I didn’t know it was the night the Shaitan would come for me, but I still found it impossible to sleep.  I paced through the two rooms of my small apartment, the worn, dirty carpet scrubbing comfortingly against the pads of my bare feet.  At that point I didn’t even know there was such a creature as the Shaitan.  I was much more concerned with the image of a plain, ordinary, office-type door that had been stuck in my mind for the past three days.  I had no idea what the door meant, and the fact that it was always hovering there in the back of every thought was driving me crazy. 

As I made a circuit through my unkempt bedroom, I glanced at the glowing clock radio on the filing cabinet next to my bed.  The green numbers said it was two o’clock in the morning.  I groaned.  If I didn’t find some way to get to sleep soon, waking up at seven for work was going to be hell. 

My cell phone rang, loud and discordant, out in the hall.

I grabbed it off the bar that separated the hall from the kitchen and flipped it open with one hand.  "Sean Sunderland."

No answer.  I stared at the device in confusion before realizing it was a text message.  I never got those.  The darkness seemed to deepen in the hall around me as I squinted at the tiny, bright patch of light that was the display.  The message was from my employer’s automated facilities monitoring system:  SNSR A -- ORCLE 42 MLFN.

I cursed.  Something was wrong with one of the oracles.  As lead guardian at Phoenix Craft, Inc., it was my responsibility to keep all our Otherworld equipment working -- and without a functioning oracle network, business came to a standstill.  I closed the phone, thinking I would fix the oracle in the morning.  In the meantime I needed to get some sleep.  The last thing I wanted was a visit to the hospital tomorrow because I was too groggy to properly calibrate dangerous equipment.

I returned to my bedroom and climbed under the covers, trying to erase the stupid, mysterious door from my thoughts.  I stared at the dancing shadows that the trees made against my closed window shade.   The lights in the parking lot of my apartment complex cast a yellowish pall over everything outside, and some of the light managed to seep in even through my closed blinds.  That was usually an irritation, but tonight it helped me feel connected to the world outside.

Sound exploded from the phone a second time.  I returned to the hall and flipped it open, looking down at the new message:   SNSR C -- ORCLE 71 MLFN.

I blinked.  Two oracles malfunctioning in the same night?  That hadn’t ever happened before.  I cleared the message, and was about to close the phone again -- but then I caught sight of my inbox.   Eighty-seven automated messages from the Phoenix Craft sensors, all having arrived within the last thirty seconds.   I stared numbly down at them, then went to get some clothes on.  Something was very wrong.

The drive to the office was uneventful; my car was one of the few on the road.   Raleigh, North Carolina was asleep at this hour.  Twenty-three minutes after leaving my apartment, I pulled into the darkened, deserted parking lot of the UME building.  Phoenix Craft was on the fourth floor.  I quickly crossed the parking lot to the back entrance; the deep silence seemed unnatural for outdoors, as if something waited in the shadows.  I told myself that I was simply unused to being out so very late.

When the elevator doors opened onto my floor, I hurried into the narrow hall to Phoenix Craft’s office space.  I flashed my keycard past the scanner at the far end, and the door beeped and let me through.   The fluorescent lights throughout the building were in low-power mode, which left the cubicles in our company’s space shrouded in deep shadow -- but an unexpected white light emanated from one of the cubes near the back windows.  I approached cautiously.

The solitary light was coming from the cubicle next to mine.  Inside lay the comatose body of Derrick Weber, Phoenix Craft’s other guardian.   He was slumped in his plush leather chair, eyes closed, breathing shallow. 

I cleared my throat.  "Derrick?"

No response at first.  After a moment his eyes fluttered and he sat up.  "Hey, boss."  His voice was gallingly amiable.   "What are you doing here?"

"The sensors notified me.  What are you doing here?"  As lead guardian I wasn’t officially Derrick’s supervisor, but I was generally responsible for directing both our efforts.  I was surprised and irritated that he hadn’t consulted with me before coming in.

Derrick only shrugged.  "Well, I live closer, and I’m used to handling these calls."

