Hidden

Chapter 8

I drifted through dreams, old memories rising to the surface and sinking into the depths. A door opened and I stepped through.

As I did everything changed, becoming focused and clear. I was standing in a hallway made out of some kind of black stone. Soft lights glowed from holders, reflecting off the walls. The walls, floor, and ceiling were all made of the same substance—it was somewhere between stone and glass, with a mirrored finish which cast back the light with perfect clarity. I brushed my fingers across it and found it cool and smooth to the touch. Turning, I saw an open doorway behind me.

I didn’t recognise this place but there didn’t seem to be any immediate danger, and I was curious. I walked down the corridor.

The corridor opened up into a large curved room. A long dining table of dark wood sat in the centre; bowls made out of a vivid green glass were spaced along its length. A little farther away was a sofa and a set of chairs, all the same distinctive shade of green, contrasting oddly with the black-glass walls. Lights hung from the ceiling, but the room was dominated by the row of massive arch windows along the left wall. They had no glass or panes, and the view I glimpsed was so bizarre that I walked up and leant on one of the windowsills so that I could gaze out.

The windows led out onto a railed balcony made of the same strange black glass, and beyond was an impossible landscape stretching away to infinity. Giant trees rose beside mirrored lakes, stretching up into a clear blue sky. The trees were the size of tower blocks, and only the perspective gave a clue to how vast they were. The biggest looked as though it could have cast St. Paul’s Cathedral in its shadow, and tiny wooden buildings and round platforms peeked from its twisting branches. Farther away I could see rolling hills, distant grasslands, and sunlit mountains on the horizon. All of the landscape teemed with life; birds flew, grass and trees and flowers crowded the hills. It was a lush, verdant land . . . until you looked down. A few hundred feet away, at ground level, the grass and trees were cut off abruptly, as though with a knife. A black wall formed a perfectly curved arc around my current location, stretching to the left and the right until it was hidden by the edges of the window. The difference was razor-edged and startling—outside the walls flowers bloomed in grassy meadows, while inside everything was sculpted from the same black glass, without so much as a blade of grass to break up the unnatural smoothness. The outside was natural, wild, and alive; the inside artificial, ordered, and dead.

I was in Elsewhere, of that I was sure, but not any part of it I’d ever seen. Looking down at the ground and judging the angle, I had to be in some kind of tower. The arc of the walls made me think that they might go all the way around, forming a circle with the tower at the centre. There was something odd about the light: the lakes and the giant trees in the distance were all bathed in sunlight, as was the landscape to either side, but the place I was in now was dimly lit, the black glass reflecting only the light of an overcast day. Something about the layout made me think of the castle in the shadow realm, with the keep at its centre.

I stared down at the black-glass walls. They had to be thirty feet high, and I couldn’t see any gates or ways to climb to the top. They didn’t look designed to keep people out. It was more as though . . .

A voice spoke from behind me. “They’re to keep things in.”

I jumped, twisting in midair, coming down in a fighting stance. A blade of blue-white energy ignited at my hand and I held it pointing down at the floor.

The girl who’d spoken was Anne . . . or something that looked like her. She had Anne’s face and eyes and slender height, but the rest of her was different. Instead of falling to shoulder length her hair stretched down her back, and in place of Anne’s soft-coloured clothing she wore a floor-length dress of vivid scarlet that shone in the darkened room. She held something in her hands, though at this distance I couldn’t see what. “You were wondering about the walls.” She had Anne’s voice, but it was stronger, more confident. “They’re to make sure what’s in here stays in.”

I stared at Anne, or whoever it was. “What are you doing here?”

“That’s a little rude.” She walked towards the table, coming into the light from the windows. As she did, I saw that she was holding a long knife, tapping the blade against the palm of her hand. She placed it on the table with a clack, then nodded towards my right hand. “You don’t need that.”

I was still holding the energy blade. Elsewhere is fluid; creating a sword of magical energy is as easy as thinking. You can make any tool or weapon you can think of, lighter than a feather and stronger than steel, with all kinds of amazing properties which could never exist in the real world . . . and they’re all completely useless. I opened my hand and let the blade vanish. “There you go,” the girl said. “Relax. I’m not going to hurt you.”

I looked at her for a moment. “You’re not Anne,” I said at last.

“No shit, Sherlock. Did you think my hair grew twelve inches overnight?”

“The sarcasm is kind of a giveaway too.” I studied the girl. “Whose Elsewhere is this? Anne’s or yours?”

“That’s a hard one to answer. Do you know how Anne can go without sleep?”

“I know it has to do with adjusting her biochemistry, but no.”

“Human bodies have safety cutoffs designed to force them to operate at lower capacity if they’re short of resources like food or sleep. Anne can override those cutoffs and keep going when normal people can’t—enough to kill herself if she’s not careful. She’s been doing that for three days straight, and that’s why she’s in a deep sleep right now. Too deep to touch Elsewhere.”

“And this is relevant because . . . ?”

“The cat’s away, so the mice can play.”

I studied not-Anne. She did look like Anne, at least physically. But the way she moved and spoke . . . it was like a different person in the same body. “Does that make you the cat or the mouse?”

