Veiled

Chapter 3

“. . . and unfortunately I don’t think it’s going to open up any time soon.”

“That’s a pity,” I said. “No chance of that changing?”

“Right at the moment my schedule’s fairly fixed, I’m afraid. I’m committed all the way through the spring.”

“Sorry to hear that. If anything does change and you have an opening . . . ?”

“Of course. I’ll give you a call.”

“Thanks for your time.”

“Have a good day.”

The man on the other side of the video feed reached forward to his keyboard and the window closed. I leant back in my chair with a sigh. “Well, that was a waste of time.”

“I didn’t like him anyway,” Luna said.

It was the next day and we were up in my living room. I was at my desk, Luna was sitting on the sofa, and we’d just finished a call with another prospective teacher. I’d had Luna around just on the off chance that the conversation might have gone well, but as it turned out she could have saved herself the trip.

“Is it me,” Luna said, “or are there not many chance mages with the Council? Because every time I get a class on chance magic, it always seems to be some other mage telling us about chance magic. I’m starting to think I know more than the teachers.”

“You know magic types have a bias towards factions,” I said. “Death mages are more likely to be Dark, mind mages are more likely to be Light . . . well, chance mages tend to be independent or Dark. They might go through the apprentice program, but they don’t stay there.”

“Yeah, can’t imagine why. So have we run out yet?”

“Of the Council-approved ones, yeah.”

We’d been at the teacher-hunting game for a month, with no luck so far. Trying to find a magic teacher who matches your magic type and has the time and inclination to teach and is trustworthy is not easy. When I’d tried it with Anne and Variam, it had taken longer than this and I’d only managed a fifty percent success rate. “Guess it’s time to go farther afield,” I said. “We could try looking abroad, start in America or Europe and work our way out. Only problem with that is that I don’t really have any contacts over there.”

“Or . . . ?”

“Or we broaden our search by person instead of by country. So far I’ve been keeping it to Light mages and the reputable independents.” I tapped my fingers on the desk. “I know there are a whole lot more chance mages out there, but they don’t advertise. And you don’t know what you’re getting . . .”

“Soooo . . .” Luna said. “Funny you should mention that.”

I looked at Luna. “What have you done this time?”

“What do you mean, ‘this time’?”

“Just give me the bad news.”

“For your information, I got an offer for a teacher already,” Luna said.

“Who?”

“Her name’s Chalice.”

“She’s a finder?”

“No, she said she’s a chance mage. And she said she wanted to meet you.”

I frowned. “That’s . . . strange.” Magical teachers who are thinking about taking on a new student usually want to interview the student. The only explanation I could think was that she wanted some sort of payment. Still, there was only one way to find out. “All right. How?”

“She gave me an e-mail address, asked me to give it to you. I’ll forward it.”

“Okay. When was this?”

“Just this morning.” Luna paused. “By the way, there’s one other thing . . .”

I’d been waiting for the other shoe to drop. “What other thing?”

“She’s . . . not an independent.”

And if she were a Light mage, Luna would have told me already. “She’s Dark.”

“Yeah,” Luna said. She was watching me carefully.

“How do you know?”

“She told me. She didn’t keep it a secret or anything.”

“How did she get your contact details?”

“She said it was through the apprentice program,” Luna said, shrugging. “It was only my public mailbox.”

I was silent. “Is that a problem?” Luna asked.

“Yes.”

“You did just say we’d have to widen the search.”

“I said we might have to widen the search, and when I said ‘widen,’ I didn’t mean take anyone we could get. Let’s try some independents before we get crazy.”

“I thought you had been trying most of the independents.”

“Then we’ll find some others.”

“Okay,” Luna said. “But while we’re doing that, it won’t do any harm if we see how it goes, right?”

I looked at Luna. “Are you actually serious about this?”

Luna paused, then nodded.

“Luna, this isn’t a good idea. She’s a Dark mage.”

“Most of the people I hang out with are ex-Dark anyway.”

“Okay,” I said. “Bit of a difference here I don’t think you’re seeing. I was originally trained by a Dark mage, a really long time ago, and in case you’ve forgotten, it didn’t work out so well. And Anne and Vari’s experience was worse.”

“It’s not like the Council are so much better.”

“Maybe not, but they’re safer.”

“They didn’t feel much safer to me,” Luna said quietly.

That brought me up short. Luna officially became my apprentice two and a half years ago, but she got her feet wet in magical society the year before. And when I say “feet wet,” it was more like “someone trying to drown you.” Back then Luna had been a novice, inexperienced and vulnerable, and on two separate occasions she’d fallen into the hands of Light mages who had done a very good job of demonstrating to her that being a Light mage did not make you a nice person. Those sorts of experiences leave an impression.

But just because Light mages can be bastards, that doesn’t make Dark ones any less dangerous. “I don’t think you’re thinking this all the way through,” I said. “You’re twenty-four. In another year or two you’re going to want to take your journeyman tests, and that means going to the Council. You already know how much grief you get for being my apprentice, and I’m only ex-Dark. If you’ve been studying under a Dark mage directly, it’s going to be worse.”

