Veiled

Chapter 14

The rest of the battle was mop-up.

Slate, Caldera, and I fell back to rejoin Haken and Trask. I kept us away from the remaining White Rose forces, and we linked up with a Keeper strike force. Haken and Caldera were shipped out to the back lines, and I went with them.

Slate and Trask went back into the fight, although by this point they didn’t have much to do. In the end, the battle was more one-sided than it had felt. White Rose’s power was in political influence, not in military strength, and their wards and defences weren’t anything like enough to hold off a full Keeper attack force. After half of the defenders had been killed or incapacitated, the rest started surrendering. By the time the Keepers finished rounding up their prisoners, they found a lot of foot soldiers and workers, a lot of slaves, and a scattering of mages and adepts. Vihaela, Cerulean, and Chamois weren’t amongst them.

I went looking for Luna and Variam once the fighting had stopped. They were out on the front lawn, a little way outside the ring of lights. Variam was resting against a tree and wrapping a bandage awkwardly around his arm one-handed. “Look, I can go get them,” Luna was saying.

“Nah,” Variam said. He glanced up as I approached. “Hey, Alex.”

“Hey,” I said. “Glad you both made it.” I nodded at Variam. “Gunshot?”

“He won’t go to the Keeper medics,” Luna complained.

“It’s not like it’s serious,” Variam said.

“You got shot! How is that ‘not serious’?”

“I’ll just go see Anne,” Variam said. “She’s better than the Keeper life mages anyway.”

“I know, but . . .” Luna looked away.

Variam grinned at her. “Upset?”

“Screw you.”

I sighed and dropped down onto the grass near to them. “Luna? You hurt?”

Luna shook her head, but didn’t turn around. I gave Variam a questioning look.

“We were with the security teams around the hill,” Variam said. “One of them caught a bullet from those machine guns right in the head. Splattered like ketchup.”

Luna twisted around to glare at him. “Vari!”

“What?”

“Can you not joke about it?”

“Hey, you were the one who wanted to get in on the battle.”

“Guys.” I raised a hand. “Enough, okay?”

Neither Luna nor Vari argued. We sat quietly for a little while. After you go through a battle the adrenaline rush keeps you going for a while, but once that’s gone you crash and all of a sudden it feels as though you can barely move. All I wanted to do was sit there.

As we watched, a group of people started to trickle out from the front of the White Rose estate, escorted by Council security. The oldest were in their early twenties; most were younger. The clothes they wore ranged from simple robes and nightgowns to outfits with implications I consciously didn’t think about. They moved in an aimless, straggling way, and kept stopping to stare around them, blinking at the lights as though they hadn’t been outside for years. Maybe they hadn’t.

“Those are the White Rose slaves, aren’t they?” Luna asked. “What’s going to happen to them?”

The Council security were trying to chivvy the slaves towards an open meadow to the south. It was slow going. “They’ll take them to the facility in Southampton,” Variam said. “See what they know.”

“What about after that?” Luna asked. “I mean, it’s not like the Council runs social services, is it?”

Variam shrugged. “Dunno.”

A small figure dressed in white had fallen behind the rest of the slaves. As I looked more closely, I saw it was the little girl from the bedroom. She was moving haltingly and kept turning to stare back at the building behind. A security man was standing over her, trying to get her moving, and from his body language he seemed to be getting frustrated. When she didn’t react he grabbed her by the upper arm and started dragging her.

There was a commotion and a short, heavyset figure came stalking out into view. As he came into the light I saw that it was Slate. He snapped something at the security man, who let go of the girl. Slate said something, his voice harsh, then pointed back in the direction of the house. The security man backed off quickly; Slate watched him go, then crouched down next to the girl. His back was to us, but there was something oddly protective about his stance.

“They’re just going to put them out on the street, aren’t they?” Luna said. She was looking towards the main body of the group.

“I don’t know,” I said, watching Slate. “Maybe they’ll have a little help after all.”

Slate stood up, guiding the girl gently with one arm. As he looked up he saw me and the scowl returned to his face. I looked away, careful not to smile.

Movement in the futures caught my attention. A Keeper was headed towards me; it was Slate’s partner, Trask. “Verus,” Trask said as he walked up.

“Hey.”

“Wards are down,” Trask said. “Going to need you to come back to HQ.”

“Oh, right,” I said with a sigh. “That.” I was still wanted for questioning. “So am I under arrest?”

