Veiled

Chapter 4

“Hold still.”

“Ow.”

“I said, hold still.”

I was back in my flat, lying on my side on the sofa. My shirt was off, and Anne was leaning over, studying me.

“You’re sure it was just hardened air?” Anne asked. “He wasn’t using something else as a missile?”

“I didn’t exactly get the chance to—”

“Don’t lift your head.”

I obeyed, putting my head back down on the sofa and talking to the floor. “Pretty sure. There isn’t . . . ?”

“There’s nothing in the wound. I just wanted to be sure.” I heard Anne sigh slightly. “You were lucky.”

“Doesn’t feel like it.”

It was about fifteen minutes later. I’d gated home, called Anne, and had been lucky enough to get her on the phone. She’d used a gate stone to make the journey to my flat immediately.

Other members of the magical community have mixed feelings towards life mages, viewing them rather as they would nuclear reactors. They’re good at what they do, but you don’t want to get close to one unless you’re really sure it’s safe. Given Anne’s history, very few mages would willingly allow her within arm’s reach. I never used to really get that attitude, but after last year, I think I understand it a little. I still don’t share it though. I’ve always instinctively trusted Anne, and as soon as she’d arrived, I’d felt myself relax.

“I’m serious,” Anne said. Her sleeves were rolled up but she hadn’t touched me. Anne can look at a living body and read its condition and injuries and state of health as easily as you or I can read a clock. “You were really lucky. The shard must have been almost flat—it went deep but it didn’t have much volume. That’s the only reason it didn’t hit anything vital. An inch or two up or sideways and it would have penetrated the kidney or the bowel.”

“Is that bad?”

“What do you think?” Anne said in exasperation. “There’s muscle damage, internal bleeding, and you’ve got some bacterial contamination.”

“Oh.” I paused. “Uh, can you . . . ?”

“Can I?”

“Fix it?”

“Of course.” Anne sounded surprised. “Did you think I couldn’t?”

“Okay.”

“When you were stabbed in the casino it was with a sword, and it was a stomach rupture,” Anne said. I felt her hand on my side; she was touching the skin around the wound, but it didn’t hurt. Soft green light glowed at the edge of my vision as Anne started to weave her spell. “That was hard. The thicker the blade and the more tearing it causes, the worse it is to treat—the really bad ones are the ones where the blade’s serrated or where it was twisted and pulled out. Air blades are easy. They’re nearly flat, and they’re so sharp they’re like surgical knives. Plus they just dissolve in the wound . . . Move your arm up.”

I did. “Would you have trouble with injuries like that?”

“Like what?”

“Where the blade’s serrated or twisted.”

“Well, no. But it takes longer.”

I couldn’t feel anything on my side. Anne was still using her magic, but I couldn’t tell what she was doing. “Is there anything you can’t heal?”

“Not really.” Anne’s voice was absentminded. “I always think of it like a flame. As long as there’s a spark left, you can build it up . . . There. Done.”

I looked down in surprise. The ugly gash in my side was gone. Blood was still crusted over it, but underneath the skin was clean and unbroken; I couldn’t even see where I’d been hurt. “Wow,” I said. “I didn’t feel anything.”

“I had the signals from your local nerves turned off.”

“Don’t you have to worry about a patient suddenly getting up when you do that?”

“Actually, I was controlling your movements as well.”

“Oh.”

“You just didn’t notice because you weren’t fighting it. Could you get up and move around?”

I did. I felt a little light-headed, but no more. “Looks good,” Anne said. She didn’t wait for me to tell her how it felt; she probably knew better than I did. “Oh, and you had some bruises and sprains, so I fixed those too. Some were from today and a couple looked like you did them yesterday evening. You didn’t get attacked twice, did you?”

“No, the first time was a sparring match.” I worked my arm; it felt good as new. “Are all life mages this good at healing, or is it just you?”

Anne smiled. “I’ve had a lot of practice. Is there any food in the house?”

I showered and changed my clothes. I felt really good; I must have been carrying a bunch of minor injuries that I hadn’t noticed until Anne fixed them. By the time I stepped out of the shower I could smell something very appetising coming from the kitchen and my stomach growled. “Wow,” I said as I walked in. “Smells good.”