“So the Council are going to be upset,” Luna said. “The Council are always upset. They’re never happy and they’re never going to like me, and you know what? I’m pretty much okay with that. I know doing this might be dangerous but . . . ever since I’ve been in the magical world, ever since I walked into your shop, I’ve been taking risks. And I kind of like it. I don’t want to be a hundred percent safe. Besides . . . the last few years, it feels like it works. Okay, yeah, sometimes it goes wrong, but everything good that’s happened to me, it’s because I took the chance and did something that could have turned out badly, isn’t it? I mean, that was the only reason I met you. If I hadn’t decided to go for it, I’d be back at home alone, sleeping most of the day and trying to find a reason to get up every morning. And that’s if I was lucky. So I don’t know what’ll happen, but . . . maybe it’s worth it.”

I looked at Luna. She was sitting up straight, meeting my gaze, and I felt a pang. She’s growing past the apprentice stage, isn’t she? How much longer before she’d be ready to strike out on her own? Two years? Less? I didn’t know, but all of a sudden as I looked at her, I felt sure that Luna was past the halfway mark. The time ahead of her as my apprentice would be shorter than the time she’d spent already. It was a strange feeling, proud and melancholy at the same time.

And if she was going to be a journeyman soon . . . then maybe it was time to start treating her like one.

“I’ll talk to her,” I said. “But I’m not promising anything.”

“Thanks.”

Once Luna was gone I opened up and spent the rest of the day running the shop. My shop’s called the Arcana Emporium, and it’s in the back streets of Camden. As far as I know it’s the only magic shop in Britain that sells actual magic (there are rumours of one in Ireland, but I’ve never gotten around to checking them out). The weather outside was cold, but I didn’t have any shortage of customers.

I get two general categories of customers in my shop: the ones who have a clue (the minority), and the ones who don’t (much more common). Generally speaking, the clueless ones aren’t a big problem—all they want to do is browse around and poke things. They’re just here for entertainment, and as long as they don’t break anything, I don’t really mind.

The ones who are a problem tend to be the ones at the far ends of the scepticism-to-credulity scale. First you get the sceptics, who are absolutely certain that magic isn’t real and will explain this to you at length. This is generally irritating rather than dangerous, but still gets old fast, particularly since a large fraction of said group seem to believe that if you don’t agree with them, then all that means is that you must not understand what they’re saying. So they’ll go back to the beginning and explain all over again about how all of this magic stuff is superstition and why no one in their right mind could really believe in it, while I try to explain in turn that yes, that’s very interesting, but there are three other customers waiting behind you and would you mind getting out of the way so I can talk to them instead?

At the other end of the scale you get the excessively credulous types, who believe in magic just fine, as well as everything else. Today’s representatives of the latter group included a guy who’d come into possession of a vase that he wanted identified because he thought it was magical (it wasn’t), another guy whose girlfriend had left him and who was convinced that it was for supernatural reasons (it wasn’t), a woman who thought she was the reincarnation of Cleopatra and wanted to talk to me about her destiny (that one went downhill fast), and some bunch of lunatics calling themselves the Circle of the Serpent who wanted my help with initiation rites (don’t ask).

In other words, a normal day. Hey, at least it isn’t boring.

But mixed in with the ones who have no idea what they’re talking about are the ones who do. And mixed in with those are the ones who might not know how the magical world works but have enough common sense to figure out that if they’re going to be involved in it, then learning as much as they can is a really good idea.

“For the last time, I’m not checking up to see if your wife is cheating on you,” I said. “I’m not a private detective.”

The man left in a huff and I turned back to the person I’d been talking to before he’d butted in. The adept was shorter than average, with scruffy clothes and overly thick glasses, but the eyes behind the lenses were perceptive. “Kind of,” I told him. “I mean, the way the law is right now, it doesn’t actually draw any distinction between Dark mages and Light mages anyway.”

“So what is the proposal going to do?”

“The big issue is Council membership,” I said. “Some mages want the Junior and Senior Council opened up to Dark mages, some don’t. This proposal of Morden’s is going further than that. If it goes through, there’ll be one seat on the Junior Council that’s only open to Dark mages.”

“But why?”

“Affirmative action, I suppose. If it’s any consolation, it’s not going to affect you and your friends directly. It only applies to mages.”

“But it’ll make a difference, won’t it?” the adept said. “If there are Dark mages on the Council, then it’s like saying that they’re approving what they do.”

“Yeah.”

“So isn’t that going to filter down? Like that thing that happened with that Dark mage, Torvald. The next time that happens they’ll be even less likely to do anything, won’t they? It’ll just keep getting worse.”

I sighed. “You might be right.”

“So what are we supposed to do? It’s not like the Council’s going to listen to us.”

“I don’t know. I wish I had some better answers for you, but I don’t. And it’s not as though the Council’s going to listen to me, either.”

“But you’re still a mage.”

“There is that. Look, how many are there in your circle?”

The adept (his name was Lucian) hesitated for a second before deciding to tell the truth. “Five.”