“Not technically.”

“Seems to be a habit.” I climbed wearily to my feet. “Come on then.”

“Alex?” Luna asked.

“I’ll be okay. Make sure he gets to Anne.”

“Hey,” Variam said. “I can take care of myself.”

“I will,” Luna said.

I walked with Trask towards the gate point, leaving Luna and Variam alone on the hill. Getting out of here was probably a good idea anyway. Right now everyone was running around trying to get things back in order; once they managed that, they were going to start looking for people to blame. There was going to be a lot of fallout from what had happened here tonight, and I was pretty sure I’d just made some extra enemies.

Then I glanced over at the teenagers and children in the meadow. Slate was still with them, along with a couple of other Keepers. As I watched, a gate opened, and the White Rose slaves started to file through. One boy who reminded me a little of Leo had stopped and was staring back at the building behind him. As we passed by, he turned and stepped through the gate, disappearing from the meadow and leaving White Rose behind.

I turned back to see that Trask was watching me. “Worth it?” he asked.

I considered it briefly, then nodded. “Yeah.”

The two of us walked away.

The next few days were busy.

I spent the first forty-eight hours in meetings and interviews. All the different Council factions wanted to hear the details of how my trip with Haken had gone, and all of them also wanted to make sure I reported said details in such a way that would work to their advantage. Before the first day was out, I’d been threatened with death, imprisonment, exile, and demotion (not necessarily in that order), and had been instructed by five separate people to follow four different and contradictory stories. There was no possible way that I could make everyone happy, and I didn’t even try. I just stalled, and waited.

I didn’t have to wait long. As the days went by, the mages in the Council had their attention pulled away from me to the political crisis unfolding around them. Now that White Rose’s organisation was in ruins, all the dirty laundry was coming out. The really secure files had been kept on keyed data focuses or in the heads of Vihaela and Marannis, but as with any security system, the weakest part is the human element, and with the number of prisoners the Keepers had taken, they had a lot of witnesses to interrogate. Some Council members tried to make covert attempts to shut the interrogations down. It didn’t work. Within a week, everyone knew who White Rose had been in bed with, with more juicy details coming out every day.

Oddly enough, being in Keeper custody ended up working out in my favour. No one was really interested in prosecuting me anymore, and being held in Keeper HQ ended up isolating me from the worst of the political storm. The only drawback was that it was hard for me to find out what was going on, but in that regard I got help from an unexpected source. Caldera was still off on medical leave, but Coatl started showing up to bring me meals and escort me around—for some reason he’d taken a liking to me, and through him I learnt what was happening in the Council as the political casualties started to mount up.

Nirvathis was one of the first to go. I never did learn exactly how he’d been associated with White Rose and what his apprentice had been doing meeting with Chamois that night, but it didn’t matter; he was never going to have a shot at the Council again. One member of the Junior Council and one member of the Senior Council both resigned four days after the battle, within an hour of each other, for “health reasons.” Along with the one Nirvathis had been gunning for, that left a total of three Council seats up for grabs. It was announced that the new Junior Council seats would be assigned first, and a political free-for-all began.

On the Dark side of the fence, Marannis found himself out in the cold. Vihaela had disappeared, the Council factions who’d lost influence were hungry for blood, and Marannis was the obvious scapegoat. He probably could have escaped if he’d been willing to cut his losses, but he hesitated too long. The Order of the Star raided his mansion while he was still trying to piece the White Rose organisation back together. Marannis was killed “resisting arrest.” Apparently someone on the Council had decided that they were tired of cleaning up White Rose’s mess.

With Marannis and Vihaela gone and their main base destroyed, White Rose disintegrated. The houses operated by White Rose were closed down and the slaves and enforcers taken into custody, and the last remaining mages involved in running the organisation slipped away.

And by the time I was finally released from Keeper HQ, everyone was far too busy with all the political chaos to pay any attention to me.

“I still don’t understand what Vihaela was doing,” Luna said.

It was a week after the battle and I was back in the War Rooms, sitting in the same alcove in the Belfry where Haken and I had waited to be summoned. Murmurs of conversation echoed across the polished floor, mages and their assistants speaking quietly as they walked. I’d been ordered to attend another hearing—a less important one this time—and I’d taken advantage of my newly acquired status as a Keeper employee to bring Luna along.

