‘No, I just don’t like the deal.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it stinks.’
‘Look, you have to be realistic. There’s no way the Council would give you clearance to-’
‘If the Council doesn’t want to give me clearance, you shouldn’t be coming to me in the first place.’ I turned to look at Lyle. ‘What’s your idea? They need the information badly enough that they won’t care about where you’re getting it? I think sooner or later they’d start asking questions, and you’d cut me loose to avoid the flak. I’m not interested in being your fall guy.’
Lyle blew out a breath. ‘Why are you being so irrational about this? I’m giving you a chance to get back into the Council’s favour.’ He glanced around at the concrete and the grey skies. ‘Given the alternative …’
‘Well, since you bring it up, it just so happens that I’m not especially interested in getting back into the Council’s favour.’
‘That’s ridiculous. The Council represents all of the mages in the country.’
‘Yeah, all the mages. That’s the problem.’
‘This is about that business with Drakh, isn’t it?’ Lyle said. He rolled his eyes. ‘Jesus, Alex, it was ten years ago. Get over it.’
‘It doesn’t matter when it was,’ I said tightly. ‘The Council haven’t gotten better. They’ve gotten worse.’
‘We’ve had ten years of peace. That’s your idea of “worse”?’
‘The reason you’ve had peace is because you and the Council let the Dark mages do whatever they want.’ I glared at Lyle. ‘You know what they do to the people in their power. Why don’t you ask them how good a deal they think it is?’
‘We’re not starting another war, Alex. The Council isn’t going anywhere, and neither are the mages that are a part of it, Light or Dark. You’re just going to have to accept that.’
I took a breath and looked out over the canal, listening to the distant cries of the seagulls. When I spoke again my voice was steady. ‘The answer’s no. Find someone else.’
Lyle made a disgusted noise. ‘I should have known.’ He stepped away and gave me a look. ‘You’re living in the past. Grow up.’
I watched Lyle walk off. He didn’t look back. Once he’d disappeared around the corner I turned back to the canal.
So long as magic has existed, there’s been a split between the two paths: the Light mages and the Dark. Sometimes they’ve existed in uneasy truce; sometimes there have been conflicts. The last and greatest was called the Gate Rune War, and it happened forty years before I was born. It was a faction of the Dark mages against almost all of the Light, and the prize to the winner was total dominion over Earth. The Light side won — sort of. They stopped the Dark mages and killed their leaders, but by the time it was over most of the Light battle mages were dead as well. The Light survivors didn’t want to fight any more wars, and the surviving Dark mages were allowed to regroup. Years passed. The old warriors were replaced by a new generation of mages who thought that peace was the natural order of things.
By the time I arrived on the scene, Council policy was ‘live and let live’. Dark mages were tolerated so long as they didn’t go after Light mages, and vice versa. There was a set of rules called the Concord that governed how mages could and couldn’t act towards each other. The Concord didn’t draw any distinction between Light and Dark, and there was a growing feeling that the division between Light and Dark was out-of-date. At the time, I thought it made a lot of sense. My own master, Richard Drakh, was a Dark mage, and I didn’t see why Light and Dark mages couldn’t get along.
I changed my mind after I had my falling-out with Richard, but by then it was too late. That was when I discovered that while the Concord had all sorts of rules for how mages were allowed to treat each other, it didn’t have any rules at all for how they were allowed to treat their apprentices. After I escaped, I went to Lyle and the Council. They didn’t want to know. I was left alone, with an angry Dark mage after me.
Even now if I close my eyes I can still remember that time, the horrible paralysing fear. It’s impossible to understand unless you’ve experienced it — the terror of being hunted by something crueller and stronger than you. I was barely out of my teens, hardly able to look after myself, much less go face to face with someone like Richard. Now I look back on it I can see the Council was really just waiting for Richard to get rid of me and remove the whole embarrassing mess. Instead I survived.
So you can see why I’m not the Council’s favourite person. And why I’ve no desire to get into their good books, either.