“So at least you’re not on your own. Okay, I’m guessing there’s something specific you’re worried about, so why don’t you give me a rundown on which of your friends you think are in danger and why. I can’t promise anything, but I can probably give you some advice that’ll make it more likely that if something goes wrong, it won’t happen to you guys.”

We talked it over. It took a while because the conversation kept on being interrupted by other customers: a girl who wanted to sell a dagger focus, three people buying various mundane items, two different guys wanting to buy magic tricks, and a latent mage just starting to come into her power who’d gotten in touch with me via e-mail. I bought the dagger off the first, sold the next three the things they wanted, gave the two would-be magicians business cards from the box on the counter, and booked a time with the last girl for a longer chat.

“Anyway, that’s the best advice I’ve got,” I said at last. “Look, you can give me a call if anything happens. Doubt I’ll be able to do anything directly, but I can give you some suggestions.”

“All right.” Lucian started to leave, then hesitated. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.”

“No, I mean . . . Kath said I shouldn’t come. She thought you were supposed to hate adepts.”

“I’ve heard that too.”

“But you don’t, right?” Lucian said. “I mean, that thing with the Nightstalkers. You didn’t go after them because you wanted to, did you?”

“I wish everyone else would believe that. Look, you want to do me a favour back? Tell the other adepts you know that I’m trying to be one of the good guys.”

“Oh.” Lucian paused. “Okay.” He left, and I went back to dealing with the rest of the customers.

When you’re forced to see things from someone else’s point of view, it helps you put things in perspective. I often feel vulnerable in mage society—in both power and influence, compared to someone like Caldera, I’m a lightweight. But just as other mages are above me, there are others that I’m above in turn. I might be weak by mage standards, but I’m still a mage, and that gives me a certain automatic level of status and bargaining power. For adepts like Lucian, and for novices like that girl, magical society is a very scary place. Things can go wrong very fast and very badly, and when they do there isn’t much of a safety net. It was a reminder that my life could be a lot worse.

It was also a reminder that this wasn’t just about me. Whatever Richard and Morden were planning, it was going to have trickle-down effects to everyone. More lives than our own were going to be affected by this.

The sun was setting when I finished with the last customer and locked up. I used to spend most of my days like this, but over the last couple of years the amount of time I’ve spent running my shop has been going steadily down. Officially the Arcana Emporium’s supposed to be open six days a week, and okay, I don’t think I’ve ever consistently kept to that, but I used to average about four and a half. Nowadays it’s more like three. Either there’s a job, or a problem, or I’m training Luna, or researching . . . and when push comes to shove, running my shop is one of my few responsibilities where if I skip out, then nothing immediately bad is going to happen. Over the last few months I’d actually got into the habit of having Luna run the place every Tuesday, just so there’d be one day the place would consistently be open.

If things kept going the way they had been, though, then before long the average number of days I was putting in at the shop per week was going to hit zero, and that bothered me a little. Weird as it sounds, my shop’s one of the only public faces for magic in this country; for people like Lucian who have some sort of magic-related problem but aren’t plugged into mage society, this is one of the few places they can go. Maybe I needed to start taking steps so that the shop could survive without me . . . I shook it off and checked my e-mail. There was a message from Carol, one of the Keeper admins; they’d received the report I’d sent about yesterday and had sent a form-letter acknowledgement back, which for some reason left me vaguely disappointed. I’d been half-expecting to get chewed out, but it didn’t sound as though they’d even particularly noticed.

Luna had sent me Chalice’s address. I sent her an e-mail agreeing to meet, then spent a couple of hours trying to dig up information. She was a Dark chance mage, but beyond that her affiliation was unknown. No apprentices or dependents that anyone knew about. Trained (and presumably born) outside the U.K., so there wasn’t as much information as there would have been if she’d grown up here. No obvious red flags, and no connection to Morden or Richard that I could find, but I was still uneasy. Dark mages always have an agenda. What was hers?

I was so lost in thought that I didn’t even see it coming when the phone rang. I picked up absently. “Lensman.”

“Hello, Verus.” Lensman is a mage with a voice that sounds like he should be on the BBC. He’s in the same business as me, more or less—while I sell items to adepts and apprentices, Lensman sells to mages. It’s higher profit but a lot more dangerous. I get some of my items from him, and over the years we’ve become friends of a sort, though we rarely meet in person. “Just to let you know, that focus you delivered looks excellent. I’ve already got a buyer lined up.”

“That’s good.” Honestly, I didn’t really care. The item in question had been a concentration-based shielding focus. Completely useless in a combat situation, but for some reason Light duellists love the things. My mind was still on Chalice.

“Well, in the meantime, I’ve sure you’ll be glad to hear that I’ve finally heard back about that archaeological project of yours.”

“Archaeological . . . ?”

“The rubbings?”

“Oh, right.” All of a sudden I was paying attention. I’d forgotten about those notes of Vari’s. “How did it go?”

“Well, it took some time.” Lensman sounded entertained. “You certainly picked a puzzler. Where did you dig them up, anyway?”

“Can’t really discuss it, sorry.” I knew that Lensman would assume that meant it was Council-related. “If you wanted somewhere more secure . . .”

