CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
It was a long walk. Not by distance, don’t get me wrong. I’ve learned to walk long distances in armor. That’s the thing you don’t get in your typical fantasy novels and games: the sheer boredom and physical strain of walking from place to place, carrying your entire life on your back, along with armor, weapons, and whatever you happened to loot during the last encounter. Trust me, I carry a lot less rope, ten-foot poles, caltrops, and months of rations in real life. That stuff’s heavy.
No, I mean it was a long walk for reasons of emotional strain. There was a crowd of concerned mothers, bored teenagers, and unemployed bodybuilders loitering at the entrance to the mall, all drawn by our recent crash into their beloved drainage ditch. Their expressions were a mixture of horrified and confused, with a good deal of mistrust thrown in for good measure. The mundane world does not tolerate the weird. It didn’t help that we looked about as ridiculous as heroes in the process of saving the world can possibly look. Half of us were dressed up like a high budget Actual Play troupe that had been living homeless in our costumes for the past three months. The rest of our little group looked like the extras from a failed reimagining of The Nutty Professor. Tesla wore the same electrical-generator-slash-traffic-light on his back that he had when we first met, with the addition of a pair of insulated gauntlets that covered his fists in coils of copper wire. Adelaide had once again adopted her look of cool detachment flavored with the promise of imminent violence. Ida looked the most normal, other than the telescoping goggles and collection of impossible tools.
The crowd gathered outside the shopping mall watched as we trudged the length of the parking lot in our sodden uniforms. It felt like the final fight scene between gangs of roaming cosplayers in a postapocalyptic movie.
“They’re, uh, staring,” Chesa said quietly.
“Well, we’re worth staring at,” I said. “How often do you think they see a silver whale fall out of the sky and disgorge a troupe of circus actors? This is high entertainment at”—I twisted to look at the sign—“the Mount Commons Grove Lake Mall and Entertainium Complex, presented by the Maxious Group. Rolls right off the tongue.”
“So what’s the plan here?” Addie asked. “Do we rush through, knock down a couple meddlers, then claim the moral high ground?”
“Um, no,” I said. “We talk. Hopefully cleverly.”
“A better question is what we’re going to do once we’re inside,” Gregory asked. “I don’t think they’re going to have a portal into the Gestalt lurking in the food court.”
“We’re not going back to the Gestalt. At least, not immediately,” I said.
“So what’s the point of this?” Adelaide asked.
“We’re going into someone’s domain.” I pulled my amulet out from under my cuirass and held it up. “I figure we can reverse the flow and use them to reach one of our domains. I’m just not sure whose, yet.”
“What good does that do us?” she asked. “The Unreal is the exact opposite direction from where we want to be. The Lumieres are hiding in the Gestalt, remember?”
“Well, uh. Yeah, I know, I just figured it was a step forward.”
“Well, it’s not. It’s a step back.” Addie stopped walking. “I need a better plan if I’m going to risk walking into a place as mundane as a suburban mall. That could do irreparable damage to my mythos.”
“Maybe we could reverse engineer the amulets and use them to access one of your domains?” I suggested. “The Eccentrics do have domains, right?”
“Yeah. Back there.” Addie jerked a thumb at the wrecked Silverhawk. “I don’t need an amulet to get there. I can swim.”
“But obviously the Silverhawk has fallen out of the Gestalt, right? Otherwise, it wouldn’t have crashed,” I said.
Ida nodded. “Whatever those valkyries did to the aethervox, it knocked us straight into the mundane world. Unless I’m mistaken, none of our powers are working. Right?” She looked at Addie. The gunsmith sulked, but shook her head. “Right. So we’re stuck in the real world until we find a way out.”
“When I joined Knight Watch, I had to create my own domain. Discover it, basically. Maybe you guys could do the same thing?”
Ida cocked her head. “That never occurred to me,” she said. “Odd. I mean, of course we could try. How did it work?”
“There’s a magic door in Mundane Actual,” I said. “Esther just . . . pushed me through?”
“Same,” Chesa said. “Kind of rude. But after a minute I got where I needed to go.”
“The amulets are based on the same magic as the door,” Tembo said. “Limited transposition, keyed to nonmaterial teleportation of quintessential anima.” Ida cocked an eyebrow at him. The big mage sighed. “Portals. They make portals.”
“Oh, why didn’t you just say that?” she asked. “No need for all the complicated words. If that’s the case, I might be able to harness the power and get it to work for us.” She took the amulet from me without letting me take it off my neck, dragging me close as she examined it. “I really don’t know magic stuff. We’d have to get at least a little bit into the Unreal before I could try anything.”
“Perfect. That’s exactly what I was planning,” I said, snatching the amulet out of her hand and standing up straight once again. “We just need to get into that mall.”
“Because shopping malls are the most magical place in the world?” Chesa asked.
