Untitled

and B was gently pushing over long-necked jars of oil and letting them break on the
floor. Marla found a jo staff propped in a corner, and though it was an inch too long to
be the perfect size for her, it was good enough for her to assault some shelves and
apothecary cabinets on the macro level, knocking them over and hammering them to
splinters with the age-hardened wooden staff. After half an hour of continual smashing,
Marla leaned on her staff and surveyed the wreckage. B was down to ripping open
plastic bags of herbs and powders. Ch’ang Hao had thoroughly destroyed the back
room, and was now in the process of removing the pendulum-blade from the ceiling and
snapping it in half. Rondeau, whose attention had predictably wandered, sat in a corner,
apparently reading a newspaper printed in Chinese. Maybe Marla was wrong. Maybe
the door wasn’t hidden, after all.
“What about that vase?” B said.
“What?” Marla said.
B pointed toward a corner by the back wall, where a pile of wreckage formed a little
mountain. Everything had already been smashed to bits over there.
“What—” Marla repeated, irritated, and then she saw it, a beautiful blue-and-white
porcelain vase with a fluted mouth, standing on an unobtrusive blackstone pedestal. “I
didn’t see that,” she said.
“I still don’t see anything,” Rondeau said, and Ch’ang Hao shrugged and shook his
head. “What’re you going on about?”
“You’re worth your weight in eye of newt, Bowman,” she said, and picked her way
through the smashed glass. She had to glance away from the vase to negotiate her way
around a puddle of bubbling red sludge, and when she looked back, she didn’t see the
vase. Marla swore under her breath. The Chinese guy had put a seriously strong lookaway
on that vase, the kind of magic only a big-mojo sorcerer could throw, but B had
seen right through it. He was a far better seer than she’d originally supposed. “You’d
better break the vase, B. It keeps slipping out of my vision.”
“Sure thing,” B said. He picked up a chunk of rough black rock—probably a meteorite,
Marla thought—and threw it overhand at the vase from across the room, a distance of
some twenty feet. The vase shattered, and light poured out, forming into a ragged oval
that showed the streets of Chinatown beyond.
“Good hit!” she crowed. “We’re out!”
Despite the fact that the door was in the back wall now, it still opened onto the same
place outside. Consistent spatial relationships were nothing more than a courtesy in this
place. Someone familiar hurried past the oval opening on the street beyond, a slim man
with a fur hat and a cane. Who was he, Marla wondered. Some henchman of the
Celestial’s, off to tell his master she’d escaped? How had he managed to follow her
today, from Dalton’s to Bethany’s to Chinatown? Before she could point him out to the
others, the old man was out of sight, and Rondeau and B were pressing past her to look
through the opening. Based on the way the man had eluded her earlier, chasing him
wouldn’t do much good now, and she had other priorities.