Russ waved some of the smoke away from his face and examined the basement. The raid went well; almost too well, considering the level of resistance. No one on his side died or was even heavily injured; they’d all be fine with a few days’ recovery time and a little healing.
It definitely helped that he could warn his support about possible magic users and enchanted items now instead of trying to convince them with rumors of strange advanced technology, but that wasn’t why this raid went unusually well.
No, it went well because no one here had any abilities beyond those of a Tier One Path. Even then, only his presence and the presence of the Boston UERT stopped something far worse; the people they’d caught inside the basement hadn’t surrendered. Instead, they’d launched suicidal attacks.
In Russ’s experience, a less powerful defense than expected usually meant either the raid had leaked or his intel was bad in the first place. A suicidal defense, on the other hand, could mean the raid had leaked or simply that the people guarding the place weren’t valued. The one thing it always meant was that there was a reason they were willing to sacrifice themselves.
There was no good reason for that here, which meant Russ needed to look for bad reasons. It was a good thing he had more tools to do that than he once had.
Russ leaned against a wall and closed his eyes. Between attending the Tutorial late, many long conversations with Serenity, and Russ’s own pre-existing combat skill, Russ was able to direct his efforts in the Tutorial to gaining a very different Path than the one Serenity initially recommended. He had no real need for a combat Path; what he needed was an easier way to track down his targets.
He hadn’t been able to figure out a way to get a Path that would simply let him find someone based on limited information; while he’d made sure to track things during the Tutorial, none of the related Paths he saw seemed to offer what he needed. They might eventually get him there, but it would be tough since they weren’t all that close. Physical tracking and magical tracking seemed to be quite separate.
Before he got the Path, he had to ask questions to get the information he was looking for. The questions would direct their thoughts in the correct direction, then he could read the answers, no matter what they actually said. That wasn’t a requirement anymore; if a target’s mind was wandering, he could gently nudge it in the direction he wanted, then read the answers. People who were dreaming were the easiest to influence, though sometimes the answers didn’t make sense; it could also work on distracted, unconscious, or even meditating people. It didn’t work on anyone who was focused on something, and it wasn’t even close to admissible in court, but it was still incredibly helpful.
It was even more helpful in a place like this. None of the people in the basement were conscious, but several were alive. They wouldn’t all stay that way without the attention of a healer, but Boston’s UERT had a healer. It wasn’t his specialty, but Miller could at least keep people from bleeding out until a better healer arrived.
Russ reached out to find the minds around him. He quickly identified the people who were conscious; two others from DHS, his usual backups in the area, plus the Boston UERT. He’d met them all before, which helped.
Next were the six unconscious people. They were - wait. There were only supposed to be five unconscious people.
Russ opened his eyes and tried to connect each unconscious mind he felt to a person. One, two, three, four, five; each unconscious person had a mind, for now at least. Neither of the bodies he could see had a mind associated. They were truly dead. The sixth unconscious mind seemed to be … behind that wall?
Russ walked over to the wall. It was stacked cinderblocks; there was no sign of a doorway near where he felt the person. He turned to one of his liaisons. “Hey, Brown. Have we found a way to get on the other side of this wall?”
Brown shook his head. “Nothing over there, Latimer. That’s the edge of the building.”
Russ rolled his eyes at Brown. That wasn’t helpful; he wouldn’t be asking without a reason. “Then how is there someone on the other side? There has to be something over there, even if it’s not part of this building. An accessway or something?”
“Who knows?” Quincy frowned at her partner. “This area’s been built over so many times it wouldn’t surprise me if there were tunnels through a bunch of the basements. God knows there’ve been rumors of smugglers’ tunnels for decades less than a mile from here. We can look, but I’ll bet we’ll have to break through the wall.”
Russ took the time while Brown and Quincy searched to take care of what he’s started. He questioned each of the five unconscious people in the basement and found out what they knew about what happened there and why they fought so hard.
The answers weren’t as helpful or as hopeful as he wanted. All they knew was that stuff came in and went out; they all thought it was new, magically enhanced drugs. Drugs that would get them sentenced to a quick death if they were caught with them, so there was every reason to fight; if they could get out, they’d be free. None of them had even tried to escape, yet they were all convinced that escape was the goal.
Russ sighed. He couldn’t even tell if that was because of outside influence or not; it was possible that something had convinced them that fighting was more important than running at the time, but it was also easily possible that they’d just never seen the openings he had. People missed things all the time, and combat was a perfect storm for that; it was hard to keep an eye out for an escape path while you had your attention on someone who was trying to kill you. It was especially difficult if it was a new situation for you, and Russ had the feeling that none of these thugs were exactly used to this sort of fighting.
