Bound

chapter 12

SEPTEMBER

I was down in Arachne’s lair when I heard the news.

Pretty much the only downside to Arachne’s lair as a home base is that it gets terrible reception. The wards screw up magical callers, and radio signals can’t make it through the tons of earth and rock. Which means that if you want to get a message to someone there and you want to do it fast, then you have to go there in person.

This particular day was a Friday, and we were planning a birthday party for Anne. She was turning twenty-five on Monday, but we’d decided to have the party at the weekend instead, partly to make it more of a surprise, and partly because that way I wouldn’t have to worry about being called away to the War Rooms. Luna and Variam had been supposed to be doing the arrangements, but they were having a fight about something or other. I wasn’t sure of the details and didn’t really want to get involved: Luna and Vari have a complicated relationship that regularly hits rough patches and I’ve learnt that when that happens, the best thing to do is to give them space. Instead, I’d gone back to Arachne’s for yet another try with the dreamstone. It was going about as well as usual (i.e., badly) and so I wasn’t really listening when I heard Arachne talking to Variam through her message focus. I did vaguely notice that Variam sounded more urgent than usual, but all of my attention was on the futures of me interacting with the dreamstone, and I kept focusing on that right up until I heard running footsteps from the tunnel and Variam’s shout of “Alex!”

I looked up. “What?”

Variam skidded to a halt at the tunnel entrance, one hand resting on the wall as though he were poised to turn and run back. “They’ve taken Anne.”

“What? Who?”

“Don’t know. Come on.”

I stared at Variam for about one second, then dropped the dreamstone onto a table. “Arachne—”

“Go,” Arachne said. “I’ll clean up here.”

I grabbed my coat and ran after Variam up the tunnel.

| | | | | | | | |

Variam filled me in on the way. Luna had been due to meet up with Anne in the evening, and when Anne hadn’t shown up, Luna had called and had no answer. At this point, a normal person would have assumed that Anne had forgotten to charge her phone, or left it switched off, or had no signal. Luna had treated it as a potential emergency and gone straight to red alert. It was just as well she had.

“How did they get her?” I asked.

“Looks like by surprise.”

“How?” I demanded. Anne had a flat which we’d set her up with in the spring. “The wards should have bought her enough time . . .”

“She wasn’t at her flat,” Variam said. “She was at her clinic.”

I swore. “So they just walked straight in pretending to be patients. Who’s ‘they’?”

“Dunno,” Variam said. “You got any ideas?”

I tried to think of the most likely suspects. It wasn’t easy—Anne’s list of enemies is almost as long as mine. “Crystal?”

“She’s been lying low for years.”

“Didn’t stop her last time.”

Variam grimaced. “Maybe someone got a description.”

| | | | | | | | |

But we didn’t need to look for a description. After Luna had sent Variam to find me, she’d done some thinking and quite sensibly realised that while we might be able to figure out what had happened to Anne, there was someone else who could do it a lot faster. So she called him instead.

Sonder was waiting next to Luna when we found her, a young man with curly black hair and a scholarly look, his clothes a little nicer since the last time we’d met and his stomach a little rounder. It was a measure of how serious things were that neither of us mentioned last Christmas. I’d worked with Sonder back then, and things had happened, and at some point we’d have to talk about it, but right now we had bigger problems. I looked at Sonder, and he looked back at me, and somehow all of that was communicated and agreed upon in less than a second. “What did you find?” I asked.

“Two mages,” Sonder said. We were out in the street, and there were houses around, enough to make it possible that someone could overhear, but we didn’t have the time to worry about that. “They managed to knock Anne out and take her through a gateway.”

“That sounds way too—wait.” My mind made the connection with what Sonder had just said. “Was one of them big and dark-skinned, and the other one white and skinny?”

“It wasn’t Sagash’s apprentices this time.”

I shook my head. “Not them. The Crusaders have a black-ops team who’ve been coming after me. Lightbringer and Zilean.”

Sonder frowned. “The Crusaders? Why?”

