Bound

chapter 11

JULY AND AUGUST

The handover took place without incident. Morden contacted me a couple of days after our return, giving me instructions to deliver the dreamstone to Onyx. I prepared for the worst, but to my mild surprise, when the day came, Onyx showed up at the meeting point, gave me one poisonous look, took the package, and left without a word. Either Morden had drilled into his Chosen’s head what the consequences of picking a fight would be, or Onyx was just biding his time.

With that done things went back to normal, or as normal as they got these days. I tried asking Morden what Richard wanted the dreamstone for, but I hadn’t really been expecting an answer and I didn’t get one. I wasn’t comfortable with Richard having the thing, and Arachne and I spent a couple of evenings talking over what his intentions might be, but all we could come up with was speculation.

The deep shadow realm fell out of alignment with the Hollow about two weeks after we left it. Variam tested it thoroughly and confirmed the next day that it was gone—gating from the Hollow to the deep shadow realm didn’t work anymore, and that strange place would stay inaccessible in some distant reality for years, if not forever. I couldn’t help but feel relieved. That vision had shaken me badly, and it was a long time before I could look Anne in the eyes without feeling a twinge of fear. But Anne acted just the same as she always had, and as the weeks passed my uneasiness faded away.

| | | | | | | | |

Clearing out the Hollow turned out to be even harder than Variam had predicted. Karyos had spent decades turning the shadow realm into her personal fortress, and the place was littered with traps and guardian plants. Most had been failures—based on what we found, Karyos’s creations had tended towards the imaginative rather than the practical—but they definitely made life interesting, and we learnt to be extremely grateful for Anne’s healing.

“You know,” Luna said after one particularly memorable encounter, picking the last of the venomous thorns out of her leg, “I’m really starting to go off plants.” But she persisted, and by the end of the third week we were no longer nervous about walking the grounds.

Troublesome as the plants were, they weren’t our biggest worry. An expedition led by a pair of independent mages tried to penetrate the Hollow, hoping to access the same deep shadow realm, and they weren’t terribly happy when we told them we’d looted it already. For a change we were able to resolve things diplomatically, but only two days later a Dark mage called Blackout arrived. He’d heard about Karyos, had decided that with the dryad gone the Hollow would be a great place to set up shop, and unlike the last pair, he wasn’t willing to take no for an answer. Convincing him otherwise took some work.

But one thing did go our way. Talisid was initially less than enthusiastic about helping out with our new project, but once I made it politely but firmly clear to him that no help for us meant no more intelligence reports for him, he changed his mind. Within an astonishingly short space of time a group of gate magic specialists arrived, and by the time they were done, gating into the Hollow was all but impossible without the access keys, a set of six focuses carved from the wood of one of the Hollow’s trees, allowing their wielder to step through the wards. As an added bonus, they doubled as regular gate stones, meaning that Anne, Luna, and I could use them to gate to the Hollow whenever we wanted. We took one each, hid the last two, and met up for a celebration in our new shadow realm, where we ate and drank and told stories under the spreading branches.

Clearing the Hollow might have been hard work, but it was satisfying. All of us except Vari had lost our homes over the past year—several times, in my case—and with the Hollow we had a sense that at last we might have a place from which we couldn’t be driven away. Morden’s demands on my time eased, and the continuing refusal of the Keepers to put me on the duty roster became a plus instead of a minus. On top of that, the Crusaders stayed quiet. I hadn’t really expected Landis’s efforts to make any difference, but to my surprise his prediction proved accurate, and neither Lightbringer and Zilean nor any other Crusader hit team came hunting for me during those long summer days.

There was only one catch. The Hollow might be turning into a prize, but the item we’d brought out of it was exactly the opposite.

| | | | | | | | |

“Are you ready?” Arachne said at last.

“Just one question,” I said. “What am I supposed to be ready for?”

Luna and I were in Arachne’s lair, standing in a space that we’d cleared of furniture. Luna was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, and looked relaxed. Of course, she wasn’t the one expected to perform.

I was standing facing Luna, holding the dreamstone that I’d brought out of the deep shadow realm. Arachne had set it into a lattice of silver wire, and beneath the wire the facets gleamed amethyst in the light. I could sense power from it, but no more so than from any other focus. It didn’t look dangerous. It looked like a pretty piece of rock.

“For trying to bond with the dreamstone,” Arachne said.

“Haven’t we been doing that already?”

“Yes,” Arachne said. “And as you’ve no doubt noticed, it hasn’t been working especially well. Today we’re going to try a more direct approach.”