“It’s a stir-fry with tuna.” Anne was over the stove; she’d washed the blood from her hands. “Sorry, there were only so many things in the fridge so it’ll be a bit makeshift.”

“Knowing you, it’ll still be better than anything I could come up with.”

“That’s not saying much.”

I laughed. Anne never used to say things like that out loud, but she’s a lot more relaxed around me these days. “There’s a catch, you know,” Anne said.

“With tuna?”

“What you were asking. About whether I can heal anything.” Anne had turned to look at me and her face was serious again. “I have to be there. If I’m next to someone, I can bring them back, no matter how close they are. But if you bleed out, or if that shard had hit you in the brain or the heart . . .”

“I know.”

“This was why I wanted you to have a gate stone for my flat.”

“You’ve got one for here. It works out about the same.”

“What if I hadn’t answered my phone?”

“I’d have had to think of something else,” I admitted. “But you’re pretty good about that kind of thing.”

“That’s because you never ask for help unless it’s something incredibly serious.” Anne had been opening a can; now she drained off the water and poured the contents into a frying pan with a hiss. “Um, by the way, don’t you have a set of armour?”

I sighed.

Luna and Variam arrived just as Anne was finishing up; she’d called them and given them the news, which come to think of it was something I should have done myself. They took a little time catching up on the story, then once they were sure I was okay, promptly started critiquing my performance.

“So let me get this straight,” Luna said. “You have a set of imbued armour designed specifically to stop attacks like this one, and you left it at home.”

“Yes.”

“Because you forgot to wear it.”

“I didn’t forget, I just didn’t realise I was going to get attacked.”

“Even though you’re a diviner.”

“. . . Yes.”

Variam and Luna shared a look. “You know,” Luna said, “I think that has got to be one of the stupidest possible ways to get killed.”

“Yeah, seriously,” Variam said. “What’s the point of having armour if you’re not going to use it?”

“It’s armour,” I said. “I can’t walk around London every minute of the day looking like I’m going to a SWAT raid. Anyway, I didn’t think it was going to be dangerous.”

Variam stared. “You didn’t think a police investigation could be dangerous?”

“Well, none of the others have been.”

Variam and Luna looked at me.

“All right! It was stupid, I get it. Look, you don’t have to worry about this stuff. You can just throw up a shield whenever you feel like it.”

“Honestly, doesn’t work as well as you’d think,” Variam said. “I can dispel anything that’s magic, but not if they just shoot through.”

“And I can’t shield either,” Luna said. “So none of us can really. Though I guess Anne can do the ‘healer’s shield.’”

“Healer’s shield?”

“You let them shoot you, then you heal yourself.”

“I’d rather not,” Anne said mildly. “It still hurts.”

Anne had made enough for about six normal people, which was just as well since I was starving—one of the side effects of life magic healing. I wasn’t the only one, either. “I wish I could eat that much and stay that thin,” Luna told Anne.

“I don’t really have a choice, you know.”

“Yeah, but you still get to pick how much goes into body fat. That would be so—”

“Okay,” Variam said. “I’m preemptively cutting you both off before you start talking about your diets. What are we going to do about this assassin guy?”

Luna and Anne turned to me. “Right now, not much,” I said. “He’s long gone and we don’t have any way to trace him. I’m going to call Caldera in the morning.”

“What if he traces you?” Luna asked.

“Then we’ll just have to see who finds who first.”

“Do you still have it?” Anne said.

I went to my desk and took out the focus, returning to the dinner table to put it down in the centre. “So that’s the thing you nearly got killed for?” Luna asked, studying the green marble with interest.

“Looks that way. You guys seen one of these before?”

“If I had, it would have been on your shelves,” Luna said.

Anne had picked the focus up and was studying it curiously. She shook her head. “I don’t recognise it.”

“I do,” Variam said.

Luna and I looked at Variam in surprise. “Really?” Luna said.

“You don’t need to sound so bloody shocked.”

“You’ve seen one?” I asked.

