Forged

chapter 5

Morden got in touch the next day.

The gate shimmered and faded behind me as I stepped into the shadow realm and glanced around. I saw green, rolling hills, with tall trees rising up into the sky. To my right, the ground sloped down into a lake, while up ahead, a collection of white-roofed buildings peeked up from behind the trees. Behind were the fuzzy and indistinct shapes of mountains. The air was warm with a gentle breeze, like a pleasant summer’s day.

The beauty of the scenery was marred by scars of battle. The grass around my feet where I’d landed had been burnt black in a twenty-foot radius, and while some of the trees rose tall, others had been shattered, their stumps ending in jagged spikes. The remains of a jetty and boathouse were charred wreckage by the lake, and though I was still a long way from the buildings at the top of the hill, I could see that at least one had collapsed. Shoots of new grass were poking up from where the greenery had been burned away, but the damage was clearly recent.

Morden’s four apprentices were waiting for me a little way up the hill. The looks they gave me as I approached weren’t friendly, but at least they weren’t planning to attack this time. “Good morning,” I told them. “I assume you’re escorting me in.”

“This way,” the tall boy said curtly. I followed him, and the other three fell in around me.

“I didn’t catch your name,” I said as we walked.

“I didn’t tell you.”

I nodded. “Manticore, wasn’t it?” I glanced at the brown-haired girl. “And you’d be Lyonesse.”

The two of them shot me looks.

The other boy spoke up. “You’re calling yourself Manticore?”

“Shut up,” Manticore said.

“Oh, right,” I said. “You haven’t told them. Should I use your birth name?”

Manticore gave me an annoyed look. The other girl opened her mouth to say something, and the taller one—Lyonesse—shot her a glare that made her close it again.

I was tempted to keep teasing them but decided to ease off. “So I’m guessing the four of you used to be students here.”

“Before your people destroyed it,” Lyonesse said.

The name of this shadow realm was Arcadia. It had been something between a school for adepts and a military training camp, and Morden had been the one running it. The Council had invaded and destroyed it at the same time that I had my showdown with Richard and Sal Sarque. “They’re not really my people.”

“It was the Council who did the attack,” Lyonesse said. “And you were on the Council.”

“So was Morden.”

Lyonesse frowned.

“So how come—?” the other boy began.

“Stop talking to him,” Manticore said curtly. We walked the rest of the way in silence.

Morden was standing on what had once been the school’s front lawn. The rosebushes and hedges had been torn apart, but the grass of the lawn had mostly survived, probably because it had been too low to be hit by the crossfire. Behind Morden was what must have been the main entrance hall, built from white stone. It looked to me as though the defenders had fortified the front of the hall and used it as cover, and the Council forces had responded by calling in the heavy artillery. The entire building behind Morden lay in ruins: the only way you could even tell that it had been an entrance hall was by looking at the outline of the walls.

“Verus,” Morden greeted me. “I see you found your way here.”

“Your directions were fine,” I said. “You do seem to have a knack for finding pleasant places to live. Did you design Arcadia yourself?”

“I had some hand in it,” Morden said. Standing alone in the wreckage, he made an odd contrast, a figure in black on a field of green and white.

I gave Morden a curious look. “Does it bother you, what happened here?”

Morden gave a slight smile that didn’t touch his eyes. “Shall we get down to business?”

“Let’s.”

Morden’s four apprentices walked past me to stand near him, spreading out into a formation that left the five of them on one side and me on the other. “You asked me for a stepping-stone,” Morden said, “but it would be more accurate to say that what you need is leverage. Against the Council in general, and Levistus in particular. Would you agree?”

“That seems fair, yes.”

Morden nodded. “Do you know why Levistus was so strongly opposed to any action against White Rose?”

I frowned. I hadn’t been expecting the question, and it took me a moment to answer. “Because he wanted to keep you off the Council. Without all the blackmail material you got from there, you wouldn’t have been able to get your seat.”

“Correct,” Morden said, “but there is another side to it that you were never made aware of. White Rose, while it existed, held the largest reserve of blackmail material within the Light political landscape. The second largest reserve was held by Levistus.”

“Really?”

