Magnus looked like Eva must have looked to others right after she had seen Tal die. She wanted to comfort him but had no idea how.
“Is there any way of intercepting the bird before it gets to its master with the staff?”
“Ordinarily, that’d be easy,” said Magnus. “But those falcons had powerful cloaking magic on them. That’s how they got the drop on me in the first place. Nothing could have gotten that close without my sensing it otherwise. Since they attacked at the precise moment when they could easily snatch the staff, they must have been watching me for some time, and I never noticed.
Besides, even if I could track the surviving falcon, I’d have no way to catch up with it.”
“What about those…portals?”
“I can only open a portal to a place I’ve already been—and I’d need to know where I was going, anyway. I can’t just will a portal to open right in front of wherever the falcon is.
“I just don’t understand how this could have happened. I haven’t used the staff since I opened a gateway to this world, and I kept it cloaked reasonably well after that. Powerful as it is, someone would have to be close to sense it, and there is no one in this area of great enough power to see through my spell, anyway. That’s one of the first things I checked.”
“Could someone have tracked you through your own magic? You have used that.”
“What I was using was pretty standard Celtic stuff. The portals, the little manipulations of nature, are something any reasonably competent druid could pull off. Even if someone noticed, the spells I was casting wouldn’t have attracted much interest. A really sophisticated sorcerer can sometimes tell who cast a particular spell, but that wouldn’t make any difference here. I don’t have a counterpart in this world, so nobody would recognize my signature even if they could detect it.
“Wait! Are you admitting I have magic?”
Eva tried to smile. “For purposes of discussion. I just wish—I just had a thought. Didn’t you tell me the orb of Theia can show you whatever you ask to see? Could it show you where the staff is being taken?”
“Who says a beautiful woman can’t be intelligent?” asked Magnus, leaning closer in an unmistakable attempt to kiss Eva. She backed away.
Magnus’s hurt feelings showed in his eyes, but all he said was, “Can’t blame a guy for trying.” He pulled the orb out of his backpack as quickly as he could and stared into its skylike depths as if he could pull the answer out by sheer force of will. The clouds swirled faster and faster, but no shape appeared within them.
“Too much stealth magic in the way,” said Magnus. “The orb could probably find anything that isn’t magically hidden, but the spell on the falcon is strong enough that the orb can’t follow its flight.”
His hand tightened on the orb as if he wanted to throw it down and shatter it on the pavement.
“If the spell on the falcon is what’s preventing you from seeing where it’s going, what about the dead ones?” asked Eva. “Can you ask the orb where they came from?”
Magnus relaxed a little. “Thank God one of us is thinking. You know, for someone who knows nothing about magic, you’re very perceptive.”
“Surely, the Eva in your world must do just as well.”
“She does,” said Magnus as he studied the twisted remains of the other falcons. “But she has spent the last six years constantly surrounded by magic. You’ve never been exposed to it at all.” He looked more closely at the falcons and frowned.
“Well, this is a good-news, bad-news kind of situation. The magic on the falcons is Egyptian, which means whoever grabbed the staff is more likely to know what it is and what it can do. However, it’s fading rapidly. In just a minute, I’ll be able to test your suggestion.”
Eva found it harder and harder to ignore the evidence in front of her. There was more weirdness than she could account for by hallucination or hypnosis. That didn’t alarm her as much as she would have expected. Perhaps it was the smooth way Magnus responded to the situation as if he had been dealing with the same kind of crisis his whole life. Of course, if what he told her about himself was true, he had been.
“Good news, bad news again,” said Magnus. “Your idea worked—the orb is giving me an image of the place from which the falcons came. Unfortunately, it’s a nondescript spot in the Egyptian desert. Since I haven’t been there, I can’t open a portal to it, and flying by magic slowly enough to keep from exhausting myself would take a week or more. Hell, it would take almost a whole day by plane. By that time, the sorcerer who sent the falcons would have already gotten the staff.”
