Marked

4

It was a month later.

‘Look, I get what you’re saying,’ Lucian said. ‘But things are different now.’

‘Different how?’ I asked. We were sitting on a bench on Hampstead Heath. The full power of the July sun was beating down on us out of a bright blue sky, and even the grass seemed to radiate heat. Crickets buzzed from the undergrowth, and the sounds of chatter and laughter drifted up to us from the people scattered across the hillside below.

‘You’re part of the Council,’ Lucian said. He was a curly-haired boy in his early twenties with a serious expression, and right now that expression was focused on me.

‘I’ve always worked for the Council, ever since you’ve known me,’ I said. Lucian had been a walk-in, one of the many adepts who entered my shop uninvited, hoping for help. Sometimes I was able to give them what they were looking for; sometimes I couldn’t, and usually that would be the end of it. But every now and again one of those walk-ins would turn into a relationship that lasted, and over the years, I’d built up quite a network of contacts. Lucian had been one of the ones who had stayed, and over time he’d become one of my major sources of information about what was happening in the adept world. ‘I’ve worked for other people too. That doesn’t mean I’ve given them your name. Anything you tell me, I keep to myself.’

‘I get that, but … Look, it was one thing when you were just an aide. And you said that you weren’t even doing that because you wanted to. I don’t know whether you were forced into it, or something …’

‘He was forced into it,’ Anne said quietly from the other side of me. ‘So was I.’

Anne had been officially appointed as my aide as of four weeks ago. Council aides are much more than personal assistants; if a Council member isn’t present, their aide is expected to be able to negotiate on their behalf, and a lot of business gets done between aides without their bosses ever meeting at all. Navigating the various factions and agendas is difficult work and I’d kept an eye on Anne during the first fortnight to make sure she could handle it. There had been some hiccups, but all in all, she’d adapted pretty well. Like me, Anne wasn’t brought up in the Light world, but her experiences with Dark mages had turned out to be quite applicable to the Council, and her habit of staying quiet and keeping her eyes and ears open had stood her in good stead.

One of the things that Anne had had to change had been her style of dress. Instead of her old jeans and jumpers, she’d switched to business suits, generally ones that showed off her figure. The one she was currently wearing was dark green, left her lower legs bare, and emphasised the narrowness of her waist, and Lucian had spent most of the first five minutes of our meeting sneaking glances while trying not to make it obvious. Between our work relationship and living at the Hollow, I was seeing Anne for hours at a time every day now. On one level it was nice, but at the back of my mind I couldn’t help feeling that the longer I let things go on like this, the sooner I was going to have to make a decision.

I realised that Lucian was talking and pulled my attention back to the present. ‘… on the Council,’ Lucian was saying. ‘You’re one of them. I mean, when they’re passing their laws to screw us over … you’re one of the ones doing it.’

‘I’m Junior Council, not Senior. I don’t get a vote.’

Lucian looked sceptical and I could tell he wasn’t convinced. To be fair, he had a point. Junior Council members might be non-voting, but I still had vastly more influence than Lucian did. ‘Look, I’m not asking you to betray anyone. We just want to know more about this association of Richard’s.’

‘That is betraying them.’

‘It might be made up of adepts, but it isn’t owned by adepts,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t matter who the figurehead is, it’s Richard who calls the shots. And I’m worried about what he’s using them for.’

‘You mean the Council’s worried,’ Lucian said. ‘They just don’t want us getting organised.’

‘They don’t mind you getting organised,’ I said. Okay, skating around the truth there. ‘Taking orders from Richard Drakh is another story. I don’t think you understand just how dangerous this guy is. Anyone who signs up with him is putting themselves on the front lines of a war.’

‘Yeah, well, we’re already on the front lines of a war.’ Lucian said sourly.

‘No. You’re not.’

‘Oh yeah? What about last October? The Keepers murdered twenty adepts who were just out there for a peaceful demonstration and what’s the Council done? Nothing. They don’t even care.’

I didn’t have a good answer to that one. The demonstration that Lucian was talking about had started out as a protest but had quickly spiralled out of control. The Keeper forces that had been on duty claimed they’d been attacked by Dark mages hidden in the crowd, and by the time the dust had settled there had been Council security personnel among the dead, which didn’t exactly fit with the ‘they were all peaceful protesters’ narrative. But given how bad Council–adept relations were, none of the adepts had been in a mood to listen, and Lucian’s version of the story wasn’t even close to the worst one I’d heard. Plenty of adepts now believed that the Council was out to commit wholesale genocide.

The whole thing had made me realise exactly how awful lines of communication in British magical society were. Light mages can hate each other while still exchanging messages, even if the messages don’t express much besides mutual loathing. But if there’s a problem with Dark mages, or independents, or adepts, then there are no good ways to get people to sit down and talk to one another. Which made it all the more worrying that when it came to the adept community, Richard apparently had been sitting down and talking to them.