“I don’t know . . .” I trailed off. Over the last couple of months, the Council had been fortifying the War Rooms, but the rumours of an impending Dark attack hadn’t gone away. And everyone still seemed to believe that it was linked to Richard and Morden.

Anne didn’t know anything about Morden’s activities. Ever since that first day in January, she hadn’t even seen him. But on that day, she’d been seen with him. And the Crusaders didn’t know that Anne wasn’t secretly still in touch with him. All they’d know was that Anne was still officially Morden’s appointee . . .

“Oh, shit,” I said.

“What?”

“I’ve got a bad feeling.” I looked at Sonder. “Where did they go?”

“They gated, but it was masked,” Sonder said. “I can try to trace it.”

I nodded. “I’m going to try and track her directly. Tell me if you find anything that might help.”

Sonder left, hurrying across the road. “Track her how?” Variam asked.

“Here, this is for Anne’s flat,” I said, handing Variam a gate stone as we started running the other way. “Remember that seeker focus?”

“I thought you lost that at Christmas?” Luna asked as we ran.

“We got a replacement,” I said. Two years ago, Anne had been attacked by a pair of Dark apprentices; their master was Anne’s old enemy, Sagash, but they’d been working for a renegade Light mage called Crystal. We’d won the battle but Crystal had escaped, and she still wanted Anne as an ingredient for a particularly nasty ritual that she’d shown no sign of giving up on, so once we’d made it back to London, we’d set things up so that if she had another try at kidnapping Anne and actually succeeded, the rest of us would be able to do something about it.

It’s probably not obvious, but this sort of thing is one of the main reasons that all the members of our little group are still alive. When we get attacked or ambushed, one of the first things we do as soon as we have the chance is figure out some kind of defence against the same thing happening again. We have contingency plans for anything from night attacks on our homes to getting outlawed by the Council in the middle of the workday. They aren’t foolproof, but Variam, Luna, Anne, and I are all much more difficult targets than we look.

We reached the park and Variam ducked behind a tree. Quickly he created a gate through into Anne’s flat, a small one-bedroom in Ealing, and we jumped through into the warm air. Light was streaming through the windows and past the plants on the sill, and it all looked very pretty, but I wasn’t here to sightsee. I pulled away a chair in the living room, took off a small ventilation grate that would have looked solid to a casual glance, and pulled out a box. “Now we pray she’s kept it up to date.”

“It needs updates?” Variam said, peering down at the thing inside. It looked like a glass rod with a thread of dark red running through the centre.

“More like blood,” I said. The hard part of setting this up hadn’t been figuring out a way to track Anne: it had been figuring out a way to track Anne that would stick. The standard trick of planting a subcutaneous tracer was hopeless; the simplest magical scans pick up that kind of thing. Tracking spells are better, but they’re easy to block with wards. But wards aren’t foolproof either. If you have a piece of someone’s body to set up a sympathetic link, you can put together a tracking spell with enough power to punch through most things. Hair or nail clippings are decent; saliva is better; blood is best of all. But it has to be fresh.

Luna and Variam fell silent as I closed my eyes and concentrated, channelling into the focus. My heart was in my mouth: if this didn’t work, it would be very bad. For a moment, as I scanned the futures, I could see nothing but myself standing there; then my heart leapt as I saw movement. An instant later, I could feel it: a mental direction. It was fuzzy, as though the signal was struggling to get through, but it was there.

I snapped back to the present and pulled a map from where it had been folded in the box. “Got something?” Variam asked.

“Yeah.” I dug around until I found a ruler and a pencil, pulled out the compass on my phone, checked again with the rod, then drew a line on the map. It ran a little south of northeast. “Okay,” I said. “Vari, gate us to . . .” I traced the pencil right and made a wide circle below the line. “There. Anywhere between Barking and Greenwich.” From there we could get another reference point to triangulate. If we were lucky, that would be enough.