“It was a different colour, but yeah, I think so. My master was doing something with it.”

“Doing what?”

“Dunno,” Variam admitted. “Wasn’t paying attention.”

“You and Luna have a lot in common, don’t you?”

“Hey,” Luna said to me, then looked at Variam. “Could you show it to him?”

Variam shrugged. “Got a lesson tomorrow. I can ask him then.”

Anne glanced at me. “Is that okay?”

I thought about it for a second. Variam can look after himself pretty well, and having the focus up in Scotland with his master would probably be safer than keeping it here. It did mean trusting Variam’s master with the information, but it wasn’t like the thing was doing any good sitting in my desk. “All right. Call us when you know anything?”

“No problem.”

We talked a little longer, but it was past midnight and it wasn’t long before everyone was yawning. Anne decided to stay over (she said she wanted to keep an eye on me). Luna wanted to go home but didn’t want to cycle back this late, so Variam gave her a lift. By the time I went to bed, the aftereffects of the healing had sunk in, and I was asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow.

I woke up to a tickling feeling. Something thin and light was brushing the side of my face; I twisted away and buried my head in the pillow and duvet. There was a moment’s pause, and I had just enough time to vaguely register a presence on the bed before something round and cold was shoved into my ear.

I woke with a yelp and opened my eyes to see a long face with red-brown fur and a pointed muzzle ending in a black nose. The eyes were yellow and less than six inches away, and they were staring right at me.

I glared. “Will you stop doing that?”

The fox pulled its head back and sat on the bed, blinking twice at me. “Alex?” Anne called from the kitchen. “Everything okay?”

“Fine,” I called back. “Just Hermes.” Apparently satisfied that I wasn’t going back to sleep, the fox jumped off the bed, trotted to the door, then looked back at me expectantly.

Hermes is a blink fox, a magic-bred creature with human-level intelligence and the ability to perform short-range teleports. I met him last year at about the same time that I ran into Richard, and after making it out of the shadow realm he followed me home. Ever since then he’s dropped by at irregular intervals, expecting a meal. I probably shouldn’t have fed him the first time.

Finding out the fox’s name had been less straightforward than you’d think, since while blink foxes can understand human speech, they can’t talk. Luna had wanted to name him Vulpix, but I’d put my foot down and gone to Arachne instead. After a private conversation with the fox, Arachne had told me to call him Hermes, though she’d been evasive about how she’d found out. “Seriously?” I said. “You want me to feed you now?”

Hermes blinked.

Grumbling, I got up and dressed. Anne was already in the kitchen when I got there, cooking something on the stove. “Morning,” she said. “Hi, Hermes.”

“’Scuse a sec,” I said. Anne moved out of the way and I opened a cupboard, rooting through the cans. “You didn’t see how he got in, did you?”

“No. Sorry.”

“Goddamn it.” I pulled out a can of cat food. “I have gate wards specifically to stop stuff like this.”

“Um, I don’t think he wants the cat food,” Anne said. “He’d rather have some of the bacon.”

“How do you know?”

There was a soft thump. I turned around to see Hermes sitting up on the kitchen counter, tail curled around his feet. He was ignoring me and looking at Anne. “Just a guess,” Anne said.

“We don’t have any bacon.”

“I bought some this morning.”

I glared at the fox. “Why exactly did you wake me up again?”

“Maybe he just thinks you sleep in too much.”

“I got stabbed!”

“Actually, you’re completely recovered.”

“You know, that lifesight of yours really takes the fun out of acting injured.”

“You seem to get injured often enough anyway.”

“I didn’t use to!”

Anne fed Hermes while I (reluctantly) got in touch with Caldera. I wasn’t looking forward to the conversation, so I put the story in an e-mail in the slim hope that that way I wouldn’t have to tell her face to face. With that done, we settled down to breakfast.

I suppose if you’re not used to how my life works, the way I was acting probably seems pretty weird. I’d just had someone try to kill me and my response had been to call my friends over for dinner. If this had been some episode of a TV series, we’d have spent the night racing around interrogating people, having dramatic adventures, and trying to find the suspect in forty-five minutes plus commercial breaks.

