Forged

by Benedict Jacka

  “I already used my divination,” I said. “Back when you entered Hyperborea. And you’re right. As far as I could see, there were only three of you.”

  “So we’re agreed?”

  “Not quite,” I said. “Why did you hold the gate open for one minute?”

  “As I said, we were ensuring that it was safe.”

  “So, funny story,” I said. “Remember back when I was a journeyman Keeper? None of the other Keepers were willing to work with me, so I had nothing to do but sit in my office all day. So one of the things I did to pass the time was read. I read the whole Order of the Star doctrine manual cover to cover.”

  “Good grief, really? Even most Keepers don’t read that thing.”

  “It was pretty boring. But it was interesting seeing where a lot of Council habits come from. Like, you know how Keepers will send someone through a gate the instant it opens? If it’s dangerous, they might send a security man first, but they always follow through right after. It turns out that the doctrine manual says that Council operatives should make a point of keeping gate exposure as low as possible. And it’s a funny thing, but everyone in the Council follows it without thinking. From open to close, they usually keep a gate running no more than fifteen seconds.”

  “I . . . suppose they do.”

  “You hid all those people very well,” I said conversationally. “You’ll have to tell me how you did it sometime. I’m guessing a combination of illusion and divination. Divination to lay a false future, and illusion to conceal them every other way. Illusionists can do a lot, can’t they? They can make a subject invisible, hide the sounds they make, even conceal them from exotic senses like thermographic imaging or lifesight. But no matter how good they are, they can’t hide the amount of time it takes to send that many people through a gate.”

  “You’re being paranoid, Verus,” Talisid said. But his voice had changed.

  “Am I?” I said, and made an educated guess. “Then what was that signal you made just now?”

  There was a second’s pause.

  Then dozens of magical signatures lit up from the room I’d just left. Elemental magic, air and earth and fire with the signature of utility spells, space and time magic flashes, barriers and protections, wards spreading outwards. The Council had taken the bait in jaws of steel.

  A dozen voices spoke at the same time through the communicator. “—spread out, spread—”

  “Alpha team, perimeter!”

  “Wards up NOW, I want wards—”

  “Clear, cle—!”

  The light on the focus winked out and the voices cut off.

  I was already working on my gate, using the dreamstone to weave the fabric of Elsewhere to join the deep shadow realm back to Hyperborea. The Council’s search ring was expanding fast, but I’d known what was coming and they hadn’t. The gate opened, and I stepped through into Hyperborea.

  The hiss of Hyperborea’s desert wind was very loud after the silence of the deep shadow realm. I took out my phone and checked the time. Excluding sync time, I’d been in there with the Council team for . . . call it four and a half minutes. Out here, it had been about five and a half hours.

  It wouldn’t take Talisid’s team long to figure out that I was gone. But not long was going to have a very different meaning for them than for me.

  Movement in the futures caught my attention and I slipped my phone back into my pocket. Time to deal with the rearguard.

  Shapes emerged out of the desert haze, two, five, a dozen. There was a large Council security force in full battle gear, wearing body armour and holding submachine guns. The guns rose up to point in my direction as I came into view and didn’t come down. Two unarmoured figures walked at the centre of the squad: mages. There was a man, tall and middle-aged, and a stocky woman with a mouth full of chewing gum. They slowed as they saw me.

  “Avenor,” I said. “Saffron.” I kept my tone courteous. If there’s a good chance you’re going to have to kill someone, you should at least be polite about it.

  Avenor and Saffron halted, their eyes shifting from me to behind me. They looked on edge, and it wasn’t hard to guess why. They would have heard Talisid’s team go in, then settled down to wait, expecting to be here for no more than ten or twenty minutes. Instead they’d been left alone for over five hours.

  “Mage Verus,” Avenor said cautiously.

  I looked at the security men. “Sergeant Little,” I said. “It’s been a while. Nowy, Peterson, good to see you as well.”

  The men watched me warily. They didn’t lower their guns, but from looking at the futures, I could tell they weren’t about to fire. I’d spent a long time leading combat missions as a Junior Councilman. Half of these men knew me personally, and the other half by reputation. From their body language and the shape of the futures, I knew they really didn’t want to get into a fight.

  “Where’s Talisid?” Avenor said.

  I raised my eyes. “Did you lose contact? Your communicator stopped working as soon as that gate closed behind him, maybe?”

  Avenor watched me closely.

  “Awkward,” I said. “Well, it’s been nice to catch up, but I’m afraid I have to go.”

  “We’d prefer you didn’t.”

  “I wasn’t asking.”

  Avenor’s voice was hard. “Until your agreement with the Council is concluded, you are still a wanted fugitive under Council law. Attempt to leave and you will be placed under arrest.”

  I looked straight at Avenor and spoke softly and clearly. “Talisid’s entire strike force just tried that and failed. You think you’re going to stop me with what you’ve got here?”

  Avenor went very still. I felt a couple of soldiers take a step back. Avenor’s eyes flicked past my shoulder, and I knew what he was thinking. He was hoping that Talisid’s reinforcements would appear, and was starting to realise that they wouldn’t.

