Chapter 19 #2
“Victoria lost people last night,” Angela continued.
“I don’t know the exact count, but at least four of her fighters won’t be coming home, and most of the rest are walking wounded.
Her elders aren’t going to be too thrilled about that, no matter how much she tries to rule with an iron fist. She came here thinking she was reclaiming her clan’s property, and she left without the property and without a third of her strike team.
The only reason she’s even still alive is that Malachi chose mercy over taking her out with that artifact.
That’s not the kind of loss you bounce back from in a month. ”
This sounded fair enough, but….
“And in a year?” Roslyn asked.
Angela shrugged. “In a year, the collection will be integrated into the town’s existing wards, and any attack on it will be an attack on McAllister property in McAllister territory.
The Wilcoxes have a vested interest in not letting the Van Horns expand their reach into Arizona, given the history.
And my daughter Miranda and the Castillos in New Mexico will back us if it ever came to that.
Victoria knows the math as well as the rest of us.
She’ll posture, and she’ll probably let it be known that the matter isn’t settled, but she won’t actually move on Jerome.
Not without losing more than she’d gain. ”
“You sound very sure,” Roslyn said.
“I’m sure enough,” Angela replied. “And we’ll keep watching. That’s what primas do.”
It did seem as if the prima had thought all this through, and Roslyn also had to admit that the house on Juarez Street seemed like a pretty good deal. But….
“Does Malachi know about this?”
Angela’s smile didn’t fade. “He will.”
Roslyn turned to look for him and saw him standing in the open doorway, which was the same place he’d been when she left him.
He hadn’t moved. Now he was watching her in that way he had, and she’d learned to read that attention well enough to know he’d heard most of what she and Angela had just said.
“A house in Jerome,” he commented as Roslyn walked back to him. “Your elders have already decided this.”
“They identified a property. Nothing’s been decided without you.” She paused, because that wasn’t entirely true, and of course he knew that as well as she did. “But the collection needs to move. You know it does.”
He looked past her at the yard, at the shredded perimeter and at the scorch marks on the outer wall that marked where the fireballs had hit. She watched him take it in with the analytical thoroughness he brought to everything and saw him arrive at the same conclusion she already had.
“Yes,” he said. “I know.”
That was all he said before he turned and went back inside. She followed him.
There was no part of her that was willing to let him out of her sight right now.
Getting Belshegar and Levi into the same room to discuss logistics took twenty minutes, partly because Connor had opinions about the plan that required Angela’s intervention, and partly because Levi had been standing at the perimeter boundary doing something that Roslyn couldn’t quite figure out but which apparently needed to be finished before he could be interrupted.
By the time the six of them were assembled in the study, the morning had advanced to the point where the sun was fully up, even though the day outside remained damp and gray.
She couldn’t wait to get back to the Verde Valley and its bright, sunny skies.
“A dimensional corridor between here and Jerome,” Belshegar said after Malachi laid out the idea.
“A stable one,” he replied. “Not a transit point. It has to be a sustained passage that can stay open long enough to move a hundred artifacts, most of them individually contained…and several of them extremely sensitive to dimensional fluctuation.”
Belshegar looked over at Levi. Some kind of unspoken communication seemed to pass between them, and then Levi tilted his head, as if to indicate he was considering something far beyond the physical plane.
“It’s possible,” he said after a few beats.
“Belshegar’s extradimensional nature provides a stable anchor point.
My own existence as a summoned being means I can maintain the corridor’s internal consistency and prevent the walls from thinning.
” He paused there, then continued. “It will require sustained concentration from both of us. And the objects must be moved in a specific sequence, from least volatile to most volatile. If anything disrupts the corridor mid-transport — anything at all — the consequences would depend entirely on what was in transit at the moment of disruption.”
Roslyn glanced at Malachi and saw that he was already looking at her.
“‘The consequences,’” she repeated. “Meaning what, specifically?”
“Meaning the artifact would experience an uncontrolled interaction with dimensional energy,” Malachi said. “For most of the collection, that would result in simple discharge. For some of the items in the basement vaults, it would result in something considerably worse.”
“Great,” she commented. “So we don’t let anything disrupt the corridor.”
Nobody argued with her, so she took that as agreement.
They started with the East Gallery. Roslyn had spent three weeks living alongside the artifacts in that room, and she knew their individual energies the way she knew the feel of a patient’s pulse.
It was something that came from proximity and time, the kind of knowledge that settled into your bones before you were even consciously aware you’d acquired it.
She’d watched Malachi tend the silver astrolabe, the bone dice, and the glass jar of trapped weather-working, had listened to his explanations during the morning sessions.
Along the way, she’d developed a healthy respect for all of them and something closer to wariness about the jar.
She didn’t know how useful that knowledge was going to be today, but she held onto it anyway.
“The dice first,” Malachi said. “The probability field is the most likely to interact with the corridor’s energy, but the field is contained within a twelve-foot radius. If it discharges, it will discharge locally. We’ll lose the dice, but we won’t lose anyone.”
“Start with the most replaceable,” she replied with a nod. “Work toward the least.”
A corner of his mouth lifted. “An accurate summary.”
Connor and Angela stayed outside to maintain what remained of the perimeter and deal with any Gibsons who might wander by to see what they were doing.
That left Roslyn, Malachi, Levi, and Belshegar to handle the actual work, which was fine, except that Malachi shouldn’t have been doing any of this at all.
She’d told him so twice before resigning herself to the reality that he was going to be involved no matter what she said.
The collection was his, after all, and he knew it better than anyone alive.
Suggesting that he should sit down and rest while other people moved his life’s work through a dimensional corridor was roughly equivalent to suggesting that he should stop breathing.
So she’d compromised. He could direct and advise, but he wasn’t supposed to do any significant magical work unless it was an utter emergency.
He’d agreed…but something in his tone had told her that he reserved the right to define “emergency” however he chose.
The corridor opened between the study’s far wall and a point somewhere outside the space she could perceive, a shimmer in the air that reminded her of the way she’d see heat baking off the highway when she had to run errands in Phoenix during the summer.
And she could feel it as well, thanks to a sensitivity she’d developed during three weeks of living in the same house with all those artifacts and a man who was himself a kind of contained power.
The corridor had a texture to it, dense and humming at its edges, the seam between one place and another held open by the quiet, sustained effort of two beings who weren’t quite human.
Belshegar stood at one side of the corridor’s entrance, while Levi stood at the other.
They weren’t touching, but there was something between them that seemed almost like a handclasp, a connection she could feel as a faint resonance in the air between their positions.
Neither of them spoke, and neither of them appeared to be doing anything visible.
Which was kind of the point.
“Move,” Malachi said quietly, and Roslyn picked up the first object — the bone dice in their containment case — and stepped through.
The corridor felt like walking through a space that hadn’t decided yet whether it was there.
The air was thick and slightly pressurized.
Her ears popped on the second step, and then she was through.
The receiving end of the corridor resolved around her, a bare room with exposed lath, empty floors, and the faint smell of dust and disuse.
But the room wasn’t unprepared — she could feel the layered ward Tricia and Allegra had laid down across the floor and up the walls, a containment lattice meant to receive each artifact into an existing field of protection rather than depositing them naked into an unfamiliar house.
The card tables were just where she’d set the objects until they could be moved into their permanent homes.
The wards underneath were what would actually hold them.
She was in Jerome. Someone — probably Tricia —had leaned a trio of folding tables against the wall, and Roslyn opened them all up and then set the case on the closest one before turning back to fetch the next item.
Step through. Set it down. Return.