“No, no, nothing sensitive about the information.” I heard the rustling of papers in the background. Lensman doesn’t like using computers—like a lot of mages, he’s the old-fashioned type. “So, the long and the short of it is that the inscriptions are almost certainly Heraclian.”

“As in the philosopher?”

“Not Heraclitus, Heraclian.”

“Okay, I have no idea what that means.”

“Yes, obscure, isn’t it? They were a mage tradition dating back to the Byzantines. Heavy associations with magical creatures. It looks as though those rubbings were taken from a storage device of some kind. Probably their version of a Minkowski box.”

“Any idea what was inside it?”

“No, it seems that whoever took those rubbings left the box sealed.”

“You said they ‘were’ a mage tradition,” I said. “Don’t suppose there’s any chance they’re still around?”

“Unfortunately not. Apparently they got a bit too close to magical creatures for their own good. Came under vampiric control and the Council had to wipe them out in the vampire wars.”

“Anything else in the notes? Where it came from, what it could be used for?”

“Sorry. We were lucky to get this much really.”

Damn it. “Well, thanks.”

I hung up and put the phone on the desk, staring down at it. I tried to puzzle out what all that meant and came up with nothing. Magical creatures in our world have been declining for centuries. Most of the types the Heraclians had been in contact with would probably be extinct by now. What would Richard want with relics of extinct magical creatures? It could mean anything, or nothing . . . and without more information, there was no way to know which. Another dead end.

I leant back, closing my eyes with a sigh. Ever since I saw Richard last year, I’d had a sense of doom. As though I were stumbling around in the dark, blind and clumsy, while Richard was looking down on me from some place of power. He hadn’t contacted me since last year, yet wherever I went and whatever I did, I could feel his presence like a silent shadow. Worst of all, no matter what we did to move against him, I couldn’t shake the creeping feeling that Richard knew exactly what we were doing and wasn’t responding in kind for the simple reason that nothing that I or Anne or Vari or Luna could do was the slightest threat.

I leant back and stared out of the window, wondering what to do. From above the rooftops, stars shone down from a clear sky, and I knew that it would be a bitterly cold night. It was hard not to feel hopeless. I was struggling and clawing to become a Keeper auxiliary, working for weeks and months at a time to gain a tiny bit more favour with the Council. Meanwhile, Richard and Morden between them had more power than I could gain in a hundred years. They could have us all eliminated at any time and place of their choosing, probably with no more than a phone call. Was I really accomplishing anything? Or were all my efforts with the Keepers and with finding a teacher for Luna just a way of passing time?

Then I shook my head. This isn’t getting me anywhere. Maybe working with the Keepers would help and maybe not, but I’d chosen my course of action and all there was to do was stick with it. In the meantime, if I couldn’t do anything about Richard or Luna, I might as well concentrate on something more productive.

All day long, in the back of my mind, I’d been puzzling over that focus I’d found last night and the question of how it had got there. Without it, I could have written off the 999 call as a waste of time. With it . . . well, focuses don’t get left lying around for no reason. Why had one been sitting by the train tracks of an all-but-empty DLR station?

The bottom line was that I’d been told to find out what had happened, and I hadn’t. Yes, I’d followed orders, but I didn’t really want to leave it at that. Part of it was a sense of professionalism, but part of it was just simple curiosity. When you’re a diviner, you have this constant urge to stick your head in for a closer look, and when you don’t, it bugs you. If I wanted to find out what had happened at that station, how would I do it?

The easy answer was time magic. Time mages can look back into the past of their current location, playing out the events before their eyes like a video recording. It’s a very useful ability, which naturally means that the supply of helpful time mages never meets the demand. I do know one time mage, a guy called Sonder, but we aren’t exactly friends anymore and I didn’t even think he was in London at the moment. That just left the mundane way. What would I do if I wanted to find out what had happened at a particular place and time and I wasn’t a mage?

The obvious answer was CCTV. London has the dubious distinction of being the most spied-upon city in the world, with more security cameras per person than anywhere else on the planet. I couldn’t remember if the station had had any cameras, but logic suggested that the answer was yes. I glanced at the clock to see that it was ten P.M. Trains would still be running.

Well, why not?

One of the drawbacks of being a diviner is not having access to the gate spell. Gate magic is one of the more useful tricks that mages have up their sleeves; it creates a portal between two points in space, allowing you to step from place to place instantly. You have to know the two places you’re gating between, but it’s still a really useful ability to have—it would have allowed me to get to Pudding Mill Lane station in about sixty seconds, using my mental image of the place from the night before. Unfortunately, gate magic is restricted to elementalists. There are a handful of non-elemental magic types that can use the spell (death and space being the most well known), but divination isn’t one of them.

If you can’t use gate spells, the next best thing is gate stones. They’re small, cheap items that can be used to produce a gate effect at will, and like most focuses they can be used by any mage. Only problem is, they’ll take you to the same place every time, namely the spot the focus was keyed to. Great for going home, not so good for outbound trips.

Which is why when I’m travelling around London, I usually just take the train like everybody else.

I stepped out onto the platform at Pudding Mill Lane, shivering in the cold air. Behind me, the doors of the train hissed shut and the carriages began to pull away from the station.

