“What do you want?”
Morden smiled. “I want the fateweaver, of course. That’s hardly a secret. The question is who you want to get it.”
I started to answer and realised suddenly that I didn’t know. I’d been so busy manoeuvring between the different factions over the last two days that I’d never stopped to think of whom I actually wanted to win. And why should I have thought about it? It wasn’t up to me.
Except now I did stop to think, I realised it was up to me. Enough of the pieces of the puzzle had ended up in my hands that I could make a difference. Morden was right. Until now I’d just been reacting, being pushed around by one faction or another. If I was going to get out of this in one piece, I’d have to stop reacting and start acting. And that meant figuring out exactly what I wanted.
I sat thinking for five minutes. Morden didn’t rush me, waiting patiently while I worked out what I was going to say.
“What are you offering?” I said at last.
“Consider the position that of intelligence officer,” Morden said. “I think it’s a role to which you’d be well suited.”
“What’s in it for me?”
“Come now, Verus. I know money doesn’t motivate you.”
“I wasn’t talking about money.”
“Ah.” Morden tilted his head. “Well, for one thing, you’d get to stay alive. You listed that as your primary goal, I believe.”
“You’re going to have to do better than that.”
“You are aware I could kill you at any time?”
“Very,” I said. “But you haven’t, which means at the moment you’ve got a reason not to. You could tell me to follow your orders or die, and I’d have to do as you said. But threatening a diviner doesn’t work out very well in the long run. Not if you’re planning to rely on the information he gives you.”
Morden studied me for a moment. I knew from looking into the future that he wasn’t going to follow through on his threat, but something in his eyes still made my skin crawl. Suddenly he smiled. “Very well, then. What I can offer you is safety. As long as you’re working for me, neither you nor any associates you bring with you will be harmed, by either side. I think you’ll find my security quite impressive. You’ll also have whatever you can find from the site, bar the fateweaver itself. Of course, your team members will have their own shares.”
“Team members?”
“So then.” Morden leant back in his chair. “Tell me how to open that relic.”
I felt the futures shift into a series of forks. I took a long look at the options ahead of me and saw the consequences of answering one way or the other. “With a key,” I said at last.
“What does the key look like?”
“A cube of red crystal.”
“How does it open the door?”
“You place the cube in the statue’s hand.”
“Do you have it?”
I paused. “Yes.”
A beat, then Morden nodded, and I felt the flicker of a minor spell. A second later, the far door opened and a young man walked in.
He couldn’t have been older than his early twenties, but no one looking at him would call him a boy. He was tall and slender, smooth-moving in a way that suggested speed, and his eyes were cold. I’d never met him, but I knew exactly what he was: a Dark Chosen, a selected apprentice. He would be fast, ruthless, a combat veteran despite his youth, deadly with his magic or without it. He was holding something in one hand, and as he came and stopped by Morden’s chair I saw what it was. It was Luna’s red crystal cube, the same one I’d left locked away in my shop.
“Let me introduce you to Onyx,” Morden said. “He’ll be looking after you during your stay. Do feel free to approach him if there’s anything you need.”
I looked at Onyx and he looked back at me. The expression on his face suggested that anyone who approached him could expect to have their throat cut. “I’ll keep that in mind,” I said.
“Excellent. Onyx?”
Onyx stepped forward and held out the cube. I lifted my hand and he placed the cube into it. Morden nodded to him and with a final glance back at me Onyx turned and left, shutting the door behind him as he went. “A gesture of good faith,” Morden said with a smile. “I’m afraid the defences on your shop need some work. We’ll have to look into getting you some better accommodation once this is over.”
I looked at the cube, feeling its presence in my hand, patient and still. “So as you can see,” Morden said, “I now have everything I need—with your assistance, of course. We should be moving within a day or two; please consider yourself my guest until then.” He rose to his feet and moved to the other door. “This way.”