“Would he?” asked Eva. “Those falcons were fast, but faster than a plane? The one flying with the staff would be slower, if anything. There’s no way it’s going to outfly a modern airplane.”
“And there you go again with the insight. Yeah, whoever sent those falcons from Egypt could hardly have expected them to come or go the whole distance between Egypt and California. But Egyptian magic doesn’t have an exact equivalent to Celtic portals. What I do to open passageways between universes is kind of an improvisation. Egyptian sorcerers traveled through out-of-body experiences—and those falcons were too solid to have been some kind of astral-projected sorcery. Wait! I got it!”
Magnus stared again into the depths of the orb. Looking over his shoulder, Eva could see what looked like a whirlpool in the middle of the sky.
“Whoever we’re dealing with is clever,” said Magnus. “What we’re seeing is an improvised portal ancient Egyptians wouldn’t even have visualized. Unlike Celtic ones, it’s generated by the power of Iah, once worshiped as the god of time. When the falcon goes through it, the bird will be whisked to the Egyptian desert in a matter of seconds.”
Magnus looked up from the orb, and his momentary excitement faded. “I could have done something similar with the staff, but without it, I have no way to reach that vortex fast enough. Once the falcon goes through, I’m pretty sure it will close, and I’ll be stuck days away from the staff stealer.
“I’m a skilled sorcerer, but I’m no match for someone who can call on the power of the staff. It took several experienced casters, the power of another ancient artifact, and a few people armed with magical weapons, to take down the wielder in my world.
“There are only two ways to beat whoever stole the staff—intercept it before it reaches him, or strike before he learns how to use it. Once he understands its full potential, he could do enormous damage, and I would have about as much chance of stopping him as a bug would have of smashing through a car windshield.”
“I know the falcon has a big head-start, but you can fly,” said Eva. “Haven’t you flown over Santa Brígida in your world? Couldn’t you portal part of the way?”
“I can only open Celtic portals to somewhere I’ve been—in this universe. I can’t use that method to reach places I’ve only been in other universes. Believe me, I’ve tried.
“There is one other way, but it wouldn’t apply in this case. If I linked mentally with someone else, I could use that person’s memories of a place to portal there. You’re the only person I know in this world, though, and I’m pretty sure you haven’t been floating around in the sky near the vortex.”
Eva frowned. “Do you know where it is?”
“Oddly, it’s somewhere over San Francisco. Whoever created it must have kept it distant so I wouldn’t be likely to notice it.” Magnus’s forehead wrinkled as he worked through the math. “Even if I could portal to the Santa Barbara airport, though—”
“Magnus, I live in San Francisco. I’ve flown in and out of SFO plenty of times—by plane, of course—but would my memories work?”
Magnus’s eyes widened. “Yeah, the vortex is above the typical flight patterns, but your memories could get me close enough to beat the falcon there. That means I could take on the sorcerer before he gets the staff.”
“Good! Just give me a minute to call my parents and make some excuse for dinner. Then we can be on our way.”
Magnus raised an eyebrow. “Once I’ve accessed your memories, I can open a portal and travel to San Francisco without having to take you with me. There’s really no reason for you to go. I can’t take you through the vortex with me, anyway. It’d be too dangerous.”
Eva looked up from the phone, and her eyes narrowed. “If it’s so dangerous, maybe you’ll need help.”
Magnus put his hands on her shoulders. This time, she didn’t pull away.
“I appreciate the offer more than you know—but there’s nothing you could do. If anything, you’d be a distraction. I’d have to spend too much time thinking about how to protect you.”
“Just because I’m a woman—”
“It has nothing to do with your gender. I’d say the same thing to you if you were a man.”
Eva reached up and put her hands on his. “What about the Eva in your world? It sounds as if you have all been in dangerous situations. Does she sit on the sidelines while you and Tal do all the fighting?”
“No,” Magnus said grudgingly. “But that’s different. She’s had combat training, and she has a magic weapon. Other women fight with us as well. But they all have magic of their own.