Now that I knew what I was looking for, it didn’t take me long to find it. There were two CCTV cameras on the platform, pointing in both directions, and . . . there. Perfect. A third camera just a little way past the platform, pointing at the gate with the No Admittance sign and looking right down on the spot where I’d found the focus last night.

I wanted to go through the gate and poke around, but despite the late hour there were a couple of other people on the platform: a man fiddling with his mobile phone and a woman carrying a bunch of Sainsbury’s bags. I didn’t want to do anything to draw attention while they were so close. Although now that I’d found the right camera, it occurred to me that I didn’t really know what to do next. How did you pull recordings off cameras? The Keepers would definitely have contacts at Transport for London, but I didn’t know whether they’d do something like that on my request.

From the departure boards I could see that trains were coming every ten minutes. As I watched, a southbound train pulled up at the platform in a rumble of light and noise, newly arrived from the terminus at Stratford. The woman with the Sainsbury’s bags got on. The man with the mobile phone didn’t. The doors shut with a hiss and the train pulled away, heading south towards the towers of Canary Wharf, leaving the two of us alone on the platform.

I tried to figure out how I’d go about getting the recordings. The camera had to be sending the data somewhere—maybe a local node? I walked down the stairwell in the centre of the platform, looking for some sort of office. No good. There was hardly any station beyond the platform, just a few locked doors. One was a lift, another a supply closet. The third was some sort of switch room. They were locked, but it was only a simple padlock. I could probably pick it . . . I looked up to see that the man was still up there on the platform, and annoyingly, he’d chosen to stand right near the top of the stairs. He was talking into his mobile in French, and ignoring me completely, but he’d have a perfect view of anything I did. Will you just get on your train and go away?

Maybe there was some other way I could get the recordings. If I . . .

Wait a second.

That man had been here when I’d arrived. He hadn’t boarded the northbound train that I’d taken to get here. And he hadn’t boarded the southbound train that had just left.

If he wasn’t waiting for a northbound train or a southbound train, what was he doing here?

Without looking directly at the guy I studied him through the futures. He was a little taller than average, dressed warmly in a woollen cap and a long coat. Most of his face was hidden behind a beard and dark glasses. As I watched, he started strolling down the stairs towards me, still talking into his phone. “Allons, ma chérie, ne sois pas comme ça. Tu sais que ce n’est pas elle. Je viens de . . .”

He still wasn’t looking in my direction. From his body language it didn’t even look as though he’d noticed I was there, but my instincts were starting to sound a warning. “Allez,” he said. “Allez, allez, allez. Ce n’est pas ce que j’ai dit. Non, tu sais . . . Je n’ai pas dit ca. Allez . . .”

The two of us were alone in the station entrance. Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, reflecting off the white tiles of the walls. The man was halfway down the stairs; his course would take him behind me and out onto the long path heading through the construction site to the main road. Something in my precognition was trying to catch my attention, and I looked into the short-term futures of what would happen when he—

Oh shit.

All of a sudden I realised just how isolated we were. There were no staff in the station, no passengers on the platform, and the next train was still four minutes away. The construction site around us was deserted. There were still security cameras . . .

. . . and how much help were they yesterday? I was on my own. Casually I shifted position, my right hand drifting to my belt. I didn’t turn around and the man disappeared out of my field of vision. He was still talking. “Tu sais que je n’ai pas . . . je n’étais—”

I held very still, counting off the seconds. Four. Three.

Now he was right behind me. “Je n’étais même pas là . . .”

Two. One . . .

“Pourquoi de vrais—” Magic flared behind me and I heard a whisper of movement, soft and quick.

I was already twisting. Something slid past me and hit the door with a thunk. At the same time my hand came up in a flash of metal, stabbing upwards.

He was quick, very quick. The knife hit home but he was already jumping back and a shield flickered into existence as the blow landed. He came down in a fighting stance, a translucent blade that hadn’t been there a second ago held in his right hand and pointing straight at me. He started to cast another spell, and before he could finish I lunged.

The man dropped the spell and struck, meeting my attack with his own. I hooked his blade and kept going, slamming him into the wall and forcing his knife hand out of position while I stabbed at his gut, one-two-three. The third blow sank home but as it did another spell blew me back, solid air striking like a hammer. I was thrown back to the steps, tripped, looked up to see him moving in a blur of motion, disappearing around the corner before I could react.

I scrambled to my feet. I could feel the signature of his spells moving out of the station towards the construction site. Air magic, soft and grey and whisper-quick. That spell he’d used to throw me away had been a wind blast, and that blade had been hardened air. I looked right to see that the door I’d been standing in front of had a narrow diamond-shaped hole, almost too thin to see. If I hadn’t moved that would have been my back.

I looked at my knife to see a trace of blood, but only a trace. He’d been using an air shield. I didn’t think he was seriously hurt, but—

My divination warned me first, my magesight second. Energy twined around the corridor where I was standing and I bolted up the stairs, putting distance between me and the centre of the spell. As I cleared the stairs and came down on the platform I felt a sudden tug of wind pulling me back and my ears popped as I heard a hollow whump from behind. I darted behind a pillar and held still.