“You first encountered Levistus during his attempt to acquire the fateweaver,” Morden said. “He failed spectacularly, yet shortly afterwards advanced from the Junior to the Senior Council. His failure with White Rose was just as complete, yet that didn’t stop him from forging an alliance with Alma and Sal Sarque. And don’t forget his personal vendetta against you—pursuing a grudge against a lesser mage is one thing, but failing at it quite another. Levistus lacks Bahamus’s birth and connections, he does not have the proven war records of Sal Sarque and Druss, and he does not possess Alma’s administrative skill. So why is he perhaps the most powerful man on the Council?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted.

“Levistus’s power lay in secrets,” Morden said. “Many of which were also known to White Rose. The two of them had an arrangement where neither would disrupt the other. My actions threatened that.”

“Huh,” I said. I’d always wondered why Levistus seemed to have such a particular issue with Morden. Come to think of it, maybe that was one of the reasons he’d never liked me, either. Secrets only have power if they stay secret, and having a diviner around would cut into his territory. “So where did he get all those secrets? Mind magic?”

“I’m sure he would have gleaned the odd titbit, but every Council mage takes precautions against mind-reading. No, what Levistus has is much more interesting, and it was only relatively late in my time on the Council that I was able to discover it. Levistus has access to a bound synthetic intelligence.”

I frowned. “An imbued item?”

“Not exactly. It is a thinking, conscious mind, grown over time. Unlike most mage creations, this one was designed to interface with machines, and in particular computer and communication systems.”

“Communication systems? Like radio signals?”

“It intercepts, decrypts, and searches them,” Morden said. “Effectively, Levistus has a small, private version of the British government’s GCHQ, or the American NSA, able to collect and sort vast amounts of electronic intelligence. The overwhelming majority is useless or irrelevant, but not all.”

“I wouldn’t have thought he’d get much from the Council, given how low-tech they are.”

“You’d be surprised,” Morden said. “It only takes one bureaucrat or Council aide to make a phone call. The phone call is intercepted, flagged by an algorithm, and passed on in a daily report. Any clues in that message can in turn be investigated in more detail, whether by his agents or by Levistus himself. Levistus has been in possession of this synthetic intelligence for over twenty years. Twenty years of compound interest on information adds up to a very large amount.”

“And your idea is to get hold of that information and use it against Levistus and the Council.”

“I am not aware of the exact contents of Levistus’s files,” Morden said. “But they are extensive. I imagine they will more than satisfy your needs.”

“I can see a problem here,” I said. “Levistus is going to have the tightest security on those files that he possibly can. He’ll either have them in some data focus that’s locked to his magical signature, or just keep them all in his head. He’s a mind mage; he can probably memorise them all without breaking a sweat.”

“Indeed,” Morden said. “But I am not suggesting you go after Levistus’s private vaults. I am suggesting you go to the source. The synthetic intelligence itself.”

“How do you know there’s anything there?” I asked. “Levistus could just take out anything he needs on a weekly basis and delete the rest.”

“He could,” Morden agreed. “And that would be the logical approach were he entirely focused on security. However, without existing data to cross-reference, it becomes harder to separate useful signals from noise. I suspect in the early days Levistus might have been willing to make such a sacrifice, but he has been operating this system for a very long time, more than long enough to become complacent. By the time I chanced upon his secret, he was, in my judgement, no longer spending enough personal time and attention on administering the synthetic intelligence for such an approach to be a realistic possibility. I believe that he has allowed data to accumulate for the sake of convenience.”

“But you’re not sure,” I pointed out.

Morden spread his hands. “Things may have changed. But as I say, this is my own judgement.”

“Mm,” I said in a neutral tone. It was still possible that Morden was leading me into a trap. “All right. Say I go after this synthetic intelligence. Where is it? In some super-fortified shadow realm?”

Morden smiled. “That’s the good news. Levistus couldn’t install it in a shadow realm. No radio. So he looked for a central location with the best reception he could find.”

A fuzzy patch of grey appeared in the air between me and Morden, around five or six feet tall. Lines of yellow-white light appeared within, tracing a three-dimensional shape. It was a tower, roughly rectangular but with protruding panels, about five times as tall as it was wide. At the top, the structure broke up into an irregular stack of blocks, with a thin mast protruding from the highest one.