‘You do realise that there’s a good chance that Richard’s the reason that protest turned violent in the first place?’

‘Yeah, well, at least he’s offering to protect us.’

‘Richard’s the kind of person that you need protection from,’ I said. ‘Have you forgotten how we met? You came into my shop asking for help because you were worried about Dark mages coming after you and your friends. Well, those same mages are the ones who are working for Richard right now. I know you think that you’re getting some kind of safety if you sign up with these guys, but that’s not how it works. Sure, they’ll offer you protection – as long as you do as you’re told. But as soon as you stop, they’ll make a point of targeting you, just to send the message of what happens to other people who don’t get in line. It’s not getting into those sort of groups that’s the problem, it’s getting out.’

‘Maybe that’s better than the deal we’ve got now.’

I rolled my eyes. ‘Lucian …’

‘No, listen.’ Lucian looked right at me, and I could tell he was serious. ‘Do you know what it’s like being an adept in this country? No matter what happens to you, the Council doesn’t care. A Dark mage can pick you right off the street, or some monster can eat you in your bed, and they don’t care. Maybe if you’re really lucky some Keepers might come around afterwards to ask questions, but by then it’s too late and most of the time they don’t do anything anyway. Everything they do, it makes it obvious that they don’t give a shit about us. But now, all of a sudden, we’ve got mages like you telling us “oh, it’s really important you don’t do this”. It’s pretty obvious why, isn’t it? The only reason they’ve started paying attention is because they’re afraid of this Richard guy and they don’t want us on his side. It’s like, we yell for help over and over and they don’t listen. Well, they’re listening now.’

‘You join up with Richard, and they’ll pay attention to you all right,’ I said harshly. ‘Just not the kind you want. You’re signing up to be pawns.’

‘Yeah, well, that’s what they’re going to say, isn’t it?’

We stared at each other in the midday sun. On the path below us, a party of men and women went by, talking loudly, a dog bounding at their heels. From the baseball game on the far side of the hill came the crack of a hit, followed by shouts and cheers.

‘I wasn’t representing the Council when we first met, and I’m not speaking for them now,’ I said at last. ‘I’m telling you this because I don’t want you hurt. Don’t sign up with these guys. And if you care about your friends, don’t let them join either.’

Lucian didn’t look convinced. ‘Was there anything else?’

I sighed inwardly. ‘No.’

Lucian got up and left. I watched him walk away down the grassy slope, thinking over his words. If Lucian was willing to say those kinds of things to my face, how many adepts were thinking the same way?

‘He’s got a point,’ Anne said in her soft voice.

I glanced at her. ‘You too?’

‘I know what you said was true,’ Anne said. ‘But think about how it looks to him. No one tells adepts anything about mage politics. I mean, nobody told me anything all the time I was in the apprentice programme. All I ever learned was second-hand from the younger apprentices. Now finally the Council’s talking to them, and all they have to say is, “Don’t join the other side.” Adepts are going to think that the only reason the Council’s paying them any attention at all is that they’re worried they’ll change sides.’

‘Mm,’ I said. ‘The donkey and the shepherd.’

‘What?’

‘One of Aesop’s fables,’ I said. ‘An old shepherd’s watching his donkey grazing in the meadow when he hears an enemy army coming. He tells the donkey to run or they’ll both be captured, and the donkey asks if the enemy army would make him carry a heavier load. When the shepherd says no, the donkey lies back down and says, “Then what difference does it make to me?”’

‘Do you think that’s what it is?’ Anne asked quietly. ‘An army?’

‘It’s what it sounds like to me,’ I said. I didn’t add what I was thinking. You build an army because you’re planning to fight someone. Who was Richard going to be turning that army against?

We gated from the heath to Wales, walking out of the trees into a secluded valley painted in green and gold, with a single small house sitting at the end over a river. A pair of buzzards circled on the thermals above, calling in their mewing voices: kew, kew.

‘It’s the front door, right?’ Anne asked as we walked into the garden.

I nodded. ‘We’ll go around the back.’

The back door was locked, and I pulled out a loose stone from the wall to retrieve the key from its hiding place. ‘Are you going to visit Morden?’ Anne asked.

‘Not planning to,’ I said. ‘Talisid was hinting about it, but I turned him down. I think he’s still hoping I might shake out some information.’

‘Is he still in that prison?’

‘The bubble realm, yeah.’ The key was sticking in the lock. Either it had rusted over the winter, or the last person to break in had managed to do some damage. I pulled it out and rubbed at it with a handkerchief. ‘Why?’

Anne hesitated. ‘This is going to sound weird, but I was dreaming about Morden.’