“You mean activating it?”

“Hence the lattice. The material has some ability to conduct thoughts.”

“I thought you said I wouldn’t need to touch this thing.”

“Once you bond with it, physical touch should no longer be necessary,” Arachne said. “For now, I think you need all the help you can get.”

“You know, I might not need so much help if you could tell me exactly what this thing’s supposed to do.”

“As I’ve told you repeatedly, it isn’t so simple,” Arachne said. “All dreamstones have a connection to Elsewhere, but their exact properties depend on the bond they forge with their bearers. Until you practise with it . . .”

“I have practiced with it. I’ve tried channelling through it, I’ve tried meditating on it, I’ve even tried talking to it. About the only things I haven’t tried are hitting someone over the head with it or sitting it down with biscuits and a cup of tea, and I’d be about ready to try those too if I thought they’d work.”

“I think we’ll leave that for later.”

I gave Arachne an exasperated look.

“This is an exploration, Alex,” Arachne said. “Not an instruction manual. The best analogy I can give you is that so far, your voyages into Elsewhere have been like diving into a very great ocean. You can explore widely, but not deeply.”

“So this focus would be—what?” I said. “Scuba gear?”

“More like turning into a fish,” Arachne said. “But only if you can make it accept you.”

I sighed. “What do you want me to do?”

“Through Elsewhere, one can find another person and speak to them through their dreams,” Arachne said. “It’s not a use of Elsewhere that most mages would expect, nor one they would recommend, but it can be done, and it’s something you’ve practised with Luna.” Arachne nodded to her. “You can find her dreams faster and more effectively than you can anyone else’s, and most importantly, the two of you trust each other. I want you to try to do that here.”

“While I’m awake?”

“While you’re awake. Mental connection is, I believe, this dreamstone’s most basic use. Any other abilities will require you to master this first.”

“I’ll give it a try,” I said. Luna stood there expectantly. I held up the dreamstone and concentrated.

Using a new focus takes a bit of trial and error, but it’s not usually all that hard. Focuses all work in basically the same way—the wielder channels power through them and the item shapes it, in the same way that a hammer or a saw directs kinetic energy. The trick is to get the channel going in the first place.

I looked through the futures, searching for the ones in which I got a reaction. Nothing jumped out at me, and I kept looking. Ten minutes passed.

“Anything happening?” Luna asked.

“No,” I said. I wasn’t sure what was going on. Normally, channelling your power into a focus gives you some sort of result, even if it’s not the one you’re looking for. But the futures in which I did that didn’t seem to hold anything at all. Admittedly I was looking for a future with a mental connection, but still . . .

I gave up on divination and tried just focusing my power into the thing. For a second, it seemed as though I almost had it—I could feel something, a sense of the focus coming alive—but then I tried to direct it and it slipped away. I tried again, and the same thing happened. It was like trying to pick up water between my fingers. I looked into the futures in which I tried other things: command words, invoking, shouting at it, hitting it, every possible action that might or might not produce a reaction from a focus item. The crystal just sat there.

After I’d run out of ideas to do it solo, we tried alternatives. A capacitor focus to overcharge the crystal, linking directly with a mind magic focus, special invocation rituals that Arachne knows.

“Is this going to take much longer?” Luna asked at last.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Because my arm is starting to ache.” Luna was holding the dreamstone to her forehead. Arachne had suggested that having her touching the thing instead of me might work. It hadn’t.

“Just wait, okay?” I said. It sounded more impatient than I’d meant it to, but we’d been at this for two hours and I was getting frustrated.

Apparently I wasn’t the only one. “Look,” Luna said, letting her hand drop. “I’ve been standing here like a shop dummy. I don’t mind lessons where I’ve got something to do, but this is getting ridiculous.”

“If you’ve got any better ideas, feel free.”

“How about I try?” Luna said. “I mean, if you just want a link, it shouldn’t matter who initiates it, right?”

“I don’t think that’s the—”

“Actually,” Arachne said unexpectedly, “that could be worth a try. Go ahead, Luna.”

I started to object, then waited in a bad temper. Luna took a breath, closed her eyes, then clasped her fingers around the lattice and concentrated.

For a moment nothing happened. “Anything?” I asked.

“Give me a minute,” Luna said.

I waited. “Now?”

“Just wait! You took way longer than . . .” Luna trailed off, staring down at the crystal.

“Luna?”