As for why they’d assumed it would only lead to death, Russ could guess; there were some new laws about the use of lethal force, and they’d been overstated by their opponents to the point that some people thought that anyone could be killed for any reason if magic or Skills were involved in a crime. It wasn’t true, but that didn’t keep people from believing it.
Despite the opposition, the law still passed; Russ wasn’t certain he approved, but he didn’t exactly disapprove either. There were times when force was necessary. Unfortunately, it was also the kind of law that was open to abuse. It needed better safeguards.
Russ closed his eyes again and searched for the unconscious mind he’d felt before. If he was lucky, it didn’t have anything to do with this place. If he was really lucky, it did have something to do with this place and would have a clue.
It was still there. No, she was still there. She was asleep, dreaming something straight out of a porn video. She didn’t seem to be enjoying it, but that happened sometimes. Dreams could be nightmares or memories. He was going to try to take advantage of that fact, but he always had to keep in mind that dreams warped things; they were almost never true to reality.
Russ sighed internally; he normally tried to avoid wet dreams, nightmare or not. Even the better ones tended to be unpleasant to experience, because either they weren’t hitting any of his buttons or they were all too interesting with a star that wasn’t him. Either way, he didn’t get to back out of this one.
All he could do was gently nudge her with questions and thoughts that weren’t about sex. It wasn’t fast; it never was. Even worse, most of the responses didn’t make that much sense; everything, including the last person she’d seen, seemed to be covered in shadows in her memory.
The second track of dreams was her running from something. Running, yet never able to get away, through all sorts of different places. Most of them made no sense, especially when she ran through a crowd of frozen people-shaped snowcones. In every single scenario, she was restrained in the same position. That meant there was a better than even chance that her body was restrained in reality.
Worse, the shadows that haunted her dreams only took on a few shapes. One was man-like while the others were bizarre, but there was an extremely limited number of them and they were always there. That could mean any number of things, but when he put it together with her being literally tied up, it probably didn’t mean anything good. The most likely answer was that there were several people involved in the way she ended up where she was, but it certainly wasn’t the only possibility. Russ couldn’t rule out more exotic explanations, either.
After all, his job was all about those exotic explanations and he’d found her just on the other side of a wall from a location that seemed to be associated with that not exactly legal antiquities trade; many of those antiquities were actually ancient enchanted items. There were reasons some things survived.
Russ had the impression that very few legal antiques moved through the basement; even fewer of them seemed to be nonmagical. The area was almost as bad as Rissa’s spare room.
It took time to push the dreams towards what Russ wanted, but eventually he saw a cinderblock wall from the floor; the shadowed man seemed to tap the blocks until he found one that moved. He pressed it into the wall and the entire section fuzzed into darkness. He then picked up Russ’s viewpoint and pulled her into the dark opening.
Russ pulled himself out of the dream sequence at that point. That was what he needed. “That’s a magical opening. That’s the last thing I needed here.”
“A magical opening? Is that why we didn’t find anything?” Quincy stood a little ways away, in a good spot to keep an eye on the rest of the room and on Russ at the same time.
Russ took a moment to examine the room. The bodies were gone, both living and dead, and it was clear that the stolen goods were in the middle of being moved out of the basement so they could be documented for the upcoming prosecution and so their owners could be determined.
The spot on the wall from the woman’s dream was open. Russ took three steps to reach it, then realized that while he had the approximate area, he wasn’t certain which block it was. He tried one, then another. The second one sank into the wall about a quarter of an inch before it disappeared. “Yeah, I think a magical opening’s the reason. And you know what that means.”
“Possible magical hideyholes.” Quincy groaned. “I hate those. Do you know how much paperwork that takes?”
Russ shrugged. “If you don’t want to do the paperwork for a wall excavation, get a detection mage. This one was a physical trigger and opens into a real space; several types of mage should be able to find that. An Earth mage, for example.” He knew that suggestion wasn’t actually better in terms of the paperwork, but it might be cheaper than reinforcing the building above the basement to not fall when the basement walls were stripped out to look for hollows.
Quincy just groaned.
Russ swung his flashlight over the area. It wasn’t nearly as dark as the dream implied, so he watched his step as he moved into the area beyond the magical door. It was roughly ten feet by eight feet, though it might be larger than that if there weren’t shelves taking up a good bit of one wall.
There was a mattress on the floor. A woman in her thirties lay on the mattress; she looked a bit worse for the wear, but she was still in the dress she’d clearly put on for a fancy night out. Her hands were tied behind her back and there was a rope holding her ankles together. Opening the door didn’t seem to wake her up.
Russ’s eyes fell on a familiar-looking vase set just past her head next to the mattress. It looked almost exactly like the djinn vase Rube found; it almost had to be one of the still missing Solomon vases.
This was the first clue Russ had found in months and he had the sinking feeling that it wasn’t going to lead anywhere. Just like the previous clues.
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