the others twinkled in a display that ran to the horizon and beyond. This must be my destination in the electronics, probably where the recorder was storing my message. There didn’t seem to be a way out. I was in a universe of electrons and I needed to get outside it.

I imagined my consciousness growing in size and the matrix shrank from being the universe to becoming a small grey square plate about where my feet ought to be. My mind slipped through solids to immerge into a vast open space. I continued to expand and without warning the vast space became a room and I felt my body hop and reconnect with my mind.

“What a rush,” I told the room before the after effects of my journey arrived. Doubling over, I felt as if I had just run a race. Struggling to avoid retching as everything appeared to be spinning; I waited for the nausea to go. The room finally came back into focus and I found myself staring at an answer phone. The number of unheard messages had reached fifty five according to the LCD counter.

“I guess we’re not in Kansas anymore.” No one responded to my words because this room hadn’t had anybody in it in weeks or maybe months, based on the thickness of the layer of dust that covered everything.

The air was musty, which was enough to bring me close to being sick again. I refreshed the air from outside and was struck by the tang in it. Running the air though the equivalent of a carbon filter, taking out the pollution and carbon monoxide content made it just about breathable. There could be no doubt that this apartment was in the middle of a city with a lot of cars.

I was finally in a state to investigate the room. It was furnished in an anonymous style with generic couch, chairs and table. There was nothing of the individual about it. It could have been a hotel room almost anywhere. No books, no magazines, no personality of any kind. If Dafydd Williams lived here, he only used it as a stopover, not as a home.

The rest of the apartment turned out to be equally unlived in. The bed was made and ready for occupancy, the roll of toilet paper in the bathroom was full and had a thin layer of dust on it. There was no food in the kitchen, though the refrigerator was on and there were no clothes in the bedroom. When I opened the fitted wardrobe I found a safe taking up most of the space inside. There were no coat hangers on the rail, which was fortunate as they would have been touching the top of the safe.

“Curiouser and curiouser,” I told it, continuing my new quote fetish. With a physical effort I forced myself to say something that wasn’t a quote from a film. “I wonder what’s in you?”

The safe had an electronic panel, a traditional tumbler, and a big key hole, not to mention its own opening wheel. I briefly considered cracking it in a traditional manner before curiosity got the better of me and I sliced off the door panel. Magic lifted the front of the safe away and I left it hovering by the bed.

The half of the safe was filled with neatly stacked piles of paper money. They were in bundles and I picked up the nearest one. It was made up of hundred dollar bills. I started counting, but gave up at twenty. My guess was the bundle contained at least ten thousand US dollars.

The next bundle was in sterling and the one below that was in euros. I picked up the top bundle at the other side and while it had the feel of currency, the notes were in no language I recognized and there was no Arabic number on it.

That made me suspicious enough to scan the room for magic. Some of this money might be from other worlds. There wasn’t the slightest trace of magic except for the things I’d been doing. Scratch that idea.

The middle of the safe was stacked with coinage wrapped in plastic in neat mostly cylindrical tubes. Some I recognized, some I didn’t. The bottom of the safe had metal bars of various sizes. The bars were of different metals; gold, silver, and other metals that could have been anything.

All in all, there must be millions of whatever currency you fancied in this safe, but it was stored as impersonally as a bank. I maneuvered the front of the safe back to the body of it and did an invisible mend. For some reason I couldn’t explain, I removed all traces of my magic from the room and did the same for all the rooms in the apartment.

Then, making sure I didn’t leave a trail, I hopped back to the Bat Cave.

“Auntie May is going to be disappointed,” I said after fully briefing my dragon. “If he ever lived there, he doesn’t now. Maybe he’s a spy.”

[It would not be impossible that he is also a wizard.]

“I thought of that, because it might explain the money. But…” I scanned the cave, which was alive with traces of performed magic. “Wizards don’t clean up after themselves like that. There wasn’t a trace of magic in the room except for what I brought with me.”

[A paranoid wizard might. And your bomber appears paranoid.]

“He doesn’t have a motive to hate me. Unless you can think of one?”

Fluffy shook his head.

I picked up the phone and looked up Auntie May’s number. A few seconds later I was talking to her.

“The apartment is empty and there’s no sign anyone has been living there recently.”

Auntie May sighed. She sounded at the end of her tether.

“There is no trace of him anywhere, and the place he worked isdenying he ever worked for them. I don’t know what to do.”

