"Ah," Rondeau said, following her down the block. "Might I suggest that we, say, ignore whatever magical you-don't-know-what we're now moving toward? Why borrow trouble?"
"I cause trouble, I don't stumble into it." Not precisely true, but the plane flight - and the necessity of flight - had made her cranky, and she'd always had a curious streak anyway. "Besides, maybe this magical something-or-other is what I'm looking for, the Cornerstone, and I won't need to find Lao Tsung at all."
"Right," Rondeau said. "Because we're in a Charles Dickens novel, and coincidences like that actually happen."
After about a block of walking, Marla stopped. "There."
"What? It's just a booth selling bootleg Jackie Chan videos - Oh. You mean that."
There was a folded space there, between a tea shop and one of the area's many jewelry stores - Marla could just see the shimmer. If there was a shop inside that shimmer, it wasn't one meant for ordinary tourists. "Want to go in?"
"I thought you just wanted to buy a chicken and find a nice quiet alley to scoop out its guts. Why do you want to mess with the local mojo?"
"Lao Tsung is a sorcerer," Marla said reasonably. "Maybe another sorcerer will know where to find him."
"Sorcerers are all at least half crazy by definition," Rondeau said. "Present company excepted. So what if we get, like, attacked?"
Marla shrugged. Being attacked wouldn't be so bad. Right now, loath as she was to admit it, she was afraid. A fight would at least take her mind off Susan's plot, flood her with adrenaline, and give her a workout - physical or metaphysical, either would be welcome. "If we're attacked, try not to get in the way."
"I bet this will be just like Big Trouble in Little China," Rondeau said. "Weird herbs everywhere, stuffed alligators hanging from the ceiling, and a guy shooting lightning bolts out of his eyes."
"I'm trying to decide if that was racist or not."
"What?" Rondeau said. "Me, or the movie?"
Marla ignored him, glancing around. There were people watching her, of course, or at least looking in her direction - it was a busy street. Ah, well. Fuck it. She grabbed Rondeau's wrist and slipped around a table of bootleg videos, into a folded place in the world. Into a sorcerer's den.
They emerged into a large room with a decor halfway between herb shop and high-tech. The floors, walls, and ceiling were pristine white, with subtle curves instead of hard-angled corners, and tall dark wood shelves butted up against one another at strange (and probably occultishly significant) angles, crammed with tins, bottles, jars, and plastic bags, most of which appeared to be filled with various kinds of dried vegetable matter. Marla wasn't interested in herbal magic - she'd never bothered overmuch with any herbs you couldn't grow in a container on a fire escape or find sprouting wild in a railroad yard. The air should have been a riot of odors, but there was a curious neutrality of odor instead, with just a hint of the antiseptic.
A long stainless-steel counter stretched the length of the back wall. A concealed door behind the counter swung open, and an elderly Asian gentleman in a dark robe emerged, followed by a far less graceful young man, presumably an apprentice. Marla caught a brief glimpse of the space behind the door, where someone lay naked on an examining table, red welts across his skin.
The door swung shut, and Marla turned her attention to the men behind the counter. The apprentice was actually a woman, dressed in boy-drag. She'd done an excellent job, but when Marla first moved to Felport, she'd found work waitressing at various bars in the less-than-respectable part of town, and still had a good eye for costume. She was in San Francisco, where drag was king, so she probably shouldn't be surprised. Odds were the old guy was the master, and the young girl was either apprentice or servant. The old man spoke to her in Chinese - Cantonese, probably, the prevailing dialect in Chinatown - but Marla shook her head.
"Nope, sorry. I can do English and I can get by in French, and my friend here can speak Spanish and knows a few swear words in a language that predates the fall of Babel, but neither of us can speak any kind of Chinese."
"What do you want?" the girl asked, in clear, unaccented English.
Marla looked at the master. He was expressionless,