There were two reasons I wasn’t doing that. First, on a strategic level, that’s not how conflicts between mages work. If you’re trying to catch a mage, the rule of thumb is that once he breaks contact, you’ve got one to five minutes to find him. After that, he’s gone. He’ll have gated away, and you’re not going to track him down without serious effort. Realistically, there wasn’t anything I, Anne, Luna, or Vari could have done to find my would-be assassin, and given what had happened last time, finding him probably wasn’t even that smart an idea in the first place. Caldera was the one with the resources to track him, and since that wasn’t going to happen quickly, it made more sense to get a good night’s sleep before calling her in.

The second reason was much simpler: I’d needed to recover. Having someone come that close to killing you is traumatic, especially when you hadn’t had time to prepare. I’d been in a state of mild shock last night, and all of the others had known it. That was why Luna and Vari had dropped everything to come over, and why Anne had stayed the night. I’ve been in this kind of situation enough times to know that when something like this happens to you, the best thing to do is hole up somewhere safe, try to relax, and spend your time doing safe, everyday things, like arguing about what to feed a blink fox. Soon Caldera would arrive and everything would start moving, and before long I’d probably be in danger again. But for now, we could rest.

“How’s the healing business going?” I asked Anne.

“It still feels weird thinking of it like that,” Anne said. “It’s okay, I think. I’m making enough money. Actually more than enough. But it still feels awkward charging people.”

“I thought you were only charging the ones who could afford it.”

“I am . . . well, I guess I’m not really the entrepreneur type. Though they do seem to treat me better than when I did it for free.”

“I noticed that too,” I said. “Back when I first took over the shop, I tried giving stuff away. Never seemed to turn out that well. I think people value something more if they pay for it.” I paused. “Are you still seeing Dr. Shirland?”

Anne nodded. Dr. Shirland’s an independent mind mage. She’d offered to treat Anne a year and a half back but had been turned down. After last spring, Anne had reconsidered.

“Going okay?”

“It’s not easy, but it helps. I’m glad you and Luna pushed me into it.”

“Have you been talking about . . . ?”

“About her?”

I didn’t need to ask who the “her” was, and Anne didn’t need to say it. Anne has her own problems, and there’s a side of her she doesn’t get on well with. “She calls her my shadow,” Anne said. “Other things too, but . . . She thinks I can work something out, but it’ll take a long time.”

“I guess now’s as good a time as any to start.”

Anne smiled slightly. “Let’s hope so.”

My phone rang, and I put it to my ear with an inward sigh. So much for quiet. “Hi, Caldera.”

“Are you at home?” Caldera said.

“Yeah.”

“I’m on my way. Don’t go anywhere.” She hung up.

I lowered the phone. “Well, it was nice while it lasted.”

Anne rose to her feet. “I guess that’s my cue to go.”

I looked at her in surprise. “You don’t have to.”

“I think it might be easier.”

I started to answer, then stopped and looked down. The bell was about to ring. Already?

I went downstairs and opened the door to see Caldera, dressed in her work clothes. “Hey.”

Caldera gave me an up-and-down look. “You all right?”

“I got better.”

Caldera pushed past me. “Then how about you explain,” she said over her shoulder, “how the hell you managed to nearly get yourself killed on the bloody DLR?”

I closed the door and followed Caldera upstairs. “Nice to see you too.”

“One job. You had one job. All you had do was investigate.”

“You were the one who sent me there. Shouldn’t I be the one blaming you?”

“I should have known it was a bad idea to send you on your own. I could—”

Caldera walked into the living room and stopped. I followed her in to see that Caldera had come face to face with Anne. Anne was in the middle of packing up her bag with her medical gear. She looked up at Caldera. There was a pause.

“You could what?” I asked when Caldera didn’t go on.

“In a sec,” Caldera said. She didn’t take her eyes off Anne.

“It’s okay,” Anne said. “I was just going.” She did up the straps on her bag and slung it over her shoulder. “Give me a call if you need anything.”

“You don’t have to,” I said with a frown.

