My plan was already well off the rails, because the one person I didn’t see was Ophelia, anywhere. I would have liked to believe that something had gone wrong for her, that she’d lost her grip on power, but I didn’t. If I couldn’t see her, that only meant she was doing something even more horrible than anything I could have imagined, and I had no idea what it was or how to stop it. I didn’t know which side to go to. Presumably Shanghai’s side would have had a stronger interest in helping me stop her, but I’d be more likely to get information about what she was doing on the American one.
I stood there like a lump dithering over which side to go to. It didn’t seem like a choice I’d get to make twice. There was a feeling of a critical mass being reached, as if the space couldn’t hold much more of us, of mana. If I wasn’t imagining it, the ceiling was receding up into an increasing dark that didn’t belong in the world. This many wizards using this much magic all together was making the place become less real.
I’d just made up my mind to head to New York’s side and try to find Liesel among the throng when a spell unexpectedly came flying right at me out of one of Shanghai’s pavilions. I reached out to snag it like the other spells I’d been plucking like ripe fruit, and I failed completely: the thing slid through my grip like trying to grab hold of a water balloon covered in oil. I flinched automatically from the hit before I registered that it hadn’t done me any harm at all; there wasn’t an ounce of malice in the thing. It was only someone taking a polite grip on my arm, conveying the intention to save me from stepping into something really unpleasant like dog poo, and to tug me invitingly another way: please won’t you come.
Which was quite alarming really: whoever had tossed that spell had already worked out, presumably based on gossip and my performance in the gardens above, that you couldn’t use malicious spells on me, but neutral spells would hit just fine. They could easily work out some way to use that against me. The politeness wasn’t a comfort either, more the opposite; if they’d decided I was someone worth being polite to under these circumstances, then they’d decided I was someone really dangerous.
But on the other hand—at least they were willing to talk to me. And I couldn’t actually see Liesel anywhere over on the American side, or even Alfie or Sir Richard for that matter. The only person I did know over there was Christopher Martel, who certainly didn’t feel any affection for me and might not feel he’d exhausted the options for trying to use me for his own stupid selfish purposes. He’d already dragged his entire enclave into this mess, for no reason other than to keep clinging to his own power.
“All right,” I said grimly, “I’ll come—” which turned into a loud squawking yelp: as soon as I’d said “all right,” the polite spell snatched me up and thwoomped me like a yanker spell straight across the field and into the pavilion it had come from in the first place. I wasn’t even left to catch my own balance; the spell stopped me and braced me on all sides at the same time, so it felt almost as though actually I hadn’t moved and the rest of the world had just been neatly rolled over a little bit beneath my feet to put me in the proper spot.
There was a chair right behind my knees, a beautiful one carved of wood with the legs made of storks, and another one directly across from me. They’d both clearly been placed deliberately, waiting, but no one was sitting in there. The only people inside with me were two fighting wizards, wearing quilted silk clothes and holding what really looked a lot like machine guns. They didn’t flinch at my appearance, but I reckon that was because they both seemed to already be as tense as any human being could manage. An odd brazier-looking thing was sitting in the middle of the tent right between the chairs—a spell holder, I realized after a moment. Only normally a spell holder is a pendant-sized thing, and this was the size of a very large charcoal grill and holding a bed of glowing fist-sized coals, each one of them a different spell, primed to go off under different appropriate circumstances.
One of them—that tidy yanking spell—was just fading away, crumbling into pale ash. Someone had prepared that spell, in advance. It hadn’t been based on my rampage through the gardens at all. Whoever had cast it had already somehow worked out that malicious spells weren’t any use on me, even before I’d understood it myself.
I had a bad moment staring at the heap of spells, wondering which of them were about to go off in my face, and then the curtains at the back of the pavilion opened and a short Chinese man came in, wearing a Mao suit made out of some kind of fabric that looked almost like denim, with the buttons made of metal. The guards looked at me with expressions that successfully conveyed both a passionate desire to riddle me with bullets and also the anguished terror of knowing it wouldn’t do the slightest good. The carved phoenix at the back of the chair uncurled its head to peer at me with similar anxiety.