“If I have any ideas I’ll get back to you.”

Auntie May thanked me and hung up.

“So that’s that then,” I said, dusting my hands together.

[I doubt it, Jake. Not with your track record.]

Before I could construct a suitably cutting remark the phone rang. A picture of Jenny appeared on it and I touched ‘answer’.

“Jake, there was a cancelled viewing this morning and the estate agent says we can see the house now.”

“Be with you in a moment.”

I ended the call and turned to Fluffy.

“I’m going to see a house with Jenny. Do you think you can keep the cave free of Cultists until I get back?”

[Can I roast anybody who drops in?]

“Fine with me.”

My dragon grinned evilly.

I hopped.

Jenny’s father eyed me up as I stood by the car.

“No diversions to the hospital this time?”

“I’ll try not to bother you.”

Jenny said goodbye to Merlin and her mother, who had drawn babysitting duty. Jenny gave me a hug and dragged me into the back of the car.

“Esmeralda’s gone home?” I asked.

“Yes, about an hour ago.”

I should have asked how, but Jenny dumped a couple of brochures in my lap and insisted I look through them with her.

The house was located at
1, The Mount
, which was an impressive sounding address, but was just the name of the road that led to the top of the hill where the house was located. And as the house was at the very top it got the number one. To buy it would cost us most of the money we had from the government. I had no idea if that made it a good deal, but Jenny believed it was a bargain.

“It’s barely been touched since the sixties. The woman who owned it had lived there since the fifties and her family don’t want to spend money renovating it now she’s dead. Given I have my very own wizard it should be quick to fix up.”

“Wizardry is a high calling, not to be used for designer kitchens.”

“Well, you can just make an exception in this case, Jake Morrissey. If you don’t, I shall invite Esmeralda round all the time.”

“Consider me your new interior decorator.”

“Provided you use my designs,” Jenny said primly, but she looked delighted.

“It has lots of land behind it and it’s secluded from the neighbors by leylandii hedges.”

“This dead woman sounds like she was a bit of a recluse.” I hated those kind of hedges and wondered if I could do a bit of stealth gardening if we bought the place.

“All the better for when Retnor comes to visit. Merlin dotes on him, you know.”

I had visions of Fluffy doing the baby sitting and winced. Still, he might get rid of the hedges if I could get him laughing at just the right moment.

“It was built in the 1890’s and the ground floor still has the bells used to summon the servants. That’s why there are kitchens on the ground and first floor, not to mention a downstairs loo along with the bathroom on the first floor.”

I looked at the plans. “Five bedrooms and two lounges. Do we need that many bedrooms?”

“We are not stopping at one child, Jake.”

It was the first I’d heard of it, but it came as no surprise.

The estate agent was waiting for us at the front door. The house was much more dilapidated than the photographs suggested and when I turned on a tap the plumbing began to shake. But Jenny was right, I could fix that easily and according to my magic sight the building was sound.

It also had an enormous coal cellar with the obligatory large house spiders. I liked it.

What really sold it for me was when we went into the garden. Plum and apple trees surrounded a lawn more than big enough for Fluffy to land on, even when you took into account the usual long slide after he landed.

“Jake?” Jenny said expectantly. There was no doubt about her vote.

“If I offer the asking price how quickly can we move in?”

“That would depend on how fast your solicitor can do all the searches,” the estate said. She was in her thirties and believed in power dressing, replete with too much make-up.

“Assume we waive all that and go straight to purchase?”

She gave me a peculiar look and then decided I was serious.

“End of next week?” she suggested.

“Then it’s a deal. I took her hand and shook it.”

36.
      
Truce

Jenny was bubbling with excitement as her Dad drove us home.

“The first thing we do when we own it; is that you redecorate all the rooms. That shouldn’t take you more than an hour. Then I want you to tidy up the garden.”

“I think the most important thing is to sort out the plumbing.”

“Well, of course I expect you to do that first. And check the boiler. Do we need to get a man in for that?”

“You don’t have the basics. You need to buy a cooker and a fridge,” her Dad said sagely from the front. “And you need to get water, electricity, gas and phone lines sorted out. Not to mention finding an internet provider.”

Jenny looked crestfallen. “I hadn’t thought about any of those.”

“Your mother will go over everything with you. She did it the last time we moved house.”

Jenny brightened at this news, then her face became one of deep concentration.

“Don’t take it that seriously,” I suggested.

