“But weren’t there already roads cut through it?” Jathmar asked. “If this is the main portal out of Arcana, there must be roads leading out of the city, through your family’s land?”
“There are,” Jasak nodded. “Those roads were built at the same time the Union formalized the treaty conferring property rights on my family. The city and the Union can maintain and widen those roads as necessary, which they’ve done many times. For all practical purposes, there’s only one portion of the original land grant still in forest cover.” He pulled over the map again and zoomed in to show them. “This section, surrounding the falls, across to here, is still in forest. The rest of it’s been leased out to the city and to the Union-for the military bases, primarily, but also for access corridors to the suburbs that extend for many miles beyond the leased land.
“That’s why Portalis is lopsided, like this.” He zoomed back out and pointed to the irregular blob of the city, which bulged and fanned out across the map on the sides away from the forested estate. “What the Transportation Corps wanted to do was run a line through the inviolate section left in old-growth forest. Grandfather refused to cut down even one more tree of what was left.”
“That doesn’t seem unreasonable to me,” Shaylar said, studying the map and glancing out the window. “When one has a legacy to protect, one has to be adamant about such things. Otherwise, there’d eventually be nothing left to conserve.”
Jasak smiled. “That’s precisely how he felt and frankly, I agree with him. For one thing, it would’ve robbed the citizens of Portalis, since the section they wanted to cut the line through runs through a section of the forest that’s open to the city as a public park.”
Shaylar broke into a delighted smile. “That’s a wonderful thing to do for your neighbors!”
Then the slider rounded a curve on its approach to Portalis and Shaylar got her first close look through the wide train windows.
“Oh…”
The single word was a soft exhalation of wonder.
Portalis was a magical city…literally. The dominant feature was, naturally, the portal. It wasn’t the largest she’d ever seen, but it was a whopping big one, nonetheless, and every single mile of that immense hole in reality was jammed with roads, control towers for sliders, floating highways, and what looked like flocks of migrating birds, except these “birds” were dragons of so many bewildering sizes and hues the air seemed to shimmer from all their wings. They flew in what seemed at first to be total chaos, but as she stared, entranced, she began to discern patterns.
Beasts of a certain size flew in one line, on what was clearly a well-established flight path. There were dozens of such lines, each with dragons of a different size, going at different speeds. Some of the small beasts were falcon-fast, making impossible maneuvers as they shot over and around other flight paths.
There were smaller winged creatures, as well. The gryphons they’d seen again and again at military bases whipped through Portalis’ skies at phenomenal speeds, intent on errands Shaylar couldn’t even guess at. Other flying things registered as she gazed in wonder at the astonishing panorama ahead, and what looked like small lozenges floated well above the ground, although still far below the sliderway, moving at a surprisingly rapid pace.
“What are those?” she pointed.
Gadrial answered. “The very latest in transportation. They’re automated carriages, powered by the latest motive spells. The official name is ‘automoticars,’ but that’s too big a mouthful. The advertisers are calling them ‘motics,’ although I’m not sure the name’s going to catch on. At this point, they’re still new enough, the public really hasn’t decided, yet, what to call them.”
“Why so new?” Jathmar frowned. “Those motic things are much smaller than a slider. Why weren’t they developed first?”
“Ah,” she smiled. “The problem was one of steerage. Sliders are guided by the control net and even dragons are guided by pilots. Gryphons are small enough and smart enough to avoid mid-air collisions, but the idea of hundreds of ungoverned vehicles-even thousands of them-flying anywhere people chose, straight through established flight paths, flown by anybody with enough cash, not by responsible, licensed pilots, buzzing across roads, whipping around people’s houses and through city streets…” She shuddered. “The very idea horrified city councils. Most cities passed laws prohibiting ungoverned flying vehicles piloted by non-licensed pilots.
“Things stayed that way for a long time, until a very bright spellcaster-a Ransaran, of course,” she added, eyes sparkling with mischief and challenge, “figured out how to cast a motive spell that follows pre-determined flight paths, responding to a series of permanent traffic pods put up in a grid all over the city. Once he did that, the door opened and the djinn was out of the bottle, so to speak.
“Although I’ve never understood why any rational person would actually want to let a djinn out of its bottle,” she added in a surprisingly grim tone. “They’re bad-tempered, incurable liars who invariably cheat any fool stupid enough to fall for their promises. Of course, they do provide a decent living for spell-casters who specialize in personal disaster and curse reversal, not to mention attorneys representing people damaged when some idiot wished for the most beautiful women in the world, which caused a djinn to yank a thousand or so perfectly innocent girls out of their houses, offices, or schools with no warning at all and no way to get home again, without suing the irresponsible worm responsible for djinn-napping them.”
Shaylar and her husband gaped at Gadrial.
“You…are joking, aren’t you?” Shaylar gulped.
“I never joke about women wronged through no fault of their own,” Gadrial said, grim as any soldier on the way to combat.
“It’s a recurrent problem,” Jas said quietly. “The military’s returned victims home many times, as a public service. There are djinn-victim aid societies, too, and it’s illegal-profoundly so-to traffic with a djinn. But idiots and reckless, irresponsible jackasses keep risking it, convinced they’ll come out ahead. They never do, but the challenge and the lure is just too irresistible for some.
“It doesn’t help that djinn are almost impossible to control, once released. There’s a whole branch of the UBI-the Union Bureau of Investigation-devoted to tracking the magic trails left by renegade djinn some fool’s let loose, but it takes a powerful spell-caster to re-bottle a djinn. It usually requires a team of them, acting in concert. More than one team’s subsequently encased a djinn bottle in concrete, to keep anyone from releasing it again, but the black market thrives on stealing bottled djinn out of holding facilities and selling them at huge prices to gullible fools. We can’t just dump them into deep ocean water, because some black marketer would use lifting spells to bring the bottle back up to the surface. And you can’t drop a djinn’s bottle into a volcano, either. That just melts the bottle and lets it out, again. That was tried, once, with genuinely horrifying results. You can’t kill a djinn by roasting it in lava, but you can make it furious enough to level a city.”
Shaylar stared in horror and Jasak shook his head, partly in sorrow, partly in obvious disgust.
“Some people are just too stupid or too desperate to pay attention to public warnings or the mandatory prison sentences for anyone trafficking in djinn, whether it’s selling a corked bottle or uncorking one for gain or revenge. Those are the worst cases, by far-the revenge cases. Trying to undo a revenge-motivated djinn attack can be a nightmare. People have died, from it. Lots of people, over the years. There’s a reason for those mandatory sentences, and anyone responsible for a djinn episode that kills someone is tried for voluntary manslaughter even if that was never his intent. If it was his intent, it’s an automatic charge of premeditated murder, whatever he may claim about extenuating circumstances.”