I tilted my head, studying the design. “A skyscraper?”

“Recognise it?” Morden asked.

It took me a second. “Heron Tower,” I said. It was at Liverpool Street, right in the middle of London’s financial district.

Morden nodded. “One of the tallest buildings in the city, and far enough removed from the Council power centres at Canary Wharf and Westminster. Levistus’s data centre is here.” The tallest block on the tower, the one with the radio mast, blinked red.

“Huh,” I said. I must have looked up at Heron Tower a thousand times while living in London. I’d never suspected a thing. “How come no one’s noticed anything?”

“Levistus has opted for stealth over fortification. The data centre has almost no permanent wards, and the few magical sources within are heavily shielded. No bound guardians, no powerful defences to radiate an obvious signal to magesight.”

“Security forces?”

“As I said, stealth over fortification,” Morden said. “The system is entirely automated. Remember that Levistus’s primary concern when setting up the site was not defending it against Dark mages, but against Light ones. He would not have been able to permanently staff it without the risk that someone would talk.”

“So in theory pretty much anyone could just break in and steal the hard drives,” I said. “Is that what you’re saying?”

“More or less.”

“Okay,” I said. “So if this place is such a great target, why haven’t you knocked it over?”

“Morden doesn’t need anything some Light mage could give him,” Lyonesse said. She and the other three had been standing quietly up until now.

“Trust me,” I told her, “there are lots of things your master could do with that.”

“While such material is less useful to me now than when I was on the Council,” Morden said, “it is still valuable.”

“Which makes me wonder why you haven’t made a move.”

“While Levistus’s data centre may not be fortified, it is still defended,” Morden said. “The location has multiple redundant alarm systems. If any are triggered, Levistus can deploy a rapid reaction force. Privately hired mercenaries, probably from outside the country.”

“Mercenaries don’t sound too bad.”

“Secondly, the data centre contains a compact and powerful bomb. I suspect, but do not know, that it is set to detonate in case of any incursion that reaches the computer systems at the centre. The bomb is more than powerful enough to destroy the synthetic intelligence and all of the records on-site.”

“Ah,” I said. “If he can’t have it, no one can.”

“And that is why I have not taken action,” Morden said. “Destroying the data centre would prevent Levistus from gaining any future benefit, but he would still have access to the records it had generated already. Over time it would weaken him, but it would take years, and any influence he lost would simply be gained by other Council members instead. I judged it not worth the risk.”

“But if you could disable the bomb and retrieve the records . . .”

Morden nodded.

I tapped my lip. “What are the bomb’s triggers?”

“You’re a diviner. I expect you can find out.”

I studied the glowing lines of the tower. “Hmm.”

“Oh, and I would suggest timing your attack for, say, tomorrow afternoon.”

I shot Morden a look. “Why?”

“Just a suggestion,” Morden said. “You’re free to ignore it.”

“Your little suggestions have a habit of being not so little,” I said. “I’ll keep it in mind. One last thing. What are you going to be doing while I’m dealing with this?”

“You mean, will I be coming with you?” Morden asked. “No. Honestly, Verus, I really don’t think you need me to hold your hand. Besides, Levistus is your problem more than he is mine.”

“If he wasn’t yours as well, you wouldn’t be being this helpful.”

“Needs versus wants,” Morden said. “The one who wants sets the terms. Was there anything else?”

Tomorrow afternoon didn’t give me much time. I’d need to stake out the place and path-walk to feel out the defences. Even once I’d learned everything I could, I had a feeling this wouldn’t be a one-man job. “No,” I said. “I think that’s enough to go on.”

We departed without incident, Morden’s students giving me suspicious looks as I walked away. Before gating out, I glanced around the ruins of Arcadia. It was still beautiful, despite the damage. I wondered if the adepts who’d trained here had seen it as a haven, and whether it would grow into a legend over time.

I also wondered whether Morden’s help was a form of revenge on Levistus and the Council for what they’d done here. Over the past few years, Morden and I had both sat on the Council, and we’d both been stripped of our positions. There was a certain symmetry in the two of us being the ones to strike back.