She elbowed me in the ribs. “Be quiet, Retnor wants something.”

I shut up, wondering if I should hop straight to the Bat Cave. After ten or twenty seconds she relaxed and smiled at me.

“Retnor wants you to go to the Bat Cave. But he also wants you to know he has guests and you shouldn’t get upset. He wants me to tell you it’s safe.”

That raised an ominous possibility.

“Are you sure he isn’t being influenced or mind controlled?”

“No, it was Retnor.”

I kissed Jenny on the forehead. “Okay, I’ll see you later.”

Despite Jenny’s certainty that the visitors were safe, I hopped in with shields raised and ready to fight. There was a bright light in one corner of the cave that resisted my magic sight. It must be our guests.

“We assure you we mean you no harm,” a familiar disembodied voice said. That confirmed it. The Progenitors had come to visit.

[Jake. I am connected to the Elders. They advised me of this visit before the Progenitors arrived and confirmed that you would be safe.]

Easy for the Dragon Elders to say. What did they have to lose?

“It took us some time to locate this dwelling. Our method of tracing Representatives does not normally include a spatial reference point. Usually it is not necessary.”

I decided I’d start with belligerence and see where it got me.

“You are not welcome here. You refused to allow me to leave the Conference when members of my family’s lives depended on it. You attempted to kidnap me in direct contravention of your own rules and now you want to talk as though none of that happened?”

The disembodied voice sounded contrite; though I wasn’t sure I believed it.

“The manner of your leaving and earlier use of the Diabli Sword may have led us to employ inappropriate methods. Since the first Conference, many thousands of years ago, we have never had a single Representative cause so much trouble.”

[Get used to it. Compared with some of the things he has done, Jake was on his best behavior.]

I can always rely on my dragon for moral support.

“What do you want?”

“We wish to assure you that we will be taking no further action against you and to warn you that the Conference World can no longer be hopped to. It would be fatal if you were to try.”

“I have already got all the information I want about that place.”

“The Dragons have assured us that you neither know how to create a Diabli Sword nor would want to. That is sufficient reassurance for us.”

“That won’t stop the Diabli from using them.” Note how cunningly I tried to find out what they know. James Bond has nothing on me.

“The Diabli are no longer part of the multiverse.”

“There are places outside the multiverse, and believe me when I tell you, the Diabli are pushing at the interface between us and them.”

There was a long silence.

“Do you have proof?”

“None I am willing to share, but the dragon Elders will confirm I know what I am talking about.”

“We must think on this.”

And they were gone.

[Jake, is there something you have not confided in us?]

I sat on the sofa and told Fluffy what I’d seen when I rescued my parents.

[This is most disturbing. The Elders believe that magic in the Damaged Zone is becoming denser as the Zone shrinks because raw magic cannot be created nor destroyed. That is how Gator was able to transform himself, a feat normally beyond dragon magic. There will come a point when the Zone shrinks sufficiently that the Diabli will be able to escape by using brute force.]

“I don’t suppose the Elders are prepared to estimate when that might happen?”

Fluffy laughed and I only just prevented the sofa from fire damage.

[Pick a number between zero and a thousand years.]

“I choose a thousand,” I said quickly. “And it would be good if you could schedule their eventual return between my many other crises.”

More flames filled the room and this time I had to rescue the kettle and the cutlery from Dragonfire. That stuff can melt steel.

My phone rang. It was Inspector Thomas.

“Hi Jake, Jenny told me you might be contactable. Can you come and visit?”

I had a lot to tell him so it might as well be now.

“If I hop to the front door now can you see me?”

“Try to stay away from the cameras outside the building. I don’t want try to explain your transportation methods to my staff.”

“See you in a few minutes then.”

I put the phone back in my pocket. “Duty calls, my noble dragon.”

[Is there a pretty young constable at the desk?]

Where did that come from? Has he started reading my mind?

“I really wouldn’t know.”

I had to wait until he stopped laughing to protect the furniture. Then I hopped.

The very attractive police officer I’d seen last time was manning, or womanning, or possibly personing the desk. She saw me through the plate glass doors before I got to them and waved to me. I waved back as the doors opened automatically and I stepped over the threshold.

There was a feeling of being whooshed through space and I gasped as hot desert air baked my skin and scorched my lungs. The rubber soles of my trainers began to stink as they melted. The sunlight was blinding and I instinctively shaded my eyes.