“You remember what we were saying about the three factions?” I said. There was no one very close to us, but I kept my voice down all the same. “White Rose, Levistus’s group on the Council, and whoever hired Chamois. Vihaela wasn’t on White Rose’s side.”

“But she was working for White Rose.”

“Yeah, well, once the Keepers started digging, they found some new information,” I said. “Turns out Vihaela was running the organisation a bit too well. Well enough that Marannis wasn’t necessary anymore.”

“So Marannis thought she was going to betray him?”

“He might have been right at that. I had a look at Vihaela’s history. Her bosses tend not to live very long.”

Luna thought about it for a second. “So he decided to get rid of her, but she found out and beat him to the punch.”

“That’s what the Keepers think,” I said. “We know that she sent Leo to deliver the focus. Well, my guess is that she also leaked the time and place of the meeting. That was how Chamois knew where to find them.”

“Why?”

“She was turning the Council against White Rose,” I said. Now that I had a bit of distance, I could recognise the tactic. Take two of your enemies and set them against each other. I’d used the same trick plenty of times myself but this was my first time on the receiving end. It was a new experience for me and I was discovering I didn’t like it very much. Maybe this was how it had felt for some of the people I’d gone up against. “Remember the rumour that the data focuses could be cracked? The only thing stopping the Council from moving against White Rose was the information they were holding. Once enough mages on the Council believed that all that blackmail material White Rose was holding on to was going to get out anyway . . . well, that was it. Kidnapping Haken just sped things up.”

“So Vihaela wouldn’t have cared about getting the focus back at all.”

I nodded. “She knew it couldn’t be cracked. As long as it was out there, lost, it was doing its job. She hardly had to do anything, really. Once things were set in motion, she just had to wait for the Keepers to figure out what was going on and move against White Rose themselves. Levistus was the one trying to put on the brakes.”

“So what are you going to do with that focus?”

“Keep it as a souvenir, I guess. Not like anyone can read the thing.”

“Levistus could.” Luna thought for a second. “He was the one behind that attack on you and Caldera, wasn’t he?”

“Either him or someone on his team. I think they were hoping that by disappearing Leo they could dead-end the case. If Leo hadn’t talked before they snatched him, it might have worked.”

“What do you think happened to him?”

“You mean once they finished ripping everything he knew out of his skull?” I shook my head. I knew there was no way Levistus would have let him live.

Luna was silent, and I found myself thinking about Leo. He’d been abused by White Rose, used as a slave and as a disposable messenger. And then when he’d fallen into the hands of Light mages, the people who were supposed to be his protectors, they’d abducted, interrogated, and finally executed him. It was a miserable end to what had probably been a miserable life, and to a certain extent, it had happened because of me—it had been Caldera and me who’d inadvertently led Levistus’s agents to where Leo was hiding.

I hated that things worked like this. I hated that children like Leo and that nameless slave of Vihaela’s could be casually murdered, while the rulers slept easy at night, protected and safe. Sometimes a mid-level mage like Marannis would fall, but for the most part the ones who paid the heaviest price always seemed to be the ones who had the least to lose.

“It doesn’t feel like we won,” Luna said.

Luna and I think alike in some ways. “White Rose is gone,” I said. “Maybe Leo didn’t get to see the benefit of that, but the other slaves did.”

“This . . .” Luna took a breath. “This wasn’t all because of me, was it? I mean, I was the one who talked you into joining the Keepers, wasn’t I? Everyone who was killed in that battle . . .”

“No,” I said. “This fight was going to happen, one way or another. If it hadn’t happened this way, it would have happened somewhere else.”

Luna nodded. I could tell that it was still bothering her though, and I had the feeling that might be a good thing. In a few more years, if everything went to plan, Luna would pass her journeyman tests and become accepted as a mage. She was going to have to get used to her actions having consequences, even for people she didn’t meet.

“So who was Vihaela really working for?” Luna said.

“The Keepers don’t know, and neither does the Council,” I said. “But we can take a guess. Levistus has been weakened, his puppet candidate for the Council seat is gone, and the status quo’s in chaos. Who’s the one person who’s going to profit the most from all that?”

“Morden.”

“He’s wanted that Council seat for years. Now there’s nothing standing in his way.”

“So Levistus loses, and it just means Morden wins instead.” Luna grimaced. “Great.”

I didn’t answer; it was too close to what had been going through my head a minute ago. It’s not the first time I’ve been caught in a power struggle between Levistus and Morden, and once again, the most I’d been able to get was a partial victory. I was still alive, but so were they.