I slipped the cube into my pocket, then got up and followed Morden into a long hallway. Pictures and rugs lined the walls, but I was too busy looking ahead to notice. Morden had known about the cube from the start; his questions had been traps. If I’d lied, the consequences would have been ugly. But I still had one edge, a secret that I was almost sure Morden didn’t know. The cube would work only for Luna. If Morden tried to open the door with the cube, he was going to get a nasty surprise.
It would be a very good idea for me not to be around when that happened.
“You’ll be working with Onyx on this assignment,” Morden was saying. “Along with three others.”
“These others,” I said. “They wouldn’t be Cinder, Deleo, and Khazad, would they?”
“As a matter of fact they would.”
“Ah.”
“I’m confident you’ll be able to resolve your differences.”
“We’re going to meet them?”
“Just Deleo.”
“And the other two?”
“Unfortunately they’ve proven…less accommodating. They should be in good condition by tomorrow.” Morden smiled. “However, I’m sure you and Deleo will have plenty to talk about. First, though, I think a reintroduction is in order.” He opened one of the doors.
The room inside was dimly lit. It looked oddly familiar and it took me a second to realise what it reminded me of: the room in Canary Wharf where I’d met Levistus. Just like there, a handful of chairs faced a full-length window made of one-way glass. But my attention was fixed on the woman standing in the centre of the room. It was Deleo, except this time, as she turned to look at us, she wasn’t wearing her mask. And this time, I knew who she was.
I stopped dead in the doorway. “I believe the two of you know each other?” Morden said.
Both of us stared at each other in silence. “Well,” Morden said eventually. “I have a disciplinary matter to attend to. Let me make it clear that I will not accept any internal fighting. Both of you work for me now. If you prove unable to cooperate, one or both of you will be replaced. Understood?”
Neither of us answered. “I said, is that understood?” Morden asked, steel creeping into his voice.
“Yes,” I said. The woman facing me nodded.
“Good. Oh, and please stay here until I return. You’ll understand why shortly.” The door clicked shut behind Morden and the room was silent.
“So it was you,” I said at last.
Deleo—not that that was her real name—spoke for the first time. “You didn’t even recognise me, did you?”
“If you’d called yourself Rachel, I would have.”
She looked away. “That’s not my name anymore.”
Silence fell again as I went back to staring at Rachel. It’s a strange feeling, seeing someone after so long. When I’d first known Rachel, she’d been a teenager, pretty and thoughtful, always changing. In her face I could still recognise the person she’d once been, but her face was immobile now, masklike. She was striking, even beautiful in a cold way, but pretty didn’t describe her anymore.
There had been four of us, back then. Me, Shireen, Tobruk, and Rachel. Tobruk was dead. Shireen was probably dead. Rachel’s fate I’d never known. After that last battle, I’d never heard from her and she’d never come looking for m
e. I’d forgotten her, buried her in my memory along with everything else that had happened back then. Until now.
“Why the mask?” I said at last.
“You wouldn’t understand.”
“Is this how you’ve been keeping yourself busy? Treasure hunting?”
“And you’ve been running a shop,” Rachel said contemptuously.
I shrugged. I can’t say I like mages looking down on me for my day job, but I’m used to it. “Running a shop or treasure hunting…it seems to have led us to the same place.”
Rachel didn’t answer. “Just out of curiosity,” I said, “what were you planning to do with me and Luna after you got into that relic?”
“Whatever I wanted.”
“Modelling yourself on our old teacher?”
“Fuck you,” Rachel snapped. “We had you. You could never beat me.”
“I wasn’t trying to beat you,” I said. Rachel made a disgusted noise and stalked to the end of the room, her back turned.
Despite the violence in Rachel’s words, I couldn’t sense any danger. With her mask off she seemed a different person. I could also tell she wasn’t going to answer any more questions, so I walked to the one-way glass and studied what was beyond.