“I’m pretty sure you haven’t trained in combat, and I’m one hundred percent sure you don’t have magic. A sorcerer powerful enough to create a temporal vortex is more than capable of killing you in a matter of seconds, even if he doesn’t already have the staff.
“Eva, I’d never forgive myself if something happened to you because of me.”
She gently pulled his hands off her shoulders. “Look, I don’t know how I feel about you, to be honest, but something about letting you go off alone to face…whoever you have to fight seems wrong.
“I may not have magic, but I have good instincts. I thought I was being watched—and I was. I think about you plunging into the unknown alone, and the idea makes me uneasy. Uneasy enough to say you won’t get my memory if you don’t take me with you.”
“Eva O’Reilly—stubborn in every universe!” said Magnus, his lips twitching as if uncertain whether to smile or frown. “Wait a minute.” He rummaged through his backpack for a while, finally pulling out a sword that seemed too long to have fit in it.
As Magnus raised the sword into the air, Eva was reminded of the paintings she’d seen of Excalibur rising from the lake. The blade caught the sun and sparkled like diamonds. Then he thrust it into the sidewalk with enough force to make the muscles in his arms bulge.
“She who can pull the sword from the concrete may accompany me,” he said in a voice that sounded like a bad Patrick Stewart impression.
Eva looked around nervously. “Someone must have heard that.”
“Someone would have heard that…and the falcon attack…and our whole damned conversation in between—if I hadn’t pretty well cloaked us when I first popped in. Regardless of the universe, supernatural beings are always nervous about too much of the hidden world being revealed to mortals. The last thing we need is having to fend off a mob of offended faeries who think I’m being careless. Now, let’s see what the sword has to say about your fitness to enter the fray.”
Eva put her hand on the hilt, which felt oddly warm, and tugged experimentally on the sword. It didn’t budge.
“The sword has spoken,” said Magnus.
“How do I know this isn’t a trick? Are you using magic to hold it in place?”
“The sword has magic of its own.”
“And you just so happen to have it in your backpack—why?”
“Oddly enough, not for the magic. I brought it along in case I needed a blade against someone protected from magic. But it is charmed a little bit like the sword in the stone. In this case, whoever drives it into a solid surface can state the conditions under which the sword can be drawn.
“Sorry to be so theatrical, but this is the only way I can reassure myself that taking you along is the right thing. If you can pull it out, you come with me. If not, I’ll use the orb to find someone who’s been to Egypt, copy their memories, and use them to find the thief.”
“As if Santa Barbara County is filled with people who’ve been to Egypt! Are you sure you want to be so obstinate with the woman you claim to love?” asked Eva, her hand still on the hilt.
“I’m sure I want to keep that woman alive.”
Eva pulled again. “You know this is impossible, right?”
Magnus looked grim. “If you believe it to be impossible, it certainly will be.”
If belief had anything to do with getting the sword out, then Eva might have a chance. “Help me!” she thought to the sword. She felt silly, but she didn’t know what else to try. “I can help Magnus if I go with him. I know I can.”
She pulled again, and the sword rose from the pavement like a knife cutting through butter. Eva swung it as if she knew how to handle a sword. She didn’t—the sword itself seemed to be doing the handling.
Magnus looked dumbfounded. “How did you do that?”
“I believed I could. Now, if folklore is any guide to how these things should work, you are honor-bound to take me with you.”
“If you insist, I will,” said Magnus. “This is still against my better judgment.”
“I do insist.”
“If you go, you have to promise to do whatever I tell you,” said Magnus. “I’m the boss—period.”
Eva nodded. “You’re in charge.”
“The sword is faerie-forged,” said Magnus. “I’ll lend it to you for this trip. As you can tell, it’s a lot lighter than it looks. It will do unexpectedly good damage, but use it as a weapon only if I tell you to. I’m really giving it to you because it offers the wielder a certain amount of protection against magic. It’s not strong enough to make you immune, so stay sharp and dodge when you can. But at least it will keep you from getting killed with one lucky spell shot.”