I bristled.  For the past two years, Derrick had been the one on call even though he was professionally my junior, because I had still been in school.  This was the first off-hours call since I had graduated from university last week, and I had hoped to handle it on my own.  But there was no way to explain this to Derrick without sounding petty, so I didn’t pursue it.  "All right, so what have you found out?"

"Not much -- but it’s bad.  Don’t know what happened."

"There are really eighty-seven oracles out?"

Derrick gave a dejected half-laugh.  "I wish.  It’s ninety-three, for the moment."

"Shit."  I felt the blood draining from my face.  "There’s no way that should happen.  I mean, it’s my network design.  This shouldn’t just suddenly..."

"Smells like sabotage, if you ask me."

I grimaced.  "I didn't see any intrusion alerts from the sensors."

"So what does that tell you?  The intruder has to be damn good.  We’re using all the newest stuff."

Until a year ago, Derrick had been a guardian with the air force.  Of course he would leap to such conclusions.  "Or it’s something else entirely," I said, hoping I was right.  "Come on, we’re wasting time.  I’ll meet you in there."

Derrick settled back into his chair, his eyes closing once more.  In a few moments his mind -- and, some said, his soul -- would be transported to the Otherworld.  This might have seemed extraordinary if I hadn’t done the same thing every day of my life since seventh grade -- and even then it hadn’t been a new technology.  The brilliant Dr. Novak had created the Otherworld more than twenty years ago.  Such a pity, such a mystery, that he and his research team had been murdered hardly five years after the initial unveil.

I hurried into my own cubicle, which contained a small desk with a few papers on it, and not much else.  My fuzzy walls were bare except for a few framed professional certifications.  When I had still been a sophomore at university, those certifications were what had enabled me to take a position at Phoenix Craft.  Certification or degree was required by law for guardians, even at a tiny fifteen-person company like this.  The amulets that guardians were allowed to use were too powerful to give to just anyone.

I settled into my own portal chair and closed my eyes, clearing my mind of all thoughts except for the image of my destination.  Of course the stupid door was still there behind everything, but I did my best not to let it interfere with the image I was trying to hold.

I wasn’t able to feel my breathing slow as the transfer began; instead I felt myself lift out of the chair, twisting into a standing position.  My muscles moved without my input, as if suspended on delicate puppet strings.   That feeling passed as my feet came to rest on a ground that was more uneven than the floor of the office.  When I felt the familiar weight of my bag of amulets pulling down on my belt, I opened my eyes.

I stood in the darkened, cobblestone courtyard of the Phoenix Craft Otherworld facilities, surrounded by simulacrums -- statues of my coworkers.  Most had an amulet bag attached at the hip.  Derrick’s sim was the only one missing, aside from my own.

Surrounding the deserted courtyard were four buildings and a smallish tower.   The largest structure was the rune workshop; we were primarily a rune writing company.  The smallest was a combination storehouse and kitchen, and the tower was the traditional guardian tower, which Derrick and I worked out of.  The other two buildings were the administrative offices and the oracle center.   Beyond everything was the endless sea of flat, empty grassland that typified the majority of the Otherworld.  I could barely make out the edge of the great moor under the wan light of four quarter moons.

The courtyard was in deep shadow, but there was a simple enough solution to that.  I reached into my amulet bag, which contained about forty smooth, round stones, and pulled out the first one I grasped.  I usually had good luck getting the right amulet without looking, and by chance this one did happen to be the silver effect amulet I was looking for.

Holding it at waist level, I spoke the simple two-word rune sequence:  "Bor za."  Only a faint grayish light emitted from the silver stone at first, but it became noticeably brighter as I raised my hand from belt-level to about four inches higher.  "Za," I said when I felt it was bright enough to work by.  The light level steadied.  I fished a chain out of my shirt and clipped the amulet onto the end.  The light swung at my breast, pushing the shadows back from my immediate surroundings but intensifying the darkness throughout the rest of my field of vision; I could no longer see anything of the moor.  I shivered, and started toward the oracle center.