“Let’s just say I’m a side of Anne that doesn’t get out much. Figures the one chance we’d get to talk would be now, but better late than never.”

“How long has Anne been using Elsewhere?”

“She started during her time with Sagash.” Not-Anne walked towards the windows, approaching me at an angle, shoes clicking on the black glass. “An escape, really. He controlled everything in the real world so she built herself a refuge.” She came to a stop by one of the windows, looking out over the endless view. “It’s not just a backdrop. It’s all detailed, every bit. It’s quite beautiful, you know.”

Something in not-Anne’s voice made me glance up with a frown. She was staring out at the distant forests, and there was a strange expression in her eyes—not hostile, but not happy, either. “Have you been there?”

“I used to.” She stared out for a second longer, then shook her head and turned towards me. “Has Vari told you about what Anne’s home life was like back when they were both in school?”

“No. Wait, so Anne knew about Elsewhere last year? When I was using it with Deleo? She didn’t—”

“In case you haven’t noticed, Anne doesn’t talk about herself much.”

I looked around the tower room of black glass and at the girl in front of me, eyebrows raised. “No kidding. She didn’t tell Vari?”

“No. Now shut up a second and listen. Anne spent a lot of her time as a kid having to take care of everyone else. Cooking, cleaning, nursing them when they were sick, that kind of stuff. She’s always been good at noticing things—she’d see when people needed help, and when her magic developed it was the same thing but stronger. She could look at everyone and see how healthy they were, whether they were hurt, what their bodies needed. And she could fix it, or try to. But here’s the thing—Anne doesn’t actually want to do that all the time. Oh, don’t get me wrong; she likes helping people and she wants to get married and have kids someday, not that there’s much chance of that ever happening, but she doesn’t want to be nurturing and mothering to every single person she meets for the rest of her life. Things like that clinic? She doesn’t do it because she wants to, she does it because she feels like she has to. Because she can heal people, so if she just leaves them alone, it’s her fault, right? But it’s a bottomless pit. Doesn’t matter how many you treat, there’s always another one. And you know what really gets annoying? Half the time they’re not even all that grateful. The better you do your job, the more you fix people’s problems, the more they take it for granted. They think it’s just the way things are supposed to be.” Not-Anne stared at me. “Do you know what it feels like to always take care of everyone and get treated like crap for it? It gets to you. Especially when you’ve got those gossip circles whispering behind your back.”

I looked back at not-Anne. “So what do you want to do about it?”

“Hmph.” Not-Anne looked back out the window. “It’s not like I get the choice. She’s too dutiful.” She paused. “Or she used to be.”

“Before what? Before Sagash? Anne keeps dancing around it but she won’t tell me. It’s obviously really damn important but she can’t make herself talk about it. You’re here because you want me to understand, right?”

“Anne doesn’t talk about it,” not-Anne said, “because she really, really doesn’t want anyone to know what happened in those nine months.”

“I was a Dark apprentice! Does she really think it’s going to be something I’ve never heard before?” I narrowed my eyes at not-Anne. “She’s not just afraid, is she? She’s ashamed of something.”

“Yeah.”

“Ashamed of what? What did Sagash do to her? Did he . . . ?”

Not-Anne looked at me curiously, tilting her head. “Did he what? Wait, are you asking if Sagash sexually abused her or something?”

I hesitated.

“Oh, for God’s sake.” Not-Anne rolled her eyes in disgust. “Use your brain. Anne is a life mage, she can paralyse anyone who touches her. Do you seriously think we need to worry about getting raped?”

“It’s not something I like to talk about, all right?”

“Yeah, well, Sagash doesn’t care,” not-Anne said. “He’s about as asexual as it gets and those bits of him withered years ago. I don’t think he’s got any physical desires left. He’s not human enough.”

“So what does he care about?”

“Power and longevity. He wants to live here forever and be king of his little world. Trouble is, you need subjects to be a king. Another twenty years and he’ll probably go all-the-way crazy and disappear into here with his shadows and never come out, but for now he’s still sane enough to get people to do what he says. And if they don’t do what he says, he makes them.”

“And that was what he did to Anne?”

“That was what he did to Anne. He wanted an apprentice-assassin. Someone who’d go out of the shadow realm, bring him whoever or whatever he wanted for his experiments, and kill anyone who pissed him off. He started training Anne, and when she said no he hurt her till she said yes. Death magic has lots of spells for affecting living bodies, and Sagash knows exactly how far he can go before they get lethal. No chance of the subject dying. Though they might want to. What he wanted Anne to do wasn’t so bad, to begin with. Spell practice, education—used her as a maid, too, when he had guests around. He didn’t need to, it was just to show her off: look how powerful I am, I’ve got a life mage waiting the table. She was still a slave, but it could have been worse.

“So then it got worse. After Anne had picked up the basics he started putting her through combat training. He’d match her up against other Dark apprentices, have them duel until one couldn’t fight anymore. Anne tried surrendering—didn’t work. The apprentice tore her apart and she got a torture session with Sagash for embarrassing him. After that, she fought. She wasn’t much good, but she was powerful. You know how life magic works—it only takes a touch.