Variam nodded and we gated out.

| | | | | | | | |

We were lucky. The mages who’d taken Anne could have gated her to Scotland, or Sweden, or Australia, or anywhere else in the world where they had a roof and enough time to ward up a safe house. They could even have taken her to a shadow realm, and any of those things would have made it far more difficult for the tracer to work. But they were Light mages, and like so many other Light mages, they didn’t want to get too far away from the Council’s centre of power. They couldn’t take her to the War Rooms or to Keeper HQ, and so instead they’d taken her here, to a small, nondescript end-of-terrace house in Walthamstow, with few windows and high walls.

“No,” I said over the phone. Variam, Luna, and I were on the other side of a set of railings and a small car park, using a block of flats to shield us from the house. “It’s E17, not N17. House number one.”

“All right,” Sonder said. In the background I could hear the clicking of keys. “One sec.”

“You think they’ve got cameras?” Luna asked quietly.

“They’re bloody idiots if they don’t,” Variam said. Evening was turning to night, and the autumn sky was fading to black.

“Alex?” Sonder said. “I’ve got it. It’s Council owned, but the records show it as mothballed. It should be empty.”

“It’s not,” I said. The curtains on the windows were thick, and only a faint glow of light showed from behind them, but the tracer focus was pointing straight there.

“It could be squatters . . .”

“And they’re having Anne inside for a cup of tea?”

I heard Sonder sigh. “Okay, it’s not squatters. What do you want to do?”

“What do you think I’m going to do?”

“You don’t have any authorisation . . .”

“I’m a Keeper, blah blah, emergency situation, necessary use of force,” I said. “But honestly, I really don’t give a fuck. Acting now, rationalising later.”

“All right,” Sonder said. “But Alex? None of the Keepers I’ve talked to seem to have any idea what’s going on. Be careful.”

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure I know why. We’ll keep you posted.” I hung up.

“Think I see a camera over the porch,” Variam said.

I looked into the futures in which I ran closer, branching them so that my future images searched the outside of the house from all three sides. “Two cameras,” I said. “One front, one back.” I looked at Luna. “Remember that spell Chalice taught you?”

“You point me at them and I’ll turn them into junk.”

We moved forward to the corner of the flats and Luna and Variam waited as I concentrated, looking ahead. Sometimes I have to make an effort to get into the mental state to do something dangerous, but not this time. Anne was in there, and I was going to get her. The only question was how.

“Well?” Variam demanded. He was shifting from one foot to the other, clearly itching to go.

“Tricking our way in isn’t going to work,” I said. Ringing the doorbell would result in being ignored at best and outright attacked at worst. “We’re going to have to blow the doors.”

“Good,” Variam said. “What’s the count?”

“I’m not seeing many,” I said with a frown. Normally Council mages have servants—guards, security, cannon fodder, whatever you call them—but in all the futures where we blasted the door down, the house was barely occupied. It didn’t occur to me at the time that there might be a reason for that. There are some kinds of work for which people don’t want witnesses. “One or two, maybe. But at least one’s a mage.”

“What kind?”

“Light and force. I’m guessing it’s Lightbringer.” Which meant it was a good bet that we could also expect Zilean.

“So we clear to go?”

I hesitated, feeling the coin of fate spin. I couldn’t get a clear read on what would happen after we forced our way inside. There might be traps, hidden deeper where my divination couldn’t so easily see, or the enemy could be there in greater numbers. If I waited, and kept path-walking, I could narrow the odds. But that would take time, and every extra minute increased the chances that they’d get reinforcements or move Anne . . . or worse. I remembered what had happened to Morden’s last two aides, and what Lightbringer and Zilean had been planning to do to me, and all of a sudden waiting wasn’t an option. “I’ll take the front,” I said. “You two take the back. Luna fries the cameras, then you go in first. I’ll follow a second later, try to split their focus. Fight your way upstairs the first chance you get. Remember, our best guess is that Anne’s on the first floor, so don’t get caught up. We want to punch through to where she is. All clear?”

Luna and Variam nodded.

“Do it,” I said to Luna.

Luna stood up, reaching out a hand towards the front of the house, and to my eyes a tendril of silver mist seemed to extend from her fingers, crossing the street to soak into the small dark shape of the camera. When Luna’s curse touches something, then whatever can go wrong, will, which in the case of computers means bugs, crashes, and hardware failure. With the amount of power Luna had just put into that camera, the only thing it would ever be useful for again was scrap metal.