Silence. I strained my ears, trying to make out some sound. Wind swirling around the platform, traffic on the main road to the east. I couldn’t hear the guy’s footsteps. What had that spell been? Whatever it was, it wasn’t friendly to human bodies. My best guess was some kind of implosion effect. Air mage, has to be. Too many spells to be an adept.

Movement in the futures. There was no sound, but looking into what would happen if I stepped out, I could sense the air mage coming back. He was floating, not walking, hovering a few inches above the ground at the foot of the steps. The air blade was still in his right hand, and as I watched he began to glide up the stairs, eyes searching left and right.

Not good. The platform had cover, but not enough. Maybe I can hide . . . The pillar I had ducked behind was more of a girder, really, holding up the roof over the platform. I held very still.

The air mage reached the top of the stairs, looking left and right. He was maybe twenty feet from where I was standing. I held my breath.

Silence.

The other man was standing quite still. The futures flickered, uncertain. In some of them he found me, in others he didn’t. I couldn’t see what I needed to do to shake him. He began walking down the platform.

I edged very carefully to the left, keeping the pillar between us. The wind had dropped and the air was still. I made it around and the air mage was walking away down the platform. Hasn’t seen me yet . . . I drew in a soft breath and let it out.

The air mage’s head snapped around.

Shit.

He cleared the benches in one jump, seeming to hang in the air, eyes locking onto me. I leapt back behind the pillar as a spray of something almost invisible and very lethal flashed down the platform towards me. I needed time. I grabbed a forcewall from my pocket, flicked the gold discs out to the platform edges, and said the command word just as another spell came flying at me.

The discs ignited, throwing up an invisible barrier, and the spell bounced off; it had been some sort of whirlwind. I backed out into the open, looking at the mage through the forcewall. “Can we talk about this?”

He threw another spell. Fragments of hardened air slammed into the forcewall, dissolving back into gas as soon as they struck. The forcewall didn’t budge. “Okay, so you’re not the chatty type,” I said. “That’s fine, we can work something out. So why exactly are you trying to kill me? I’m guessing it’s got something to do with what happened last night?”

No answer. I couldn’t see the guy’s eyes behind the dark glasses, but the rest of his face was expressionless. Usually when someone attacks you, they want to talk, either to justify themselves or to convince you to give up. When they’re silent and blank-faced, it’s a bad sign. It means they’ve already written you off and they’re not going to waste time talking to a dead man.

The air mage fired off another useless spell at the forcewall, then stopped. His head tilted up as he looked at where the forcewall met the platform roof and I knew he was studying the spell with his magesight. Forcewalls transfer energy into whatever they’re anchored to when they’re attacked, which makes them very hard to blast through. Air magic isn’t much good at blasting through stuff. It’s much better at moving things around.

Unfortunately the forcewall only went as far as the platform edge.

Magic curved around the mage as he floated into the air. He flew out over the train tracks and right around the wall.

Shit! I was already moving, jumping off the other edge down onto the tracks, putting the concrete bulk of the platform between us. I’d been hoping that the guy would chase after me, fly low over the platform where he’d have trouble manoeuvring, but instead he flew straight up, coming all the way over the platform roof to arc down on top of where I was hiding. I had to scramble back onto the platform to look for cover.

The mage did an attack run, sweeping past. Bullets of hardened air threw up chips of concrete as I darted behind the advertising boards at the platform centre. The shots tracked me as I moved, tearing through the flimsy plastic of the boards, punching holes in the posters from Transport for London announcing that Being Careful Won’t Hurt You and urging everyone to Report Anything Suspicious to Our Staff or the Police. The boards went dark as the lights behind them fizzled and died, and the air mage soared up into the sky again, disappearing from my sight.

This was bad. As long as this guy stayed airborne I couldn’t touch him. Running was useless; it was too far to the main road. I glanced up at the indicator. Three minutes until the next northbound train. Could I hold out that long?

The air mage did another flyby. The first attack was a hail of daggers made of hardened air, the second a whirlwind that would have picked me up and thrown me out onto the tracks. Next was a wind blast like a solid punch, and after that was another implosion spell, shattering more of the poster boards and sending a hollow boom echoing out over the construction site. I ducked and dodged, jumping behind the platform, using the forcewall as a barrier, pulling every trick I could think of to shake him. I was holding him off, but I wasn’t stopping him. Magic doesn’t run off some sort of limited resource, and while casting spells takes energy, it’s no more tiring than any other demanding skill—apprentices might exhaust themselves after a dozen or so spells, but a journeyman or master mage won’t. Which means that you can’t make a mage run out of magic. As long as they want you dead badly enough, they can just sit there and keep casting the same spell at you over and over again until you roll over and die.

And just as I was thinking that, my luck ran out.

The air mage had fallen into a pattern, aiming spells at the same points on the platform. He started to cast another dagger burst, and I began to jump down behind the platform edge . . . and in midcast he changed target, placing the centre of the burst right above where I’d been about to take cover.

You don’t have much margin for error when you’re dodging spells. I tried to get to the stairwell before the detonation.