I knew that Lyle was gone and wasn’t coming back, but I stayed where I was for another twenty minutes, watching the reflections in the dark water and waiting for the ugly memories to settle. When I was calm again, I put Lyle and everything he stood for out of my mind and went home. I didn’t feel like doing any more work that day, so I left for the park, locking the shop behind me.
London is an old city. Even visitors can feel it — the sense of history, the weight of thousands of years. To a sensitive it’s even stronger, like a physical presence embedded into the earth and stone. Over the centuries pockets have developed, little enclaves in the jungle of buildings, and the place I was going to is one of them.
The park is about ten minutes’ walk from my shop, tucked down a twisting backstreet that nobody ever uses. It’s overgrown to the point of being nearly invisible behind the fence and trees. There are construction vehicles parked outside — officially the park’s supposed to be closed for redevelopment, but somehow the work never seems to get done. There are buildings all around, but leaves and branches shelter you from watching eyes.
I was sitting on a blanket with my back against a beech tree when I heard the faint rattle of a bicycle on the road outside. A moment later a girl appeared through the trees, ducking under the branches. I waved and she changed direction, walking across the grass towards me.
A glance at Luna would show you a girl in her early twenties, with blue eyes, fair skin and wavy light brown hair worn up in two bunches. She moves very carefully, always looking where she places her hands and feet, and often she seems as though her body’s there while her mind’s somewhere far away. She hardly ever smiles and I’ve never seen her laugh, but apart from that you could talk to her without noticing anything strange … at least to begin with.
Luna’s one of those people who was born into the world of magic without ever really getting a choice. Adepts and even mages can choose to abandon their power if they want to, bury their talents in the sand and walk away, but for Luna it’s different. A few hundred years ago in Sicily, one of Luna’s ancestors made the mistake of upsetting a powerful strega. Back country witches have a reputation for being vicious, but this one was mean even by witch standards. Instead of just killing the man, she put a curse on him that would strike his youngest daughter, and his daughter’s daughter, and her daughter after that, following his children down and down through the generations until his descendants died out or the world ended, whichever came first.
I don’t know how that long-dead witch managed to bind the curse so tightly to the family line, but she did a hell of a thorough job. She’s been dust and bones for centuries but the curse is just as strong as ever, and Luna’s the one in this generation who inherited it. Part of the reason the curse is so nasty is that it’s almost impossible to tell it’s there. Even a mage wouldn’t notice it unless he knew exactly what to look for. If I concentrate I can see it around Luna as a kind of silvery-grey mist, but I only have the vaguest idea how it does what it does.
‘Hey,’ Luna said as she reached me, slinging her backpack off her shoulder. Instead of sitting on the blanket she picked a spot on the grass, a few yards away from me. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Sure. Why?’
‘You look as if something’s bothering you.’
I shook my head in annoyance. I’d thought I’d concealed it better than that, but I always have trouble hiding
things from Luna. ‘Unwelcome visitor. How’s things?’
Luna hesitated. ‘Can you …?’
‘Let’s have a look at it.’
Luna had been only waiting for me to ask; she unzipped her backpack and took out something wrapped in a cotton scarf. She leant forward to place it onto the edge of the blanket and unwrapped it, staying as far away as possible. The scarf fell away, Luna scooted back, and I leant forward in interest. Sitting in the folds of the scarf was what looked like a cube of red crystal.
The thing was about three inches square and deep crimson, the colour of red stained glass. As I looked more closely, though, I saw it wasn’t transparent enough to be glass; I should have been able to see through it, but I couldn’t. Instead, if I looked closely, I could see what looked like tiny white sparks held in the cube’s depths. ‘Huh,’ I said, sitting up. ‘Where’d you find it?’
‘It was in the attic of a house in Clapham West. But …’ Luna paused. ‘There’s something strange. I went to the same house three weeks ago and didn’t find anything. But this time it was sitting on a shelf, right out in the open. And when I went to the owner, he couldn’t remember owning it. He let me have it for free.’ Luna frowned. ‘I’ve been wondering if I just missed it, but I don’t see how. You can feel it, can’t you?’
