“But why do they get hostile?” I asked. “You designed them, right?”
“Lily designed the bodies,” he corrected. “But the personalities were those of her friends, and some of those ladies have a temper. But mostly, they just get a little willful or catty or whatever. They’re not a problem.
“Those are the problem.”
I realized that we’d started moving again, and were now approaching some kind of stadium. I couldn’t see it too well, as it was on the opposite side of the car, but it looked pretty big. Although not compared to what was floating in cages beside it.
“What is that?” I asked, staring at the nearest one.
“What we came to see.”
The car swung around, getting into a queue for admission, I guessed. A bunch of guys on bright red rickshaws were patrolling the airspace around the main event, probably to discourage freeloaders. The new position gave me a better view and answered a few questions, although not all of them.
The “stadium” wasn’t actually floating, as I’d first thought. Even for a city with magic to burn, that would have been excessive. The base was five skyscrapers built around a small park, and the still functioning bridges connecting them. The roofs of the skyscrapers and the entire length of the bridges were crowded with spectators, but far more people had brought their own seats. Thousands upon thousands were crammed into vehicles of all descriptions, which filled the spaces between the buildings as well as the skies all around.
Some of the flying stadium seats were small, including a ton of two or four-seater rickshaws. At the opposite end of the spectrum were levitating platforms holding hundreds of spectators in nicely slanting rows so that everybody got a view. And in between was every kind of vehicle imaginable.
There were buses with twenty or more people on top, yelling and cheering. There were stretch limos serving as stadium boxes for the rich and well connected. There were people on things that weren’t technically vehicles at all, with the sofa I’d almost collided with earlier suddenly making more sense as I spotted dozens more just like it. Some people had even had their makeshift sky houses towed over to the event, so that they could watch in comfort from their balconies.
And then there were the cages, given plenty of space by the crowd, maybe because they were rocking from side to side while the contents screeched and cawed and howled. Even with the limo’s obvious soundproofing, the ruckus could be clearly heard. As could the low-level roar of the crowd, the whir of hundreds of fan blades, and some Cantonese being broadcast either through a spell or a hell of a lot of loud speakers.
It must be deafening outside, I thought, wondering how anybody stood it. And then I noticed a guy in a rickshaw with some Chinese writing on it, and a picture of earplugs underneath. Ray would like this place, I thought with a pang. They really knew how to merchandise.
“When the Circle started to pull their people out of here for the war, it left us with a problem,” Zheng said. “Local mages and some reinforcements from the mainland had to take over patrolling the dead zones, but most didn’t know how. They were wardsmiths and spellbinders, not war mages, and this was not their skill set.
“But there wasn’t anybody else, so the Circle started bringing some of the nastier things they captured over here, 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, whi
le 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?”