‘You mean in Elsewhere?’

‘No, just a regular dream. I was circling around his prison, looking for a way in.’

‘Huh.’ I inserted the key and tried again. It scraped, then turned, and the door promptly stuck. I banged it with my shoulder to force it open. ‘You haven’t been missing having him as your boss, have you?’

‘Not even slightly.’

The inside of the house seemed very dark after the bright sunlight of the valley. We walked down the hall and turned into the kitchen. The room was dusty and felt abandoned, exactly the same as it had been since I’d last left it, except for the wires running across the edge of the front door and down to the open gym bag below.

‘So who was it this time?’ Anne asked as I walked over to inspect the device.

‘I can see the future, not the past.’ The bomb was a stack of plastique packed into the gym bag, the wires ending in contacts stuck into the blocks. It was crude but powerful, enough to blow apart the house, the victim and anyone else unlucky enough to be within thirty feet or so of the front door. ‘I suppose I could get Sonder or someone to track down whoever it was, but honestly, I don’t think it’s worth it.’

‘It feels a little bit strange that you don’t even bother identifying the people trying to kill you any more.’

‘Who has that kind of time?’

The house we were in was mine, a small farm cottage I’d bought a long time ago as a safe house. Unfortunately, the more you use a safe house, the less safe it gets, and after the third or fourth set of unwelcome visitors I’d reluctantly accepted that it was time to move on. There was no point in making that fact public though, so I’d moved out all my valuable possessions, left just enough stuff behind to make it seem as though I still lived there and arranged for electricity and water usage to add some credibility. Once that was done it was just a matter of checking back every few days or so to see whether anyone had left any unpleasant surprises.

‘I know this probably makes me a bad person for suggesting it,’ Anne said, ‘but do you think we should stop disarming these traps?’

‘The idea being that the next person to break in gets to be the target of whatever was left behind by the last one?’

‘Pretty much.’

I’d checked the futures several times to confirm that cutting any of the wires would disable the thing, but I went ahead and looked at the longer-term futures just to make sure. It’s never a good idea to be too sure you’ve outsmarted your enemy. ‘Too much risk that someone innocent might get caught,’ I said. ‘Besides, leaving these things around just feels untidy.’

‘Untidy?’

The fact that these traps were still showing up was actually good news, all things considered. Apparently word had spread that trying to kill me face-to-face was a bad idea, which was the reason that my would-be assassins were now restricting themselves to long-distance efforts. Obviously, having to deal with lethal booby traps wasn’t ideal – so far this year there had been two bombs and one attempted poisoning, and that wasn’t counting the magical ones – but I much preferred it to having my enemies come after me in person. For one thing, divination is very well suited to avoiding traps. For another, a long-range assassin is far less of a threat. The really scary killers are the ones who are willing to get close enough to make sure they don’t miss.

I drew my knife and delicately sawed through first one wire, then the other. There was no visible effect, but the bomb was now an inert lump of chemicals. ‘Clear,’ I said, straightening up.

‘Want me to pick up the post while I’m here?’ Anne asked. She hadn’t backed away. It’s quite a vote of confidence when someone is willing to stand next to you while you defuse a bomb.

‘Sure. I’ll go put this one with the others.’

We gated to the War Rooms, and as we stepped out into the entrance hall, we stopped speaking out loud. The War Rooms have too many watchful ears, and while I’ve never found proof that the place is bugged, there are a lot of spells that can allow their caster to eavesdrop with little risk of detection. I ought to know since it’s something I’ve done myself. Fortunately, these days I don’t need to speak out loud to communicate.

So what happened in the dream? I asked Anne mentally.

It was strange, Anne replied. I was circling the prison from the outside, trying to find a way in. And it was definitely Morden’s prison, I knew that much. I think I was trying to get to him, and I couldn’t break through the barriers, and I was really frustrated.

We were talking via my dreamstone, the amethyst-coloured focus currently tucked away in my inner pocket. Arachne had told me that once I mastered its use, I wouldn’t need to have it on my person at all, but I still found that doing so made this easier. It wasn’t telepathy, not quite – mind magic telepathy works by broadcasting thoughts and picking them up in turn. This was more like opening a link. And it wasn’t just thoughts either: I could pick up some of the emotions in Anne’s mind, knew that she was watching the people around us as we spoke. I could even feel the echo of her memories of the dream, restless and circling, like a frustrated predator.

The dreamstone’s linking ability was limited. While it worked very well on the people I knew best and was closest to – which meant Anne, Luna, Variam and Arachne – establishing a link with someone else was harder, and the less we knew and trusted each other, the more ‘harder’ shaded into ‘impossible’. Then again, that wasn’t too much of a sacrifice to make. The link was two-way, and just as I could pick up other people’s thoughts and memories, they could pick up mine. I was fine with keeping people I didn’t trust out of my head.