There was a sucking, crunching sound behind me.  I whirled.  Another of the sims had disappeared, and in its place stood Thomas Cross, my boss and the CTO and founder of the company.   He was one of the privileged few who could afford a home portal, which allowed him to come here without having to first travel to our Outside offices. 

His eyes opened.  "Sean -- thank God.   I got the alerts.  Have you been in there yet?"

"No, but Derrick is there now."

"Any idea what’s going on?"

"I was just on my way to look."

Thomas nodded.  "I’ll help out in any way I can.  I’ve never heard of such a massive failure as this, but whatever the cause is, I’m sure you can take care of it."

Thomas’s own light winked on as we started off for the oracle center.  When I’d been brought on as Phoenix Craft’s first guardian two years ago, I’d discovered that the company’s Otherworld facilities were in much worse shape than anyone had realized.  Our buildings had been penetrated and defaced twice before I was hired, but what hadn’t been quite as obvious were the underlying weaknesses in all of our systems.  We hadn’t had any more break-ins since I had started reworking things, but unfortunately a lot of the structural problems I had been fighting with since the beginning were still there.  The oracles in particular had been problematic, but never on this scale.

The heavy wooden doors of the oracle center swung open as we drew near.  Derrick emerged with a curious expression on his face.  He nodded respectfully.  "Hello, Thomas."

Thomas nodded back.

I was too impatient for formalities.  "What is it?  What’s happened now?"

Derrick motioned us inside.  "It doesn’t make any sense..."

The cavernous room beyond the doors was dark except for the pale, ambient light emitted from a hundred bowling-ball-sized oracle orbs.

I blinked.  "I thought you said ninety-three of them were out."

Derrick rubbed a hand in his crew-cut hair.  "They were.  I don’t know what’s going on."

Thomas frowned.  "Well, something fixed them.  What did you do?"

"Nothing!  When Sean came up to me Outside, I went to see him.  When I came back, they were all working."

I stepped up to the nearest oracle.  "You’re certainly right that this doesn’t make any sense.  Let me check it."

I knelt down, running my fingers along the flutings of the gray stone pedestal that supported the orb.  The orb itself had a faint dancing haze around it, the colors of random visions playing muddily across its surface.  Each individual oracle stored different visions, but all of them were connected into an interdependent network; a Phoenix Craft magus could use any orb to access the memories, thoughts, ideas, or other data stored anywhere in the network.  This setup was quite familiar even to those magi who were only accustomed to the sweeping public oracle nets in the cities and towns of the Otherworld.

I whispered the necessary word of unbinding, and the orb glowed brighter.  Peering in, I saw a swirling mass of images, each passing too quickly to identify.  I concentrated on finding information about the oracle itself, and many of the images fell away.  I focused on one image in particular, which floated forward.  The other pieces of information still hovered in the background, but what now dominated the interior of the orb was a readout with the first line:  SESSION UPTIME - 0:0:0:4:52.

I looked away from the oracle, and the images fell back into an unintelligible swirling mass.  "It’s true," I said.  I was completely bewildered.  "They were down, but they came back up about five minutes ago -- they seem fine now."

Thomas cleared his throat.  "Do you think they’ll stay up?"

"I don’t even know what caused them to go down in the first place."

Thomas closed his eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose, apparently to ward off exhaustion.  "Well, let’s look around and see what we can find.  Things like this don’t happen without cause."

The three of us ran diagnostics on the oracles for another half hour, looking for the cause of the disturbance.  We didn’t uncover the slightest clue.  The only thing we were able to determine was that all of them had come back online at the exact same instant.

Thomas was staring out at the small sea of oracles, shaking his head.  "Do you two have any more ideas?"

Derrick and I both shook our heads.

"Well, I’m going home," Thomas said.  "We’ll keep an eye on them, and see if anything else happens tomorrow or over the weekend.  That’s all we can do."

"That sounds good to me," Derrick said.

Thomas smiled.  "I really appreciate the extra effort today, guys."