“I should probably be getting back.” Anne walked to the door. Caldera let her pass, moving noticeably farther out of Anne’s way than she really needed to, and I saw her eyes track Anne as she went by. Anne disappeared down the stairs, and a moment later I heard the sound of the front door opening and closing.

I turned to Caldera. “Was that really necessary?”

“She’s not a Keeper or an auxiliary,” Caldera said. “She’s not cleared for this information.”

“She just patched a giant bloody hole in my side. You don’t think that earns at least a thank-you?”

“A thank-you, yeah,” Caldera said. “Just leave it at that next time. You know there are Keeper-sanctioned healers.”

“Anne’s saved my life at least twice.”

“She’s also—” Caldera checked what she’d been about to say, shook her head. “Never mind. All right, I want you to go through exactly what happened last night. Don’t leave anything out.”

I still felt annoyed, but suppressed it. I sat down at the table with Caldera and started the debriefing. It took the best part of an hour, and by the time we were done I felt strung out.

“You were lucky,” Caldera said once I’d finished.

“Lucky would be not getting attacked by an assassin-mage in the first place,” I said. “Seriously, can you stop acting like this was my fault?”

“You still shouldn’t have gone back. If you suspected something—”

“Suspected what? There was no evidence that it was going to—”

“All right, all right,” Caldera said with a wave of her hand. “I’ll admit, you didn’t totally screw up.”

“Is that supposed to be a compliment?”

“Anyway, we’re officially assigned to the case. So you can consider yourself on the clock as of yesterday.”

“Do we get anyone else?”

“Rest of the Order are stretched thin right now,” Caldera said. “The ones who aren’t tied up with security ops are off looking for some missing Council guy. You get me.”

“One case, one Keeper?”

“It’s usually enough.” Caldera closed her notepad. “Okay, here’s how things stand. Liaisons are pulling the CCTV from Pudding Mill Lane and Stratford stations for the past seventy-two hours, so we should have that by the end of today. Next priority is this air mage. I’ve checked the watch list and there’s no one recently active who meets your description.”

“He was speaking in French,” I said. “At least, before he was trying to kill me.”

Caldera nodded. “We can try the French Council, but that’ll take time. Anyway, we’ll need a better description before we go to them. Once the CCTV footage gets in, we should have a photo.”

“Timesight?”

“The waiting list for time mages is a mile long,” Caldera said. “I’ve put in a request flagged as urgent, but don’t hold your breath.”

“Maybe we can get this air mage to try to kill you, too. That ought to bump it up the priority list.”

“Next up, this focus. You got it here?”

“It’s with Variam’s master,” I said. “Landis. You know the guy, right?”

“Yeah,” Caldera said, and sighed. “Fine, let’s see if he’s got anything.”

Gate magic makes travel so much easier. If I’d been on my own, getting up to Edinburgh would have meant either an overpriced rail ticket and hours on the train, or a path-finding exercise involving gate stones. With Caldera, we were there inside five minutes.

Edinburgh’s a weird city; castles and ancient buildings and modern shops all piled together down the length of sloped streets, with that giant grass-and-stone hill looking down over the rooftops. In the summer it’s crammed with tourists, but this was February, generally accepted to be the most miserable month in the British year, and not too many visitors were braving the cold winds and drizzle.

In magical society, Edinburgh’s famous for a different reason: it’s the location of the second and smaller of the Council’s two apprentice programs. Sometime back in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, there was a treaty signed giving the Edinburgh mages the right to run their own teaching establishment separate from the ones in the south. Over the centuries most of the mage schools were assimilated into the association that would eventually become the London apprentice program, but the Edinburgh faction resisted it for long enough that having a second apprentice program became a tradition. There’s still the odd attempt to merge the two, but the proposals have always fallen through, partly due to Scottish nationalism but mostly because a number of British mages find it useful to have a secondary power centre in the British Isles that’s not quite so closely connected to the Council.

We wound our way through the streets, away from the tourist centres and to a stone house down a side alley. We rang the bell and the door opened to reveal Variam. “Hey, Vari,” I said.

“Hey,” Variam said. He looked more subdued than usual.