I didn’t make it.

There was a bang that hurt my ears, and something hit me in the side and back, sending me flying. I hit the stairs and rolled down, scraping to a halt on the landing, pain stabbing from a dozen places. I couldn’t see my attacker but I knew he was coming and I fumbled for an item in my pocket. On the second try my hand closed over a small sphere—one of my condensers—and I threw it at the top of the stairs. My head was still spinning and the throw went long, hitting the pillar behind and shattering. Mist rushed out, cloaking the platform and the top of the steps in fog.

I struggled to my feet. Pain lanced from my side; I put my hand to it and felt wetness. Another spell in the futures, but no danger; it was going to miss. A moment later I heard the boom of another implosion spell and felt the whack of wind as air rushed by. The mist swirled slightly.

I could feel a faint rumble through the concrete: the train was coming. I crouched on one knee, waiting. Above, I saw the glow of lights through the mist. No more attacks, not yet, but if— He was waiting for me to move. I held my breath, keeping very still.

The rumbling grew louder and with a whine of metal the train pulled up by the platform. I still couldn’t see it, or him, but I knew where he was: up and to the left, waiting for me to show myself. The train doors opened with a hiss. I looked to see when they would close, counted down. Nine . . . eight . . . seven . . .

Now.

I ran up the stairs. The air mage detected me, waited for me to clear the top of the stairwell, fired. I checked just as he cast his spell, fire stabbing my side, heard the hiss of projectiles slashing through the mist ahead of me. Three seconds. I ran right, the mist parting to reveal a blue-and-red carriage, curious faces peering out; the doors were just beginning to close and I jumped through. They met behind me with a thud, and with a jolt of acceleration the train started to move.

All of a sudden I found myself in the middle of a scattered crowd of people, all staring. “Excuse me,” I said to the nearest guy, a black man in a peaked cap. He got out of my way, and I began moving forward to the front of the carriage. As I did, I glanced back over my shoulder through the train windows. The mist cloud was a grey patch, fading away on the platform behind. I couldn’t see my attacker.

“Are you all right?” a woman said. She was on one of the seats at the front, twisted around to look. I wondered briefly how I looked to everyone else, and that made me remember my wound. I touched it with my left hand again and drew in my breath. Looking down, I saw blood smeared over my fingers and palm.

“Oh, shit,” the woman said. “You want me to call an ambulance?”

“Might not be the best idea.” Now that I was out of combat, my side was really hurting. I didn’t think it was going to kill me, but it was deep. Not good.

“I’m calling 999,” the woman announced. She pulled out a phone and started tapping.

There was a thump from above, echoing through the carriage. It was hollow, and heavy. It was, in fact, exactly the kind of noise a grown man would make when landing on the roof of a train.

Shit.

The passengers in the train looked upwards. They looked confused rather than worried; I had the feeling that wasn’t going to last. “Hello?” the woman was saying. “Ambulance.”

I held still, scanning futures. The people around were making it harder, their actions tangling with my own. What was this guy going to do, smash his way through the windows?

“Hello? Yeah. There’s a man here, I think he’s hurt . . . I mean, yeah, he’s definitely hurt . . . what? Marie Gilman . . . Yeah, my number’s, wait a sec . . .”

I couldn’t see any futures in which the air mage broke in, but it was looking like he wouldn’t have to. Up ahead, the lights of the shopping centres were getting brighter and I could see what looked like a platform. The next station was barely a minute away. And it was the terminus, which would mean everyone would be getting out . . .

“No, the DLR,” the woman was saying. “What? Hang on, I’ll check. How old are you?”

It took me a second to realise the woman was talking to me. “What?”

“I think about thirty?” she said into the phone. “Oh. Okay . . . Do you have any existing medical conditions?”

I stared at her.

“They want to know if you’ve got any existing medical conditions,” the woman said. “Oh, she was asking if you’ve got any chest pain?”

“No, I have a pain in my side, because someone just stabbed me through it. And you might want to forget that call and get out of here, because the man who did the stabbing is probably on the roof of this train.”

“What?”

The train was pulling into Stratford and the doors would be opening in twenty seconds. Stratford’s not Pudding Mill Lane: the station was well lit, skyscrapers rose up around us, and another train was waiting to go on the other side of the platform. We were still at the edge of the station, but there would be staff farther in—the closer I could get to the main floor of the station, the more pressure there’d be for this guy to back off. Why was he even after me? The only explanation I could think of was that he wanted that focus I’d picked up last night. Maybe he’s planning to take it off my corpse.

The train stopped with a hiss. The passengers got off, filing out through the doors, heading for the stairs down. I followed them, hands in my pockets, head down. My side was hurting badly, but I didn’t let it show and I didn’t look up. It’s hard to pick one person out of a crowd, especially from the back. All I needed was for this guy to hesitate for a few seconds and I’d make it out. I scanned through the futures—he wouldn’t be aggressive enough to attack me right in the middle of a bunch of commuters, right?

Right?

Oh, fuck!