Naturally I was trying to fix all those things with magic, but though I had plenty of stored magical energy, I had none available to deploy. This was becoming increasingly annoying. Just how many ways were there to stop a wizard using his magic anyway?

A few feet in front of me, resting incongruously on the desert sand was a black lacquered box. It was decorated in runes that glistened. I tried to reach for it and discovered it was protected by a shield.

Using magical sight I could see my energies being sucked away and stored by the box. They were flowing into it through a round jewel set in a design that looked like an eye. Crude paint marks, completely unlike the rest of the box had been painted on below the eye.

The heat was beginning to get to me and I could feel my skin begin to burn. Deciding to make a run for it, I only got six feet before running into another shield. I fell to the ground and screamed as the sand burned my hands.

There didn’t seem any way out of this trap, and I was certain this was a trap set by the bomber. It had all of his hallmarks; the only one missing was the absence of an innocent victim to share my fate. He must be slipping.

The rate of energy loss slowed down. I stared at the box and saw it was nearly full. A quick check showed that I was still half full. The bomber had made a mistake. He had underestimated just how much magical energy I typically stored.

I tried to create an umbrella over me, but the slowing wasn’t enough. The lid of the box began to bounce as surplus energy spilled out of it.

Nothing about this weapon made sense. It had been decorated in a fashion that suggested it was a prized possession you would put somewhere prominent for people to admire. The crude overwriting on the front implied that it had been converted from another purpose. My guess was the box had been designed to store a wizard’s energy to be available when needed. Effectively it was an attractive battery rather than a weapon.

Great, I had proved how well I could reason just as I was about to die from heat exhaustion.

I put my hands over my head, which was cooking rather faster than the rest of me.

The thing about a household tool converted to a weapon was that it wasn’t designed to be a weapon. It was managing to dump energy and stay in balance, but only because it had slowed the flow from me.
Now there was an idea.

I might not be able to slow the flow to the point where I could use my magic, but I could certainly increase the flow. That required only the tiniest bit of useable magic because the box was already doing all the leg work.

I pushed magic at the box. The sweat pouring from my forehead increased. Magical sight showed the jewel beginning to melt, but more importantly the escape valve couldn’t cope and the magic inside the box was being compressed.

The inevitable explosion was not in the slightest bit spectacular as the shield around the box caught the blast and all the pieces. However, what remained of it was only fit for burning.

The sky above me turned dark and moments later a rain storm reduced the temperature by dozens of degrees. I healed my burnt skin and stood with arms outstretched as the rain fell over me. Rain has never felt more magnificent.

I didn’t want to leave any clues as to how I had beaten the trap so I destroyed what remained of the box down to the molecular level. The shields were easy to remove. Then I scrubbed the surroundings clear of all traces of magic. With any luck, my bomber would be scratching his head for months over what had happened here.

Then, after a quick magical wash and brush up I hopped back to the police station door. The police woman was in deep conversation with two other officers and didn’t see me arrive. I located the highly sophisticated magic that covered the entrance and erased it before stepping across the threshold, remembering the officer’s name as I did so.

“I’m here to see Inspector Thomas, Tonia. He’s expecting me.”

Her face paled and she used the table for support.

“I saw you vanish.”

“He didn’t get far then,” one of the two male officers said, with more than a trace of sarcasm.

The two men laughed and walked away.

“Don’t let it bother you,” I said to the distressed officer. “I’m a very missable sort of guy.”

“I have to rerun the video.”

That certainly wouldn’t be a good idea. My magical sight had located the computer involved and a second later the recording was gone.

“I wouldn’t waste your time.”

I indicated I was going upstairs and Tonia nodded her head absently. It probably would have been fairer to remove her and her colleagues’ memory of the event, but I hated touching people’s minds like that. It always felt dirty.

The Inspector waved a piece of paper in my face as I walked in.

“We received another letter, just like the previous one, incomprehensible marks and your name in English in the middle of it.”

I took the letter and read it out loud in English, translating as I went.

“To the moronic Welsh police. This should flush out that incompetent Jake Morrissey and then he will be dead and you will never know what happened to him. Unless some prospector in the Nevada desert stumbles over his bones. The box will be long gone by then.”

“He doesn’t have a high opinion of us, does he?” the Inspector mused. “Any idea what that Nevada desert reference is all about?”

“Trap set at the police station door. You might have to send Constable Tonia to rehab. She saw it sprung.”