The room on the other side of the glass was a torture chamber. Three small barbed cages were lined against the far wall, not quite tall enough to stand in and not quite wide enough to sit in. A rack was in one corner, and there was also a vagrant’s chair and an iron maiden with its spikes just visible inside its half-open doors. In pride of place, at the centre of the room, was a ten-foot-tall agoniser. Its straps and metal plates had been polished, ready for use.
Although Morden’s torture chamber was well-equipped, I couldn’t help but notice that it was a little on the primitive side compared to Richard’s. Richard had gone to special effort to select devices that inflicted pain without causing physical damage, so that they could be used over long periods of time without need of a healer. Maybe Morden was the old-fashioned type.
By the way, if you’re getting creeped out by my discussing the pros and cons of torture chambers, I’m not surprised. Just trust me when I say you’d understand if you’d ever been there. Treating it like it’s something normal helps make it less scary.
Of course, when you’re treating torture chambers as something normal, that’s also a sign that you should seriously reexamine your life.
“Just like old times,” I said. When Rachel didn’t reply, I looked at her. “Did Morden put you in there? Or was it just Cinder and Khazad?”
Rachel looked at me without expression. I leant back against the wall, watching her. “You wouldn’t take orders from anyone, back then,” I said after a pause. “You were the one in charge, that was how you sold it. Now one day and you’re following Morden? What changed?”
Rachel turned her back on me again. For a moment I thought she wasn’t going to answer, then she spoke. “A lot of things changed.”
“One thing hasn’t.” I smiled slightly. “We’re supposed to be working together again.”
“No.” Rachel turned to me. “I never wanted to see you. I wouldn’t have, if Cinder hadn’t sniffed you out. Then you had to get involved with that girl. Why couldn’t you hide like the rest? Just looking at you makes me—” Rachel clenched her fists and took a breath. “I hate you more than I could ever hate Morden. He’s just another man. You’re—”
Rachel trailed off. “I’m what?” I asked.
“You’re a memory,” Rachel said, her voice low and intense. “Every time I look at you I have to remember. Stay away from me. I’ll kill you if that’s what I have to do to stop seeing your face.”
The sound of an opening door made us both turn and look. From the other side of the one-way glass, three people had entered the torture chamber. As soon as I saw them I understood what was going to happen, and why Morden had told us to stay.
Morden was at the front. Behind him were the two girls who’d been accompanying him at the ball: Lisa and the brunette. The brunette’s face was blank and she was pulling Lisa along by one wrist. Lisa was crying and begging, tears streaming down her face. Despite the one-way glass, we could hear everything she said clearly. “No, Master, please. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’ll do anything. I didn’t mean to. Master, please, I didn’t mean to, I didn’t. Don’t put me in there. Master, please—”
There’s a kind of horrible fascination to these things. Even when you know what’s going to happen, something makes you look. I’d seen what was going to happen, knew how this was going to end, yet somehow I found myself staring through the one-way glass. To one side, I was conscious of Rachel standing motionless, watching as well.
As the other girl started strapping Lisa into the agoniser, Lisa stopped pleading and just started crying. “Lisa,” Morden said. “Do you understand why you are here?”
Lisa mumbled something. “Louder, please,” Morden said.
Lisa sniffed. “Dis—disloyalty.” Her voice was shaky.
“To whom?”
“To you. Please, Master, I didn’t—”
Morden raised a hand and Lisa fell silent. The other girl had finished with the straps, leaving Lisa spread-eagled. “This is the punishment for disloyalty,” Morden said. He looked at the brunette and nodded. The other girl’s face was still blank. She turned and activated the device.
I’m not going to describe what an agoniser does. You don’t want to know. After the first sixty seconds I couldn’t watch anymore. Lisa’s voice gave out somewhere around the second minute, but she still kept trying to scream.
Rachel didn’t look away. She stood by the window and her face was so still it could have been carved from marble. The light of the agoniser lit up her face in reflected blue-and-white flashes. She didn’t move throughout the whole thing, standing like a statue.
