Forged

by Benedict Jacka

  “I’m not sure,” Sonder said.

  “This spot is special because it’s fifteen degrees offset from the plane of a gateway appearing at that spot there,” I said, pointing at the flower bed. “Symmaris likes to create her gates so that they’re rotated seventy-five degrees clockwise. She can’t make the angle any more extreme than that without compromising the spell, but it means that if anyone’s standing right there in front of the gate, she won’t be facing them. She’s paranoid that way. Do you understand?”

  “Not really,” Sonder said uneasily. “Look, I think we should get moving—”

  Sonder stopped as space magic pulsed from the spot I’d been pointing at. With a shimmer, the air darkened and transformed, forming a gateway between the courtyard and somewhere else.

  I’d already turned away. Using my coat to hide my movements, I drew my pistol and fired.

  The bullet reached the gateway just as the gate portal had finished forming, and entered and exited the gate five and a half feet off ground level at an angle of fifteen degrees from the plane of the gate. I had just a fraction of a second to see Symmaris on the other side of the gate, standing in a Keeper briefing room, her hands raised as she focused on her spell, and her eyes came to rest on me and began to widen just as the bullet hit her in the middle of the forehead.

  Symmaris’s head snapped back and the gate winked out. The security man who had been about to jump through never made it. The echoes of the shot rebounded around the walls and died away, and the courtyard was quiet once again.

  “Hey!” Sonder shouted. “What are you . . . ?”

  I returned the pistol to its concealed holster and turned back to Sonder. “You really should pay more attention to these things.”

  Sonder looked on edge, ready to fight or flee. The funny thing was, I was pretty sure he didn’t understand what had just happened. From his angle, he would have seen the gate open, caught a glimpse of Council security, then nothing. Sonder’s never been very decisive; he can react when threatened, but when there’s no clear course of action, he tends to hesitate. I used to be the same.

  Up above, lights were coming on in the flats, and people were peering out of the windows to see what the noise was. Sonder looked from me to where the gateway had been. “We’re done here,” I told Sonder.

  Sonder hesitated. A future wavered into existence of him trying to trap me in a stasis bubble.

  I looked at him and shook my head.

  Sonder looked back at me and the future vanished. I turned and walked away.

  Two minutes later, three more gates opened up and a Keeper assault force came storming in to find Sonder standing alone in an empty courtyard. I was long gone.

  chapter 5

  Morden got in touch the next day.

  The gate shimmered and faded behind me as I stepped into the shadow realm and glanced around. I saw green, rolling hills, with tall trees rising up into the sky. To my right, the ground sloped down into a lake, while up ahead, a collection of white-roofed buildings peeked up from behind the trees. Behind were the fuzzy and indistinct shapes of mountains. The air was warm with a gentle breeze, like a pleasant summer’s day.

  The beauty of the scenery was marred by scars of battle. The grass around my feet where I’d landed had been burnt black in a twenty-foot radius, and while some of the trees rose tall, others had been shattered, their stumps ending in jagged spikes. The remains of a jetty and boathouse were charred wreckage by the lake, and though I was still a long way from the buildings at the top of the hill, I could see that at least one had collapsed. Shoots of new grass were poking up from where the greenery had been burned away, but the damage was clearly recent.

  Morden’s four apprentices were waiting for me a little way up the hill. The looks they gave me as I approached weren’t friendly, but at least they weren’t planning to attack this time. “Good morning,” I told them. “I assume you’re escorting me in.”

  “This way,” the tall boy said curtly. I followed him, and the other three fell in around me.

  “I didn’t catch your name,” I said as we walked.

  “I didn’t tell you.”

  I nodded. “Manticore, wasn’t it?” I glanced at the brown-haired girl. “And you’d be Lyonesse.”

  The two of them shot me looks.

  The other boy spoke up. “You’re calling yourself Manticore?”

  “Shut up,” Manticore said.

  “Oh, right,” I said. “You haven’t told them. Should I use your birth name?”

  Manticore gave me an annoyed look. The other girl opened her mouth to say something, and the taller one—Lyonesse—shot her a glare that made her close it again.

  I was tempted to keep teasing them but decided to ease off. “So I’m guessing the four of you used to be students here.”

  “Before your people destroyed it,” Lyonesse said.

  The name of this shadow realm was Arcadia. It had been something between a school for adepts and a military training camp, and Morden had been the one running it. The Council had invaded and destroyed it at the same time that I had my showdown with Richard and Sal Sarque. “They’re not really my people.”

  “It was the Council who did the attack,” Lyonesse said. “And you were on the Council.”

  “So was Morden.”

  Lyonesse frowned.

  “So how come—?” the other boy began.

  “Stop talking to him,” Manticore said curtly. We walked the rest of the way in silence.

  Morden was standing on what had once been the school’s front lawn. The rosebushes and hedges had been torn apart, but the grass of the lawn had mostly survived, probably because it had been too low to be hit by the crossfire. Behind Morden was what must have been the main entrance hall, built from white stone. It looked to me as though the defenders had fortified the front of the hall and used it as cover, and the Council forces had responded by calling in the heavy artillery. The entire building behind Morden lay in ruins: the only way you could even tell that it had been an entrance hall was by looking at the outline of the walls.