I broke cover, running for the front door, while Variam and Luna split off towards the garden. I was dimly aware of Luna working the spell a second time, but I didn’t stop to analyse. At any second the mages inside might notice something, and our best defence was speed. I dropped my bag beside the front door, pulled out one of a handful of things that looked to a casual glance like bundles of thick cord wrapped in electrical tape, ripped off the backing, stuck it to the door around the keyhole, unwrapped the wire leading to the activator, let the wire unspool as I backed off around the corner, pulled out my 1911 from the bag, took the gun in my right hand and the activator in my left, and spoke into the communicator in my ear. “Vari. I’m ready at the front.”

There was a moment’s pause, then Variam’s voice spoke into my ear. “Ready at the back.”

“Ready at the back,” Luna said.

I took a breath, let it out. “Go.”

Fire magic flared behind the house. The walls around flashed red and I felt the vibration as the spell went off with an echoing boom. I counted one heartbeat, two, four, then there was the scuffle of footsteps and I heard movement from inside and I covered one ear with my gun, pushed the other down into my shoulder, closed my eyes, and pressed the button.

There was a roaring whoom that seemed to go all the way through my body. Something bounced off my shoulder; the door was still attached to the hinges but there was a ragged hole where the middle had been and I clambered through. There was smoke everywhere and my ears were ringing, but my divination told me where the stairs were and I ran for them, taking them two at a time. My foot had just hit the first-floor landing when a door opened and Zilean came out.

I’d seen him coming and I was already bringing my gun up, but everything seemed to be going very slowly and I had what felt like all the time in the world to study the Crusader mage. I saw his hair, brown and combed back but with a few strands out of place—that stuck in my mind for some reason—and the downward lines to either side of his mouth, and I saw his eyes widen as he recognised me, and then something made me glance down and I saw that he was holding a surgical knife in one hand, and the blade was red, and then everything else I might have noticed vanished in a rush of fury and I fired.

Zilean was quick, but not quite quick enough. He twisted and a wall of crackling energy came up between us, but the shot had been on target and I heard a gasp. I steadied on the landing and kept firing; I couldn’t see through the barrier and so I spaced the shots out to cover the hallway, but as I did I felt the surge of another spell and there was a blinding flash, then the wall was gone and the hallway was empty.

I could hear the whoompf of fire magic down below, and racing footsteps from above. Bright spots were dancing before my eyes, but there was red blood on the plaster and I knew at least one of my shots had found its mark. I sprinted upwards.

I didn’t think about going down to help Variam and Luna, and I didn’t give any thought for a possible ambush. I could say that I was counting on my precognition to keep me safe, and maybe it would have; I could say that I thought that Variam and Luna could handle themselves, and maybe that was true too. But the truth is, none of those things made it into my mind at all. The one glimpse I’d had of that knife had filled me with bloodlust and I wanted Zilean dead. Zilean could have turned on me and maybe it would have gone badly if he had, but my instincts told me that Zilean was afraid. I chased him up to the attic; the door was locked, but I ran at it without breaking stride and kicked with all of the strength that my training with Anne had given me, and the wood splintered and broke.

Zilean was at the far end of the room. He’d managed to get the window open and stood clutching his shoulder with his other hand and he looked back at me in panic and I sighted on him, but as I fired he cast his spell and his body seemed to turn white and distort, and with a flash he turned into a bolt of lightning that zipped through the window and out into the night and my shot kicked splinters from the window frame.

I swore and darted to the window, but as I reached it I saw the flash as Zilean cast his lightning jump again, and as my vision returned I saw nothing but rooftops. Another flash reflected from the next street over, and I knew that the Crusader was gone.

I realised that I couldn’t sense any more spells below. “Vari, come in,” I said, turning and heading back down the stairs. “Report.”

“He’s gone!” Variam shouted back at me.

“Who?”

“The other mage, Lightbringer, whatever his name is. There’s a gate portal, he’s gone through!”