“Landis in?” Caldera asked.

“He’s up there,” Variam said, pointing his thumb at the rickety staircase behind him. “Good luck, you’ll need it.”

Up until a year and a half ago, Anne and Variam were living with me. Anne moved out in the summer to a flat in Honor Oak, but Variam came here to Edinburgh, taking up the role of apprentice to a mage named Landis, a Council Keeper from the Order of the Shield.

The Keepers of the Flame have three orders. The largest and most well known is Caldera’s order, the Order of the Star. The Order of the Star police magical society; if a crime is committed that breaks the peace of the Concord or the national laws of the Council, they’re the ones who are supposed to deal with it. Next is the Order of the Cloak, the ones responsible for preserving the secrecy of the magical world. They work with (and on) the mundane authorities, dealing with normals and sensitives, and they’re much less high-profile. They rarely deal with other mages, to the point that a lot of mages forget that the Order of the Cloak even exists.

And then there’s the Order of the Shield. Once the biggest of the orders, their name’s a hint at their original function: they were battle-mages, meant to protect the population from magical predators. But as magical creatures declined, so did they, and nowadays they’re the Council’s military reserve, called in when a situation is violent or expected to get that way. Ninety-nine percent of their time is spent sitting around doing nothing or guarding against threats that never show up. The last one percent involves getting sent into the most horrendously dangerous situations imaginable. Let’s put it this way—the Order of the Shield are the ones who get sent in when the Council thinks that mages like Caldera aren’t enough.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that Keepers of the Order of the Shield have a reputation for being weird. The Council gives them more leeway than the other orders, probably because people who were entirely sane wouldn’t be volunteering for the job in the first place. Mostly, they just point them at a problem, then get out of the way. I’d met Landis two or three times, but this was the first time I’d visited his house.

The top floor of the building was a wide room with a beautiful view out over the Edinburgh skyline. The room was a workshop, with desks and benches covered in half-built or disassembled clutter, and papers and books were stacked in piles or scattered in the corners, and bent over the desk at the centre was Landis. He’s tall and rangy, with sandy-brown hair and an angular face, and he always seems to be moving. As we walked in he thrust a finger towards us without looking. “Caldera! Lady of the hour! Excellent timing, I’m quite sure you did it on purpose, and don’t think it’s not appreciated. Or was it you, Vari?”

“It’s not that.” Variam had followed us into the room and was looking at Landis in a long-suffering sort of way. “They just wanted to know—”

“Wanting to know, the source and saviour of our problems, but there’s no escaping it, is there? Oh, hello, Verus, of course I don’t need to tell you that. Right then, let’s be about it!” Landis bounded up and covered the distance to Caldera in three long strides, holding something out to her. “There! No goodly state in the realms of gold, but a thing of beauty in its way.”

I peered at the thing warily. It looked like a wide-bodied dart, about the size of my hand, with a body of beaten copper that gleamed in the daylight through the window. I could also feel fire magic radiating from the thing, and a lot of it, which made me more than a little nervous. Fire magic’s good at what it does, but “what it does” mostly involves burning things.

“It’s very nice,” Caldera said. “But what we came for—”

“But time and tide wait for no man, eh? Or woman, or child, or elemental spirit, so no sense admiring the weather.” He tossed the dart to Caldera, who caught it; I felt Variam flinch. “Now just take a twiddle at the top and we’ll be on our way.”

Caldera sighed. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Disassembly, my dear girl—give that gadget you’re holding in your delightful hands a closer inspection by way of its inner parts, field-strip and cleaning, don’t you know?”

“Oh, I give up,” Caldera said. “Fine—like this?”

Caldera fiddled with the dart, trying to find a way to open it as Landis watched eagerly. After a moment, she found the right angle and unscrewed the top until it came off in her hand. Beneath was a complex arrangement of crystal rods, each glowing with a small but powerful orange light. Together they looked like a weird miniaturised furnace, and very dangerous. Out of reflex I started searching through possibilities, figuring out whether this thing was safe.

“Excellent!” Landis clapped his hands happily. “There you go, Variam! Doubting Johns, eh?”