Luna didn’t answer. She was looking down at the focus with an odd expression, as though she were looking through it to see something far away. And as I looked at her I noticed something else. In my magesight, I usually see Luna’s curse as a cloud of silver mist swirling around her. It was doing that now, but some of it was seeping into the dreamstone, soaking into the crystal without trace.

“Luna?” I asked, then my eyes went wide. Arachne’s cave is one of the few places I feel comfortable enough to relax my precognition, and I hadn’t been looking ahead until it was too late. “Arachne!”

Arachne is much faster than she looks. As Luna collapsed, Arachne’s legs blurred in motion, and she caught Luna an instant before her head could hit the stone. The dreamstone fell to the floor with a clink.

“Is she all right?” I asked anxiously. Luna looked perfectly healthy, but she was unconscious, breathing steadily in and out. The silver mist of her curse tried to soak into Arachne’s forelegs and was turned aside, blown away like smoke in a wind.

“No spells harming her,” Arachne said after a moment. “At least, none that I can see.”

“What happened?” I asked. I itched to get closer to Luna, put a hand to her forehead, but I don’t have Arachne’s abilities. The curse had been repelled from Arachne’s body; it wouldn’t be repelled from mine.

“I believe she’s sleeping,” Arachne said. “Check when she’ll wake.”

I looked ahead into the futures. I saw future after future of Luna lying silent and still and my heart jumped, then I looked further and felt a surge of relief. “She’s going to wake up. Four minutes, maybe five.”

Arachne looked down at Luna. “Hmm.”

“Did you expect this?” I demanded.

“No, but as far as I can tell she’s perfectly healthy. Wait.”

I waited, pacing up and down. At last Luna stirred and looked up at me, her eyes unfocused and clouded. “Alex?”

“Are you okay?”

“I think so.” Luna blinked, sitting up and running a hand through her hair. “Man. That was weird.”

“Okay,” I said. I walked to pick up the dreamstone, then set it firmly down on a table. “I think we’ve had enough experiments for one day.”

“I agree,” Arachne said. “Luna, rest. When you’re ready, tell us what you saw.”

| | | | | | | | |

“That was really strange,” Luna said fifteen minutes later.

“You just dropped,” I said. “It was like you went to sleep standing up.”

“Wasn’t how it felt. I was in Elsewhere, I think. I was in . . .”

“In?”

“My great-aunt’s village,” Luna said quietly.

“Where’s that?”

Luna glanced around. Arachne was off a little way away, giving us space. “You haven’t been there,” Luna said. “At least not . . . you remember when we got caught by Belthas, and you went looking for me? You remember the place we saw, right at the end?”

“A village in the mountains,” I said. It had been a memorable experience, though I hadn’t spent much time looking at the scenery. “Not in Britain, I think. It looked deserted.”

Luna looked at me in surprise. “You never said anything.”

I shrugged. “Figured you’d tell me when you were ready.”

“Huh. Well, it’s in Sicily, up in the hills.”

“When did you go?”

“A long time ago.” Luna’s voice was normal, but her eyes were distant. “After the accident. My dad had told me something about his family, the ones who never went to the mainland. I thought if I could find them, they could tell me what I was.” Luna was silent for a second. “She was my great-aunt, I think. I only saw her that one time. A little old woman, sitting in an armchair in the corner. And then I left . . .”

Luna trailed off and I didn’t ask her what had happened next. I knew that she was remembering the bad time in her life, her teenage years when her curse had reached its full power. Luna hadn’t had any way of understanding what was happening to her—all she knew was that everyone who got close to her was hurt, often badly, and she had no idea why. The “accident” had been when her parents had gone to fetch a psychologist, and their car had been hit by a truck. They’d survived, but that had been the last time Luna had ever seen her parents. She’d run out of the house and never come back.

“So you saw it again?” I asked. “That was where it took you?”

“What?” Luna started, then shook herself as though she’d been asleep. “Yes. I think.”

“What did you see?”

Luna looked up at me, and there was still that distant look in her eyes. “The same thing we saw the last time we went there in Elsewhere.”

“Oh.”

“Not my parents this time. Just . . . that.”

I knew what she was talking about. I’d only had one look at that creature, and it had been enough. “What happened?”

Luna shrugged. “We talked. Not in words. More like . . . you know when you have a dream, and you dream that someone’s talking to you? And you know what they’re saying, even though you don’t actually hear?”

I leant back, frowning.

Luna sat waiting for a while. “So was I in Elsewhere?” she said at last.

“Makes as much sense as anything else,” I said. “I wonder . . .”