I jumped out of the way as a blade hissed past. The air mage was right on top of me. I’d lost my knife somewhere back in the last fight; I fumbled for another weapon but he was already aiming another spell and I dived for cover behind the struts at the centre of the platform. There was another boom, deafeningly loud and very close; the shock wave made me stagger as something seemed to punch my back.

Shouts and curses echoed from all around. We’d been right at the only exit and suddenly people were scattering, some running away, others standing and staring and trying to figure out what was going on. It would have been the perfect cover, except that the air mage was already there, stalking around to block my way out, another air blade low and by his side. He could see me and I backed up, keeping the platform struts between us. “What the hell is wrong with you?” I shouted at him. “Just go away!”

He didn’t answer, and I felt a trace of fear. Usually I deal with battle-mages by outmanoeuvring them, using my divination to avoid their attacks and putting distance between us. But air mages are the skirmishers of the elementalists, fast and light and agile. They aren’t as strong in a stand-up fight as a fire or earth mage, but they have more than enough power to crush someone like me.

The air mage tried to circle around and I dodged again, keeping cover between us. If I couldn’t outrun this guy, I’d have to outthink him. Was he after that focus? I glanced through futures in which I tested it. With the chaos going on around it was hard to be sure, but I thought it was getting his attention. Maybe he’d seen the auras of the items I was carrying—

“Oi!” a new voice shouted. “You!”

The air mage stopped and turned. It was the woman from the train. She was standing behind the air mage in the mouth of the exit tunnel, but instead of running she’d stopped and was pointing at the air mage and glaring. She still had her mobile phone to her ear. “You back off!”

We both stared at her. I think we’d both forgotten that the bystanders were even around. “You’re the one who stabbed him, aren’t you?” the woman said. “Well, I’ve called the police, so you better back off!”

I looked at the woman in disbelief. “Are you crazy?” I shouted. “Get out of here!”

“Yeah, you’re welcome,” the woman said. She actually sounded offended. “Not like I’m helping you or anything. Now you”—she turned back to the air mage—“you going to beat it, or do I have to get serious?”

The air mage studied her for a second. Other people had turned to watch too, and for an instant everything was still. Then the mage flicked one hand and air struck out in a hammer blow. It smashed into the woman with the distinctive crack of breaking bones and threw her twenty feet down the tunnel, sending her rolling over and over to lie still.

Someone screamed and suddenly the platform was chaos, people running, dodging, getting out of the way. The air mage started advancing towards me again, glass crunching under his boots. “That,” I said tightly, “was not necessary.”

The mage didn’t answer. He was still studying me from behind his glasses, and the air blade was by his side again. He’d obviously figured out that I was hurt, and he was intending to get in close to finish the job.

There. To my right, people were running onto the train at the platform. Behind me I could sense a man in an orange TFL vest staring down at the activity, and he was next to the train’s control panel. DLR trains don’t have drivers, but they do have a manual override. All of a sudden I had a plan. “You know what, screw it,” I said. “This isn’t worth dying for.” I pulled a pouch from my pocket.

The air mage paused, studying me. The pouch was the one I use for my condensers, padded to stop them from breaking. There was one left, still inside, a marble-shaped item about the same size and shape as the focus I’d found last night. I let him get a brief look at it, and then from behind me I sensed the TFL man hit the button and I moved.

The air mage’s hand came up and another spell flashed down the platform. He’d been expecting me to run for the train, but I hadn’t; I’d thrown the pouch into the train, and the shards of hardened air crossed paths with it midflight. It landed on the train floor and skidded, just as the doors closed behind it with a thump. With a whine of electrics the train started to move.

The air mage looked between me and the train. “Now what?” I said. I had to speak loudly over the rumble of wheels. “You can get me, or you can go after that focus. But you stay to finish me and that focus’ll be gone by the time you catch up.” I stepped back. “Which is it going to be?”

The air mage hesitated and I held my breath, feeling the futures swirl ahead of us. So many things could go wrong. He should have had just enough time to sense the magic from the condenser, but if he’d gotten a good enough look at that pouch before the doors cut his magesight off, he would have seen that it wasn’t the right one. Or I might have guessed wrong and it was me he was after. Or maybe—

Then the air mage gave one quick shake of his head and started running down the platform. I scrambled for cover, but he sprinted right past, matching the train’s speed and then leaping off the platform. The jump was impossibly high and graceful, arcing through the air to land with a thump on the train’s roof. I had a last glimpse of him straightening, holding his balance easily on the rocking carriage, before starting to walk towards where I’d thrown the pouch. He didn’t look back.

I watched the train pull away into the distance, running lights fading into the sea of neon. Only when I was sure that he wasn’t coming back did I sigh and relax. I was hurting in a dozen places, and now that the adrenaline was fading away, I was realising just how bad the wound in my side was. Blood had soaked through my shirt and coat, and I was starting to feel light-headed.

I looked at where the woman was lying. She wasn’t moving, and that was enough to kill any satisfaction I felt at having escaped. From a quick check I could tell that she was alive but badly hurt. I didn’t have anything that could help her, and I could hear sirens in the distance; the paramedics were on their way and the police would be too. Time to go. I turned and limped away, looking for somewhere out of sight where I could gate home.