“But there was a problem. See, Anne was dangerous in a duel, but Sagash didn’t want a duellist. He wanted an assassin, someone who’d kill for him, and Anne wouldn’t kill. He threatened her, but that was Anne’s line in the sand. She’d given up as much as she was going to and she said no. So obviously he tortured her, but she’d been learning from those fights and she’d figured out how to mute her pain receptors. Sagash could kill her but he couldn’t hurt her. She told Sagash that she’d rather die than become someone like that.”

Not-Anne stopped talking. She looked out at the distant forests, and an unpleasant memory came to my mind. That night when I’d met Anne outside her flat . . . She hadn’t said it in those words, but that had been the subtext, hadn’t it? Given the choice of taking my help or living in danger, she’d picked danger. Better to die than become someone like Sagash . . . or me?

I shook my head hard, trying to forget that last thought. “What happened?”

“Anne made a mistake,” not-Anne said simply. “She thought Sagash needed her alive. But the way he saw it, he didn’t need her at all. He was going to live forever. Sure, he’d invested time in her, but he could always get another. He only wanted her for his Chosen, and if she wasn’t willing to kill she wasn’t any use to him. So he called her bluff. He put her up against a Dark mercenary in the arena. A kid, really, one of those child soldiers. Sagash must have fed him some story or other, promised him a reward, because he didn’t talk, he just went for Anne and tried to kill her. Anne tried to disable him, but Sagash had given the kid a set of wards. Not against lethal attacks, just nonlethal ones. That was when Anne realised that Sagash meant it. She’d said she’d rather die—well, that was the choice he was giving her. Either she fought back and killed the guy, or she was going to die right there. No more life, no more growing up, no chance for a happily ever after somewhere down the line.”

“What did she do?” I asked quietly, even though I knew the answer.

“You know, most people never really think about how magic works.” Not-Anne leant back against the window’s edge, elbows propped against the sill, watching me casually. “Your magic’s a reflection of your personality, right? Well, that goes both ways. If your magic’s good at something, that says something about what kind of person you are. Life magic’s really good at healing. And it’s really good at killing.” She tilted her head. “Do you know just how tired you can get of taking care of everyone all the time?”

I didn’t answer. “Anne got hold of that kid and ripped the life right out of him,” not-Anne said calmly. “Took a few tries, but she didn’t give up. And looking down at his body afterwards . . . In a way, that was where I was born.”

I stared at not-Anne as she leant against the window, the light from outside falling across the scarlet dress. Despite everything she’d been saying, she looked relaxed. I didn’t know what to say.

“So, that night she stayed up thinking about killing herself,” not-Anne said. Her voice was so normal it was disturbing. “Obviously she didn’t. I mean, staying alive was why she’d done it in the first place, it’d kind of defeat the point, right? Things settled down, she recovered a bit, convinced herself she’d never do it again. Then Sagash brought in another kid. Same story, different guy. Second time was easier. Third was easier than the second, fourth was easier than the third. After a while Sagash stopped bringing them in. Either he was running out or he figured Anne had learnt her lesson.”

“How many?” I asked quietly.

Not-Anne shrugged. “Enough.”

I looked at her in silence.

“Anyway, eventually Vari showed up and they broke out. Hurt Sagash but didn’t kill him, more’s the pity, and they got back to London and lived happily ever after . . . except they didn’t. Anne couldn’t accept what she’d done—couldn’t accept me. Oh, she’d been fine with it when she needed me, but once she was safe, well, she didn’t want me around anymore, did she? So she tried to pretend the whole thing never happened. She avoided fighting and duelling, anything that could raise the wrong kind of questions, and put on the pacifist act instead. After all, the only ones who’d been there had been Sagash and the guys she’d been fighting, and since all except Sagash were dead, well, there wasn’t anyone to argue, was there? Except me. So she shut me away.” Not-Anne gestured around her at the black-glass walls. “In here. Where she can forget about me and all the ugly little secrets that don’t belong in her perfect world. But she can’t get rid of me—I’m part of her and she still needs me. When things get really dangerous she’ll bring me out, long enough to keep her alive. She just won’t admit it.”

I remembered the one time I’d seen Anne use her abilities to kill. I hadn’t understood what I’d seen in her eyes, not then. “Okay,” I said. “You brought me here to tell me all this. Why? What do you want?”

“Why do you think?”

“Because you want to be in charge?”

Not-Anne rolled her eyes again. “Jesus, you’re paranoid. Okay, fine, maybe I’d appreciate it if she’d treat me a little better. But there’s kind of a more pressing issue, don’t you think?”

“You mean getting out of this castle.”

“Ding ding, we have a winner! I might have been born here, but I’m not keen on staying for the rest of my life, which isn’t going to be very long at this rate. I’m part of Anne, remember. She dies, I die. Plus no matter how much of a bitch she can be, I don’t actually hate her that much. I want her out of here, and that means she needs to sort out her issues fast, probably within the next twenty-four hours, because somehow I don’t think the Sagash Psycho Club is going to wait around while she takes her time about it. She needs to stop fighting me or she’s not going to make it out.”

