Out of perverse curiosity, I lifted my watch and looked at the time, watching the seconds ticking off. Lyle had finished his call at 9:38. Exactly as the display ticked over to 9:39, there was a distant banging at my front door. I hate show-offs.
I pulled myself to my feet, wincing at the stiffness in my legs, and went downstairs. A teenager was standing outside my shop window, holding a white envelope in his hand. Apprentice employed as a gofer; some things don’t change. I unlocked the door, nodded at the “Alexander Verus?” and took the envelope from him. As he disappeared up the street, I opened the envelope and took out the card inside.
It was the real thing. In flowery language and copperplate handwriting, the card stated that the High Council of the British Isles would be honoured if Alexander Verus, et cetera, et cetera, would present himself with an escort of his choosing, et cetera, et cetera. There was a footnote about the dress code in slightly pointed language that I couldn’t help but wonder if Lyle had put in specifically to have a dig at me. Like there’s anything wrong with jeans and sweaters.
I went back upstairs and dropped into my chair, staring at the card while flipping it back and forth between my fingers. It was made of cream-coloured paper with black lettering, and embossed at the top in gold was the Council’s coat of arms. As I scanned it, I could detect the magical fingerprint that marked it as a genuine invitation. The only question was what I was going to do about it.
I don’t like the Council. I don’t like its ideas, and I don’t like its people. The Council doesn’t even follow its own laws, much less the spirit behind them, and as far as they’re concerned, morals are whatever’s convenient at the time. They have absolutely no problem with throwing people to the wolves, including people who are supposed to be working for them.
On the other hand, if I just turned Lyle down, I’d be back where I’d started. After the events of last night, I was pretty sure that the Council’s plans for this Precursor relic were going to be stepped up, whatever they were. The members of the team detailed to investigate would know a lot more than I did. Maybe enough for me to figure out what Cinder and that woman were up to.
And I’d only be going to talk to them. I could still turn them down if I wanted.
Yeah, right.
The starting time on the invitation was eight P.M. GMT. That gave me about ten hours to decide what to wear, pick out my shoes, and make sure I wouldn’t be killed before the doors opened. With that settled, I picked up my phone again and dialled Luna’s number.
She picked up on the third ring. Luna gets up earlier than me, but then she doesn’t stay up till the early hours of the morning analysing weird magical artifacts. “Hello?”
“Hi, Luna, it’s me.”
“Hey, Alex.” Luna’s answer was friendly, but there had been a tiny pause before she spoke.
“Listen, can you do me a favour? Could you come around to my place sometime today?”
“Um…”
“I know it’s short notice. I’ve found out something important about that cube of yours but I need you to run a test. Is that okay?”
“Well…” Luna hesitated, then her voice firmed. “Okay. I can come by now. About an hour?”
“Great. See you then.” I broke the connection and turned to look at the cube. I’d been up for a good four hours last night studying the thing. I still hadn’t figured out what it did, but I was starting to get a pretty good idea what it was.
Magic items are inherently difficult to create. By its nature, magic is tied to life, created by the exercise of a living, conscious will. Trying to make a permanent magic item out of an object is sort of like trying to make a permanent light source out of bits of wood. But mages are a persistent lot, and over the years they’ve worked out ways to get around the problem.
The simplest way is to use items which aren’t magical at all, but which guide and direct raw magic in a specific form. These are called focuses, and they’re effectively tools built for a single purpose, like a hammer or a chisel. Energy channelled into them is shaped and directed in the same way that water follows the banks of a river, and given enough time they can even pick up an imprint of the personality of the user. They’ve no power of their own, but they’re useful in the right hands.
Another approach is to make one-shot items like the fog crystal I’d used the night before. In this case a mage casts a spell, then seals it in an item; typically you break the item to cast the spell. These are usually low-power effects, and their main function is to make schools of magic available to those who can’t access them normally. A skilled crafter can whip up a one-shot item in a couple of hours, and they do a brisk trade in the magical economy.
Sometimes, though, neither a focus or a one-shot will do it; you need something that’ll last and has power of its own. But to use magic, you have to be alive. The solution that some creative (and probably slightly crazy) mage came up with a long time ago is to make an item that is alive. The resulting creations are known as imbued items, and they can be extremely powerful and extremely dangerous.
Luna’s cube was an imbued item. It was too powerful to be a focus, and too complex to be a one-shot. It was complex enough that it even had protections against detection magic; there was a kind of null field around it that warded away active scans. I’d tried looking into the future to see what the consequences would be of forcing my way in, and decided quickly that I did not want to do it. This thing had a lot of energy, and it was quite capable of releasing it explosively if provoked. As yet, I hadn’t been able to communicate with it, and I wasn’t sure if there was any way to. Imbued items tend to be single-minded, and they usually don’t talk, making their own decisions based on whatever sensory input they have access to. I’d discovered that the cube had a network of microscopic holes in its outer shell; that was what produced the sparkling effect when you looked into the depths. I had the feeling they were access points of some kind, and that the right signal of visible light might activate the cube, but any such signal would be extremely complex. Without more information, there was no way I could guess it.
