“Yup.” Darien gestured again and the cone spun faster. With a grating crunch, it touched the wall, and a cloud of dust and old mortar puffed into the air. Darien and Jasper swayed in unison, but the big drill held steady as fragments of brick started raining to the floor. “It’s working!” Silas heard effort and elation in Darien’s voice.
Silas wanted to offer his strength in support, but barely dared breathe to avoid upsetting that startling display of power and function. He forced his attention to the wall, to the magic he could sense in the room beyond and how it was responding. As far as he could tell, the bite of the big drill hadn’t changed the humming presence of the spell behind the bricks.
The tone of the grinding changed, and a few shards reached the doorway, as the heap of crumbled masonry grew. Suddenly, Jasper and Darien lurched and Darien grabbed Silas’s arm. Jasper muttered a word, and the spell collapsed in a shimmer of gold and blue. Silas set a hand under Darien’s elbow and pulled him close, bracing his body with one hip while staring past him. A ragged hole, three feet wide, revealed a shine of white and green from beyond the wall.
Darien pushed off from Silas and ran a hand over his hair. “Good work on the flange-blocker thing, Jas. I was worried we were going to drive right through.”
“Might make the flange even bigger the next time,” Jasper said. “Let’s see what we have.”
Silas pushed ahead of the other two as they approached the gap. The magic on the other side was created by his mentors, and he was the best person to deal with it. He bent to look through.
On the far side of the wall, a matching small room stretched perhaps ten feet across by a dozen feet wide. He saw no other door, no window or staircase, but near the farthest wall stood a… space. A dark hollowness almost like the opening of the Veil, surrounded by a frame of white and dark green runes painted across the stone. The frame hummed a note that he felt in his back teeth. The darkness eddied slightly, with threads of lighter gray floating in it. A kind of warding rose in front of it, making the magic hard to sense.
“Is it a portal to the Veil?” Jasper asked, looking in past Silas’s shoulder.
“Not quite.” He couldn’t say how he knew, except that he’d opened a path to the Veil a thousand times, and whatever sat in that doorway was not the same place. “A portal, yes, clearly, but not to the Veil or a hell. There’s no taste of brimstone. And it feels more alive than the Veil.” The taste of that space between life and death was always arid and dusty, static and inimical to life. This was… greener.
Silas eased through the ragged brick opening, stepping over the knee-high lower rim, and straightened. The wards recognized him, letting him through, and he scuffed them out with his foot. Immediately, he could sense the familiar magic in more detail, with Coldwell’s dark green outlining runes similar to a standard Veil portal hooked into white strings of runes that made no sense at all, and math that reminded him of Jasper’s more esoteric constructs.
Darien followed him as he moved carefully around the scattered fragments and approached the portal. Jasper hurried to join them. “That’s fascinating. There’s a power connection there almost like what I use to keep a spell going when I untether it.” He pointed to an upper corner.
Silas squinted at it. “You don’t think Norlington was able to just set this loose and have it keep running off his own power all this time?” The brick wall looked more than a year old, and Norlington had been gone a year. “What’s the longest you’ve kept an untethered spell running?”
“A few minutes. And it turned my hair gray.” Jasper shook his head. “Unless he was the most powerful sorcerer that ever lived, I can’t imagine he could push enough power into this to keep it going for years untouched, and on after his death. Not even if he was willing to suck himself down to a husk for it.”
“So it’s still getting power from somewhere else,” Darien said. “You think there could be a demon bound to it, like there was to that book we found behind the Veil?”
Silas floated a demon-find rune toward the structure, careful to limit how close it got. There was no telltale red shift, no smoke or spark. “Not that I can detect.”
Jasper said, “I think—” but was cut off by a rush of wings as Kii swooped past him.
“I feel the call from Home!” Kii called. “Only one way to—” The rest of her words were silenced as she winged into the darkness at the center of the gate and vanished.
“Kii! Stop!” Grim commanded, an instant too late.
“Where did she go?” Pip sniffed the stone floor just outside the spell limits. “Her body should be frozen right here, shouldn’t it?”
“Only when we travel to the Veil,” Silas said. “Our spirits make the trip there without our bodies, because only spirits exist in the Veil between worlds. But a true portal, like those I open for demons, takes the host body, demon body, and spirits all across. Unless the banishment is done inside the Veil itself. Then it leaves the human body behind in the circle.” Although thoroughly dead and burned to ash.
“Will Kii come back?” Pip raised his head to scent the air.
Now there’s the thousand-dollar question. Silas clenched his fists to keep from reaching out to touch the spell, from trying to do something, without stopping to think.
Darien peered into the swirling void like he could make the hawk reappear by the intensity of his gaze. “She has to come back.”
“If she followed the call to Home, she might not.” There was an unaccustomed gentleness in Grim’s voice. “Not unless she’s brought back by a new summoning.”
“Jasper could summon her back. Right?” Darien turned wide eyes on Jasper. “You could do that?”
“I could try,” Jasper said slowly. “Usually, petitioning for a familiar doesn’t specify anyone in particular—”
“Wait!” Silas threw up his hand. Something swirled and changed in that portal magic, flickered, brown and beige, and then became a hawk, winging toward them. Kii had vanished swiftly, but she reappeared far more slowly, like she was fighting a headwind, wings beating in powerful strokes. She burst from the center of the portal into the room, banked, and landed on the floor with a scrape of talons and a flutter of pinions. Her beak opened in heavy panting breaths.
Their “Where were you?” and “What did you see?” and “You reckless fool!” tumbled together. Kii shrieked a shrill note and they fell silent.
“Indeed.” She mantled her wings and resettled more neatly. “It’s not Home. But it’s somewhere. And I could get to Home from there, if I followed the pull. The call’s clear as can be from the other side.”
“What did you see?” Jasper asked. “Were there people there?”
“All I saw was a prairie, a field of summer grain and blue skies and trees in the distance. I didn’t dare go far out, or the temptation to keep going Home might’ve been too strong.”
Silas said, “So whatever’s blocking your world from ours isn’t in effect there.”
“No.”
“How intriguing.” Jasper moved as close to the portal as he could without crossing the base line of runes. “An undiscovered world. Well, undiscovered by us, since whoever lives there clearly knows about it. And presumably Norlington did too. I wonder if they’re being plagued by demons there, or if that’s specific to our world.”