I looked at not-Anne with raised eyebrows. “And you think I’m going to be able to do this in twenty-four hours when literally every other person she’s ever met hasn’t been able to do it in five years.”

“Yeah, well, you’re not my first choice either, but it’s not like we’re exactly swimming in options. Pity you didn’t make a move on her last night, would probably have made her open up a bit. You could have spun her the ‘this might be our last night alive’ line.”

I gave not-Anne an irritated look. “That would have been manipulative, sleazy, and extremely stupid given that we’re in a castle of people trying to kill us.”

“Oh, don’t be such a prude. She knows you think she looks hot after last year.”

“She’s eight years younger than me.”

“So? Emotionally she’s probably more mature than you are. Though that’s not saying much.”

I sighed. “You’re a lot less nice than the real Anne, you know that?”

“Yeah, well, next time you’re talking to her remember she thinks all this stuff, she just doesn’t say it. Point is, ever since escaping to London she’s been trying to play the good girl and it isn’t working. That’s why the Light mages don’t like her—they can see she’s hiding something. So we’ve got this stupid situation where she’s too dangerous for the Light mages and not dangerous enough for the Dark ones. She needs to stop pretending.”

“Look, I’m not a psychoanalyst. Shouldn’t you get an actual professional?”

“Right, after you wake up you can go shopping around the castle and find one, maybe have her sit down on a couch for a chat. Oh wait.” Not-Anne glared at me. “We do not have time. You want to drag Anne to a shrink, do it later. Right now you need to do whatever it takes to make her fight her way out of here.”

“Anne does know how to fight. I’ve seen—”

“No, you haven’t. Against Vitus, maybe, and that was only because I was driving. The rest of the time she holds back. If she’d been serious, she’d have killed both those apprentices in her bedroom and we wouldn’t be in this mess.”

“And then she would have been breaking the Concord.”

“Fuck the Concord. Every Dark mage in the country breaks it, why shouldn’t she?” I started to answer and not-Anne waved her hand. “Fine, whatever. I don’t care about long-term solutions, all right? Get Anne out of here and you can do whatever the hell you want.”

“That bit we’re agreed on.” I studied not-Anne. “Does Variam know about you?”

“He’s got his suspicions.” Not-Anne glanced out the window. “Let’s wrap this up.”

“One more thing,” I said. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m getting the impression your priorities are a bit different from Anne’s. Are you sure you want to get away from this castle as badly as she does?”

“Oh, please. Sagash has got the right idea about some things, I’ll give you that, but we’re just furniture to him. Anne and I might not always agree, but one thing we know is that we’re not going to be a slave again. You think I want to be his tool until he uses me up? I want to be the one that everyone else is afraid of, who makes the decisions about who lives or dies and makes everyone shut up when she walks in the room. I don’t want to be Chosen, I want to be queen.”

I looked back at not-Anne for a long moment, feeling a chill. I’d heard that speech before, or something very like it. “It might be better for you and for Anne,” I said quietly, “if you don’t get what you want.”

Not-Anne shrugged. “Not like I’ll ever get the chance.” She pushed herself off the window’s edge. “Time’s up.”

“Why? What’s going to happen?”

“You ask too many questions, you know that?” Not-Anne walked away, deeper into the shadows of the tower. Only her voice echoed around me as she faded from sight. “Just keep her alive. There’s more hanging on it than you know.”

I started to answer, but she was gone. The room I was in was empty, and as I looked around I saw that the room was darker, the light fading. I started back towards the place I’d entered from; the lights above me began to dim and go out one by one, and I broke into a jog. I was alone in the tower, the glass corridors silent but for the sound of my feet. The door I’d entered by was at the end of the corridor, clearly visible in the shadows. I pulled it open, and as I did the last lights went out and I was left in darkness. I stepped through and back into my dreams, the doorway disappearing behind me as everything began to fragment and become fuzzy. Sleep came.

I woke up slowly. I didn’t feel rested, but my neck and back were stiff and aching and I was too uncomfortable to go back to sleep. As I realised where I was, I remembered that I shouldn’t be going back to sleep. In a moment I was fully awake and scanning for danger.

I was propped up against the wall, alone. Anne was gone; with her magic-enhanced physiology she’d recovered from the exertions of three days in the time it had taken me to recover from one. Looking into the futures in which I went down the stairs, I saw that she was in the room below. There were no signs of battle or danger.

Now that I was awake, I was uncomfortably aware of just how big a risk I’d taken falling asleep like that. Still, it had paid off, and both of us were rested—we’d need it for the day ahead. I pulled myself to my feet, wincing at the pain in my muscles. Sleeping in armour is really not comfortable.

The window on the north side of the room looked down onto the grass and the pool of water. From the grey-blue sky I knew that the sun had risen, but the bulk of the castle was blocking its rays and no direct sunlight was touching the grassy enclave. White birds—doves, maybe—were gathered at the rushes by the edge of the pool, dipping their heads to sip fresh water. It was a peaceful scene and I stood in the shadow of the window’s edge, watching idly while I scouted through the futures ahead.