—

I spent the afternoon scouting out Heron Tower and path-walking to test its defences. There was good news and bad news.

The good news was that I was pretty sure I could break in. The bad news was that as I’d suspected, this wasn’t going to be a one-man job. If I wanted to have any reasonable chance of this succeeding, I’d need help. And that was a problem, because while I knew a lot of people capable of supplying that help, there were good reasons that I didn’t want to ask them.

The natural choice for a job like this was Luna. Luna isn’t the best combat mage, but her chance magic is excellent for stealth operations. Just as important, I knew her, trusted her, and we knew how to work together. The problem was that while I was pretty sure we could get into the data centre without being detected, leaving would be another story. There was a very good chance that I was going to end up shooting my way out, along with anyone I brought with me. And if I did that with Luna, it was only a matter of time until the news got back to the Council. At that point, Luna would become an outlaw, just like me. The life as a shopkeeper and independent mage that she’d so carefully built would be destroyed. I couldn’t do that to her.

Going to Variam brought the same issues. He’d be worse at the stealth parts of the job, better at the combat ones, but again, it would only take one person recognising him for his career as a Keeper to be over. In fact, pretty much anyone with any kind of relationship with the Council was out for the same reasons, which ruled out all Light mages and most independents.

There was the option of Anne. She was more than powerful enough and couldn’t care less about getting into trouble with the Council, given that she was on their most-wanted list already. Unfortunately, she was on that list for very good reasons, the main one being that she was possessed by a human-hating, enormously powerful, and probably insane jinn. On top of that, Dark Anne was the one currently running things, and she was violent, impulsive, and unreliable. I didn’t want to trust her with something like this unless I had no other choice.

So I needed someone who was either a Dark mage or the next thing to it, but who could be depended on to perform a difficult and dangerous job. And it had to be someone I knew well enough to trust.

Put like that, I could only really think of one person who fit.

—

And that’s pretty much all of it,” I finished.

I was standing in a small park near to the old Arcana Emporium. Back in the old days, before my shop had been burned down, I’d used it as a gating point. Thick trees and bushes blocked out line of sight to the buildings all around, and provided some shade from the late afternoon sun.

The man standing in front of me was big and heavily muscled, as tall as me but with the build of a heavyweight boxer. His arms were folded, the muscle outlines visible through his sleeves, and he was staring past my shoulder, apparently deep in thought. He’d listened to my entire story without saying a word.

“So?” I prompted when Cinder didn’t speak.

Cinder looked up at me with a frown, then went back to studying the grass on the small hillock over my shoulder.

“Are you in?” I asked eventually.

“Thinking,” Cinder said in his rumbling voice.

A minute went by.

“Is this going to take a while?” I asked when Cinder still didn’t talk. “Because I could give you some time. You know, go for a walk, get some tea . . .”

Cinder didn’t answer.

“Learn a new language . . . work out the issues with general relativity . . .”

“You going to shut up?”

I stayed quiet.

“All right,” Cinder said at last.

“All right?”

Cinder nodded.

“Any questions?”

“No.”

“You don’t even want to hear the plan?”

“You’re about to tell me.”

“Well . . . yes.”

“So?”

I sighed. “You know, you’re much less fun to explain things to than Luna.”

Cinder just looked at me.

“Fine,” I said, handing Cinder a tablet. “You can see the blueprints for Heron Tower there. Levistus’s data centre is on the two floors in that top block, highlighted in red.”

Cinder took the tablet and zoomed in, studying the map. “Getting in is easy,” I said. “Getting in without the bomb going off is hard. The blast won’t threaten you but it’ll destroy the records I’m there to get. Unfortunately, whoever set up the security measures for the place was thorough. There are a lot of redundant and overlapping triggers.” I’d spent a good two hours path-walking, trying to figure out a way to disarm the alarm systems, and I hadn’t found one. Any attempt to disarm it piecemeal just caused another trigger to activate instead, and the frustrating thing was that I often couldn’t tell why my attempts were failing. Though I wasn’t sure, I suspected that Levistus might have put in security measures specifically to mess with diviners. “Opening the doors triggers the bomb, cutting through the walls triggers the bomb, gating inside triggers the bomb, and trying to interfere with any of those triggers also triggers the bomb. There’s a chance that if I get close I might be able to figure out a way through, but I don’t want to bet on it.”