“Wonder what?”

“The first time I picked up that crystal, I saw something,” I said slowly. “I thought it was something to do with the deep shadow realm, but maybe it was the dreamstone doing . . .”

“Doing what?” Luna asked. I shrugged and she tilted her head, thinking. “Do you think it was some sort of test?”

“For what?”

Luna shrugged. “Beats me.”

I looked across at the dreamstone, where it lay on the table. I wasn’t sure if Luna’s guess was right or wrong, but if it really had been a test, I had the unpleasant feeling that I’d failed. “I don’t know,” I said. “We’ll try again tomorrow.”

| | | | | | | | |

Luna was quiet for a few days, then spoke up about a week later. We were in the Hollow, midway through setting up a perimeter security system, and the two of us were alone—Anne was off at her clinic and Variam was training for his journeyman test. “Alex?” Luna asked. “How did you pick your mage name?”

I looked at her in surprise. We were sitting under a tree, soaking up the warm air. A stack of rods was piled untidily on the grass—the idea was to plant them around the border of the island to detect any space magic effects. In theory, gate wards are supposed to stop that sort of thing, but it’s always good to have a backup. “That’s what you were thinking about?” I said. “I thought it was to do with your curse.”

“That’s not really something I worry about anymore.”

“Huh,” I said. “Well, I didn’t pick it so much as I was told it.”

“Told it? By . . . ?”

I shook my head. “Not by Richard. He had a hand in it though. He sent us all to Elsewhere and told us that that was where we’d find our names.”

“That was how you found out about Elsewhere?”

I nodded. “I always wondered how Richard knew it would work, because in all the times that I’ve been back there, the same thing’s never happened since. Not exactly, anyway. Maybe he did something. Or maybe it was just as simple as telling us, and our minds did the rest.”

“For all of you?”

“Well, Tobruk was bragging afterwards that now he had his name,” I said. “So I’m guessing it worked for him. He was going to announce it once he became Richard’s Chosen. Or he would have.” I looked at Luna. “Thinking about your own?”

“I’ve been back to the apprentice program a few times,” Luna said. “For duelling, or picking stuff up, or things like that. And I noticed that . . . I don’t know. I’m supposed to be a mage, but it doesn’t feel like I’m a mage. They don’t really treat me like one.”

“And you think the name’s got something to do with it?”

“Does it?”

“Yes,” I said. “You know that Light and Dark mages are more similar than they like to admit. The naming ceremony means a lot to them. They’re not just picking how they’ll be addressed; they’re leaving their old lives behind. The way they see it, humans are in the normal world, mages are in the magical world, apprentices are somewhere in between. Becoming a journeyman and taking a new name is the sign that they’re choosing the magical world.”

“I’m not sure that’s what I want.”

“I know,” I said. “Thing is, so do they.”

“Can I be a mage without giving up on the normal world?”

“You’re asking the wrong question,” I said. “You are a mage. You’re the one who decides what that means.”

Luna was silent for a couple of minutes. “Why did you run the shop?” she asked eventually.

“This is your day for out-of-left-field questions, isn’t it?”

“I know how you got the Arcana Emporium,” Luna said. “You told me the story. But you never told me why you kept at it. I mean, you ran it for how long, six years?”

“Seven.”

“So why didn’t you sell up and go do something else?” Luna said. “I mean, you could have made more money somewhere else.”

“Pretty much anywhere else.”

“So why?”

I’ve been asked that question a lot over the years, and usually I throw off some pat reply. This time I told the truth. “Because of the one in a thousand.”

“The what?”

“You did enough shifts at the shop,” I said. “Out of every thousand people who walked through that door, about nine hundred are tourists or cranks. Another ninety are hobbyists or small-timers. That leaves ten. About nine out of those ten are there for business. They want information, or they’re buying, or selling, or they’re looking for something that’s not on the shelves. Sometimes it’s trouble, but usually it’s not. You add all those together, that’s nine hundred and ninety-nine. The thousandth person . . . that’s the one who needs help. I don’t mean they want help, like all those idiots who come in asking for love potions or a way to win the lottery, I mean they need help. A new mage who’s just started to wake up to their power, and who doesn’t understand what’s happening to them. An adept who’s being hunted by a Dark mage. Someone who’s in danger from an item or a creature or a spell, who doesn’t have anywhere else to go.”

“Like me,” Luna said.

“Like you,” I said. “The other nine hundred and ninety-nine? They don’t really need me. The tourists and the hobbyists can all buy their stuff from some other shop. The mages and the adepts have other places they can go. But what about the ones who don’t have anywhere else to go?”

