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“There might not be a way,” she said. “Let me think.” She sat cross-legged on the floor
and put her chin in her hands, staring at the wall. What would the Chinese guy have
done? He was a sneaky bastard, fond of traps and hidden things. Also, he was greedy as
hell—she remembered the way the apprentice (who was, almost certainly, actually the
master in the apprentice’s body) had counted the cash, smoothing the bills out on the
counter. This room was still full of magical objects, and probably lots of money, since it
was more secure than any bank. The Chinese guy probably hadn’t had time to get even
half his valuables before fleeing Ch’ang Hao’s ever-expanding fury. Would he really
have cut himself off from this place, leaving his fortune behind?
Of course not. Which was further proven by the fact that he hadn’t severed the ties
between this place and the ordinary world entirely. He could still get back in. And he
would want to, since so much of his wealth was here. There was no point in his being
able to get in, though, if he couldn’t get back out. Which meant there was some way to
open this place from the inside. The Chinese guy would come back at some point,
probably with some kind of serious magical firepower to subdue Ch’ang Hao. They
could just wait for him to return. He probably wouldn’t expect Marla and Rondeau to be
here, and they might be able to get the drop on him, especially since they now knew for
sure that the one they had to fear was the young Chinese woman in boy-drag. Marla was
reasonably confident she could beat the Celestial into revealing the way out.
But that was the brute-force approach, and despite prevailing opinion, Marla did have
strengths other than, well, simple strength. The Celestial had fled in a hurry, so he
couldn’t have done anything too complicated. The entrance was, in all likelihood,
simply hidden. A briefly muttered spell showed her that there was no simple lightbending
illusion hiding the entrance, the way there was on the other side. Which meant
it was hidden somewhere else. “Okay,” she said aloud. “The door is hidden here,
somewhere. This isn’t exactly a literal space—it’s as magical as it is physical, and its
physicality is entirely dependent on magic—so the door could be hidden in anything,
disguised as anything.”
“So it could be inside this jar of dried starfish,” Rondeau said, picking up a widemouthed
mason jar.
“Yes,” Marla said. “So smash it open already.”
Rondeau heaved the jar against a far wall. It broke open, and starfish arms showered
out. “Nope,” he said. “That’s not it.”
“Good start, though,” Marla said, grinning. This was it, she was sure—pretty sure
anyway. The Chinese guy had hidden the entrance, which was really just a spell that had
previously been made to look like a door. Now it had been made to look like something
else. Smashing whatever it looked like would have the same effect as kicking down the
door. It would open the way out. Ch’ang Hao had actually been on the right track with
his furious breakage. “Ch’ang Hao!” she called. “Get out here! We’re going to bust out
of this place!”
Ch’ang Hao lumbered out of the back room, and she briefly explained. He nodded,
looking almost hopeful, and began methodically smashing jars and wrenching open tins.
Rondeau was whistling and slicing up a dried alligator mummy with his butterfly knife,