“So?”

“There’s one weakness I can find,” I said. “Levistus didn’t want to use heavy ward coverage, because that would have made his spy station too obvious to magesight. So he’s had to rely on technological defences, mostly sensors and alarms. They need power.” I nodded at the tablet. “The main electrical switchboards are in the mechanical levels in the basement. The backup power is on the roof. If we cut the power at both locations, that should open up a way into the data centre.”

Cinder raised an eyebrow at me. “Should?”

“I haven’t been able to test it,” I admitted.

“If it doesn’t work?”

“Then I’ll improvise,” I said. “If it helps, I’d like for you to handle the basement while I take the roof. That means that any nasty surprises are going to be landing on me, not you.”

Cinder grunted and turned his attention back to the map. “What’s their backup?”

“Backup is going to be Levistus’s personal response team,” I said. “The leader is Levistus’s personal aide, a mage called Barrayar. Force mage, pretty dangerous. There’s also a small hit squad that I haven’t met. They look like either low-grade mages or adepts, but they seem like combat specialists. One teleporter, one force blaster, and one who uses hand-to-hand attacks. Once an alarm is triggered, they’ll gate in within minutes.”

“Keepers?”

“That’s the good news. Levistus’s alarms are set to alert him, not the Council, and he isn’t going to call for Council reinforcements as long as he has any other alternative. Given the contents of that data centre, the last thing he wants to do is draw attention.”

“Exit?”

“From the basement, you’ll be able to gate out anytime you want,” I said. “The upper levels are more difficult due to the gate wards.”

“Bringing that elemental?”

“That’s the plan.”

“All right.” Cinder tossed the tablet back to me. “I do this, you find me Del.”

“Okay. I can’t guarantee she’ll cooperate, but—”

“No,” Cinder said. “You find her, and you make sure I get a chance to talk to her.”

I grimaced. I didn’t like it, but it wasn’t like I hadn’t seen this coming. “All right.”

—

It was late that night before I was able to empty my pockets onto my desk, sit down on my chair, and start unlacing my shoes in preparation for bed. Outside my window, the stars of the Hollow were glowing in the purple-and-green nebulae of the shadow realm’s night sky. It was beautiful, but I felt tired and unhappy.

The plan I’d worked out for the attack on Heron Tower was sketchy, with a lot of places where things could go wrong. If this had been the old days and if the participants had been my old group—me, Luna, Vari, Anne—I never would have okayed it. But now I had the fateweaver, and Cinder. We might or might not get the data, but I was pretty sure we’d be able to make it out in one piece.

But it wasn’t the plans for tomorrow that were bothering me. Instead, my mind kept wanting to go back to my memories of last night, and that brief split-second where I’d looked into Symmaris’s eyes. I hadn’t known Symmaris well, but I had known her, known her name and quite a few other things about her, right up until the point where my bullet had blown the brains out of her skull and turned her from a living, breathing person into a corpse. It hadn’t been the first time Symmaris had been involved in an attempt to kill me, and judging from what I knew of her, she’d probably deserved it, along with the rest of the mages on that team.

So why was it bothering me?

Because it wasn’t really about Symmaris, it was about all the other people before her. Symmaris wasn’t the first person I’d killed, or the second, or the twentieth. She was just the most recent addition to a whole pile of bodies. And tomorrow, I was going into battle against Levistus’s men, and they’d be trying to kill me, and to stop them I’d have to kill them first, and one by one, the pile would keep getting higher. And worst of all, I couldn’t see any way it was likely to stop. There’d always be some new enemy or some old one. How long before I got so tired of it that letting one of them kill me first would start to seem like an easy way out?

In the past, what had held me together had been my friends. When I’d brushed up against the darkness, Anne and Luna and Vari had grounded me, given me something to hold on to. Now I was drifting.

And if I succeeded at everything, if I somehow managed to bring Anne back from her possession, would she still want me? Back in the early days, my relationship with Anne had nearly ended because I killed one person. How would she react to what I’d become now?