What did the prison look like? I asked curiously.

A castle of black stone rising up out of the haze, Anne said. It reminded me of Sagash’s shadow realm, but uglier and without the growing things. Why?

Just curious, I said. I knew that the prison where Morden was being held was called San Vittore, but I’d never seen it. You don’t think he was trying to send you a message or something?

Through a dream? It’s possible, I suppose, but it seems like a funny sort of message. If he could do that, why not tell me directly?

Either way, if it happens again, let me know. I knew that Morden and Richard wanted something from Anne, and I didn’t like anything linking them to her, even something as vague and nebulous as this.

I will.

With the morning errands done, it was time for the bulk of the day’s work.

A lot of people get confused about how the Light Council works, so it’s probably worth taking a minute to explain. The Light Council is split into two parts, the Senior Council and the Junior Council, and the biggest difference between the two is that the Senior Council members are voting while the Junior Council members are non-voting. This means that when a resolution is put before the Council, it’s only the Senior Council members who get a say. The Junior Council have the right to speak on the topic, but not to vote on it.

If you’re wondering why they have a Junior Council at all, the answer is that like a lot of political systems, it’s a mix of circumstance and tradition. In the old days there was no Junior Council – there were seven Council members, and that was that. There was much less of a bureaucracy too – if you worked for the Council, chances were you knew at least one Council member directly. What changed all that was nothing to do with mages and everything to do with this country’s regular inhabitants. In the eighteenth century, Britain was the home of the Industrial Revolution, which along with advances in agriculture led to the population increasing by a factor of ten. With more normals came more mages, and all of a sudden the Council rulership was too small to handle the job. So the bureaucracy grew and kept on growing, and somewhere along the line it got big enough that seven Council members weren’t enough to oversee it all. But no one was willing to expand the number of voting members beyond seven (probably because none of them wanted their own votes diluted) and so the compromise reached was the creation of the Junior Council. To begin with there were only two or three of them, but that number had also gone up over the years until it reached the current status quo of six. Seven Senior Council and six Junior Council made up the full Light Council of thirteen.

Although Junior Councillors can’t vote, in all other ways they have pretty much the same rights as the Senior Council do. They can appoint aides (who gain the legal status of Light mages for the duration of their appointment) and they can’t be sentenced or outlawed via Council resolution the way anyone else in the country can. This was why Levistus had been trying so hard to get me off the Council – as long as I held a seat, it severely restricted the ways in which he could go after me. Council members also can’t be removed from office without a full formal trial, which takes for ever, as evidenced by the fact that Morden was still technically a Council member even though the Council had started proceedings against him nine months ago. Finally – and most importantly – to be raised to the Senior Council, you have to be on the Junior Council first. Which means that for the Senior Council, the question of who gets to be on the Junior Council is very important indeed.

When I’d replaced Morden in his Junior Council seat, despite my months of work as an aide, I had only a sketchy idea of what the Junior Council actually did. To be honest, I’d assumed that that wasn’t likely to change. At the time I’d only recently become a member of the Keepers, who had responded to my promotion with all the warmth and enthusiasm of a housewife waking up to find a dead rat on her kitchen floor. They’d done the bare legal minimum to confirm my appointment, then had proceeded to freeze me out completely. Now that I was on the Council, I’d expected exactly the same thing to happen.

As it turned out, I was dead wrong. Turns out the Council works very differently from the Keepers – in the Keepers you’re assigned jobs by your superiors, but members of the Junior Council are mostly free to select their own duties. There are provisions to force Junior Councillors who are slacking off to do more work, but there aren’t any provisions to force them to do less work (possibly because it had never occurred to the guys writing the rules that someday they’d have a Council member who wasn’t a Light mage). With hindsight, it made sense – if it had been possible for the other Council members to shut Morden out, they’d have done it already, and if they weren’t going to do it for Morden, there was no reason to expect them to do it for me. But at the time, it had been quite a surprise to reach Morden’s study in the War Rooms and find a desk full of work and a lot of impatient messages expecting me to pick up where he’d left off.

I could have avoided it. As I said, there are provisions to force slackers to do their share, but if I’d simply sat at home and refused to help, I don’t think anyone would have forced the issue. But in the end, I hadn’t. Partly it was self-interest: the more involved I was in the workings of the Council, the harder they’d find it to get rid of me. But probably a bigger reason was a sense of responsibility. This morning, it had been Lucian attacking the Council and me defending them, but up until a few years ago I would have been the one in Lucian’s place. I’d hated the Council and everything it stood for, and I’d had nothing but bad things to say about how it treated everyone who wasn’t a Light mage. Now that I was on the Council myself, I had a chance to do something to remedy that. It wasn’t a huge amount of power, but it was more than 99.9 per cent of people in magical society would ever have, and it felt wrong to waste the opportunity.

