For the first time Gag glanced around, suddenly back to earth and looking nervous. “Uh, yeah. Hey, uh, you think the Guard heard the Black Legion was after me, and since they spotted me first they picked me up? But maybe the Guard don’t know what I did. If they knew, maybe I wouldn’t be in here, huh? Maybe they’d go after the Legion’s gold too.”
“I think you’ve hit it right on the head,” I said. “And here you are, sitting around, just waiting for somebody to remember you and figure out what you’ve done. Who knows - maybe the Black Legion will decide to check out the jails themselves. They could walk in that front door there any second.”
“Don’t say that,” Gag said with a note of resignation. “You’re a right guy, don’t do this to me. I gotta get out of here, I know I gotta get out of here, only I can’t. I ain’t got none of my stuff. I can’t blow out of here without my stuff.”
Well, there went that hope. “Think about it for a while. You’re a smart guy, Gag, maybe you’ll come up with something.”
“Well, okay.” He didn’t sound too convinced, which meant he was being realistic. Realistic or not, we had to think of something. If nothing else, we’d suffocate if we stayed in that place. I scanned the crowd, but Gag was the only person I recognized.
I turned and studied the lock again. There was something about it that puzzled me, but I couldn’t quite figure out what it was. It was a normal round lock, about six inches across and painted black. Its outlines were slightly indistinct and slowly swimming -
Wait a minute. I’d never seen fuzzy edges before on anything but a cat or after anything but a binge. My eyes were still good so I figured it couldn’t be their fault; the Guard hadn’t whacked me over the head so I didn’t have a fresh concussion. Now that I thought about it, I remembered that I’d only heard that some sorcerers were able to pick out magic-loaded items by that wooly radiation. Some of them had described the manifestation as a bit of haze around whatever-it-was. I’d only heard about it, I’d never been able to do it – like I said, I’m not a magic user - but then there that lock was, sure enough, fuzzing away like mad. Maybe, I thought with a sudden surge of hope, I was getting a little inadvertent help from Gash and his metabolism thing after all.
I stared at the lock. Well, what did I do now? The way popular tale-tellers liked to describe it, when you worked magic you reached out with your mind and then something impressive happened. I knew better. Magic was work, hard work, and the hardest parts were in the theory. Another reason I didn’t like magic was that I could never handle the math.
On the other hand, what did I have to lose? Maybe gods didn’t have to do things the same way regular sorcerers did. So I tried reaching out with my mind. Have you ever tried reaching out with your mind? Right. All I had to do was actually think about how to do that, and I realized I didn’t have the slightest idea what it meant.
I scowled at the lock. I want you open, I thought. The lock sat there, ignoring me. I tried to fight down my growing frustration. I’d heard at another time that frustration was the quickest way to magical paralysis. Even if you felt you couldn’t do something, you had better not pay too much attention to the feeling or it would dominate you, and the feedback would make sure that you really couldn’t do it. I can do it, I told myself, really I can.
The lock still sat there. I decided to try another approach. I concentrated on the lock, I visualized the lock, I visualized the lock open. I tried to fill my mind with lock, lock, nothing but lock. Nothing but open lock. I wrapped my hand around the lock, willing power to flow across and blast it open. I even thought about tasting the lock.
The obstinate nasty son-of-a-crocodile lock didn’t even twitch.
Against all my attempts at control, I was getting frustrated after all, but what I really was getting was mad. I hit the lock with the side of my hand. All thoughts of the lock vanished. “Yeaow!” I said, clutched my hand, wondered if I was dumb enough to have broken it.
Suddenly the door to the jailhouse opened. A Guard lieutenant and half-a-dozen very large troopers crowded in to the room with the jailer, their swords drawn. I could see a whole bunch of other soldiers behind them in the street, and through the window more of them were spreading out around the building. “All right, you men,” the lieutenant called out, “you’re getting out of this rathole!”
Nobody answered him. We all knew that wasn’t the bottom line.
I closed my eyes and thought, “Open!”
I heard a rattle of chains and more stamping and opened one eye wide enough to peek. Another half-dozen soldiers were dragging in a long length of heavy chain studded with manacles; if that lobby had already seemed packed, it clearly had seen nothing yet. The lieutenant shouted, “Time to move out to the palace!” but when I’d seen that chain I’d already figured it out. I was annoyed and frustrated and mad, and the pain from my hand was like the time a ruby-eyed marmovore tried to chew off my finger, and the last thing I wanted to add to my mood was the pleasure of being shackled in irons and dumped in a dungeon, and so I screwed my eyes shut and thought “OPEN!” as hard as I could, trying to push all of the anger and pent-up frustration into it, sweeping everything else out of my mind until it was only OPEN, my entire world was OPEN, I felt myself hitting my hand once again against the lock for good measure, all the muscles and veins were standing out on my forehead, and then all at once my head spun and I lost my balance and I fell hard against the bars. That’s all I need, I thought fuzzily, I gave myself a stroke. But something, I didn’t quite know quite what, something had happened.
My nose was mashed up next to the lock. I squinted at the lock. It was still closed, locked tight. I snarled at it. “Gods damn -” I said.
The floor rumbled. I opened my eyes wide and looked around. Everyone else, Guard included, was doing the same thing. The floorboards creaked and rippled, and one of the troopers lost his balance and pitched over, taking his neighbor with him. Another man fell backward through the door. “Earthqua -” somebody shouted, and then the rumbling stopped.
The quiet in the jail was striking. The Guardsmen picked themselves up, gazing nervously at the floor. Most everyone in the place was nervously aware of the floor. “Right!” said the lieutenant. “Now I want you all to -”
And then the rumbling was back. Boards groaned, metal screeched, Guardsmen fell down, and the cage that was the cell lurched backward and dropped a foot. Beneath the cage, the wood floor rippled and puckered down, then tore open and began to rip back toward its edges. The bars at the bottom of the cell, in the middle where the weight on them from the standing people was heaviest, slowly started to bend downward into the widening hole underneath. Even over the rumble and the creaking and the squeaking, I could hear the snap and clang as the welds holding the bars together started to go. All at once, a man in the center of the cell dropped with a wail out of sight like he’d fallen straight through a trapdoor, which, in a close way, was exactly what had happened. The cell lurched again and tilted further.
People were sliding and dropping in numbers now as the bars peeled away in earnest. A few men had managed to jump up in the air and had grabbed hold of the bars enclosing the ceiling, and their dangling forms were increasingly visible as the rest of the crowd lessened. I had one hand wrapped around Gag’s collar and the other arm looped through a bar in the door. “When the avalanche is over, we go!” I yelled at him.
“But that hole!” Gag said. “It’s deep! We fall in and we keep going forever!”