I nodded. The cube radiated the distinct sense of otherness that all magic items do. This one wasn’t flashy, but it was strong; someone sensitive like Luna couldn’t have walked by without noticing. ‘Did you touch it?’
Luna nodded.
‘What happened?’
‘It glowed,’ Luna said. ‘Just for a second, and-’ She hesitated. ‘Well, I put it down, and it stopped. Then I wrapped it up and brought it here.’
The cube wasn’t glowing now so I focused on it and concentrated. All mages can see into the magical spectrum to some degree, but as a diviner I’m a lot better at it than most. A mage’s sight isn’t really sight — it’s more like a sixth sense — but the easiest way to interpret it is visually. It gives a sense of what the magic is, where it came from, and what it can do. If you’re skilled enough you can pick up the thoughts the magic was shaped out of and the kind of personality that created it. On a good day I can read an item’s whole history just from looking at it.
Today wasn’t one of those days. Not only could I not read the item’s aura, I couldn’t read any aura on it at all. Which made no sense, because there should have been at least one aura, namely Luna’s. To my eyes Luna glowed a clear silver, wisps of mist constantly drifting away and being renewed. A residue of it clung to everything she touched: her pack glowed silver, the scarf glowed silver, even the grass she was sitting on glowed silver. But the cube itself radiated nothing at all. The thing was like a black hole.
Left to their own devices magic items give off an aura, and the more powerful the item, the more powerful that aura is. This was why I’d had Luna bring the thing out here; if I’d tried to examine the cube in my shop I’d have had a hundred other auras distracting me. The park is a natural oasis, a kind of grounding circle which keeps other energies out, allowing me to concentrate on just one thing at a time. It’s possible to design an item so as to minimise its signature, but no matter how carefully you design a one-shot or a focus, something’s going to be visible. The only way to mask a magical aura completely is to do it actively, which left only one thing this could be. I dropped my concentration and looked up at Luna. ‘You’ve found something special, all right.’
‘Do you know what it is?’ Luna asked.
I shook my head and thought for a moment. ‘What happened when you touched it?’
‘The sparks inside lit up and it glowed. Just for a second. Then it went dark again.’ Luna seemed about to say something else, then stopped.
‘After that? Did it do anything else?’
‘Well …’ Luna hesitated. ‘It might be nothing.’
‘Tell me.’
‘It felt like it was looking at me. Even after I put it away. I know that sounds weird.’
I sat back against the tree, looking down at the cube. I didn’t like this at all. ‘Alex?’ Luna asked. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘This is going to be trouble.’
‘Why?’
I hesitated. I’d been teaching Luna about magic for a few months, but so far I’d avoided telling her much about the people who use it. I know Luna wants to be accepted into the magical world, and I also know there’s not much chance of it happening. Mage society is based on a hierarchy of power: the stronger your magic, the more status you have. Sensitives like Luna are second-class citizens at best.
‘Look, there’s a reason not many mages run shops,’ I said at last. ‘They’ve never bought in to the whole idea of yours and mine. A mage sees a magic item, his first reaction is to take it. Now, a minor item you can keep out of sight, but something really powerful … that’s different. Any mage who finds out about this thing is going to be willing to take time off his schedule and track you down to take it, and he might not be gentle about how. Just owning a major item is dangerous.’
Luna was quiet. ‘But you don’t do that,’ she said at last.
I sighed. ‘No.’
Luna looked at me, then turned away. We sat for a little while in silence.
Luna’s curse is a spell of chance magic. Chance magic affects luck, bending probability so that something that might happen one time in a thousand, or a million, happens at just the right time — or the wrong one. The spell around Luna does both. It pulls bad luck away from her, and brings it to everyone nearby.