I ran down the stairs. “It’s still open?”

“Yeah, but it’s masked. You want us to chase?”

I hesitated, but for only an instant. “No. Burn it.”

I saw the red flash from all the way up the stairwell and felt a surge of gate magic as the spell in the portal collapsed. “Clear,” Variam said.

“Ground floor is clear,” Luna said. “We’re moving up.”

It was only much later that I got the full story from Luna and Variam, about how they’d run into Lightbringer down in the kitchen. There had been a brief, furious battle, Variam’s orange fire and the trailing mist of Luna’s curse meeting Lightbringer’s flashing blades, and now that I think back on it, I cringe at the risk we took. Zilean and Lightbringer were both individually stronger than us, and they had God only knows how many reinforcements just a phone call away, but they’d been caught by surprise and in the end that had been enough. I think if they’d realised that there were only three of us, they would have stood and fought, but the speed and fury of the attack had caught them off guard and they never had the chance to learn just how few of us there were.

But all that was still in the future; for now, the house was ours and we went through the rooms one by one looking for Anne. It took only seconds to figure out where we needed to go. The room that Zilean had come out of had a metal door, with a complicated lock which had sealed when the door had swung shut behind him. Variam melted it to slag. Rivulets of molten metal trickled down, burning black streaks into the door frame and floor, and Variam shoved the door open with the palm of his hand.

I don’t have a very visual memory, at least not for most things. It’s not that my memory’s bad; it just works best on connections and patterns. If I spend an hour with a group of people, then I’ll remember what they talked about, who was in charge and who interacted with whom, but ask me what one of them was wearing or what colour their hair was and I’ll come up blank. My mind just doesn’t work that way; I can remember things that happened, but not exactly what they looked like.

But every now and again you see a sight which burns into your memory and never goes away.

The inside of the room was thickly lined with brown padding. A small wheeled trolley was pushed up against the wall, and on it were two trays holding what looked like surgical instruments: forceps and hooks and scalpels. The centre of the room was dominated by a long, wide table, and on it was something that was hard to identify. For a second my eyes told me that I was looking at some kind of crude doll, coloured red with scraps hanging off, then I noticed that it was the size and shape of a person, then the doll took a breath and with a sense of dawning nightmare I realised that it was a person; my eyes just hadn’t made the connection because I’d never seen someone without their skin before.

My stomach clenched and I wanted to vomit. It would have been horrible enough if it were a stranger; that it was Anne made it a thousand times worse. Luna stared, her face going pale, then she clapped a hand over her mouth and stumbled back out onto the landing. Variam didn’t quite join her, but I could see the muscles in his jaw working. I felt bile rising up in my throat and choked it back. One by one I was noticing all the things that I’d missed, and each one made me desperately wish that I could stop thinking about what they meant. Small metal scaffolds were set up on the table, with thin wires running down to where they were attached to flaps of skin. Around the chest someone had started to cut through the muscle, revealing bone, and the torn flesh pulsed rhythmically. A soldering iron was resting on the table, a tiny wisp of smoke rising up from its tip.

“What . . .” Variam paused, swallowed. “What do we do?”

I tried to think of something to say and failed. I felt paralysed.

Luna came back in, wiping her mouth. “Oh, God,” she said, staring at Anne. “How do we help her?”

I tried to figure out how to go about curing Anne or stabilising her, and just the thought of it overwhelmed me. I was out of my depth, but both Luna and Variam were looking at me, and I grasped at straws. “We have to get her out of here.”

“Maybe a hospital . . .” Variam started to say, then trailed off. The Crusaders had contacts with the Keepers, the Keepers had contacts with the emergency services, and if we brought Anne into an emergency room, then they’d know within an hour.

But it made me realise what we had to do. “Not a hospital,” I said. “Somewhere safe.”

“The Hollow,” Luna said instantly.

“If we carry . . .” I started to say, then stopped as I realised what that would mean. First we’d have to untangle Anne from the net of wires and hooks sunk into her skin . . . and then what? I imagined picking her up and had a horrific vision of her screaming and thrashing and crashing to the floor.