  “Verus,” Morden greeted me. “I see you found your way here.”

  “Your directions were fine,” I said. “You do seem to have a knack for finding pleasant places to live. Did you design Arcadia yourself?”

  “I had some hand in it,” Morden said. Standing alone in the wreckage, he made an odd contrast, a figure in black on a field of green and white.

  I gave Morden a curious look. “Does it bother you, what happened here?”

  Morden gave a slight smile that didn’t touch his eyes. “Shall we get down to business?”

  “Let’s.”

  Morden’s four apprentices walked past me to stand near him, spreading out into a formation that left the five of them on one side and me on the other. “You asked me for a stepping-stone,” Morden said, “but it would be more accurate to say that what you need is leverage. Against the Council in general, and Levistus in particular. Would you agree?”

  “That seems fair, yes.”

  Morden nodded. “Do you know why Levistus was so strongly opposed to any action against White Rose?”

  I frowned. I hadn’t been expecting the question, and it took me a moment to answer. “Because he wanted to keep you off the Council. Without all the blackmail material you got from there, you wouldn’t have been able to get your seat.”

  “Correct,” Morden said, “but there is another side to it that you were never made aware of. White Rose, while it existed, held the largest reserve of blackmail material within the Light political landscape. The second largest reserve was held by Levistus.”

  “Really?”

  “You first encountered Levistus during his attempt to acquire the fateweaver,” Morden said. “He failed spectacularly, yet shortly afterwards advanced from the Junior to the Senior Council. His failur
e with White Rose was just as complete, yet that didn’t stop him from forging an alliance with Alma and Sal Sarque. And don’t forget his personal vendetta against you—pursuing a grudge against a lesser mage is one thing, but failing at it quite another. Levistus lacks Bahamus’s birth and connections, he does not have the proven war records of Sal Sarque and Druss, and he does not possess Alma’s administrative skill. So why is he perhaps the most powerful man on the Council?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted.

  “Levistus’s power lay in secrets,” Morden said. “Many of which were also known to White Rose. The two of them had an arrangement where neither would disrupt the other. My actions threatened that.”

  “Huh,” I said. I’d always wondered why Levistus seemed to have such a particular issue with Morden. Come to think of it, maybe that was one of the reasons he’d never liked me, either. Secrets only have power if they stay secret, and having a diviner around would cut into his territory. “So where did he get all those secrets? Mind magic?”

  “I’m sure he would have gleaned the odd titbit, but every Council mage takes precautions against mind-reading. No, what Levistus has is much more interesting, and it was only relatively late in my time on the Council that I was able to discover it. Levistus has access to a bound synthetic intelligence.”

  I frowned. “An imbued item?”

  “Not exactly. It is a thinking, conscious mind, grown over time. Unlike most mage creations, this one was designed to interface with machines, and in particular computer and communication systems.”

  “Communication systems? Like radio signals?”

  “It intercepts, decrypts, and searches them,” Morden said. “Effectively, Levistus has a small, private version of the British government’s GCHQ, or the American NSA, able to collect and sort vast amounts of electronic intelligence. The overwhelming majority is useless or irrelevant, but not all.”

  “I wouldn’t have thought he’d get much from the Council, given how low-tech they are.”

  “You’d be surprised,” Morden said. “It only takes one bureaucrat or Council aide to make a phone call. The phone call is intercepted, flagged by an algorithm, and passed on in a daily report. Any clues in that message can in turn be investigated in more detail, whether by his agents or by Levistus himself. Levistus has been in possession of this synthetic intelligence for over twenty years. Twenty years of compound interest on information adds up to a very large amount.”

  “And your idea is to get hold of that information and use it against Levistus and the Council.”

  “I am not aware of the exact contents of Levistus’s files,” Morden said. “But they are extensive. I imagine they will more than satisfy your needs.”

  “I can see a problem here,” I said. “Levistus is going to have the tightest security on those files that he possibly can. He’ll either have them in some data focus that’s locked to his magical signature, or just keep them all in his head. He’s a mind mage; he can probably memorise them all without breaking a sweat.”

  “Indeed,” Morden said. “But I am not suggesting you go after Levistus’s private vaults. I am suggesting you go to the source. The synthetic intelligence itself.”

  “How do you know there’s anything there?” I asked. “Levistus could just take out anything he needs on a weekly basis and delete the rest.”

  “He could,” Morden agreed. “And that would be the logical approach were he entirely focused on security. However, without existing data to cross-reference, it becomes harder to separate useful signals from noise. I suspect in the early days Levistus might have been willing to make such a sacrifice, but he has been operating this system for a very long time, more than long enough to become complacent. By the time I chanced upon his secret, he was, in my judgement, no longer spending enough personal time and attention on administering the synthetic intelligence for such an approach to be a realistic possibility. I believe that he has allowed data to accumulate for the sake of convenience.”