But sitting there in the Belfry, I made a decision. I was tired of Levistus and Morden. I’d seen enough people sacrificed as pawns in their political games. I wanted them to pay for what they’d done. Maybe for someone like me, they really were just untouchable. But if I had the chance . . .

Then I’ll bring them down. That’s a promise.

Something in the futures caught my attention, and I looked up. There was a mage crossing the floor towards us. Luna followed my gaze, and her eyes narrowed as she saw who it was. We watched in silence as he walked up to us and stopped. I didn’t say anything, and Luna didn’t either.

“Hey,” Haken said. Given what had happened to him, he looked in pretty good shape. It wasn’t really a surprise; Keepers get a good health plan. “Can I have a word?” His eyes flicked to Luna.

I paused just long enough to make it clear I was thinking about it. “I’ll be back in a bit,” I told Luna, then rose to my feet. Luna didn’t answer, and her eyes stayed on Haken as we walked away.

Haken and I crossed the Belfry, footsteps echoing on the stone as we traced the lines of the patterns beneath our feet. Other mages were scattered around, but none came close. I could sense subtle wards meant to detect eavesdropping. We rounded a column and turned left, still in silence.

“Committee are dragging their feet about Cerulean,” Haken said at last.

“Yeah, I bet they are.” Cerulean hadn’t shown up for his inquiry, even though they hadn’t officially suspended him yet. That one was going to be a major embarrassment for the Keepers. Informing on the side was one thing, but having one Keeper outright betray another was not going to do their reputation any favours. About the only consolation from their point of view was that with all the other political developments, no one had all that much attention to spare for a Keeper being fired.

“The guys we’re holding from White Rose are saying they didn’t know anything about it.”

I shrugged. “Might be true.”

“Yeah.”

There was a pause. We rounded another column and passed by the reception desks, heading back across the floor.

“So . . .” Haken said.

“Go ahead and ask it.”

“Why’d you do it?”

“Do what?”

Haken gave me a look.

“I don’t know everything,” I said. “You’ll have to narrow down the question.”

“I talked to Slate,” Haken said. “He said that it was because of you that they found me.”

I grinned. “Slate must have loved having to admit that.”

“So . . . ?”

“So?”

“You could have led them somewhere else.”

“I could.”

“So why’d you do it?”

I walked for a little way before answering. “Maybe it helped me prove my innocence to the Keepers,” I said at last. “Maybe I didn’t see any profit in holding a grudge. Maybe it was some other reason.” I shrugged. “From your perspective, does it matter?”

“Maybe not,” Haken said. “All the same . . . I’m curious.”

“When Cerulean tried to shoot me, you had a split second to decide whether to try to kill me, or whether to try to stop me,” I said. “You tried to stop me. If you want a reason, you can go with that.”

“And I assume you’re not going to tell me how you went through that wall of fire or how you vanished off our senses.”

“Yup.”

We’d done nearly a full circuit of the Belfry, and as we turned the final column, Haken stopped. “Then just so you know,” he said. “Levistus isn’t going to forget this. Right now he’s going for that Senior Council seat. But sooner or later, once that’s done, he’s going to come after you. There won’t be any more threats or warnings. If I were you? I’d start working on an escape plan.”

I looked back at Haken for a second. “Thanks for letting me know.”

“Yeah,” Haken said. “Good luck. You’ll need it.”

It was the next day when I stuck my head inside Caldera’s office. “You rang?”

“Yeah,” Caldera said. She was frowning at her computer. “Be with you in a sec.”

I crossed the room and sat in front of her desk, stretching out. To the right was the small workstation I’d been using. To the left was Haken’s half of the office. The desk looked a lot clearer than the last time I’d seen it. “Haken moved out?”

“Yes,” Caldera said without looking up. Her tone made it clear that she didn’t want to talk about it. I took the hint and stayed quiet.

The only noise in the office was Caldera’s fingers on the keys. She wasn’t a fast typist, and watching her, it struck me how awkward she looked sitting at a computer. Every time I’ve seen Caldera out in the field she’s looked confident and capable, but in front of a keyboard, she just looked out of place. At last Caldera took her hands off the keys and reached down to pull open a drawer. She took something out and set it down on the desk with a click. “Here.”