  Saffron was less hesitant. “You’re under arrest.”

  I looked back at her.

  Saffron turned to glare at the security men. “Sergeant! Have your troops arrest that man.”

  There was a dead silence, broken only by the whine of the wind. Several of the Council security men looked at each other.

  “Sergeant!” Saffron shouted. “Little, or whatever your name was!”

  Little nodded to her cautiously. “Keeper.”

  “I gave you a direct order! Arrest that man!”

  “Keeper Saffron,” Little said respectfully. “I feel that in this particular case this would be an inadvisable way to commit my men.”

  “I don’t give a shit what you feel!” Saffron turned, addressing the men. “Arrest him now! Shoot him if you have to!”

  The security men looked at her, at me, at each other. Then one of them lowered his gun. Two more glanced at him and followed suit. One by one the barrels descended to point down at the sand, until none were aiming at me.

  Saffron stared, apparently lost for words.

  “What’ll it be, Avenor?” I asked. “By the way, very shortly you’re going to be getting an urgent message from the Council. I’d suggest that you and your security team would be much better served by responding to that message than by getting yourselves killed in an attack on me. But it’s your call.”

  Avenor looked from side to side. None of the men met his eyes, and the last futures in which he tried an attack faded away. He looked back at me, face hard. “This isn’t over.”

  I let Avenor have the last word. With a nod to him and Saffron, I walked past. Both mages and the security men watched as I walked through the crowd, out through the other side, and disappeared into the desert haze. No one tried to stop me.

  * * *

  —

  Once I was clear of the shadow realm, I made a short call to Morden. Then I went to the Hollow to gear up.

  For the meeting wi
th Talisid, I’d deliberately gone in underequipped. It was all but certain that they’d had a diviner or some other mage with a way of getting a look at me, and I’d been doing my best to lull their suspicions. That wasn’t a concern anymore, and I loaded for bear. I took my armour, my dreamstone, and my old MP7, as well as my usual dispel focus. A combat knife and handgun rounded out my weapons, and for defence I added a mind shield, an aquamarine in the shape of a teardrop that hung around my neck. It was the best mental defence focus I’d been able to get my hands on, and for some years now I’d had it stored away, just waiting for the right opportunity. Now I’d see if it was worth what I’d paid for it. I added my usual collection of miscellaneous tools and one-shots, then gated to the Heath, at the old entrance to Arachne’s lair.

  I arrived as the sun was setting behind the western hills. Gleams of sunlight penetrated the trees, casting long black shadows that stretched away without end. The air was warm, but the atmosphere was curiously hushed; a few voices were carried on the wind, but not many. The summer evening was quiet and still.

  The ravine that had once led to Arachne’s lair was deserted. The tunnel leading down into the earth had been sealed, and the spells that had opened and closed it were gone. If you didn’t know better, it looked like just a mound of earth. There were no guards or alarms: the place had been looted when the Council had raided it, and apparently they’d decided they were done with the place. With no one living there and nothing valuable to find, it would probably be abandoned. Over the years, fewer and fewer would have any reason to visit, until someday, in fifty or a hundred years, no one would remember it at all. Men and women would walk their dogs, and children would play, not knowing that a cavern complex lay beneath their feet.

  Maybe Arachne would return sometime around then. It was a nice thought. I wouldn’t be around to see it.

  I sat on a fallen tree and waited. Birdsong carried on the evening air. From far above, I heard the distant roar of an airliner, heading westwards.

  Soft footsteps sounded, shoes on earth. “This,” Anne said, “had better be good.”

  I turned to see Anne half-lit beside one of the trees. Spatters of sunlight fell across her bare arms and legs, swallowed up by the black of her dress. Her expression was shadowed, but didn’t look welcoming. “Sorry about the wait,” I told her.

  “I hate waiting.” Anne took a step forward into brighter light. “You made me wait five hours.”

  “I told you my best estimate was four to eight, and I explained why.”

  “No, you didn’t. You ran off some random crap about deep shadow realms and I stopped listening. Now how about you go back to explaining why I’ve been hanging around these woods all day?”

  “If you’d bothered to listen the last time I explained,” I said, “you would have had to wait an hour or two at the most. And if you’d stopped being so paranoid and just given me a phone number, you wouldn’t have had to wait even that long. The reason it’s taken this long is that I had to wait for the Council to—”

  “Bored.”

  “Okay, let’s try this another way. It took five hours because the time flow—”

  “Bored.”

  “Do you want me to explain this, or not?”

  “Too many words.” Anne made a spinning motion with one finger. “TLDR.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll explain this in terms that are simple enough for your attention span. What do you think we’re here to do?”

  “You want me to kill Levistus.”

  “And as soon as we go after Levistus, the Council is going to send a response team to kill us. A response team that’s going to have their best combat mages and their best weapons. Right now, that response team is stuck in a deep shadow realm for the next few hours. We’re going to kill Levistus before they get out. Clear?”

  “See, you should have explained it like that the first time.” Anne folded her arms. “What’s stopping them sending more?”

