where the new guys got a chance to learn the techniques they needed to take ‘em down. Word got around and people began coming to watch, then somebody figured, hey, why not charge admission to help with the rebuilding . . .”
“And, thus, a new sport was born,” Louis-Cesare murmured.
Zheng nodded. “All the usual ground games—football, horse racing and the like—have been cancelled due to the possibility of the participants being attacked. The matches quickly became the only game in town. Now, it’s not just new mages learning the ropes. They still have some of that, usually as a warm up. But there’s also teams of crazy people who volunteer to take on the worst of the worst.”
“And the city allows that?” I asked. “What if they get killed?”
Zeng shrugged. “It’s volunteer only, so they know what they’re getting into. And mage squads are in place—the trainers and their students—if things get out of hand. But the purses for the victors are pretty substantial, as the better the show the more spectators it draws in.” He shrugged.
“The Wild, Wild East,” I said, repeating something I’d thought earlier.
Zheng laughed. “That it is. At least until we can figure out what the hell went wrong with the system.”
“What did go wrong?” Louis-Cesare asked, while I eyed up the creature in the nearest cage.
It looked like an Escher drawing of some type of squid. I couldn’t be sure as it kept morphing and twisting in totally impossible ways that hurt the brain and crossed the eyes, while flashing in changing, neon colors that didn’t help. Graffiti, I thought, looking away before I was mesmerized. Guess not all of it exploded. And now some kid’s idea of cool had turned into something that could possibly eat your brain after it finished frying it.
“That’s why I’m here,” Zheng said, answering Louis-Cesare. “Our consul isn’t too happy about a boat load of free-floating magic in the middle of a war. She wants me to find out why the system that worked for hundreds of years is suddenly bubbling over with extra power, and what can be done to stop it.”
“And have you?”
He snorted. “Do I look like a mage to you? I lived here most of my life, but that doesn’t mean I’m an expert on how everything works. Fortunately, I do know a few. They’ve been working with the Circle’s men to fix things, and their theory is simple: get the damned pillars back up.”
“The pagodas that were destroyed when the city fell,” I explained to Louis-Cesare, who hadn’t been here. “They served as waystations for channeling the power of the lines into the phase.”
“And they channeled a lot,” Zheng added. “They absorbed a ton of power, even though most of them were redundant. As we found out the hard way, one pillar can support the phase alone if required, but the designers put in multiple redundancies because if the damned thing fails, the city falls back into real space, taking out human Hong Kong along with it.”
Louis-Cesare nodded. We’d been briefed about this in the senate, although judging from his expression, being here made it much more real. Try being in the battle, I thought, remembering.
“But now that most of these pillars are down,” Louis-Cesare said. “That power is going where?”
Zheng gestured at the white fog again, boiling maybe ten or so blocks away. “In there. It’s just floating around, like overflow from a faucet that nobody remembers how to turn off, because everybody who designed this city is dead. People know how to run the system, but not how to restrict it to a trickle until we get the rest of the pillars back up.”
“Then what are you doing about it?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Living with it. The theory is that the excess magic will become less and less of a problem as each pillar comes back online. They’ll be sucking up most of the overflow like sponges, just like before, and what little is left over will be grabbed by the government or hijacked by people like me.” He grinned. “Until then, we’re stuck dealing with the consequences—and so are you.”
“Us?” Louis-Cesare said sharply. “Why us?”
Zheng took out the little golden charm again, and weaved it in and out of his fingers. “This is the Chinese symbol for eternity. It’s also the calling card of a new triad that started up recently. Nobody knows much about them, except that they operate in there,” he nodded at the cloud again, “and that they