A stir of movement from the north side of the courtyard caught my eye; there was something in the shadow of a crumbling archway. Just enough reflected light came through for me to make out a small long-bodied animal, about the size and shape of a cat but with a pointed face and a thick bushy tail. Red fox. This shadow realm really must be old if it had its own predators.

The fox crept closer, revealing a red coat with splashes of white and black on its underside. A low pile of rubble hid it from the birds by the pool. It came to the edge of the rubble and froze, head down, eyes locked onto the birds in a stalking posture. I watched with interest, taking care not to move and draw attention; I’ve always liked animals, especially predators. The fox was quite still, focused on the birds, and it looked hungry. The doves didn’t seem to have noticed it yet, but there wasn’t any more cover. As soon as it took another couple of steps it’d be seen.

The fox held still and I kept a casual eye on it, my attention still taken up with scouting us a way out. It didn’t look as though anyone was searching for us just yet, but I was still worried about the possibility of some kind of magical detection. The shroud over the place looked as though it would block most standard tracer spells, but my divination still worked, which meant other techniques might too. The shroud also wouldn’t rule out more mundane methods of searching, such as just sending out scouts. I already knew those shadows could fly—if I were Sagash’s apprentices, I’d be using them for aerial recon. They probably didn’t have enough of them to cover the entire castle, but . . .

The fox crouched to spring, and I looked at it curiously. It was still the best part of forty feet from the birds—

The fox leapt, vanished. There was a scuffle and explosion of wings and the doves were airborne, flapping frantically up and away. I’d been about to turn; now I looked down in surprise. What just happened?

The fox was by the pool, its weight on one of the doves and its jaws locked tight. The bird was flapping feebly, trying to get away; the fox sank its teeth into the neck and twisted. There was a crack and the dove went still. The fox hoisted the bird up, looking quickly around, then trotted back towards where it had come, head tilted high so that the dove’s wings trailed on the grass. It covered the distance back to the archway and disappeared into the darkness. The surviving doves were still in the air, circling; the whole thing had taken less than twenty seconds. Nothing was left except a scattering of feathers by the pool.

Footsteps sounded from below and Anne appeared in the stairwell, looking past me out through the window. “Did you see that?” I said.

“The bird?” Anne asked. She was still wearing my greatcoat. “I felt it die, but . . .”

“Not the bird, the fox. Did you see it move?” I’d seen the fox jump, a short bound of a foot or two, then all of a sudden it had been coming down on the bird.

Anne frowned. “No. I think it’s the same one that was here two days ago. It was on the other side of a wall, but when I got closer it just disappeared.”

“Holy crap,” I said. “Blink fox.”

“What’s a blink fox?”

“Magic-bred species—some twentieth-century mages made them as spy familiars. They look like a red fox, but they’ve got human-level intelligence and they can do short-range teleports.”

“You mean it was looking for us?”

I shook my head. “No, it was hunting. If it was under a mage’s control it wouldn’t be that hungry . . . hmm.”

“Hmm, what?”

“I heard those two apprentices saying something about trying to catch a fox. Maybe we could strike a deal with it.”

Anne looked at me with raised eyebrows. “Seriously?”

“It’s been hiding out in this castle, probably longer than you. It’d know a lot about the place.”

“It probably belongs to those apprentices,” Anne said. “Can’t we just get out of here?”

“I guess.” I was reluctant—when I run into a new type of magical creature, my first instinct is to make friends with it, an old habit from my days as Richard’s apprentice where the magical creatures tended to be better company than the humans. But Anne was right; we were on a clock. “You said something yesterday about another way out?”

“There is, but . . . I’m not sure how useful it’s going to be.”

I made a go-ahead gesture and Anne crouched next to me. She drew one finger across the flagstones of the stone floor, tracing out lines. “These are the edges of the castle.” She seemed to have recovered from last night, at least physically—her movements were quick and her voice soft and clear again. “The outer walls are the lines of the stone, the bridge is here. Front gate.” Her finger drew back, tapped a marking a quarter of the way across. “Sagash’s keep.” She drew her finger back farther, placing it on a spot in what would be the north-centre of the castle, mirroring the keep’s position. “This is the other exit.”

I studied the map. If Anne was getting the distances right, we weren’t far away at all.

I should probably take a second here to explain some details about gate magic, because if you’re not familiar with it, it’s probably not obvious just how bad a position we were in here. Gate magic shapes portals between locations, creating a similarity between points in space so that you can step from one to the other. It can be used to travel from place to place within our world, to go from place to place within a shadow realm, or (with more difficulty) to go from our world to a shadow realm or vice versa.

Gate magic can be blocked though, and the wards over this shadow realm were designed to do exactly that. Within the central keep, they would block any use of gate magic or teleportation at all. Outside the keep, the wards wouldn’t stop you gating around the castle, but they would prevent you from using gate magic to get out of the shadow realm unless you were at one specific point (the front gate) and holding the key. It’s a fairly standard security setup—it makes it easy for the residents to travel around but hard for anyone else to enter or leave.

Unfortunately, neither Anne or I could use gate magic. We could use gate stones, but gate stones will only take you to one place, which would only be any use if we had gate stones keyed specifically to places in the castle, which we didn’t. The same did not apply to Sagash’s apprentices—it was more or less a guarantee that between them they’d have gate magic, gate stones, or (more likely) both.