“Carry the table,” Variam said. “I’ll burn the legs off if we have to. Luna opens a gate, we get it through.”

I turned to Luna. “The gate wards on the house must have a keystone. Hurry.”

| | | | | | | | |

I don’t remember much of the rest of that visit. I remember that Luna managed to disable the wards, and I think Variam did manage to sort out the table, but I don’t recall him doing it. The sight of Anne’s mutilated body made everything else hazy. I remember talking to her, telling her that we were here, that she was going to be okay, but she didn’t speak and I couldn’t tell if she heard.

But it worked. Luna got a gate open to the Hollow and managed to hold it open long enough for Variam to lift the tabletop and carry it through. I remember being terrified that we’d drop it, but we didn’t, and Luna followed us through to leave us alone in the Hollow, the three of us standing over Anne’s body while the night sky of the shadow realm glowed above.

Variam and I stayed to watch over Anne and we cut away the wires and hooks, one by one. It took a long time, and Anne didn’t flinch or wince, but we did. Meanwhile, Luna went to find Arachne, and Arachne came. She doesn’t like to leave her lair, but she has her ways out in case of emergency, and this was an emergency. Arachne looked over Anne and worked what magic she could, but she warned us that Anne had been so badly maimed that any attempt to cure her would likely make things worse. We’d taken out the foreign objects and now Anne’s body was working to heal itself, and the best thing we could do for her was guard her and make sure she was undisturbed. So we did.

It was a long night.

| | | | | | | | |

It was some time in the early hours of the morning. We had tents set up, but they were small three- and four-person affairs, and none of us had wanted to try moving Anne inside one or setting it up around her. In the end, we’d just set up windbreaks, and taken turns keeping watch. It was my shift and I was lying half awake, dozing. Above, the stars were shining, brilliant and bright. The Hollow’s sunset and sunrise matches its mirror in England, but for some reason, instead of the stars of Earth, the view you see when you look up is some impossible sky out of a fairy tale, clusters of blue and purple and red glowing from between multicoloured nebulae. I could just hear the sound of Anne’s breathing, and listening to it kept me on edge. I think at some level I was afraid that if I didn’t keep listening to it, then it might stop.

When I heard my name, I thought at first it was just another dream. I’d been drifting in and out of them, imagining that Anne would wake up and talk to me, and I kept waiting for it to fade, then I realised that I’d opened my eyes and I was looking up at the stars and I heard Anne’s voice again.

I sat bolt upright. “I’m here. Can you hear me?”

I heard Anne take a laboured breath. “Yes.”

I scrambled to Anne’s side. In the starlight, she was only a shape in the darkness, but my divination told me she was there and moving. “Don’t move. You were hurt, badly. We’ve taken you to the Hollow and you’re safe, but you have to stay where you are. Okay?”

“I know.”

“What do you need?”

Another breath. “Water.”

I helped Anne drink. She couldn’t hold the bottle, but we’d brought straws. “What else?” I said when she was done.

“Time.”

I hesitated. It was a stupid question, but I needed to ask. “Are you okay?”

Anne was silent for a second. “No.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“I’m not going to die,” Anne said. Her voice was a little stronger, but it still sounded as though it was an effort for her to talk. “But . . . no. I’m not.”

“Which one of them was it?” I said quietly.

“The white one,” Anne said. “Zilean.” She paused, and when she spoke again her voice was empty. “They wanted to know about Morden’s plans. I kept telling them I didn’t know. They didn’t listen . . .”

I felt a wash of emotions go through me—sorrow and pain and guilt, but mostly rage. I wanted to see someone dead for this. My list of enemies was already too long, but Zilean had just made it to the top. I took long, steady breaths until I could speak calmly again. “Is there anything I can do?”

“Stay and talk,” Anne said. She was sounding drowsy now. “Have to sleep. But . . . be nice to hear your voice. Just for a little while . . .”

“Talk to you about what?”

“Anything,” Anne said sleepily.