When it finally ended, Lisa was a weeping heap of bloody rags. Morden said something that I didn’t listen to while the other girl took Lisa down and led her out of the room, supporting her to keep her from collapsing. Morden switched off the lights as they left. He hadn’t looked through the window at us once. After the screams, the silence was frightening.
“Morden likes sending messages,” I said at last. My voice sounded strange in my ears. I don’t think Rachel heard the tremble, but it was a near thing.
“You think that was a message?”
I looked at Rachel. “The ‘punishment for disloyalty’?”
“That was half of the message,” Rachel said distantly. “That’s what he’ll do if we upset him. If we betray him”—Rachel looked at me with cold eyes—“he’ll just kill us.”
We were shown back to our rooms and I was left alone in the small bedroom in which I’d woken up. Outside, the rain was still coming down, and night had fallen. All I could see through the darkness and the rain was the dim outlines of trees. The room was warm and cosy, keeping out the cold, but I knew the shelter was an illusion. You might freeze to death outside, but you’d still be safer than in here.
At last I had a chance to think. I walked up and down the small room, collecting my thoughts as the rain beat against the glass and the last traces of light faded from the sky.
If nothing else, at least I finally understood what had been going on. There had been two puppetmasters from the beginning: Levistus and Morden. Everything that had happened traced back to one of them. Levistus’ pawns were the investigation team; Morden’s were the three Dark mages. Levistus had control of the site, but Morden had the key.
And what about me? Somehow I’d managed to get myself hired by both. I was safe only as long as Levistus and Morden both thought I was on their side. That would last until Morden made his move and took control of the Precursor site. At that point, Levistus would decide I’d betrayed him as soon as I was seen with Morden’s troops, and Morden would decide I’d betrayed him as soon as he tried the key in the statue and woke up the lightning elemental for another round. At which point I could expect both of them t
o put me on their hit list.
It comes as a bit of a shock when you stop to take a look around and realise just how badly you’ve managed to screw things up, especially when all your decisions seemed like good ideas at the time. Within a few days, two of the most powerful mages in England were going to want me personally and painfully dead.
So what was I going to do about it?
Staying faithful to either Levistus or Morden wasn’t even worth considering. Morden’s little speech had left me cold; I’d made the mistake of swearing fealty to a Dark mage once, and there was no way I was doing it again. And Levistus had made it very clear that he would keep me around exactly as long as I was useful and not one second longer. Both would be happy to have me killed as soon as the fateweaver was in their hands, assuming the other didn’t do it first.
Running wasn’t an option either. I had no idea where I was, nor how far this mansion’s wards reached; any attempt to break out would be a roll of the dice even without the guards and defences. A better plan would be to wait until we set out and try to slip away. With my magic, I could probably pull it off…but all that would earn me would be assassins in my footsteps. Neither Levistus nor Morden struck me as the forgiving type.
Force was out; so was alliance. I turned it around and looked at the problem the other way. What did I have going for me?
Knowledge. I was the only person in the world who knew how to open that relic. Morden knew about the key and maybe Levistus did too, but I was the only one who knew that Luna had to be the one to turn it. But what I could learn, others could learn. Right now I was the only one who knew, but no secret this big could stay a secret for long.
So how could I use it?
Snatches of the conversations I’d heard in the last two days floated to the top of my memory. Arachne saying how seers carried great power in times of conflict. Levistus talking about fateweavers, how commanders had carried them in the Dark Wars. Morden talking about action, purpose.
It’s hard to know exactly where ideas come from. Pieces of thought and memory assemble at the back of our minds, creating something more than the sum of their parts. I think it was then my plan started to come together, but only as something vague and shadowy. All I knew was that I needed to talk to Luna, but there was no way I could reach her.
Alex Verus Novels, Books 1-4 (9780698175952) Page 18