‘So what have we got for today?’ I asked Anne.

The study I’d inherited from Morden was a small, comfortable room in dark-panelled wood tucked away behind one of the administration blocks. Like all of the War Rooms, it was deep underground, but an illusion feature covering the back wall helped improve the aesthetics. I had it set to a view of a forested hillside, with an audio of birdcalls and the sounds of a distant river, giving the room a pleasant, airy feel. The desk dominating the centre of the room was covered in papers. Mages are slow to adapt to new technology, and the Council still hadn’t fully shifted over to computers. A proposal to digitise the War Rooms was currently working its way through the bureaucracy, which probably meant that the Council would start bringing in desktop PCs somewhere around the invention of quantum computing.

‘First, some bad news,’ Anne said. ‘The Order of the Cloak are very definite that they don’t have any records on those adepts you saw with Richard. Nothing from the pictures; nothing from the descriptions. I asked them to get in touch if they did hear anything, but I don’t think we can expect much.’

‘Damn it,’ I said. Last year I’d managed to briefly eavesdrop on a meeting between Richard and a set of adepts that, with hindsight, had probably been important. Unfortunately, at the time I hadn’t known that it was Richard, and by the time I’d started chasing it, the trail had gone cold. The Order of the Star had already sent me away empty-handed, and the Order of the Cloak had been my last hope. ‘I can’t shake the feeling that they’ve got something to do with his new adept association. If we could track them it might be a way in.’

‘And on that topic, we’re still not hearing back from those other adepts from the association,’ Anne said. ‘The messages have gone through, but they’re not answering.’

‘Because we haven’t managed to get hold of the right people, or because they don’t want to talk to us?’

‘I think it’s probably the second.’

I wondered what these adepts were going to do once they were ready to start talking. ‘What else?’

‘Julia’s trying to get your help on reviving the ID resolution again.’

‘Oh, come on.’ I rolled my eyes. ‘Tell her whatever it takes to make her go away. Next?’

‘The Keepers want a meeting about the Splinter Crown. They say some new details have come up from interrogating those thralls. And Druss’s aide wants an update on the item recovery leads.’

I’ve had to learn a lot of things since joining the Council, and one of the more useful concepts I’d picked up was the Eisenhower Matrix, a method of ordering tasks by importance and urgency. The idea is that you file every task into one of four quadrants: important and urgent; not important but urgent; important but not urgent; and neither important nor urgent. Depending on which of those four a task is in, you do it, delegate it, schedule it or ignore it.

The ID resolution was an example of a task that was neither important nor urgent. The Directors wanted a registry of all the magic-users and magic-involved people in the country, and they kept bringing the idea back no matter how many times it was vetoed by everyone else. For some reason Julia had decided that my support would help (or more likely, she was just pestering everyone on the Council no matter their status). I didn’t want to help with the resolution, and given that Julia was Alma’s aide, I didn’t want to get involved with her either. In this situation the best way that Anne could help me was by keeping them at arm’s length and waiting for them to give up and go away.

The Keeper meeting was urgent but not important. After all this time, it was unlikely that the information they’d turned up would be anything useful – it was far more likely that they were just using it as another opportunity to dig for evidence that I was a security risk. The Keepers had never got over the episode a year and a half ago where they’d done their best to arrest me at Canary Wharf. I’d escaped and made them look stupid into the bargain, and they weren’t going to forgive me for either of those things any time soon. On the other hand, I couldn’t openly ignore the request either. ‘Can you handle the Keepers? If you go in my place, they can quiz you, but you should be able to get out of anything compromising by telling them you weren’t there. Just let me know if they try to pull anything.’

Anne nodded. ‘And Druss?’

‘I’ll have to go,’ I said. Giving reports to Druss did nothing to aid the recovery effort, but it was politically important. Druss the Red was one of the few (if marginal) allies I had on the Council, and if he asked for something, I did it. That’s how patronage works. ‘Get back to his aide and schedule a time. Anything else for the day?’

‘Just the usual. There’s the security briefing, but …’ Anne frowned. ‘That’s odd.’

‘What?’

‘A new notification.’ Anne touched the message focus. ‘It wasn’t there when I checked just a minute ago. It must have just come in as soon as I started reading.’

I looked up, alert. ‘What does it say?’

‘It’s asking for you at one of the secure conference rooms at your earliest convenience. But it doesn’t say who you’re supposed to be meeting or who sent it.’

‘Doesn’t need to,’ I said. A tingle had gone through me at Anne’s words. I knew exactly who’d sent that message. Important and urgent tasks you do right away.

