Staying Dead. Laura Anne Gilman

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СКАЧАТЬ no doubts. A pro.”

      “But it was definitely a magic-user?”

      Sergei was, like so much of the human population, in that nether area between Null and Talent, but after so many years as her partner he was well-versed enough in the uses of it to make certain assumptions. Besides, realistically, what else could it have been?

      “Yeah.” She refrained from sarcasm. Barely. “Whoever it was used the building’s wiring to convey the spell. Probably had every person in the building so hocused, they couldn’t have told you what color their socks were.”

      “And then got the cornerstone out—how?”

      Wren’s mouth twisted in frustration, making her look for a moment like a five-year-old given brussels sprouts. “Okay, that part I haven’t quite figured out yet. Translocation, probably.”

      Translocation of an inanimate or inert object wasn’t a difficult spell for someone with any kind of mojo and open channels, but the actual performance took a lot out of the caster. Especially if he wasn’t present on-site, preferably within eyesight of the object. That was impossible in this case, since the object to be retrieved wasn’t accessible without the breaking and entering of a kind that hadn’t happened. So. A distance grab of that magnitude would make the hire-price prohibitively expensive, and the cost would increase the further the object was moved. Or it should, anyway. Even the best Talent had to eat and pay the rent, and a Transloc like that would wipe you for anything else for a week. “Might have intended to replace the stone with something else, to maintain volume consistency—” the hobgoblin of all translocations “—but the alarms going off must have wigged him.”

      “Alarms?” Sergei sounded a little alarmed himself. Wren reached out and sorted the pile of papers on her desk with one finger. Blueprints of the Frants building, cut into twelve-by-twelve squares for easy shuffling, covered with red ink—Sergei’s handwriting—and her pencil smudges. “Yeah, alarms. I could feel the echoes when I went into the basement. Nice little mage-triggers. Someone is a smidge nervous down there. I wonder if the perp knew about them before he went down, or if he was expecting a simple grab-and-run, so to speak. And before you panic, no, I didn’t set it off again. The parameters were set way too high for little old me.”

      Actually, that was a lie. She had sensed the threads of magic and slipped under and between them. While she wasn’t ever going to be called to serve on the Council—even assuming they lobotomized her long enough for her to agree to sign on—that was more a matter of attitude than Talent. Where she was strong she was very strong, and distracting attention from herself, be it magical or physical, was as natural as breathing to her. Her mentor had called it Disassociation, which was basically a fancy way of saying that she could make people—or things, specifically things like an alarm system—believe that she wasn’t there.

      The problem, as far as anyone had been able to explain to her, was that for all her undeniable talent she was just a little too dense, magically speaking. The current channeled fine—she had the skill, no doubts there—but it sometimes channeled in weird ways, denying her access to a lot of the major skills like levitation and translocation. Pity, as they would have been damned useful in her career.

      “You think maybe the thief meant to use it for blackmail? Or maybe ransom? Hey, got your protection spell here, what do you want to give me for it?”

      “Or possibly to open up the door just enough for a direct attack by someone else?” Sergei sounded like he’d given this some serious thought while she was out doing the hard work.

      “Maybe. I know, I know, not our problem. I’d prefer blackmail, though. Easier to find someone if they’re going to be so obliging as to send back a calling card.” If she were a better conductor…ah, well.

      On the plus side of that density, the risk of her wizzing out—losing her mind to the magic flow—was probably lower than anyone else at her comparable Talent level. There were always going to be portions of her brain the current couldn’t get into.

      “They also serve those who hum in choir,” she muttered.

      “What?”

      “Nothing. Look, whoever this was, he’s a subtle guy, definitely strong, but not too bright. He squelched the elementals but forgot to sedate them.”

      “Which, in English, means what?” Sergei did exasperated like a guy with years of practice.

      Wren grinned, forgetting he couldn’t see her. Tweaking Sergei was always so much fun. He did the staid businessman thing so well, sometimes he forgot to take it off. “It means exactly that, which if you would ever remember anything I’ve told you about elementals you’d, well, remember.” He had the weirdest mental block about certain aspects of current—she’d almost given up trying to figure it out. Then again, non-Talents should be uneasy around current. She shouldn’t blame him if even knowing things wigged him out enough to not want to think about it. “I tapped into the wiring, and there was a horde of elementals there. Quiet, but jazzed, like something’d shoved a massive current up their tails, but told them to lay low about it.

      “But when I stirred them up, they came shooting out, like they were hoping whatever it was had come back.”

      And once they had come to her hand, she had been able to stroke them into giving up the residue from that burst of magic. That was another one of her stronger skills—reading magic like some people could read Braille, or maps, or any other code. It made her useless in a really powerful thunderstorm, stoned like kitty on catnip from the overload of power, but the rest of the time it was part of her stock-in-trade. Where one magic-user had gone, she could go, recreating their trail with remarkable accuracy. Well, mostly. Unlike her other skills, which had names and entries in the skillbooks her mentor had shown her, this one seemed to be particular to her and the way her brain worked. Or if other Talents had it, they were keeping just as quiet about it as she was. The end result either way was that she had no real idea how it worked, or why, or how to control it.

      Then again, she didn’t understand any of that about her computer either, and it still worked fine. Most of the time.

      “I skimmed off a decent enough emotional memory of the thief to recognize him or her again. Pretty sure of it, anyway.”

      Sergei made an unhappy-sounding noise in the back of his throat. She didn’t think he was aware he did it—she couldn’t imagine him making it during negotiations with clients, or the highbrow, hoity-toity art collectors who made his gallery so obnoxiously successful, which meant it was a Wren-specific complaint. The thought made her grin again. “Even if you were sure, that doesn’t help us unless you actually run into him—”

      “Or her.”

      “Or her, in the near future. Wren…” A sigh, and she knew he was fiddling with one of the slender brown cigarettes he carried with him everywhere and never smoked.

      “Yeah, I know. Doesn’t help worth diddly, realistically. But what, you expected this guy to leave a calling card? It happens, sure, but not real often. Which is good, otherwise we’d both be out of work.”

      Sergei made a noncommittal noise that might have been agreement, amusement or a growl.

      “Look, all I need is a reasonably-sized list of people with something to gain by the client losing his big block o’ protection, and I can backtrack from there. We do a little digging, to see who has the skills, or the money to hire a mage of that power, and then I can retrieve the cornerstone, which you know I can do in my sleep. Easy money. So no worries.”

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