I was still uncomfortable leaving the facility unattended.  "I think I’ll stop by the tower and take a quick look through the sensor logs," I said.  "But you two go on ahead."  

Forty minutes later I left the guardian tower in frustration.  I still hadn’t turned up anything useful.  I was only a little heartened by the fact that the oracles were still operational; I hated not understanding what was going on with equipment I was responsible for.

Pausing outside the tower door, I noticed a little weed growing between the cracks of the courtyard stones -- a hardy species that was notorious for ruining the foundations of buildings.  I pulled a red reduction amulet out of my bag, cupping it in my hands, and spoke the five activation runes that were etched in gold into its surface:  "Ta lim zed anh nil".  Each glyph flared a brilliant gold as I spoke it, until the sequence was complete and the amulet itself glowed with a sharp red aura.  I pointed at the offending sprout, and it was reduced to a tiny pile of ash.

Feeling slightly bolstered by what I felt was a solid, if minor, display of my prowess as a magus, I dropped the now-dulled amulet back into my bag.  I rejoined the crowd of simulacra at the other end of the courtyard and closed my eyes, concentrating.  In the next moment I was back in my cubicle, the few dimly lit fluorescent lights buzzing overhead.   I pulled myself out of the portal chair and headed for the elevator.

But when I pushed the call button outside the elevators, nothing happened.  The button didn’t light up, and no elevator came.  Frowning, I returned to the hall outside the Phoenix Craft offices and tried to open the stairwell door -- but the handle seemed to be stuck.  I pushed down with all my strength, but with no effect.

My heart was starting to beat faster; there wasn’t any other way down.  I shook my head to clear it, and a metallic glint behind me caught my eye.   I turned to look at it more fully, and my heart nearly stopped.  The door.  The shadowy alcove across from the stairwell had always been empty, but tonight there was a door there.   I stared at it:  there wasn’t a company nameplate next to it, and the magnetic card reader was also missing.  It was the door that had been stuck in my head these past three days.  Had it been here all this time?  Maybe I’d subconsciously noticed it and had been worrying over its appearance.

I cautiously pulled the door open, and found myself looking down a brick spiral staircase into gloom.  A dank smell wafted out into the hall.

I stepped back, wiping my hands nervously on my khakis.  Something wasn’t right about this door.  From its placement in the hall, it really looked as if it should open into the back of the kitchen refrigerator.

I tried the main stairwell door once more, but it was sealed tight.  So this was the only way out.  I irrationally wished for my bag of amulets, even though they would have been useless Outside. 

I started down.  The sharp curve of the staircase made it so that I was always on the verge of falling.  I stayed close to the outside, where the steps were widest.  As I continued downward, the dim light from above faded away to nothing, and I was left stepping mechanically down in complete blackness.  With nothing to see, phantom fears began crawling into my mind.  To give myself something to focus on, I started counting each step as I took it.

It was on step eighty-seven that I ran out of steps, practically falling on my face.  Was I in some sort of basement?  The darkness pounded down around me, making my ears ache.  Visions of janitor’s mops lying askew paraded through my mind, and I cringed at the thought of gouging out an eye on one in the dark.  Since I couldn’t see anyway, I covered my eyes with one arm.  I stretched out my other hand until I could touch the wall to my left, and began making my way along it. 

I felt up and down the wall for a light switch as I went, but there was only blankness.   After a few feet, I decided to start counting my steps again.  Soon I was up to three hundred, and then seven.  So, not a basement after all.  The wall was still made of brick, and there had been little in the way of variance -- no doorways, no pictures, nothing resting along the wall.  Just blankness.  I started walking more briskly.

At one thousand, two hundred and ninety four paces, I realized that the floor in front of me was slightly higher than that behind me.  At two thousand, six hundred and one steps, a light was faintly visible under my raised arm.  I uncovered my eyes, and found I could just make out the features of the tunnel.  I sighed in relief.  Hopefully there was an exit at the end; all I wanted to do was find my car.  I continued up the gentle slope, jogging now that I could see, and emerged into the bluish light of four moons.