The secure conference rooms in the War Rooms are far below the Belfry. We took the stairs down, winding our way deep into the earth. The deeper we got, the fewer people we saw. More than a thousand people use the War Rooms every day, but even so, that number doesn’t even come close to filling the place. There are lower levels that are all but deserted: some holding living or training quarters that are currently mothballed; others marked as ‘storage’, though exactly what they’re storing isn’t specified.

We came to a halt at the end of an empty corridor. A blank metal door stood before us, with an outdated speaker system by its side. I pressed the button by the microphone. ‘This is Verus.’

There was a pause, then a voice sounded through the speaker. ‘I see you’ve brought your aide.’

‘Yes.’

There was silence. By my side, I felt Anne shift. I had the feeling that the person on the other end was involved in a discussion as to whether to ask me to send Anne away. If they did, I was going to tell them no. I’d already looked through the futures of us coming down this corridor, and I was pretty sure that I was going to win an argument if they chose to start one … but the silence stretched out longer than I was expecting, to nearly a minute.

At last the voice came through the speaker again. ‘Please come in.’

I pushed the door and it swung freely. Anne and I walked inside.

The room within was more spartan than the rooms I was used to meeting in, walled and furnished in concrete and metal. The secure conference rooms are older than the blocks in which the Council usually conduct their business, and they’re not designed for comfort: the temperature was a few degrees colder than the upper levels of the War Rooms, which are kept at a steady twenty-two degrees centigrade all year round. The only reason people use the rooms down here is if they don’t want attention.

Two of the three mages occupying the conference room were ones I’d been expecting. White-haired Bahamus, sitting at the table, looked calm and comfortable, and Talisid, balding and unobtrusive, stood a little way off to the side. It was the third mage who made me stop and stare. I’d had time to check the futures, but the thing about divination is that you never have the time to check everything. So you take shortcuts. In this case I’d confirmed that it really was Talisid who’d sent the message, and I’d checked the futures for any sign of danger. But while I’d confirmed that Talisid would be there, I hadn’t checked to see who else would be there, and the mage sitting at the end of the table watching us enter was one of the last I’d expected.

Maradok is a mage with straw-coloured hair and a long, mournful-looking face. He could be an English civil servant, if you don’t look too closely at his eyes. I’d seen him off and on in briefings over the past few months, and our relationship had been cool, for good reason. I looked at Talisid. ‘What is he doing here?’

‘I was about to ask the same with regard to the healer,’ Maradok said. ‘I was under the impression this was a secure briefing.’

‘Anne is here because she’s my aide and because I trust her,’ I said coldly. ‘Neither of which applies to you.’

Talisid coughed. ‘Perhaps some introductions are in order.’

‘No, no, I think we all know exactly who everyone else is,’ I said. ‘What I’d like to know is why you called me here using what was supposed to be our secure contact method to meet someone who’s tried to have me assassinated.’

‘And I would like to know why an ex-Dark apprentice with no security clearance is accompanying him,’ Maradok replied.

Bahamus lifted a hand. ‘Enough.’

Maradok is from Council intelligence, and this was the second time we’d crossed paths. The first time had been a year and a half ago, when he’d sent a team of Light mages to kill me in my sleep. That attack was the reason that I was living in the Hollow now, as well as the reason that Luna was currently running the Arcana Emporium instead of me. When I’d called him on his actions, Maradok had told me that he’d done it because long-range divinations had predicted that I was going to be instrumental in aiding Richard’s rise to power. It hadn’t convinced me, to put it mildly, and nothing in the intervening months had made me like him any more.

‘Perhaps we should start at the beginning,’ Bahamus said. ‘Verus, Anne, would you care to take a seat?’

With misgivings I pulled out a chair, picking the leftmost place at the table so that I could watch Bahamus and Maradok at the same time. ‘I believe all of you have met in person with the exception of Mage Anne Walker,’ Bahamus said. ‘Mage Walker, these are Mages Talisid and Maradok. Both work for the Council in an advisory capacity.’

He means they’re both Council intelligence, I voiced silently to Anne. They work for the Guardians, which means they report to him but also to Sal Sarque.

Isn’t that the same guy who sent that fire mage who burned me nearly to death? Anne asked.

Yes.

Great.

‘It’s a pleasure to meet you at last,’ Talisid said courteously. ‘Verus has spoken very well of you.’

‘Thank you,’ Anne said in her soft voice. ‘That’s very kind. Mage Maradok, it’s a pleasure to meet you too.’

Maradok inclined his head. ‘Likewise.’

He’s looking at me like he’s a snake and I’m a bird he’s deciding whether he wants to eat, Anne voiced silently.

Oh, don’t worry. I’m pretty sure that’s how he sees everyone.

‘Now that that’s out of the way,’ Bahamus said, ‘we have a matter of some importance to discuss. From the fact that your aide is here, I assume you are willing to take responsibility for bringing her in on this.’