The object on the desk was a small silver signet, with a stylised flame and coat of arms. With my magesight, I could sense a faint magical trace. It was a focus, and as I looked at it, I realised I knew what it did. Keepers carried focuses like these as identification symbols. This one was smaller, with a different pattern, but it was recognisable as the same basic design. It was an official Council signet.

“Congrats,” Caldera said. “Welcome to the auxiliary corps of the Order of the Star.”

I blinked at her.

“No smart-arse comments?” Caldera asked.

“I’m, uh . . . just surprised.”

“About what?”

“Honestly?” I said. “I had the feeling you were going to blame me for what happened with Haken.”

“You followed the orders you were given,” Caldera said. “You did your job.”

I looked at Caldera for a second. “Don’t take this the wrong way,” I said, “but you don’t exactly seem happy.”

“About what? That Haken was the one who set us up in Uxbridge?”

I didn’t answer.

“I’m not a fucking idiot, okay?” Caldera said. “I put it together. And yes, we’ve noticed how you kept quiet about it instead of laying another charge against the order. Sure Rain’ll appreciate it.” She gave me a look. “Picking up our politics fast, aren’t you?”

I raised my eyebrows.

Caldera stared at me for a second, then passed a hand across her eyes. “Fuck.” She paused. “Forget it.”

“The thing with Haken’s getting to you, isn’t it?”

“He was my partner for a year,” Caldera said. “I knew him when we were apprentices. Yeah, it’s getting to me.”

“If it’s any consolation, he did try to help,” I said, then shrugged. “A little. I don’t know. Maybe give it some time, talk to him. You might be able to work something out.”

“Yeah.” Caldera pushed a set of stapled sheets of paper across to me. “All right. Take a look at these.”

I flipped the report around, started reading it, blinked, skipped to the end. “Smuggling?”

“Yeah, looks like there’s a new source of meld. We had a handle on it for a while, but seems like a new supplier’s got into the market. Best guess is it’s coming from Thailand.”

“This doesn’t have anything to do with White Rose?”

“Not really.”

“So . . . we just go on to the next job?”

“What were you expecting?” Caldera said. “Victory parade?”

“Would have been nice.”

Caldera snorted. “How’d you think this was going to go? It was just a case. They come and they go. Some are easy, some are hard. But you know what they’ve all got in common?”

I looked at Caldera, interested. “What?”

“They end,” Caldera said. “And you go back to your desk and start the next one.” She shook her head. “You still think like an independent, Verus. There’s trouble, you fix it, and everything goes back to normal. But that’s not how it works now you’re in the Keepers. For us, this is normal.”

“Mm. By the way?”

“What?”

“You can call me Alex.”

Caldera gave me a curious look. After a moment, she nodded.

We sat in silence for a little while, broken only by the rustle of paper as I turned the pages. “Do you think what we did to White Rose will change anything?” I asked.

“Short term?” Caldera said. “Sure. Longer term?” She shrugged. “Demand’s still there. People are still the same. You can make things a little better if you work at it. But in the end, nothing really changes.”

I thought about that for a moment. I remembered the Keepers, and the feeling of sitting in the Belfry, watching the mages of the Light Council go about their business. Even in the middle of everything that had happened, there had been a sense of inertia there, a stability. It was easy to believe it would always be the same. Caldera was paging through the report, distracted, and all around us, the bureaucracy of the Keepers hummed quietly. It didn’t feel any different.

At least, not yet.

It was a month later.

The Conclave is a semicircular amphitheatre, the largest of the three chambers at the heart of the War Rooms. Gold leaf covered the domed roof above, and gilt-framed paintings and works of art looked down from between velvet curtains. I’d never been inside the Conclave before. Usually the room is forbidden to all but an inner circle of Light mages, but there are a very few events where the gates are (reluctantly) opened to outsiders. This was one of them.

The room was crowded. Mages sat in rows at the curving benches, while those who hadn’t been able to get a seat stood in the stairs or at the back. Security was everywhere, Council operatives and Keepers standing at vantage points at the lower levels and scanning the crowd from the balconies above. I could feel the presence of literally hundreds of defensive wards and spells, but few of the mages seemed to be paying attention to them. Everyone was focused on the stage below.

Thirteen chairs stood at the centre of the stage, one row of seven, slightly raised, and a second row of six in front and below. Ten of the chairs were occupied. One of the ten people was Levistus, sitting still and silent. The other nine I’d never seen before. All wore elaborate mage robes; none were young. The one thing all shared was that each of them wore a simple gold chain over their shoulders. These were the Junior and Senior Councils, the leaders of the Light mages of Britain, and collectively they wielded more power than any other group in the country.