“The one in a thousand,” Luna said. “Wait. Was that why you put me in charge of the e-mails?”

I laughed. A while back I’d given Luna the job of running the Arcana Emporium’s e-mail account, which mostly had meant writing answers to a seemingly endless stream of questions. She’d complained for months, but somewhat to my surprise, she’d stuck with it.

“It was, wasn’t it?” Luna said. “I thought it was just a way to make me study.”

“Well, that too,” I said. “But it was the same deal. For nearly every one of those e-mails, whether you answered them or ignored them didn’t make any real difference. But every now and then . . .”

“Yeah,” Luna said. She paused. “They still keep e-mailing, you know.”

“Would have thought they’d have stopped by now.”

“Actually, there are more than there used to be,” Luna said. “Mostly, they want to know when you’re going to reopen the shop.”

I was silent. I’d thought about it, from time to time. I could do it. I’d lost my stock in the fire that had gutted the building, but I could build that back up. I could rent or buy a new place, or even rebuild the old one. Then I could fit it out, spread the word that I was back in business . . .

. . . and someone else would probably blow the place up again. And maybe me with it. A shop is too visible, a shopkeeper too vulnerable. I’d been able to get away with it when I was a little fish and beneath everyone’s notice, but not now.

Or maybe ever. Somewhere at the back of my mind over the past six months, I’d had the vague idea that once this was all over and things were back to normal, I could start the Arcana Emporium up again. But were things ever going to get back to normal? The number of enemies I had was going up, not down, and the number of attempts on my life was doing the same. Even if Morden replaced me as his aide, even if I walked away from the Keepers, there’d still be Richard to deal with, and Levistus, and the Crusaders, and all of the other mages and mercenaries and monsters that I’d pissed off over the years. They’d come hunting me, and if I was standing behind a counter, it’d be that much harder for me to get away. And no matter whether they succeeded or failed, my shop wouldn’t be a safe place to visit. Now that I looked back on it, I was lucky the Arcana Emporium had lasted as long as it had. I didn’t think I’d be so lucky twice.

It was a depressing thought. For years, my shop had been part of my identity. Now I had to face the fact that I wasn’t going to be able to go back to it for a very long time, if ever. Maybe it wasn’t just Luna who needed to figure out who she was going to be.

“I don’t think it’s going to happen anytime soon,” I said at last.

Luna nodded. She looked sad, but not surprised. We sat together, listening to the birds singing in the trees.

| | | | | | | | |

There was one last thing which happened that August.

I was still going in to Keeper HQ, and for several days running I saw references in the department bulletins to “the Barnes inquiry.” It felt as though something was going on, and the next time I managed to catch Coatl alone, I asked him about it.

“Oh, that clusterfuck,” Coatl said. Coatl is a fat, cheerful mind mage from South America who arrived in London on an exchange program a few years ago. He was one of the few Keepers I was on speaking terms with, though we were still talking alone with the door closed. “You heard about the raid in Pimlico?”

I shook my head.

“Met were doing a drugs bust. There were adepts, we got called in, and it got messy.”

“So why the inquiry?”

“When the whole thing was done there were a few injured normals and some fire adept called Goldman was dead. Keeper at the scene was Reyes; he claimed the burns were from fires that Goldman started.”

“Isn’t Reyes a heat mage?” I said sceptically. I’d met the Keeper a few times and didn’t like him much. Back when I’d still been talking to Caldera, she hadn’t liked Reyes either; apparently he had a reputation for excessive force.

“Yep.” Coatl shrugged. “On the other hand, Goldman was a violent little shit. Only reason he was there was that he was trying to rip off those drug dealers so he could sell the stuff himself.”

“So what really happened?”

“God knows,” Coatl said. “Probably both were dirty. But people have been making noise, so the Council are holding an inquiry.”

I snorted. “Which means either they’re going to clear Reyes of everything, or they’ll find some minor fault and give him a slap on the wrist.”

“Probably.”

I checked things out for myself the next day, but everything I could find matched with what I’d heard from Coatl. I kept hearing rumblings about the case, both in the Keeper news and from my adept contacts, but I had more immediate things to worry about, and as the days went by, it became background noise.

Now that I look back on the whole thing, I wonder if there was anything I could have done. Maybe there was, but it’s a lot easier to see warning signs in hindsight. In any case, in the first week of September something happened that drove everything to do with the Keepers out of my thoughts.