‘That would be correct.’

‘I would like it noted for the record that I consider her a security risk,’ Maradok said. There was no heat in his voice; he could have been talking about the weather.

‘Your reservations are noted,’ Bahamus said. ‘Is there anything else?’

Maradok nodded. ‘The decision is of course yours.’

Does this guy have something specific against me? Anne asked.

I think if he really had a problem with you, he’d be making more noise. This sounds more like him covering himself in case things go wrong.

‘To business then,’ Bahamus said. ‘Have you been following the progress of the case against Morden?’

The change of subject caught me slightly by surprise, but only slightly. I’d had a feeling this would come up. ‘I’m familiar with it.’

‘You’re aware of the current state of proceedings?’

‘To the best of my knowledge, there hasn’t been very much proceeding,’ I said. ‘The indictment was issued last year, and Morden pleaded not guilty. He made his first appearance in court at the end of the winter.’ That had been a big deal, publicity-wise – having a member of the Light Council in court had drawn quite a crowd. ‘But since then, as far as I’m aware, very little has happened. The prosecution asked for more time for their inquiry, which was granted, and that’s been about it. There’s some talk about choice of representatives, but everything seems to have stalled.’

‘Have you spoken with Morden about this?’ Talisid asked.

‘No.’

‘Why not?’ Bahamus asked.

‘Because I don’t have any particular interest in helping him,’ I said. ‘As I’m sure you’re aware, I didn’t become Morden’s aide voluntarily. Anne and I were coerced into our positions, and once Morden was arrested, we were able to distance ourselves. I don’t see any particular reason to reopen our relationship.’

I could feel the eyes of all three men upon me, and I schooled my face to stillness. I was fairly sure that they’d been listening very closely to my choice of words there, trying to decide whether they could trust me. Oddly enough, while I’ve had to conceal things from the Council before, this was one time where I was being completely honest. Why are they asking about Morden all of a sudden? Anne asked silently.

Test of loyalties, I suspect. I wondered whether the men in the room with me actually believed that I’d been an unwilling servant to Morden, or whether they just saw me as a rat jumping off a sinking ship. Talisid probably believed the former; Maradok the latter. I wasn’t sure about Bahamus.

‘And has Morden contacted you?’ Bahamus asked.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Forgive me, Councillor, but I believe these are all statements I’ve made already. Is there something you’re working towards?’

‘As you say, the case against Morden has not proceeded quickly,’ Bahamus said. ‘While there are procedural issues to work through, the greater reason for the delay is a question of strategy. To put it simply, the Council has to decide what to do.’

‘I was under the impression that there was no strategy to decide upon,’ I said, keeping my voice carefully neutral. ‘Every time it’s come up in the Council, official policy has been unanimous.’

‘When I say the Council has yet to decide,’ Bahamus said, ‘I mean the Senior Council. The circle of people brought in on it has been very small.’

I didn’t ask why, if it was so secret, Talisid and Maradok knew about it when I didn’t. I already knew the answer: I might be on the Junior Council, but I was still an outsider. ‘Then if the Senior Council has been discussing this in closed session, what decision have they reached?’

‘That has been a matter of some debate,’ Bahamus said. ‘At present, we are considering two possible courses of action. The first possibility is simply to proceed with the trial and press for the strictest possible penalty. Morden has committed treason and is an accessory to murder. He will be tried, found guilty and sentenced to death.’

I nodded. It was what I – and pretty much everyone else – had been expecting.

‘This course of action, however, comes with drawbacks,’ Bahamus said. ‘For one thing, killing Morden, no matter how personally satisfying it might be, will do very little to improve our strategic position. Right now, the core of the effective opposition to the Light Council among the Dark mages of Britain is Mage Drakh and his cabal. While Morden may have functioned as a front for Drakh, he has done very little to contribute to those actions of Drakh which concern us most seriously. If Morden is removed, Drakh’s organisation will survive, and if anything may actually be strengthened in the process. Morden has been clear that he intends to plead his innocence at the trial. Regardless of what evidence we bring before the judge, many Dark and independent mages will discount it. As a result, we risk making Morden a martyr, and in doing so, eliminate any hope of a negotiated settlement. The militants among the Dark mages will use Morden’s rise and fall as proof that attempting to work with the Council, and work within the system, is hopeless.’

I raised my eyebrows. That was something that hadn’t occurred to me – and something I wouldn’t have thought a Senior Councillor would have thought of either. Usually they’re so committed to the Light-mage point of view that they’re quite unable to see how their actions come across to anyone else. I guess you don’t get onto the Senior Council by being stupid. ‘That does seem like a valid concern,’ I said. ‘Of course, you could argue that given the general attitude and beliefs of Dark mages, hoping for a negotiated settlement via peaceful means is naïve.’