Eva swung the sword again. “Don’t worry—I’m not about to throw myself into danger.”
“See that you don’t,” said Magnus with surprising sternness. “Stay close to me—behind me, preferably. I’ll try to cast protective spells as needed, but the farther away from me you are, the harder it will be to do that, especially as fast as I’ll have to work in combat.”
Eva was amazed at how quickly Magnus had morphed from a sulking Romeo into a commanding Julius Caesar. She wondered if her Tal would have been like that if he’d lived long enough to have the chance.
Magnus pulled a scabbard out of the backpack and helped her belt it on. “Light as the sword is, you’re going to want to sheathe it until you need it,” he said. “The magic protection will apply whether you wear the blade or wield it.
“Now, open your mind to me so that I can link well enough to get your memories of San Francisco.”
Eva didn’t have the foggiest idea of how to open her mind to that kind of contact, but apparently, she did well enough for Magnus to get what he needed. He waved his arm, and a silvery portal opened right next to them.
“I’m taking us to Golden Gate Park,” he said. “If I’m traveling with someone, that’s easier than popping out in midair like I planned to. The vortex is pretty much right above that, so it won’t be a very long trip once we get ourselves organized. Oh, one thing first.”
Magnus chanted in a language that sounded a little like Welsh, then grinned at her. “When popping out of a portal, sometimes a don’t-notice-me spell doesn’t hold up well. I’ve just made us invisible and inaudible to anyone except each other.”
Stepping through the portal was a weird experience for Eva, like stepping out of reality and into a silver whirlpool in a dream world. Moving back into reality again was jolting, but she was getting used to having her worldview challenged every few minutes.
They emerged right in front of the enormous bronze statue of Buddha in the Japanese Tea Garden. It was a good thing Magnus had taken precautions because they almost ran straight into a tourist taking a selfie in front of the statue.
“We really are invisible!” said Eva. The tourist looked right at them—more like through them—took another selfie, and walked away.
“Did you doubt my ability?” asked Magnus, grinning. “OK, we’d better do this. Reaching the vortex is going to be a slow process if I have to levitate you separately. It’s better if you hug me.”
Eva raised an eyebrow. “I’m tempted to question your motives.”
“I’m sensing the staff just a little, which means the falcon moved faster than we thought. We have to get through the vortex as quickly as possible. Of course, if you’d rather stay behind—”
Eva put her arms around Magnus. “Let’s get going!”
Magnus grinned again, raised his arms, chanted a bit, and they shot into the sky much faster than she had anticipated. She tightened her grip.
“It’s OK,” said Magnus. “I won’t let you fall. It’s wise not to look down, though.”
Eva looked up instead. She couldn’t see the approaching vortex, which must have been visible only to the magically talented. However, she did see what she thought was the falcon shoot like a bullet through the sky and disappear right above them.
“Damn!” said Magnus. “Hang on!”
Eva felt a jolt as Magnus increased speed, but because she had been prepared for it, it wasn’t too bad.
“I didn’t think you could go this fast.”
“Shouldn’t,” said Magnus from between clenched teeth. “Burns magic really fast. No choice now, though.”
Entering the vortex was far more jarring than passing through the portal. Eva felt as if they were moving at light speed, that such velocity would crush them or make them burst into flames. Neither catastrophe happened, but she did lose track of where she was. Locational terms like up or down, near or far, no longer had any meaning.
Exiting the vortex was like hitting a brick wall psychologically, though the physical impact was far less. It took Eva a moment to reorient herself—a moment too long.
In California, it had been late evening. In the Egyptian desert, it was a little before sunrise, but the moon was full, bathing the surrounding sand in light that made it look a little like silver dust.
A yard or so away stood a hooded figure robed in black who looked as if he were made of shadow. Eva couldn’t tell much about him, not even if he was human or just a stress-induced hallucination.
The falcon fluttered uneasily toward the figure and dropped the staff into his outstretched hands.