The seconds it had taken me to deal with the chain had given Levistus the chance to open the range. His shield was up, a translucent barrier of crystalline light, and a nimbus of blue energy glowed around him. Ice shards materialised behind and above his shoulders, hovering in the air and pointing towards my heart.
The ice shards flew at me as though fired from a gun. I leapt to one side and they shattered on the floor and against the pedestal behind. Before I’d even landed, more were materialising and Levistus was firing again, with still more after that. It wasn’t a single attack but a barrage, like a machine gun that never ran out of bullets.
I dodged, ducking and twisting under the rain of ice. The shards were thin slivers of blue energy, needle-sharp, and in the futures I saw them spear through my flesh as though it were paper. Levistus’s control was tight, directed by his iron will, but there were too many of the shards for him to focus on them all, and in that gap the fateweaver did its work, opening up safe paths through the deadly rain.
The room flashed blue, the light illuminating Levistus’s face. I didn’t watch his eyes; all my attention was on the lines of the futures, thread-thin paths of safety forking through a sea of death. An ice sliver took a few hairs off my head; another brushed my sleeve. Cold seeped into me but my armour seemed to pulse with life, holding back the chill.
Levistus was getting closer. I’d started thirty feet away; now the distance was closer to twenty. Every now and again there’d be a gap in the barrage, and I’d use the opportunity to take a step forward. Step by step, Levistus drew nearer.
Out of the corner of my eye, I could see strain on Levistus’s face, mixed with concentration. He backed away, giving ground. The barrage of ice didn’t slow: shard after shard materialised and flashed out towards me, but as each attack came out, I marked it and plotted a new course so that it would miss. My path formed a zigzag, cutting back and forth but always turning towards Levistus.
Levistus came up against the wall. He tried to escape to the right and I moved to block him. Barely ten feet separated us now. The barrage intensified, growing wilder, faster, but all that did was open up more chinks for the fateweaver. The sound was a constant roar, the keening crash of ice shards striking the floor and walls, the scuff of footsteps.
A final step and I was within arm’s reach. Levistus was right in front of me, close enough to touch. His shield shimmered, a glowing barrier. I was so close now that the shield was an obstacle against the rain of shards, and I moved to use it as cover, placing it between me and Levistus each time a new icicle materialised. The paths of safety were wider now, and I was able to turn my attention away from keeping myself alive, and towards Levistus.
Levistus’s shield shone, reflecting the image of the knife in my hand. The blade glanced off the steel-hard planes, but with each strike I was probing for a weakness. Levistus was spending most of his energy on defence now; only the occasional ice shard made it around the shield to slash down. I dodged them all, searching, seeking.
Levistus tried to reinforce his shield, change his attack pattern to drive me back. The futures shifted and for an instant there was a crack in his defences.
The fateweaver drove into that crack like a wedge. The future I needed opened up, one tiny possibility amid thousands, and my divination found it.
Levistus’s shield shattered as I drove my knife through it point-first, the edge gleaming. Shards of frozen magic spun in the air as I rammed the blade into Levistus’s gut. My impact slammed him up against the wall. I saw the shock in Levistus’s eyes, felt his clothes as I gripped them with my free hand, then I twisted the knife, pulled it out, and drove it between his ribs and into his heart.
Levistus and I stared into each other’s eyes from inches away. The shock in his eyes became pain, then that familiar look of surprise that you only see on dying men. I felt Levistus shudder, warm blood oozing over my fingers, slick on the knife handle. Then those odd colourless eyes seemed to fade and the life went out of them. Levistus slid down the wall. I let him down slowly, then let him crumple to the floor.
I looked down at Levistus’s body. His face was expressionless again, blank in death as it had been in life. There was blood on his clothes, the wall, my hands.
Mechanically I wiped the knife on Levistus’s robes and sheathed it, then straightened and looked around. The shadow realm seemed suddenly very empty, half-real without its owner. Some of the pedestals and shelves had been destroyed in the battle; others were intact, their contents radiating magic.
There were enough treasures here to make any normal man rich for a hundred lifetimes, but I could sense active spells in the background, and I didn’t know what I might have triggered or what might be coming. My body was still hyped from the adrenaline but I could feel exhaustion creeping up on me. I needed to finish and get out.
I took a few things. A crystal vial, seemingly fragile, with something glowing inside. A headband of beaten copper, dull and tarnished, worked into the shape of a crown of feathers. Finally, there was a long, spear-like weapon, suspended in some kind of containment field. The haft was black, and though it had been a long time, I thought I recognised it as a Russian design called a sovnya. Both it and the copper headband were imbued items, and possibly the vial too. I held them cautiously at arm’s length, keeping a neutral mental posture, carefully not attempting to claim them, but even so I could feel them stir and uncoil as they reacted to my presence.
I gated out and through a series of staging points, jumping from continent to continent.
Night had long since fallen by the time I got back to the Hollow, and as the gate closed behind me, it was all I could do not to collapse. The aftershock of the combat was starting to hit, and I wanted to run away and fall asleep and throw up. I dumped the imbued items and my weapons, then stripped off my armour and fell into bed. I was asleep in seconds. Dimly, I was afraid of what dreams would come, but if I had any, I was too far gone to remember.