‘Possibly,’ Bahamus said. ‘But we have to take the long view. Ultimately, this period of tension will settle down into some kind of arrangement, whether explicit or implicit, and at present, Morden is effectively the figurehead of all Dark mages in Britain. It will be much harder to negotiate any kind of agreement if he is dead.’

I remembered my conversation with Lucian this morning, and how I’d been thinking about the problems of having no lines of communication. Apparently I wasn’t the only one aware of the issue. ‘Am I right in thinking that the Council might also be reluctant to set the precedent of executing one of its own members at all?’

‘There is some truth to that, yes.’

I nodded. Rulers don’t like turning on their own if they can avoid it. It gives the common folk ideas. ‘I’m assuming you wouldn’t be telling me this unless you were considering an alternative.’

‘Which brings us to the second possible course of action,’ Bahamus said. ‘It is clear that the primary motivating force behind the attack on the Vault was Mage Drakh. Under this plan, we would instead focus on him.’

‘What would you do, raid his mansion?’ I asked. ‘I was under the impression that the Keepers had looked into that already.’

‘Indeed,’ Bahamus said. ‘Their conclusion was that to have any realistic chance of capturing Drakh, the attempt would require an inside man.’

Alarm bells went off in my head, and I lifted both my hands. ‘Oh no,’ I said. ‘Not this again. I have done that particular trick far too many times by now. Everyone on Richard’s side of the fence has had more than enough time to figure out that I was working for you guys during the attack on the Vault, and I’m pretty sure that if I even got near them, they’d—’

Bahamus raised one hand. ‘Calm down, Verus. As you say, your allegiance is known. You were never considered as a possibility.’

‘Okay.’ I let out a breath in relief. ‘Then if it’s not me you’re considering … ?’

Bahamus simply looked at me.

‘Wait. Morden?’

‘He is the most natural choice, wouldn’t you say?’

‘You’re hoping to get Morden to betray Richard?’

‘From what you’ve told us, and from all we’ve been able to discover, Mage Drakh is the undisputed ruler of his cabal,’ Talisid said. ‘The only two with the influence to make requests of him are Morden and Vihaela. Of the two, Morden seems the best choice for several reasons.’

‘I’m not arguing with that, but … what possible motivation would Morden have to help?’

‘For one, the fact that we have him under arrest,’ Talisid said. ‘For another, the fact that if he chooses not to cooperate, we will regretfully have to revert to our initial plan. Namely, his execution.’

‘And if he says yes, then what?’ I said. ‘He gets to retake his seat on the Council as though nothing happened?’

‘No,’ Bahamus said. ‘Regardless of any mitigating factors, Morden is clearly guilty of his crimes. He will be removed from the Council, one way or another. However, if he cooperates, he will keep his life and his freedom. And the ruling that keeps one seat of the Junior Council open to Dark mages will be allowed to stand. His legacy – if you can call it that – will live on.’

Something about Bahamus’s last words made me look up. The older mage was looking at me steadily. ‘The seat will still be for Dark mages,’ I repeated.

‘Under the circumstances, I would prefer it should the seat remain in the hands of someone whose loyalty had been established. I am certain I could persuade a majority of the Senior Council to share this view.’

I sat quite still. Was he saying … ?

Is he bribing you? Anne asked.

It sounds like it, doesn’t it? ‘I … see.’

‘Can we count on your cooperation in this matter?’ Bahamus asked.

‘I don’t have any objection in principle,’ I said slowly. ‘However, I have to wonder what it is that you’re hoping for me to contribute.’

‘To start with, you would be the one conducting the negotiations with Morden,’ Bahamus said. ‘Given your extensive history with him, you would seem to be the most qualified.’

‘So I’m the one who gets to tell him to turn Richard in or we chop his head off?’

‘Essentially.’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Assuming he agrees to the terms, what’s the next step? I mean, he can’t exactly hand you Richard while sitting in a cell. Are you going to let him out on bail?’

‘No,’ Talisid said. ‘He would, to put it mildly, be considered a flight risk. And I seriously doubt any of our usual security measures could keep him in the country should he be set free. However, he still has followers. We expect him to work through them or similar intermediaries.’

And no prizes for guessing who’s going to be the go-between. Still, it’s not as though I was expecting to get this for nothing …

‘I realise that this is short notice,’ Bahamus said, ‘but I’m afraid that we will need an answer from you now.’

I looked back at the three men in front of me. All three were watching me closely, though with subtly different shades of expression. I already knew that this was not a do-it-or-else offer – if I said no, Anne and I would be walking out. But with deals like this, you don’t get take-backs. I was going to have to pick a side immediately.

I thought quickly and made my decision.