“Are we done here?” Caldera said. “It’s not as though—” She started to move her hand towards the glowing crystals.

A future suddenly jumped into my sight in horrible clarity. “Don’t touch that!” My voice came out as a yelp.

Caldera paused. “Don’t touch what?”

“That thing’s a bomb!” I couldn’t take my eyes away from Caldera’s fingers, only a few inches away from the central rod. I’d just had a vivid image of what would happen if she touched it. “The crystal in the centre’s a pressure sensor. You hit it and it’s going to blow up the whole room!”

Caldera stayed still for a second, then, very carefully, moved her hand away from the trigger. “Landis?” There was a dangerous note to her voice. “Would you mind explaining?”

Landis had disappeared to a bench in the corner and was digging through spare parts. “Yes, yes, the tragedy of our violent natures, but what can one do, hmm? Certainly can’t deny the artistry in the affair . . . Ah! There you are, you little rascal!” He strode back with a slim-handled tool in one hand.

“Mind telling me why you wanted me to open it?”

“Fluctuations, my dear girl! No use in setting the circuit if it’ll lose containment as soon as it brushes up against some unfriendly spell, eh?” Landis paused, stroking his chin. “Though earth’s not quite the ideal test, should really have brought a water mage—no chance you’re planning to spontaneously change to that type, is there?”

“I don’t know why I expected anything else,” Caldera muttered. She thrust the bomb and its cap at Landis. “Take your little do-it-yourself suicide kit back, all right? I’m not your lab assistant.”

Landis took the parts from Caldera and spent a moment juggling the things in a way that made me cringe. He ended up with the bomb in one hand, the tool (which I recognised as a conductor probe) in the other, and the cap in his mouth. “Look,” Caldera said, following him back to the bench. “You said you knew what that focus was, right?”

“Mf crth uh dr,” Landis said around the cap, his attention on the bomb as he fiddled at it with the probe. “Brth urf yrr crld yrf way uh mrmuh . . .”

“How often does he do this?” I said under my breath to Variam.

“All the bloody time,” Variam said gloomily. He’d withdrawn to behind a bench, and I could sense he had a fire resistance spell up.

“Hah!” Landis dropped the tool on the bench, spat out the cap, and looked at the bomb in delight. “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever, eh? Well, until it goes off, but only in life’s transience do we truly see, et cetera et cetera.”

“Landis?” Caldera said.

“Hm?”

“The focus?” Caldera was obviously trying very hard to be patient.

“Secrets hidden in the craftsman’s hands! Of course!” Landis flung himself into a chair and put his feet up on one of the desks, crossing his legs. “Variam, make us some tea, there’s a good chap. They must be parched.”

Variam disappeared quickly, probably glad to be out of the blast radius. “Right then!” Landis said. He was still holding the bomb in his left hand, and the safety cap was still off. The pressure sensor glowed menacingly; I knew it would only take a strong tap to detonate it, and I had to restrain myself from flinching as Landis waved it in my direction. “Good old Vari told me the story. Fascinating account, wish I’d seen the fellow who went after you, Verus, must have been quite the spot of exercise, hmm?”

“You could say that.”

“Wish I’d been there, but we’re still on standby. Tedious business, but ours not to reason why.” He sighed for a moment, then visibly brightened, set the bomb down on one arm of the chair, and rooted around in his pocket to produce the same focus I’d given Variam last night. “Not much to look at, is it?” he said with interest, studying the green marble. “Hidden depths, though, the data array is mightier than the sword, hmm? At least when we’re talking Council politics.”

I kept a wary eye on the bomb. Landis had balanced it on end on its fins. It would only take one jerk of the chair to knock it to the floor, in which case it had roughly a fifty-fifty chance of landing on its tip and blowing apart the chair, the benches, the floor, and probably us. “Data array?” Caldera said.

“Indeed! Good old-fashioned storage device. Lovely craftsmanship, don’t see many of them these days.” Landis studied the focus admiringly, then glanced up as Variam came back. “Ah, man of the hour! Just in the nick of time.”