* * *
—
There’s a very specific feeling when you wake up in the morning with something hanging over you. It makes your stomach and heart sink, a mixture of anxiety over what you did and worry over what’s going to happen next. When you’re young, you get it for things like an overdue library book, or a fight with another child. As you get older, you outgrow worries like that, but you don’t outgrow the feeling at all—you just get it for different reasons. For some people, it’ll be fear of a bad grade, or an angry manager. For others, it’s money, or the police.
But I’m fairly sure no one else woke up that particular morning wondering what was going to happen now that they’d just assassinated one of the leading politicians in the country. It was so extreme that I had trouble grasping it. There are lots of people who’ll tell you how to handle a bad breakup, or losing your job. There isn’t much advice out there on how to deal with killing a government minister and their entire personal staff.
I dressed, cleaned my teeth, and shaved. The imbued items I’d stolen last night sat around the room, their presence oppressive. I didn’t want to eat with them watching me, so I took some fruit and a protein bar out of the cottage and ate my breakfast sitting on a fallen tree in the Hollow’s morning sun. After the chaos and ugliness of last night, it was a relief to look at the sunlight and feel the wind.
Karyos arrived just as I was finishing up. The hamadryad seemed to glide through the undergrowth without brushing it, almost as if the plants bent aside to let her pass. “We have a visitor.”
I paused, holding the remains of my apple. “Outside?”
Karyos nodded. “He has disturbed the sensors but has not attempted entry. I believe he is waiting for a response.”
“Anyone you know?”
“No.”
I looked quickly through the futures to see who I’d find if I stepped out of the Hollow and to its mirrored location in the Chilterns. My eyebrows rose. “H
uh.”
“Do you recognise him?”
“Yes,” I said. “He’s a Light mage, and very powerful. I don’t think he’s an enemy though.” Or at least he hadn’t been before last night.
“Will you receive him?”
I thought about it for a second and then nodded.
* * *
—
The gateway at the Hollow’s entry point opened and Landis stepped through.
Landis is tall and rangy, with sandy-coloured hair and an abrupt way of moving. He spends half his time acting oblivious and the other half acting like a lunatic, but I’ve learned over the years that he’s more observant than he looks.
Landis is one of the most dangerous battle-mages I know. He’s not well-known outside of the Order of the Shield, but he’s as experienced and powerful as any elemental mage I’ve ever met, and even with the fateweaver, I wouldn’t like to take him on. Which was a problem, because as a member of the Order of the Shield, he had a duty to at least arrest me, and more likely kill me on sight. Inviting him in was a risk, but right now both my instincts and my divination were telling me that he was here to talk.
“Ah, Verus!” Landis said. “So good of you to see me on such short notice. I imagine you must have a busy schedule these days.”
“That’s one way to put it,” I said. “Why are you here?”
Landis looked from left to right at the forests of the Hollow, smiling. “This really is a wonderful shadow realm. ‘A thing of beauty is a joy for ever,’ as they say. I must remember to visit more often once this is all over.”
“It’s very pretty, yes,” I said wearily. “Landis, I don’t mean to be rude, but I just killed around a dozen people last night. I’m not really in the mood for discussing aesthetics.”
“Yes, I know. I find it’s important to centre oneself at such times.”
I looked at Landis. He looked back at me pleasantly.
“Would you like to take a walk?” I asked.
“Of course.”
We began to stroll through the woods of the Hollow, the path winding gently between trees and through clearings. “I imagine you’re wondering whose side I’m on,” Landis said.
“You’re a Keeper of the Order of the Shield,” I told Landis. “You answer to the Council, which means at any time they could order you to go kill me, and you’d be forced to do exactly that. Don’t get me wrong; I appreciate all you’ve done for us. But it seems to me it’s going to be very hard for us to stay friends.”
Landis nodded. “Quite understandable. Have you noticed that virtually no Keepers from the Order of the Shield have been sent after you?”
That caught me off guard. I thought for a second, going through names. “There have been a couple.”
“Ares and McCole. Both have extensive ties to Council Intelligence.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll bite. Why haven’t the Order of the Shield been sent after me?”
“Because senior members of the Order of the Shield—notably myself—have politely but firmly communicated to the Council that we view pursuing you as counterproductive.”
I looked at Landis with a frown. He looked back at me with eyebrows raised. We continued to walk through the woods of the Hollow.
“You’ve been protecting me,” I said.
“Effectively.”
“Why?”
“For years now, some among us have recognised that Levistus was more dangerous to the Council than Richard Drakh could ever be. Drakh struck at the Council from outside; Levistus was rotting it from within. Worst of all, Levistus had displayed a disturbing ability to suborn or blackmail others to his will. In another ten years, he would have been a dictator.”
“Probably less,” I said. “But back up. You’re telling me you and your friends in the Order of the Shield knew about all this all along?”
“Yes.”
“And what were you planning to do about it?”
“Our hope had been that your conflict with Levistus would present some opportunity to weaken his political position.”