“Anything? Well . . . okay. I never did tell you about how I met Luna, did I?” I settled back slightly on the mat. “It would have been about five years ago. I was in my shop, same as I usually was, and I remember hearing the bell go as someone walked in. I didn’t really notice her until she came up to the counter . . .”

The stars glowed down from above.

| | | | | | | | |

It was two days before Anne was well enough to get up and walk around, and two more before she was strong enough to work a gate stone to leave the Hollow. Not long by medical standards, but it was the longest I’d ever seen Anne out of action, and I kept a close eye on her. Physically she was back to perfect health in less than a week, but she was quieter, more withdrawn. I was worried about her, but when I tried probing, Anne made it clear that she didn’t want to talk.

I tried to get Lightbringer and Zilean indicted for breaking the Concord. Anne was officially a mage now, after all, and that meant she had the same rights as any other Light mage . . . in theory. An investigation was started, but I wasn’t surprised when it began to drag. What really made me flip my lid was the news Rain gave me afterwards.

“They’re doing what?” I nearly shouted.

“Don’t jump to conclusions,” Rain said. I’d come into Keeper HQ, and we were in my office. A little paper had accumulated on the desk since the spring, but not much. “It’s still at preliminaries.”

“They’re investigating Anne for running that clinic?”

“According to the records, it wasn’t authorised . . .”

“Let me see if I’ve got this straight,” I said. “Lightbringer and Zilean just literally flayed Anne alive and as far as I can tell, the investigation team’s response has been to have one interview and then let the two of them go. But they’re willing to prosecute Anne for fucking healing people for free?”

“They’re not connected, Verus.” Rain looked weary, but I was too angry to care. “One is the Order of the Star; the other is the regulatory staff at—”

“Jesus Christ.” I stalked to the window and stared down over the street. Right at that moment, if Morden had given me the opportunity to burn the whole Council, I’d have said yes. Why was I working for these people?

“I might have a different job for you,” Rain said.

I didn’t answer.

“The Council are still worried about the possibility of an attack on the War Rooms,” Rain said. “They’ve set up some new security systems, but they’re in the preliminary phase. A diviner would be useful.”

I didn’t turn around.

“Verus?”

“The last time I checked, the Council thought that the one who was supposed to be behind this attack on the War Rooms was Morden,” I said. “So why would they want me of all people messing with their security systems?”

“Not everyone thinks that way.”

“This isn’t their idea, is it? It’s yours.”

“I don’t think you’re a traitor,” Rain said. “No, the Council didn’t ask for you, not specifically. But they assigned me the job, and you’re the person I’d pick for it. You’ve been wanting to get on the duty roster—well, this is a way to do it.”

I still didn’t answer. “Well?” Rain asked.

“Morden isn’t going to attack the War Rooms,” I said.

“How do you know?”

“It’s not because he tells me his plans,” I said. “I just know he won’t. You know why?”

Rain shook his head.

“Because he doesn’t need to,” I said. “If Morden really does want to bring the Council down, then attacking them directly would be the worst thing he could do. It’d unify them, give them an external threat. You know the real reason the Council are so weak nowadays? It’s shit like this. Lightbringer and Zilean just kidnapped Anne in broad daylight and tortured her for information, and everyone knows they tortured her for information, and you know what’s going to happen to them? Nothing. We’ll give evidence, and there’ll be interviews, and reports. And then something will go wrong. The paperwork will get held up, or your superior won’t authorise it, and a year from now Lightbringer and Zilean will still be around. Maybe their freedom to act will be curtailed a bit, but that’s all. What message do you think that sends? All the other mages who aren’t in tight with the Council look at this, and they think: ‘That could be me, that could happen to me.’ Every time that happens, it chips a little bit away at the Council’s base of support. Out of all the mages in Britain—Light, Dark, and independent—how many are really loyal to the Council anymore? One in ten? The only reason the Council works at all is because of mages like you. And there are fewer of you than there used to be.” I shook my head. “Morden doesn’t need to destroy the Council. He just needs to wait for it to destroy itself.”

Rain was silent for a moment. “Do you want the job?”

“No,” I told him, and walked out.