What all this meant was that as long as Anne and I were in this castle, Sagash and his apprentices had a huge home-ground advantage. The only thing stopping them from gating to our position right now was that they didn’t know where we were. As soon as that changed, they could just jump right on top of us and we’d have a hell of a time getting away from them. And even if they couldn’t find us, they could just set up camp at the front gate with a bunch of shadows and wait for us to show up. Where else were we going to go?

But if there was a back door, that opened up some options. “It’s definitely an exit?”

“Back then it was. It might have changed.”

“Have you been there since?”

Anne shook her head. “I couldn’t have used it. It needs a key.”

“The same as the one for the front gate, or a different one?”

“Sagash never let me get close enough to see.”

“Probably a different one,” I muttered. Worth checking, though. “What about surveillance? Is there any way for Sagash to pick us up while we’re here?”

“He uses the shadows, mostly,” Anne said. “He’s got enough that he can turn the sky black with them, but most of the time he keeps them down in the tombs. He just relies on the fixed sensors instead.”

I looked up sharply. “Fixed sensors?”

“At the front gate. They log everything that comes in or passes through.”

“So they would have seen us both come through?” I frowned. “Why hasn’t Sagash done anything?”

Anne shrugged helplessly.

“There’s something strange going on. If Sagash was acting against us, the whole castle should have been mobilised by now.” I looked up at Anne. “I don’t think Sagash was the one behind the attack on you. I think it was just Darren and Sam, and now they’re trying to keep it secret from everyone else.”

“But why?” Anne looked dismayed. “I’ve never even met those two!”

It was my turn to shrug. From their conversation, it had sounded as though Darren and Sam had been afraid of Sagash finding out what they’d been doing, but if Sagash really did have that sensor net, wouldn’t he have found out already? None of the explanations quite fit—there was some missing piece I hadn’t figured out. “I’m going to take a look at that back entrance,” I said. “I need you to stay still and quiet for a bit.”

I found a place to sit with my back resting against the wall, while Anne sat cross-legged opposite me and watched quietly. As soon as I was settled, I closed my eyes, looking into the future in which I went downstairs and started going east. It didn’t take long before I found the building Anne was describing, tall and rectangular and surrounded by high walls and colonnades. It looked as though it was—

The vision fragmented as the actions in Anne’s immediate futures expanded to disrupt the point earlier in the chain at which I left. I frowned, routed around the disturbance, and patiently traced my way back to the same building. A search of the ground floor discovered a circle made out of some greenish material which would show up to my magesight. Looked like a transport pattern. I looked to see what would happen if I used a gate stone within the circle . . . nothing. If I used the key focus as well? Also nothing. I wanted to try some command words, but the distance was hampering my ability to search. Maybe—

The vision fragmented again. “Could you please stop doing that?” I said with my eyes closed.

“Doing what?” Anne asked.

“Talking to me.”

“I’m not.”

“You’re thinking about starting a conversation, and each time you do it changes the futures.”

“I can’t even think about talking to you?”

“You can think as much as you like, so long as there’s no possibility of you actually doing it.”

Anne didn’t answer. The back gate didn’t look good—maybe not hopeless, but I couldn’t confirm that without getting closer. I switched directions, looking through the futures in which I headed towards the castle’s main gate. My future self worked his way south, following the mental map I’d worked out last night, around the keep. No sign of shadows or patrols. The future was starting to thin out, becoming delicate, hard to steer. A little closer and—

—again it broke apart.

“Anne.”

“I’m trying!”

“I know it seems like I’m just sitting here,” I said, “but this isn’t as easy as it looks and it’d really help if you could stop distracting me.”

Anne didn’t say what she was thinking. I tried yet again to trace out the route to the south . . . the same thing happened.

Maybe I was going about this the wrong way. We needed a way out of here, but escaping this castle wasn’t something I could solve alone. I was going to need Anne’s help, and that wasn’t going to happen as long as we kept putting off this conversation. “All right,” I said. “Go ahead and ask.”

“Ask what?”

“What you’ve been thinking about asking me since I got up.”

Anne was silent. I waited, counting off the seconds, watching the futures fork and twist, shifting with Anne’s thoughts. “Last night,” she said at last. “Was that you?”

I just looked at her.

Anne let out a long breath, leant her head back against the wall. “How much of it do you remember?” I asked.

“Bits and pieces. Like something you hear as you’re falling asleep. It’s hard to remember which parts are real and . . . She told you about the last time, didn’t she? What I . . . when I was here.”

I nodded.

Anne closed her eyes. “I wish she hadn’t.”

“She . . .” I paused, mentally trying out different pronouns. “That person I was talking to. Do I call her ‘she’ or ‘you’?”

“I don’t know,” Anne said with a sigh. “Maybe that’s the problem.”

“Why didn’t you tell anyone about all this?” I asked. “I know you’ve got your issues with me, but what about Luna? Or Vari?”

“I don’t want them to see that side of me,” Anne said. “I didn’t want you to see it either.”

“Are you that ashamed of what you did?”

“Yes.”