  “The Council’s first priority is to protect itself,” I said. “Right now, they think there’s an attack being launched against the War Rooms.” Morden was seeing to that. It wouldn’t be a very thorough feint, but it wouldn’t have to be—the Council would be in a state of maximum paranoia after losing contact with Talisid. “They have enough reserves left to defend the War Rooms against a full attack from Richard’s cabal, and they have enough reserves left to send a strike force to crush us. They don’t have enough to do both.”

  “And what if they pick Option B?”

  I shrugged. “What’s life without a little risk?” I held out a hand. “Coming?”

  Anne looked back at me, then a smile flashed across her face. “You know, I’ve been waiting for you to do that for a really long time.” She jumped lightly across the ravine, then strode up to me, the sunbeams casting her in alternating dark and light. “Let’s do this.”

  I gave Anne a nod. Together, we walked away.

  chapter 11

  You can tell a lot about a mage by where they live. Some live in little terraced houses in the suburbs. Some live in mansions out in the country. Others live in places that are so well hidden you’ll never see them at all. Levistus’s house and base of operations was a house on a street in London called Kensington Palace Gardens.

  Calling Kensington Palace Gardens rich is like saying that Heathrow Airport is big. It’s true, but doesn’t explain the scale. Let’s say you live in the U.S. or the U.K. or some other Western country, and let’s say you work full-time earning an average sort of salary. If you managed to save fifty percent of that pretax salary, then the amount of time it would take you to save enough money to buy a house on Kensington Palace Gardens is longer than the amount of time between today and the birth of Christ. If you decided to get the money by playing the lottery, you’d have to win the U.K. national jackpot five times running to get even halfway there. The people who live on that street are the sort who buy Ferraris without noticing the difference in their bank balance.

  So I have to admit, I got a particular satisfaction out of watching Anne blow Levistus’s front door into a thousand pieces.

  Wooden splinters went skittering across the floor. The doors had been warded against scrying, three or four different types of sensory magic, and against any attempt to pick or bypass the lock. They hadn’t been warded against overwhelming force. Anne and I came through side by side and scanned the front hall, seeing a room floored in white marble, with black veined pillars flanking open doorways, all decorated in an elegant, minimalistic style. A curving staircase disappeared upwards. Running footsteps sounded from several directions, and Anne and I halted.

  Men appeared from both sides. They were wearing polished shoes and well-tailored suits, but they were clearly security guards. More interesting to me was the way the lines of their futures moved: they were human, but unnaturally rigid and constrained. I suppose it shouldn’t have surprised me that Levistus had mind-controlled guards, but I hadn’t expected quite so many. All six of the guards were holding handguns, which they levelled. “Freeze!” one shouted.

  Anne stared at the men, eyebrows raised. “Seriously?”

  “Stay where you are,” one of the men called. “Hands up and get down on your knees.”

  Anne looked at me. “These guys aren’t even worth my time.”

  I shrugged.

  “Second warning,” the man announced. “Hands up, now!”

  Anne sighed. She raised a hand and clicked her fingers.

  Black death streamed in out of the night, flowing around us and into the mansion. There was the flash and bang of gunfire. It wasn’t aimed at us. Claws flickered; screams rang out in stereo; blood painted the walls. A bullet hit the chandelier, sending a tinkle of broken glass falling to the marble.

  As quickly as it had started, it was over. Six corpses lay on the floor. Spindly figures stood over them, man-sized but thin and inhuman
, moving in fits and jerks. These were jann, lesser jinn that Anne could summon. Or that the jinn could. I’d fought against the things, but it was a new experience to have them on my side.

  “This is what he sends to stop us?” Anne said. “I’m honestly kind of insulted.”

  “These were just the sentries,” I told her. Glass crunched under my feet as I advanced. A jann looked up from where it was crouched over a body, hissed, then flitted away. I heard a scream from deeper in the mansion: the jann had fanned out ahead. I felt a flicker of conscience and ignored it. Gunfire sounded from the first floor, and I sensed the signature of spells; I headed for the stairs.

  The stairs led into a big drawing room which had been converted into an office. Desks near the bay windows provided work spaces for the men and women who worked here. Or had worked here. Two bodies were shapeless heaps on the carpet: near to them, one jann was dissolving and another was kicking weakly as it died.

  A woman was standing behind one of the desks, her face pale and spotted with blood, holding up a focus item like a holy symbol. It was a force magic focus, and it was generating a transparent cylindrical barrier a few feet in radius. Three jann tore at the barrier with their claws. Pressed up behind the woman, a young man was shouting into a communication focus. “—need help now! This is an emergency! We need Keepers here now!”

  A female voice spoke from the communicator, calm and unemotional. “No Keepers are available to respond at this time. We recommend you withdraw from your present location and await instructions.”

  “There isn’t any time! We need—!” The man heard a gasp from the woman behind him and whirled. He saw me with Anne at my back and brought up something in his other hand.

  Anne reacted instantly. Green-black death tore through the barrier as though it were tissue paper, stripped the life and flesh from the bodies of the man and woman, and smashed their remains through the bay window and sent them falling into darkness towards the lawn below.