I sighed and lay down on my bed. I’d stripped off my clothes while I was thinking, and now I switched off the light and lay on my back, staring up at the ceiling. I remembered a conversation I’d had with a Dark mage, back when I was still an apprentice. He was an older man who’d been a battle-mage for a long time before retiring, and he’d told me something that had stuck with me. He’d said that a lot of the people he’d known back in the life had died not when they threw themselves into danger, but after. They’d been able to stay ahead of their enemies while they’d been going all out; it had been afterwards, when they’d tried to slow down, that it had caught up with them.

I couldn’t afford to do that. I had to be ruthless.

But how much of myself was I going to lose?

My artificial arm felt cold against my side. I put it out of my mind and forced myself to sleep.

—

I was in the middle of a dream when I became aware of someone seeking me. The dream was vague, confused, a memory of sitting on the high grassy fields of the Heath with Anne, but as I rose to my feet I saw that I was alone. I readied myself, aware of a presence coming closer.

A door opened in the air just up ahead, white-and-blue crystal. It swung open to reveal a figure behind. “Hey, Alex,” Luna said. “Got a minute?”

I shook off the sleep-mist and walked forward, letting the dream weaken and fade. By the time I reached the door and stepped through, the scenery behind me had faded to black. The door swung shut with a click.

We were standing in a palace of crystal and silver, the colours a mixture of pale blues and whites. The hallway I’d stepped into looked almost as though it had been sculpted from glowing ice. Floating staircases curved away up to landings with high arched doors on the level above.

“I was wondering if you’d call,” I said, looking at Luna. Luna was wearing a white dress with sky-blue slashes, and heeled shoes that rang on the glass-like floor. “You look good.”

“It’s Elsewhere,” Luna pointed out. “I can look however I want. And you picked a hell of a time to disappear on me.”

“Yeah, sorry. I’m not really the safest person to be around right now.”

“Is this about those Keepers?”

“They’re still checking on you,” I said.

“Those two, Avenor and Saffron?” Luna shook her head. “Don’t worry about it. They’d have given up a week ago if they weren’t so desperate.”

“Mm.”

“Stop worrying, I know what I’m doing. Come on, I need to talk to you.”

I wasn’t as comfortable as Luna about shrugging off a Keeper investigation, but she turned and started walking, and I followed. We started up one of the staircases towards the balcony above. “Anne came to see me,” Luna said.

“I know.”

“You know—of course you do. You couldn’t have stopped by?”

“Every time those Keepers talk to you, Saffron’s reading your surface thoughts and Avenor’s watching your body language,” I said. “The less you have to lie to them, the safer you’ll be.”

“I was there for the raid on Onyx’s mansion and for your trip to Sal Sarque’s fortress,” Luna said. “Did they figure that out?”

“No,” I admitted.

“Yeah, because I didn’t let them. Come on, Alex, give me some credit. I’m not a little girl anymore.”

“You’re really not, are you?” I said. I looked sideways at Luna as we walked along the balcony and through the arch. She looked confident and poised, and I remembered the first time I’d brought her into Elsewhere, where I’d been the one to step into her dream. She’d come a long way since then. It was a pleasant thought. Even if this doesn’t work out, I’ll be leaving something behind.

“What are you smiling about?” Luna asked.

“Oh, nothing. You were saying?”

“Right,” Luna said. “Anne. What exactly is your plan with her?”

We’d come through into a long hall with railed galleries running around the edge. A swimming pool rippled in the centre of the hall, and fires burnt in fireplaces at floor level, giving an interesting flame-and-ice contrast, red against blue. “The Council’s the priority, then Richard,” I said. “As long as they’re out there, Anne and I have a reason to work together. Once they’re gone . . . well, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

Luna nodded as if that had been what she’d expected to hear. “I’m not sure you’re going to have that long. When I was speaking to Anne . . . you were watching that?”

“Yeah.”

“Figures. Alex, she really scared me. I’ve met Dark mages out to kill me and Light ones out to kidnap me, and she frightened me more than any of them. I’d rather be back in Onyx’s mansion dodging fireblasts than spend another ten minutes alone in a room with her.”