I wondered what they thought of what was happening in front of them.

“Who comes before the Council?” the master of ceremonies asked.

The man he was addressing looked about thirty, though I knew he was far older. He had dark hair, the polished good looks of someone who spends time cultivating them, and a half smile that rarely left his face. His robes were black, which I was sure had been a deliberate choice. This was Morden, one of the most powerful Dark mages I’d ever met. If the mages sitting in those chairs were the strongest amongst the Light faction, Morden was their counterpart. “One who is summoned,” Morden replied. He didn’t raise his voice, but it carried to the edges of the room.

“How do you come before the Council?” the master asked.

“In humility and in obedience,” Morden said.

“Why do you come before the Council?”

“I wish only to serve the Council, in heart and mind and soul.”

“Where would you serve?”

Morden’s voice stayed quite steady. “On the Council, should it please the Councillors.”

I heard a slight murmur go through the crowd. It was as if they hadn’t quite believed that this was really going to happen until they heard the words. I’d read the histories: in all the thousands of years that the Council of Britain had existed, a Dark mage had never sat upon it. Until now.

The ritual continued, question and answer, each exchange scripted. I took the opportunity to look around, scanning the faces of the mages I could see. A few looked thoughtful. More looked angry. I didn’t get the sense that the Light mages here were happy about what was happening today, and as I looked into the futures in which I approached people, I saw that anger turned towards me. Of the ones who recognised me, all too many saw another Dark mage like Morden. They were looking for someone to blame, and I didn’t think that was going to go away. If anything, as the reality of Morden’s presence on the Council sank in, it would get worse—

A voice whispered into my ear. You know where you belong.

I jumped, twisted. There was no one behind me. Mages around me turned to look at me, frowning. I looked from side to side, heart hammering. There was no one there, and the futures were clear.

But I’d known that voice. It had been Richard’s.

On the stage below, the master of ceremonies turned from Morden to the sitting Councillors. “Who will accept this mage to the Council?”

Everyone fell silent, watching. All eyes were on the nine men and the one woman sitting on those chairs. One of the men was the first to move, straightening his dark red robes before unhurriedly rising to his feet. A moment later, a second stood, followed by a third. One at a time, slowly and deliberately, each of them rose . . . except for Levistus.

The chamber was dead quiet, and I held my breath. Everyone’s eyes were on Levistus. An election to the Council had to be unanimous. The appointment would have been decided over behind closed doors, but any member, at least technically, had veto power. If Levistus stayed seated, Morden would be refused his seat. Levistus would almost certainly be removed from the Council himself in the aftermath, but he could do it . . .

Levistus stayed where he was, and I sensed the futures fork, just briefly. Then he rose to his feet. His pale eyes regarded Morden without expression.

“It is agreed,” the master of ceremonies said. “Mage Morden, step forward.”

Morden stepped forward and bowed his head. The master of ceremonies picked up a gold chain, twin to the ones worn by the ten mages standing behind him. The chain was plain and heavy, almost simple compared to the artworks around the chamber, but it symbolised far more. He placed the chain around Morden’s neck. “You are raised to the Junior Council, that it may further endure,” the master of ceremonies recited. “May the Light guide you.”

Morden straightened. His right hand came up to touch the chain, holding one of the links between thumb and forefinger for a second, then he nodded to the master of ceremonies and walked to one of the empty chairs. He sat, and the other ten sat as well. Now there were eleven.

A faint murmur went through the room, then died away into silence. I don’t know what I’d been expecting—an outcry, maybe. Instead everyone just watched. You read a lot about history being made; you don’t often see it happen. Sitting on his Council seat, Morden surveyed the crowd. I was hidden away at the back, yet his eyes found me. Maybe it was my imagination, but he seemed to give me a tiny smile and a nod of the head.

I looked away sharply. The master of ceremonies was announcing something else, but I didn’t listen. Instead I found myself scanning the faces around me, looking from one mage to another. None were familiar, and it took a moment before I realised who I was looking for. Richard. I couldn’t see him, or sense his presence, yet somehow I knew he was there.

Caldera’s wrong, I thought. Things are changing. I turned and walked out of the Conclave, leaving the Council behind. The Keepers on the door watched me go.