One person, though, had been able to produce a response from the cube: Luna. I didn’t know why, but if she’d been able to get a reaction once, maybe she could do it again. At least, that was what I was hoping.
I checked my watch. Luna was due in forty-five minutes. I washed and shaved, then looked into the future to see what time she’d arrive. I paused, then looked again.
Luna wasn’t coming.
That was strange.
I looked a third time, then a fourth. As things stood, Luna wasn’t going to come to my door within the next hour, or any hour for that matter. Frowning, I pulled out my phone and called, but got her voice mail. I looked into the future, trying for a clue, and couldn’t see one. A thread of worry started to curl up from somewhere inside. Maybe she’d been in an accident?
No, that didn’t make sense. The one good thing about Luna’s curse is that it makes her nearly immune to accidents.
But it doesn’t make her immune to things done on purpose…
A new, unwelcome thought intruded. Maybe Luna wasn’t coming because she didn’t want to. The more I thought about that, the more likely it sounded. Occam’s razor states that the simplest explanation is usually correct. The simplest explanation for Luna’s not showing up was that she didn’t want to see me. God knows I’ve had enough people flake on me before. I got up and paced, tense and nervous, glancing at my watch. Twenty minutes. Did Luna need my help? Or did she want to stay away?
Give a problem like this to an engineer, and he’ll give you an answer straight away: insufficient data. But in life, you have to make calls on insufficient data all the time. I forgot about my magic and listened to my instincts.
My instincts told me Luna wouldn’t have flaked after promising to come.
She was in trouble.
In two strides I was at my desk. I went through the drawers in a clatter, shoving handfuls of items into my pockets, snatch
ed my cloak from the wardrobe, then ran downstairs and out the door. As I hurried down my street I pulled out my phone and dialled Luna’s number. It didn’t work. I swore and tried again. This time it rang. One ring, two rings, three rings…“Come on, come on,” I muttered as I hurried along.
There was a click. “Hello?”
“Luna, it’s Alex. Where are you?”
“Um, five minutes away. What’s wrong?”
“Luna, this is important.” I tried to keep my voice calm. “I need to know where you are exactly.”
“Uh…” I heard Luna stop and turn around. “I don’t know the name of the street. It’s the one off Camden Market with that glass building on the corner.”
Luna was only a short walk away. But if she wasn’t going to arrive…I felt a chill. That meant that whatever was going to stop her was there with her right now. “Turn around! Go back into the market!”
“What?”
“Back into the market, or the shops. Anywhere where there’s lots of people.”
“But your house is the other way.”
“I know! Luna, please, just trust me. Do it now!”
There was a moment’s silence. I’d broken into a run, and I was quickly covering the distance. Then I heard Luna’s voice. “All right…”
“Are you in the market?”
“Yes, but Alex, there are people everywhere! I can’t stay far enough—”
“I’ll be there in two minutes. Just keep moving, and—Luna? Luna!”
The line had gone dead. I swore and kept running.
Camden Market is one of the big tourist attractions of London. It fills the blocks between Chalk Farm Road and the Grand Union Canal, and even on off days it’s busy. On Saturday mornings it’s packed to the seams with street sellers, tourists, arts-and-crafts types, teenagers, goths, punks, trendies, performers, bargain hunters, antiquists, dealers, kids, and just about everyone else, all forming a seething mass. The shops sell antiques, knickknacks, and fashions of the kind that newspapers call alternative and most people just call weird, and everywhere is filled with people, talking and eating, bargaining and shopping, filling the place with noise. Finding one girl in Camden Market is like looking for a contact lens at a football match. It’s impossible for a normal person.
For a mage, though…
Luna turned off Chalk Farm Road and down Camden Lock Place. To most eyes she would have blended in with the crowd, a girl of medium height wearing casual clothes and backpack. Only the way she shied away from anyone who got too close made people glance at her. From time to time she would look nervously over her shoulder, scanning the bustling crowd.
Luna turned down a side street where there were fewer people. She shook her head at a man trying to give her a leaflet, skirted a clothing stall, crossed onto the pavement.
Something appeared out of the shadows next to her. Luna jumped, then stopped as she recognised me. “Alex?”
“This way. Quick!”
One of the best things about Luna is that she knows when not to argue. She’ll ask questions for hours without a break, but when I tell her to move, she moves. Luna ran down the stairs and I held the door open for her, then slammed it shut, hearing the lock click.
We were in an underground parking garage, filled with rows of cars lined neatly between support pillars. Fluorescent lights cast a weak glow over the concrete floor. The sounds from outside were muffled, a steady buzz. “Alex?” Luna asked. “What’s wrong?”
“Two people after you,” I said. I hadn’t laid eyes on them yet, but if Luna and I hadn’t ducked out of sight I would have. “A man and a woman.”
Luna just looked at me, confused. “They would have moved on you as soon as you got to the end of that street,” I said, and pointed. “Find somewhere to hide. We’re not out of the woods yet.”
As Luna hurried to the side wall, I pulled the packet of trail dust from my pocket and tore it open. I ran to the other side of the garage and opened the door at the end, leaving it ajar so that a sliver of light crept through. Then I paced the distance back, sprinkling the trail dust left and right. The brown powder sparked briefly as it touched the floor, vanishing. Once I’d covered all the floor we’d stepped on, I walked quickly to where Luna was waiting. “What are you doing?” she asked.