  “But you’re not sure,” I pointed out.

  Morden spread his hands. “Things may have changed. But as I say, this is my own judgement.”

  “Mm,” I said in a neutral tone. It was still possible that Morden was leading me into a trap. “All right. Say I go after this synthetic intelligence. Where is it? In some super-fortified shadow realm?”

  Morden smiled. “That’s the good news. Levistus couldn’t install it in a shadow realm. No radio. So he looked for a central location with the best reception he could find.”

  A fuzzy patch of grey appeared in the air between me and Morden, around five or six feet tall. Lines of yellow-white light appeared within, tracing a three-dimensional shape. It was a tower, roughly rectangular but with protruding panels, about five times as tall as it was wide. At the top, the structure broke up into an irregular stack of blocks, with a thin mast protruding from the highest one.

  I tilted my head, studying the design. “A skyscraper?”

  “Recognise it?” Morden asked.

  It took me a second. “Heron Tower,” I said. It was at Liverpool Street, right in the middle of London’s financial district.

  Morden nodded. “One of the tallest buildings in the city, and far enough removed from the Council power centres at Canary Wharf and Westminster. Levistus’s data centre is here.” The tallest block on the tower, the one with the radio mast, blinked red.

  “Huh,” I said. I must have looked up at Heron Tower a thousand times while living in London. I’d never suspected a thing. “How come no one’s noticed anything?”

  “Levistus has opted for stealth over fortification. The data centre has almost no permanent wards, and the few magical sources within are heavily shielded. No bound guardians, no powerful defences to radiate an obvious signal to magesight.”

  “Security forces?”

  “As I said, stealth over fortification,” Morden said. “The system is entirely automated. Remember that Levistus’s primary concern when setting up the site was not defending it against Dark mages, but against Light ones. He would not have been able to permanently staff it without the risk that someone would talk.”

  “So in theory pretty much anyone could just break in and steal the hard drives,” I said. “Is that what you’re saying?”

  “More or less.”

  “Okay,” I said. “So if this place is such a great target, why haven’t you knocked it over?”

  “Morden doesn’t need anything some Light mage could give him,” Lyonesse said. She and the other three had been standing quietly up until now.

  “Trust me,” I told her, “there are lots of things your master could do with that.”

  “While such material is less useful to me now than when I was on the Council,” Morden said, “it is still valuable.”

  “Which makes me wonder why you haven’t made a move.”

  “While Levistus’s data centre may not be fortified, it is still defended,” Morden said. “The location has multiple redundant alarm systems. If any are triggered, Levistus can deploy a rapid reaction force. Privately hired mercenaries, probably from outside the country.”

  “Mercenaries don’t sound too bad.”

  “Secondly, the data centre contains a compact and powerful bomb. I suspect, but do not know, that it is set to detonate in case of any incursion that reaches the computer systems at the centre. The bomb is more than powerful enough to destroy the synthetic intelligence and all of the records on-site.”

  “Ah,” I said. “If he can’t have it, no one can.”

  “And that is why I have not taken action,” Morden said. “Destroying the data centre would prevent Levistus from gaining any future benefit, but he would still have access to the records it had generated already. Over time it would weaken him, but it would take years, and any influence he lost would simply be gained by other Council members instead. I judged it not wo
rth the risk.”

  “But if you could disable the bomb and retrieve the records . . .”

  Morden nodded.

  I tapped my lip. “What are the bomb’s triggers?”

  “You’re a diviner. I expect you can find out.”

  I studied the glowing lines of the tower. “Hmm.”

  “Oh, and I would suggest timing your attack for, say, tomorrow afternoon.”

  I shot Morden a look. “Why?”

  “Just a suggestion,” Morden said. “You’re free to ignore it.”

  “Your little suggestions have a habit of being not so little,” I said. “I’ll keep it in mind. One last thing. What are you going to be doing while I’m dealing with this?”

  “You mean, will I be coming with you?” Morden asked. “No. Honestly, Verus, I really don’t think you need me to hold your hand. Besides, Levistus is your problem more than he is mine.”

  “If he wasn’t yours as well, you wouldn’t be being this helpful.”

  “Needs versus wants,” Morden said. “The one who wants sets the terms. Was there anything else?”

  Tomorrow afternoon didn’t give me much time. I’d need to stake out the place and path-walk to feel out the defences. Even once I’d learned everything I could, I had a feeling this wouldn’t be a one-man job. “No,” I said. “I think that’s enough to go on.”

  We departed without incident, Morden’s students giving me suspicious looks as I walked away. Before gating out, I glanced around the ruins of Arcadia. It was still beautiful, despite the damage. I wondered if the adepts who’d trained here had seen it as a haven, and whether it would grow into a legend over time.

  I also wondered whether Morden’s help was a form of revenge on Levistus and the Council for what they’d done here. Over the past few years, Morden and I had both sat on the Council, and we’d both been stripped of our positions. There was a certain symmetry in the two of us being the ones to strike back.