The really twisted thing is that from what I’ve learned the spell was originally invented by Dark mages as a protection, not a curse, because it makes you as safe from accidents as a person can possibly be. You can run across a motorway in rush hour, climb a tree in a lightning storm, walk through a battlefield with bombs going off all around you, all without taking a scratch.
But the accidents don’t go away; they just get redirected to everyone nearby, and when the spell is laid permanently, the results are horrible. The closer Luna gets to another person, the more the curse affects them. She can’t live in the same house as anyone else, because something terrible would happen within a month. She can’t keep pets, or they die. Even having friends is dangerous. The closer other people are to her, and the longer they stay near, the worse the result. Whenever Luna comes to care about any other human being, she knows that the more time she spends with them, the more they’re going to be hurt. She told me once that the first boy she kissed ended up in a coma.
I’ve spent some time researching Luna’s curse, trying to find a way to break it, but haven’t gotten anywhere. I might be able to get somewhere if I studied her intensively, but Luna’s life is hard enough without being treated like some kind of science project. Still … ‘Luna?’
‘Hm?’
‘There’s something I was …’ Something brushed against my senses, and I stopped. I looked into the future and my stomach suddenly went cold.
Luna was watching in puzzlement. She could tell from my expression that something was going on, but she didn’t know what. ‘Alex?’
I jumped to my feet. ‘Get away!’
Luna started to rise, confused. ‘What’s going on?’
‘There’s no time!’ I was desperate; we had only seconds. ‘Behind the tree, hide! Hurry!’
Luna hesitated an instant longer, then moved quickly behind the beech. ‘Stay there,’ I said, my voice low and urgent. ‘Don’t make a sound.’ I turned back just as a man stepped from the trees in front of me.
He was powerfully built, with a thick neck and wide hands, and muscles that bulged through the lines of his black coat. He might have looked like a bouncer or a bodyguard, maybe even a friendly one, if you didn’t look too closely at his eyes. ‘Verus, right?’ the Dark mage said, regarding me steadily. ‘Don’t think we’ve met.’
2
The two of us stood facing each other across the grass. The wind had dr
opped, and the birds around had gone silent, sensing danger. I stood still, keeping my face blank and not letting myself show any sign of the sickening sensation you get when you’ve made a really bad mistake. I’d left my house without weapons or defences. Once upon a time I never would have dreamt of stepping outside without them, but months of safety had lulled me into dropping my guard.
Now I was paying for it. I was standing in front of a Dark mage, and if he decided to come at me, I was toast — literally. The silence stretched out while I looked frantically into the future, trying to see what would happen. ‘I guess we haven’t been introduced,’ I said at last, keeping my voice steady.
‘You can call me Cinder.’
I raised my eyebrows. ‘Subtle.’
‘Trying to be funny?’
‘I don’t know, are you laughing?’
He grinned then. ‘Smart mouth.’
I didn’t answer, but as I looked at the futures branching out from ahead of us, I felt a chill. This conversation could unfold in a thousand ways, and most of them led to Cinder attacking me, brutally and without warning. And the cause of the fight was …
I stopped, trying to keep the confusion off my face. It was the red cube, the same one that had been left on the blanket just two feet behind where I was standing. The instant Cinder saw it he would do his absolute best to kill me, and I had no idea why.
Right now Cinder was focused on me, but in only a few seconds he would notice. I made a snap decision and deliberately turned my back on Cinder, crouching down to fold up the blanket. ‘I reckon …’ Cinder began to say, then stopped. ‘Hey.’
I didn’t turn around. ‘What?’
‘I’m talking to you.’
I wrapped the blanket around the cube, keeping the thick cloth around the thing. ‘And?’ I took out my bag and started packing the blanket inside. From behind, I could feel Cinder’s confusion. No one turns his back on a Dark mage unless he’s crazy or planning something. I felt a surge of magic starting to build up behind me, and I glanced over my shoulder, feeling an itch in my back. ‘Stop that,’ I said, keeping my voice cool.
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