“Just trust me. And let me do the talking,” I said. “We can agree I’m good at that.”
The lead elements of the mob reached us while we were still approaching the mall. Lines of oversized SUVs channeled us into a single lane, making it easy for them to block our path. Two women, wearing what I can only assume were terminal levels of beige to distract their enemies and threaten their rivals, flanked a harried-looking security guard. At first I was pleased to note that the guard seemed to only be armed with a Taser. Then I remembered I was wearing metal armor, and was soaking wet.
“So what’s all this about?” the guard asked, hitching his belt over his belly. “We don’t want any funny business.”
“Failed promotional stunt,” I said. “For . . . uh . . .”
“For an amusement park,” Chesa stepped in. “You might have heard about it. Over in . . .” She glanced around. We hadn’t really established where we were.
“Mount Grove . . . Heights?” I ventured. The guard’s forehead wrinkled.
“Don’t know that I’ve heard anything about that,” he said. The two mothers stared at us with pinched foreheads and pursed lips. “Could be where the skate park used to be?”
“No,” Mother Thing One said. “We wrote a petition. That’s going to be a farmer’s market.”
“Yes,” Mother Thing Two said. “A petition. We write those.” She poked me in the chest with her iron-hardened finger. “Often.”
“Right, well. Early stages of development. As you can see”—I gestured to the Silverhawk—“we still have a lot of kinks to—”
“Kinks!” the Mother Things yelped together.
“I mean, problems. You know, not . . . never mind. We still have a lot to work out.” I pulled off my helm, resting it against my hip. “It’s going to be a combination Ren faire, science museum, and . . . library? Does that sound good?”
“I’ve heard things about libraries,” the first mother said warily.
“That they’re full of books?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said, her worst fears confirmed.
“Will there be a skate park?” the other mother asked.
“No. No, of course not. Wouldn’t want teenagers doing . . . things.”
“Lame,” one of the attendant teenagers muttered, then shuffled off. It seemed that offending the vagrant child won us the affection of the Mother Things. At least, long enough to get past security.
“As long as there’s no skating,” One said.
“Nope. No skating. Now . . .” I motioned toward the door. “If you don’t mind? We need some oversized pretzels and a novelty hat. For research, of course.”
The crowd parted. The security guard looked relieved to avoid some paperwork, and the rest were still just curious. But once we were inside, things calmed down.
“That was good,” Chesa said. “As long as they don’t go down to the Silverhawk and interrogate The Good Doctor.”
“That might be amusing,” I said. “At least the Pinkertons should be able to distract them. Mothers like men in suits and facial hair.”
“So what now? We aren’t actually getting pretzels, are we?” Gregory asked.
“I could use a pretzel,” Ida said. “And they’re consistent with our timeline. The bigger the better.”
“We’ll start with pretzels. But then we need to find a store.” I walked up to the directory. Of course, what I wanted was at the far end of the mall. “That’s a relief. A lot of these places closed down.”
“What?” Chesa asked. “You’re not taking us to another bookstore, are you?”
“Heavens, no. This is much, much nerdier.” I marched off. “Follow me!”
The pretzels were unwieldy. There is a quantity of pretzel that is entirely appropriate, and then there are pretzels that defy logic and common sense: piping hot limbs twisting together, dripping with butter and chunks of salt the size and consistency of loose gravel. Those were the pretzels we had. Everyone seemed happy.
“I can’t believe they let us carry our swords in here,” Gregory said, carefully balancing his tissue-wrapped pretzel in one hand as he licked salt off his fingers. “I got arrested once for wearing my Ren faire cloak while I was Christmas shopping. Banned me from the mall for two years!”
“Arrested for being a nerd,” Chesa said, rolling her eyes. “You and Rast have that in common.”
“To be fair, I was arrested for public intoxication,” I said. “I wasn’t drunk. I was just practicing my Chaucer while I walked around in the park. Cops thought I was ripped to the gills.”
“‘Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote,’” Gregory declaimed. “‘The drogthe of March hath perced to the roote.’”
“‘And bathed every veyne in swich licour . . . ’” I responded.
“Please stop. Both of you,” Chesa mumbled into her hand. “People are staring.”
“Let them,” Gregory said. “I stopped caring what other people think about my hobbies a long time ago.”
“Amen to that.” I toasted him with the remnants of my pretzel, then shook the final bits of salt off my hands. “Let the mundanes be mundane. I have more interesting things to care about.”
“Really, the two of you have more in common than you think,” Chesa said, shaking her head.
“Us? The two of us?” Gregory asked. He and I looked at one another dubiously. “No, I don’t think that’s right.”
“As far as the swords are concerned, the Mundane might be imposing its will,” Tembo said. “Keeping them from really looking too closely at us.”
“Then explain why no one has complained about my pistol,” Ida said. I shrugged.