I threw the last handful of the trail dust back where we’d gone, then crumpled up the wrapper and stuffed it into my pocket. “Covering our trail. Are you okay?”
Luna’s face clouded. “I touched someone. I was trying to get away, but he bumped into me, and…Alex? What’s wrong?”
I’d been looking into the future; now my heart skipped a beat. “Get down. Behind the car!”
Luna’s eyes went wide and she obeyed, kneeling down next to the wheel of a big fourbyfour. I yanked my mist cloak out of my bag and pulled it around my shoulders, then stepped back into the shadows and flipped the hood up over my head, feeling the cloak blend with the wall. Luna had looked away for a second, and now as she turned back, her eyes passed over me without seeing me. “Alex?” she whispered.
“I’m here,” I whispered, and Luna started. “Stay down, stay quiet.” I shut up and an instant later I heard the door rattle. Luna heard it too, and went very still. I stood upright in the corner, just another shadow in the dark.
The handle of the door we’d entered by was rattling. There was a moment’s pause, then a flicker of sea-green light. Dust puffed into the air, and suddenly there was a hole where the handle had been. The door swung open with a creak.
The two people who stepped through wore different clothes from last night, but I still recognised them. One was Khazad, spindly and stick-thin, his movements birdlike and quick. Now that I could see his face I could see he looked vaguely Middle Eastern, his eyes darting from side to side. The second was the woman who’d been ordering him around. Unlike Khazad, she still wore her mask, and as I saw that I leant slightly forward. Khazad came down the steps and turned from left to right. He was holding something in one hand, frowning.
“Well?” the masked woman said after a moment. She was still above, scanning the area. I saw her eyes pass over me, but she gave no reaction. I knew she shouldn’t be able to see through my mist cloak at this range, but it wasn’t me I was worried about.
“Wait,” Khazad said.
“Is she here or not?”
“This thing’s screwing up,” Khazad said in frustration. “Stupid piece of crap.” He raised a hand, and something dark gathered in his palm.
As it did, I felt something from Luna. I glanced down and stared. The silver mist of Luna’s curse was moving. A strand of it slipped invisibly outward, reaching ten, twenty times farther than normal, curving over the cars to brush against the object in Khazad’s hand. “Shit!” Khazad snarled.
“Well?”
“I don’t fucking believe this! It’s dead!”
“Is it,” the woman said absently. She was still scanning from left to right, her eyes passing over where Luna and I were hidden, and I didn’t dare move.
“Screw it,” Khazad said angrily. He stuffed the whateveritwas into his pocket. “What about a trail?”
“Wiped.”
Khazad glanced up, his eyes narrowed. “Thought she was a norm?”
“She isn’t a mage.” The woman’s eyes traced the wall from behind her mask. “But there’s something…”
I held my breath. The woman’s eyes had come to rest on me, and she was staring right at where I was hidden. Again. How does she know? Five seconds passed, ten.
“Well?” Khazad demanded.
The woman looked away, and I let out a soft breath. “That door,” she said, her voice suddenly sharp again. She started walking towards the door I’d left ajar, disappearing behind the pillars. I strained my ears to listen. Khazad said something I couldn’t hear, finishing with “—not there?”
“We’ve got her address,” the woman said. “One thing at a time.” The door creaked open and their footsteps receded up the stairs.
/> Luna started to move, but I signalled for her to stay down and she did. I counted off a full minute, looking through the futures, then walked forward, pulling the mist cloak from my shoulders. “Let’s go.”
“Who were they?” Luna asked, scrambling to her feet. She looked anxious rather than scared, which probably meant she didn’t understand what we’d just heard.
“The man’s called Khazad. I don’t know the woman’s name. You don’t want to meet them.”
As we hurried back the way we’d come and emerged out into the street, Luna spoke up hesitantly. “They kept saying ‘she.’ Did they mean—?”
“Yes.”
Luna shut her mouth, and we walked the rest of the way back in silence.
We were back in my flat, above the shop. Luna was curled up on my sofa in the same spot she’d been lying in last night, watching me. Her white hands were curled around a coffee mug. She’d been sitting listening for the last ten minutes, speaking only to ask questions.
“So that’s how it is,” I finished. “Cinder, Khazad, and that woman tried for the relic last night. Now it looks like they’re going for something else instead.”
“The cube?”
“Cinder was looking for it yesterday, and those two are working with Cinder. Now they’re looking for you.”
Luna was quiet for a second. “Why?”
“Probably traced the cube to the same place you got it. They don’t know you gave it to me or they’d have been trying to break in here. Right now, you’re their lead. They’re not going to give up easily.” I hesitated. “I’m sorry for getting you into this.”
Luna only shook her head. “How were they tracking me?”
“Khazad had a focus. There are lots of ways; he was using one of the simple ones. Luna—”
“It was my curse, wasn’t it? That was what stopped him from finding me.”
I blinked. “You can tell?”
Alex Verus Novels, Books 1-4 (9780698175952) Page 7