“Why?” I said slowly. “What are you afraid she’ll do?”

“I don’t know,” Luna said. She fell silent and we walked a few steps, her shoes tapping on the gallery floor. “It felt like a recruitment pitch. I think she’s trying to get a bunch more jinn-bonded mages, with her as the boss.”

I frowned, thinking. “I’ve been learning some things about jinn.” I told Luna what I’d heard from Sonder. “Maybe that’s her plan. She wants hosts for those four ifrit.”

“And then what?”

“God knows.”

“Do you think the jinn’s making the decisions?” Luna asked. “Is she that far gone?”

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “The jinn might be nudging her, but she’s still the one in control. For now, at least.”

“Yeah, that was the feeling I got too,” Luna said. “But I don’t think that’s the good news you seem to think it is.”

“Why not?”

Luna was silent for a few seconds before answering. “Why do you think Anne fell in love with you?”

I looked at her in surprise. “Is this really the time?”

“There’s somewhere I’m going with this.”

“Fine . . . Because she trusted me, I guess. And because I was smart enough and good-looking enough and got on with her well enough and all the rest. But I always had the feeling that the biggest reason was that she’d spent most of her life having everyone pull back from her and be afraid of her, and I didn’t.”

Luna made a face. “I was afraid you were going to say something like that.”

I looked at her in annoyance.

“Argh.” Luna ran a hand through her hair. “I’m not good at explaining these things. Look, Anne and I have spent a lot of time together. Visiting at the apprentice programme, meeting at the shop, watching anime in the evenings. She might have liked you the most, but I’m pretty sure I understood her the most, better than anyone except maybe Vari. Now, I can’t remember when it was that you told me about her dark side, but I do remember it wasn’t actually much of a surprise.”

“Okay . . .”

“What do you think were the things you did that made the biggest impression on her?”

I shrugged. “The whole business with Fountain Reach, I guess. And then what happened with Sagash.”

“Right.”

I waited. We’d done a full circuit around the walkway. I stopped, leaning on the railing, and looked at Luna. She looked back at me.

“What are you getting at?” I asked.

“None of those things involved you trusting her.”

“Well . . . maybe not.”

“Okay, Alex, harsh truth time, okay? Anne didn’t fall in love with you because you trusted her. And it wasn’t because you’re tall and fit and good-looking and owned your own house, though that helped. She fell in love with you because you were stronger than her.”

I gave Luna a disbelieving look. “That doesn’t make sense.”

“Why?”

“Well, for one thing, I’m not.”

“I know that’s how it looks to you,” Luna said. “But think about how it looks to her. You saved her from those gunmen at Archway, you rescued her from Vitus’s shadow realm, you rescued her again from Sagash’s shadow realm, you got her away from Lightbringer and Zilean . . . you get the idea? Every time she’s been in real trouble, you’ve been there to save the day, either by outsmarting the people who get in your way or by flat-out killing them. I know Anne’s got more raw power but she can’t do what you do. Light Anne likes that because she feels that when she’s with you, instead of having to take care of everyone else, she gets to be the one taken care of for a change. And Dark Anne likes that because strength is the only thing she’s got any respect for.”

“Okay, look,” I said. “Whether I agree or not, how is this going to help?”

“You’re thinking that it doesn’t matter if Dark Anne’s evil, she still cares about you,” Luna said. “She does, but not in the way you think. She’s going to push you to see what she can get away with, and she’s going to keep pushing, and being nice to her is just going to make things worse. It won’t matter that the jinn’s not in charge.”

I looked down at Luna. She looked back up at me, leaning on the railing, her gaze clear and serious. “You’re not just worried about me, are you?”

“If Anne does go ahead with this recruiting spree, I don’t think she’s going to want strangers.”

“I’ll do what I can to step on it,” I said. “But right now the Council comes first.”

“It’s not the Council I’m worried about.”

I watched Luna walk away, disappearing into the blue-white light of the palace, before turning away to open a doorway back into my own dreams. Between my arm, Anne, and the Council, there were a lot of clocks running. I wished I knew which was going to run down first.