“It doesn’t really sound as though you had much choice.”

“I did have a choice. I could have lost. I thought about it, each time. But I didn’t. I’d use my magic to . . . kill them, and afterwards I’d cry and I’d hate myself and I’d promise it was the last time, and then I’d do it again anyway.” Anne looked up at me with haunted eyes. “Most people, when they hurt each other, they don’t really understand what they’re doing. When I look at someone I see everything, every layer of their body, skin and muscle and bone. You have to, before you can heal them. When you use that to hurt them, it’s . . . vile. You’re destroying something beautiful. You drain the life out from a body and you can see it, watch the blood vessels shrivel and the tissue wither. It’s like their body trusts you, opens itself up, and you betray it. And you know the worst part? It gets easier each time. You still know how horrible it is, you just . . . feel it less.”

“That’s why you wouldn’t duel, isn’t it? Back when I first met you.”

“Sagash told me once that in the end you don’t feel anything at all,” Anne said quietly. “You can still see what you’re doing to someone’s body, you just . . . don’t care. I’ve . . . I’ve wondered how many more it’ll take. Before I become like him.”

“I don’t think it’s just about the numbers. I mean, if something was going to push you over the edge, I don’t think it’d be that.”

Anne gave a half laugh, half sob. “Oh, great! So something else is going to turn me into a monster instead?”

Oops. Okay, so I probably wasn’t the most tactful person to be having this conversation. But as the other Anne had pointed out, there wasn’t exactly anyone else. “I think you’re setting much-too-high standards for yourself.”

“Not murdering anyone isn’t a high standard.”

“I’m not talking about what you did back when you were Sagash’s prisoner. That was just you being put in an impossible situation, and trust me, I know all about those. I was talking about what you’ve been doing afterwards. You took lives then, so now you’re trying to avoid any kind of violence and only use your magic for healing. And maybe if you were one of the Light mages and you lived in that kind of protected world, then you could get away with doing that. But you’re not, and you can’t.”

Anne was silent. “Second thing,” I said. “I think you’re too focused on yourself.”

Anne looked up with a frown. “What?”

“This stuff you’re beating yourself up over? You’re only thinking about what you did, what you’re responsible for. Everything you’ve told me about what happened back then, you’ve only talked about the choices you made. But that’s not how the world works. Everyone makes choices and they all have a part in what happens. The way I see it, in terms of responsibility for those deaths, the order goes: number one, Sagash, for setting up the fights; number two, those kids you were fighting, for agreeing to whatever Sagash promised them; number three, the Council, for letting Dark mages like Sagash get away with this crap and not helping Variam when he went to them; and number four, you, for not being able to figure out some miracle way to fix it all. Taking all the blame isn’t just wrong, it’s self-centred. The world’s bigger than just you.”

“Is that how you justify it?” Anne said quietly. “What you did?”

I thought about it for a few seconds, then looked at her. “Honestly? Yeah. I think after a certain point, if someone comes after you and won’t back down, then it’s on them.”

Anne was silent. “Maybe you’re right,” she said at last. “But . . . it doesn’t change anything. They’re still dead, and I’m still that much closer to being like that.”

“Are you really that afraid you’ll end up like the Dark mages?”

“Isn’t that what always happens? Anyone who lives in our world, grows up as a mage—they only ever get worse. You meet apprentices, and they’re mixed. Kind, cruel, everything in between. But the older they get . . . look at them. Sagash, Vitus, Morden.” Anne looked at me. “I thought you were different. You’d been with a Dark mage, like me. But you were kind, you helped us. I thought . . . I thought if you could make yourself better, then I could too.”

I winced a little at that. She’d chosen a pretty bad role model. “Anne, I’m not a hero. I’m just a survivor, that’s all. If I ever seemed like I was trying to set myself up as more than that, that was my own mistake.”

“I know,” Anne said, sounding tired. “I was building you up into something you weren’t. It’s just . . . It feels like the longer you live as a mage, the more you turn into what you used to hate.” She looked down at the stone. “Maybe that’s how it works in our world. The only heroes are the ones who die young.”

I gave Anne a disturbed look. “That’s a pretty depressing philosophy to live by.”

“Is it?” Anne didn’t meet my eyes. “I can’t tell anymore.”

I looked at Anne a second longer, then shook my head. “All right, it’s time we got moving. Whatever the answer, we’re not going to find it sitting around here. Oh, and just so we’re clear, I am not on board with you dying in this castle just so you don’t turn into something worse. I like you alive and as you are, and nothing you’ve told me over the last day has changed my mind on that. Okay?”

Anne looked up in surprise. After a moment she smiled. It was a little halfhearted, but it was something. “Good,” I said, and offered her my hand. “Let’s get going.”

There were two ways out of the windmill—the bottom and the top. At the highest level a ladder led up to the roof, where a wooden bridge led away from the sails back onto the castle battlements. Anne and I did a quick check for flying shadows, then headed back down. “Are you going to be okay barefoot?” I asked.

“I can heal any cuts faster than I get them,” Anne said. She was still wearing my coat, bare legs showing as she moved. “Do you want to try the back gate or the front?”

“Back. If there’s a password I might be able to hack it if I get a good look.”