“Wonderful,” I said. “So you, some of the most competent and dangerous battle-mages on the entire Council, have been sitting around all this time doing . . . nothing. You couldn’t have gotten rid of him yourself?”
“Being a Light mage has a price, Verus,” Landis said. “Yes, we could have removed Levistus directly. But doing so would in all probability have started a civil war. The Keeper Orders have many privileges, but in exchange for those privileges, we must accept certain limitations on our freedom of action.”
“Limitations,” I said bitterly. “Yeah, that’s a nice way to put it. You know how many people died last night because you didn’t feel like you had enough ‘freedom of action’?”
“Forty-eight confirmed dead and four missing, the last I checked,” Landis said. “Twenty-eight security personnel, eleven Council employees and functionaries, nine members of Levistus’s personal staff, and four mages. I knew six of them personally. Lorenz was the one I was best acquainted with, after Caldera, of course. An ex-member of the Order of the Shield, liked to play the flute. Affected boredom much of the time, though it was something of a pose. Quite a talented air mage, but he did have some rather careless personal habits and fell in with Levistus as a result. Married, though he and his wife had been separated for years. I hope the news doesn’t hit her too badly. From the autopsy, I assume he was killed by Anne, though the bullet wound was presumably your work. Then there was Casper. An adept, only in his mid-twenties, if I recall. I used to talk to him during court appointments at the War Rooms. He always struck me as quite idealistic. Genuinely believed in the Council, though some of the things he saw as liaison to Levistus were beginning to make him uncomfortable. He might have found a different position quite soon if those jann hadn’t torn out his throat. Then there was Christina, whose body they found on the front lawn. She didn’t work for Levistus at all, she simply was unlucky enough to be there on an errand at the time of your attack. I believe she was engaged to be married this coming spring . . . did you want me to go on?”
“Please don’t,” I said. What Landis had just said was probably going to stick in my memory for years. It’s bad enough when the people you kill are faceless strangers. Knowing their names makes it so much worse.
“And then of course there’s Caldera, who you know very well. We actually roomed together for a little while; I don’t know if she ever told you. I’d been a journeyman for a good few years but they passed that law requiring members of the Order of the Shield to meet the same qualifications as the Order of the Star, so she and I ended up in the same class. She was always rather disappointed that I didn’t have what she considered a proper appreciation for high-quality beverages, but she did her best to educate me all the same, and I was introduced to quite a few fascinating drinking establishments as a result.” Landis paused. “I advised her to accompany Talisid’s force. She refused. She was quite certain you’d find some way to evade them, and she wanted to be ready when you did. She always did have excellent instincts for fieldwork, but they didn’t bring her much happiness.”
I was silent.
“You aren’t the only person who’s had to make hard choices, Verus,” Landis said. “I’ve been a Keeper for quite some time, and I’ve made a great many decisions that have led directly or indirectly to people’s deaths. Believe me, I am fully aware of their consequences.”
We walked for another minute or so without speaking. “All right,” I said. “Assuming I accept everything you’re telling me, I don’t think you came here just to thank me for taking care of your business. What is it you want?”
Landis nodded. “I want you to stop assassinating Council members.”
“You’re not the only one.”
“By burning away the dead wood, the forest fire allows new growth,” Landis said. “However, at a
certain point, that fire must stop. I have now specified the point at which it must stop.”
I looked sidelong at Landis. His manner was pleasant and there was no threat in his words, but I knew that if I replied with or what? I wouldn’t like the answer.
“It’s all very well to say ‘stop,’” I said. “But as you may or may not be aware, the entire reason I’m fighting this private war is that the Council refuses to call it quits.”
“I may be able to exercise some small influence in that regard. At the very least, I suspect when you next call, they’ll be more inclined to take you seriously.”
“Yes, because I just killed one of them. Backing down now is the absolute worst thing I can do. What I’ve done is bad enough, that would make it be all for nothing!”
“All you have to do is make the same request as before. Who knows? Maybe this time they’ll listen.”
I thought for a second. My instincts were telling me to say no. I finally had the Council on the ropes and I didn’t want to back off.
But making an enemy of Landis was a bad idea. He was Variam’s master, and his word carried a lot of weight in the Order of the Shield. If he was telling the truth, then he was the only reason I didn’t have a whole extra Keeper Order to deal with.
And then there was the personal side. Landis had done me some very big favours over the years. He had taken a chance on Variam when nobody else would, and he’d backed me up in some scary fights. I owed him a lot.
“All right,” I said. “Because it’s you, I’ll try it. But I can’t promise it’ll work.”
“Good show!” Landis said cheerfully. He clapped me on my shoulder hard enough to rock me sideways. “I won’t keep you any longer, then. Do feel free to contact the Council at your earliest convenience.”
* * *
—
I escorted Landis out of the Hollow. The portal closed behind him and I was left alone.
With Landis gone, I felt at a loss. I thought about getting in touch with November or Variam and catching up on the news, but it felt like the wrong thing to do. Council communications would be in chaos right now, and I really couldn’t see any point in eavesdropping. I probably knew more about what was going to happen next than they did.
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