“Maybe we’re just in the south,” I answered. Then, looking up, I spied our destination. “Ah! Here we are! A refuge for the weary traveler at long last!”
The sign over the door read GROGNARD GAMES and was flanked by a shield bearing a twenty-sided die on one side, and a machine gun loaded with chain-fed six-siders on the other. The windows displayed stuffed dragons, plastic robots, and stacks upon stacks of board games arranged into a dungeon maze. Inside I could hear the alluring sound of shuffling cards and clattering dice.
Chesa skidded to a halt.
“No. No way. I am not going into a place like that. Never!”
“You’re wearing a chain-mail battle dress and carrying arrows hewn from fresh saplings. Legolas himself would call you a bit of a tryhard, Ches.” I put one arm around her shoulders. “No one’s going to tell you about their D&D character. I promise.”
“What is this place?” Addie asked, peering up at the sign. “Some kind of casino?”
“A casino of the imagination,” I said. “Come on. I’ll explain once we’re inside.”
Grognard was a pretty typical game store. Racks upon racks of plastic miniatures lined the walls, while standing shelves carried terrain, dice and dice accessories, and novelty items like plushie mimics and foam swords. The collectible card games were locked up behind the counter or under glass cases, their value calculated in multiples of monthly income. I had spent a lot of time in places like this, before I joined Knight Watch. I approached the gentleman behind the counter. He watched me with understandable trepidation. I’m sure this wasn’t the first time a party of fully armed murder hobos had entered his store.
“Good sir,” I said with a slight bow. “My party and I would like to make use of one of your gaming chambers, if such is available on short notice?”
“Uh . . .” He looked between us nervously, no doubt calculating the cost of potential damage to his walls, if we got too rambunctious with those swords. “It’ll be fifty bucks deposit, ten dollars an hour.”
“Are you kidding me?” I snapped, before swallowing my reaction. “I mean, yes, indubitably. A fair price for such a fine establishment. And we will need to rent supplies as well. The appropriate manuals, dice, character sheets . . . so forth.”
“You don’t have your own dice?”
“I’m afraid our current situation has left us bereft of many of the comforts of the modern gamer. Including dice.” Again, a slight bow. He rolled his eyes.
“Yeah, okay. Hang on.” He disappeared behind into the supply area behind the counter. The sounds of rummaging commenced.
“Rast, what are you doing? We don’t have time for a game!” Chesa said.
“Patience, patience. Just play along.”
“What’s with all the bowing and the big words?” Adelaide asked. “Are you trying to impress him?”
“I’m trying to be awkward. I want him to think we’re just a bunch of gamers looking to roll dice. Not the supercool hero dudes that we actually are.”
“Oh, yeah. Definitely a mistake he would make,” Chesa said. “We get mistaken for supercool dudes all the time out in the real world.”
I would have continued this argument, but the shopkeep returned with a stack of books, pencils, grid paper, and a bag of mismatched dice.
“That’ll be seventy-two dollars,” he said, setting the books on the counter.
“Wait, you just said fifty.”
“Plus the books. You can keep the dice, if you want. People leave them behind.”
“Ooo . . . dice.” Gregory pounced, pawing through the grocery bag.
“Right, whatever.” I turned to Adelaide. “Pay the man.”
“Me? Why do I have to pay for this?” she asked.
“Because . . .” I lowered my voice, which was pointless, because the guy was right there. “They don’t have American Dollars where I come from. Remember?”
“I figured you were Canadian or something,” the guy said. “That accent.”
“Accent? What . . . never mind.” I turned back to Addie. “You and Ida are the only ones with real money.”
“I’m tapped out,” she said. “The pretzel place took my money. Like, all of it. Antique silver quarters don’t go as far as they used to.”
“She’s not kidding,” Ida said, her cheeks sticky with butter and salt. She brandished her pretzel. “These were a nickel at the World’s Fair.”
“I deal only in the currency of genius,” Tesla said, peering at the ceiling. “Your lighting arrangement, for example, is a travesty of the electrical arts.”
“Hey!” the guy behind the counter said, pointing at Ida. “No outside food or drink!”
Ida growled at him, quickly stuffing the remainder of the pretzel into her mouth. Her cheeks bulged as she slowly chewed it up, glaring at him the entire time.
“Alright, so . . . what will you take that isn’t money?” I asked. “We have a variety of useful items and services available, if you’re interested.”
“Okay, this is getting weird.” The guy slid the books away from us, snatching the bag of dice from Greg’s hands, then stepping back. “Go somewhere else.”
“But we need the room! And the dice!” Greg pleaded.
“No, sorry. Not going to—”
“Hold on,” Chesa said, sliding closer to the counter. “I know what guys like you want. What you really want.”
The guy swallowed hard, looking her up and down.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” she said with a smile.