“If you can’t?”

“Then we look for a backup plan,” I said. We left the windmill and began crossing the grass towards the entrance into the next courtyard. A few scattered feathers by the pool marked where the blink fox had made its kill. “If worst comes to worst we can go to ground and hope Luna and Vari and Arachne work out some way to get in touch, but that’s not . . .” I stopped walking.

Anne came to a halt and looked at me. “What is it?”

“I’m not sure.” I frowned, looking ahead. I’d scanned the futures from the top of the windmill only a few minutes ago and everything had looked clear, but for some reason something was catching at my attention, some sort of encounter. It looked as though it was in the immediate future, but that didn’t make sense—I would have seen that coming. “Hold on.”

Anne tilted her head, puzzled. I looked into the futures in which we waited where we were. There was someone coming. What the hell? I couldn’t see any immediate combat, but there was no way I should have missed something that blatant. It wasn’t the castle—the shrouds didn’t block divination magic. I couldn’t have been that careless . . . could I? “We’ve got company,” I said. “Back to the windmill, quick!”

Anne’s eyes went wide. We hurried back to the windmill and up the steps to the doorway, where I turned. That was better—now we had some cover. “Who is it?” Anne asked.

“Working on it.” I still couldn’t see any combat but that wasn’t much reassurance—just because the encounter didn’t start with violence didn’t mean it wouldn’t end that way, and we didn’t have any friends in this place that I knew of. I focused on a single future, narrowing it down to get a clearer vision. It was a man, coming closer. Not Sagash. Not his apprentices. That was strange—why was I standing like that? It was as though I were scared of something. It was a little tricky to focus on the image, but not too hard. There. It was—

Wait, that couldn’t be right.

Oh, Jesus.

Anne looked at me sharply. “Alex? Are you okay?”

I stood frozen, staring into space. All I could do was look at the futures over and over again, as if doing it would make them change.

“Alex,” Anne said, looking worried. She touched a hand to my shoulder. “Your heart rate just jumped. What’s wrong?”

My heart was hammering in my chest. I wasn’t imagining any of it, it was all real. Oh shit oh shit oh shit . . . I felt my hands starting to shake and turned on Anne. “Run. Now!”

Anne looked at me, puzzled. “What?”

“Get out of here.” I spoke as fast as I could, the words tumbling out of my mouth. “Someone’s coming, you can’t be here when he arrives. Get up to the top of the windmill, you can get away that way. Go!”

“Who’s coming?”

“There’s no time! Get out of here!”

“Then . . . why aren’t you running as well?”

I was too paralysed to come up with an answer. Anne looked at me, then when I didn’t reply she shook her head. “I’m staying.”

“No!”

“If it’s a person coming, I can defend myself better than you can.”

“I’m not asking!” Terror was making it hard for me to think clearly; I pointed up towards the ceiling. “Do as I say and get out of here, now!”

“You’re not my master, and I don’t think you’re thinking straight. Besides . . .” Something flickered in Anne’s eyes. “I’m tired of things happening to other people because of me. Whoever’s coming, it can’t be Sagash or his apprentices or you’d have said. Who is it?”

I stared at Anne, then slumped a little. “You win,” I said quietly. “Make sure you don’t regret it.”

Doubt showed in Anne’s eyes, and she looked at me with a frown. I think it wasn’t until then that she got a glimpse of just how afraid I really was. I turned towards the grassy space and we waited in silence.

I spend a lot of time running from things. It works, up to a point. Most of the time when you’re in danger, the one who’s threatening you isn’t after you, not personally. They just want something you have, or you’re in the way for some reason. Get away from them and stay away long enough, and things will change.

But sometimes what the other person wants isn’t a thing, or a piece of information, or some other short-term goal. Sometimes what they want is you. And when that happens, then all running does is put things off. It’ll delay them, but if they want you badly enough then eventually they’ll catch up again. Sooner or later you’ll have to face them—the most you can do is choose the time and the place.

Anne and I waited in the doorway, looking out across the pond towards the castle walls. To our left, the sails of the windmill kept turning, the rhythmic creaking sound echoing through stone and wood. The sun still hadn’t yet reached a high enough point in the sky to look down onto our little enclave, and the grass and water were left in shadow. There was a doorway in the castle wall, and from the courtyard beyond I heard footsteps. At my side I felt Anne turn her head, looking through the wall towards something only she could see.

The footsteps grew louder and I felt light-headed, grey spots sparkling before my eyes. Old words came back to my mind, Tobruk’s voice speaking to me from another time, vicious and cruel. He’s going to find you and he’s going to hurt you and you’re going to die. Make sure you stay alive till then, Alex. I want to see your face. I’d never really believed he was telling the truth.

The man who stepped out onto the grass was maybe forty or fifty, though few trying to guess his age would have bothered. Everything about him was ordinary: brown hair, brown eyes, average height, average build. Most people would have glanced over him without a second thought. I couldn’t have told you what he was wearing; just the sight of him was enough to freeze my blood. He stood in the shadow of the castle wall, looking straight towards me, and I held my breath.

“Alex,” Richard said. “It’s been a long time.”