Variam distributed teacups. Landis leant forward to take his, making the chair sway, and I winced. “Okay, so you’re saying . . . um . . . is there any chance you could put the cap back on that bomb?”

“Eh? Goodness, you’re right! Memory like a sieve.” Landis caught up the bomb, twirled the cap back onto it, and then threw it without looking in the direction of the sofa. Even though I knew it wasn’t going to blow up I couldn’t help but close my eyes briefly. The bomb thumped into the cushions, bounced once, and lay still. I let out a sigh of relief and shared a glance with Caldera. She looked relieved too. Variam hadn’t moved—maybe he was desensitised to it.

Landis, meanwhile, was in full cry. “. . . marvellous design! Completely stable once they’ve been set to the user, and no energy requirements at all. You see that distinctive little fractal pattern at the centre, little universal-tinged beggars? That’s the Halicarnassus influence. Tricksy things, bugger to forge but worth the effort.” He beamed at the two of us.

“So let me get this straight,” Caldera said. “It’s a data storage?”

“Right on the bull’s-eye!”

“Can you read it?”

“My dear girl, weren’t you listening? What’d be the point of a signature lock if any Tom, Dick, or Jehosaphat could come along and take a gander?”

That rang a bell. “Wait,” I said. “It’s a signature lock?”

“The very same!”

“Okay,” Caldera said to me. “You know what he’s talking about, right? Any chance you could say it in English?”

Landis watched with interest, steepling his fingers, and gave me an approving sort of nod. “It’s a type of security system,” I said. “I’ve read about them, but . . . oh.” Suddenly it all made sense. “That’s why the thing didn’t respond. I mean, I was looking for a password, but if it’s signature-based—”

“Then no more use than common pebbles!” Landis looked very happy. “So nice not to have to explain everything, you wouldn’t believe how slow these young fellows can get.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t get it,” Caldera said, “so if you don’t mind slowing down for the benefit of those of us who don’t spend their free time messing around with magic items, maybe you could spell it out?”

“It’s a data focus,” I said. Now I understood how the thing worked. “Mind magic core, you channel a bit of energy in and access the information telepathically—you guys use them, right?”

Caldera frowned. “Those things? We stopped using them years ago. Capacity’s great but you can’t transfer the data, and finding anything is a pain in the arse.”

“But those were the regular kind, right?” I said. “Anyone could use them?”

“Yeah, why?”

“Because these are signature locked,” I said. “That’s their selling point. They’re made in a morphic state, can’t hold anything to begin with. Once a mage uses them, they shape to that specific magical signature and they won’t react to anyone else. Kind of the magical equivalent of a DNA lock.” I glanced at Landis. “Right?”

“Seven out of ten!” Landis said. “This particular design is set to two signatures, not one.”

“Does that mean we can read it?” Caldera asked.

“’Fraid not, dear girl. Set, locked in, and unchanging for ever.”

“Any way to break the encryption?”

“None whatsoever. Otherwise they’d hardly keep using the things, given that searching for any one particular piece of data inside them is, as you so succinctly observed, a pain in the arse.”

“So it’s useless,” Caldera muttered, and rose to her feet. “Damn it.”

“Just a second,” I said. “What was that you said about Council politics?”

“Well, Council are the only ones that use ’em, aren’t they? The old-fashioned isolationist types. Dull buggers, the lot of them, but if you’re going fishing for the owner, that’s where I’d try. Here you go!”

Landis tossed the focus to Caldera, who caught it and shook her head. “Yeah, that’s not really an option. Thanks for the help.”

Caldera and Landis said their good-byes, and Caldera disappeared downstairs with Variam following. I was about to go after them when I heard Landis say, “Oh, Verus?”

I stopped in the door and turned.

“You might be getting into deep waters.” All of a sudden, Landis’s voice was serious. “I’d be careful who you trust the next few days if I were you.”

I frowned, but as I was about to say something Caldera called up from downstairs. “Hey, Verus! You coming or what?”

“Well, you’d best be off!” Landis said, and just that quickly his old manner was back again. “Tally ho and all that, eh? Good luck out there!”