Taken

by Benedict Jacka

  Talisid nodded. “They seem to have accepted your explanation as the most probable one.”

  Luna looked between us. “What explanation?”

  “Crystal had access to Anne through the apprentice program,” I said. “She could have read the information she needed out of Anne’s mind.”

  “It doesn’t account for every detail,” Talisid said. “But given Crystal’s obvious guilt I think the Keepers are eventually going to accept it.”

  “So they’re going to let Anne go?” Luna asked.

  “I can’t give any guarantees, but that’s what I would expect.”

  Luna looked relieved. “Looks like it’s about to kick off,” I said.

  Talisid turned towards Fountain Reach. “So it is.”

  For a few seconds the hillside was still. Then from below the night lit up in a flash as explosives went off all around Fountain Reach. The mansion’s outer walls simply disintegrated, coming down in a tumble of bricks and stone even as the echoes of the first blast came rumbling around the hills. The inner layers of the mansion were spared from the initial shockwave only to be caught in the spreading flames, fire engulfing the house far quicker than should be possible.

  The blaze grew by leaps and bounds, licking higher and higher. From below I could sense fire magic working to enhance the flames and air magic pouring in pure oxygen to feed them. Sparks and embers went soaring into the night sky. Even from here I could feel a slight warmth; down below it must have been truly hellish.

  The wards didn’t stand a chance and I felt them shredding and dissolving as the structure they were tied to burned away. I wondered what it must be like for Vitus, hidden in that pocket dimension that had once been his fortress and had now become his tomb. If it had been a smaller fire he might have been able to extinguish it by transporting away the air or the burning material as he had before, but there was nothing in the world that could have extinguished this. All he could do was sit there and watch.

  I don’t know if Vitus came out. There was a minute or two during which the wards still held, even while all around them Fountain Reach burned with a single flame. Maybe somewhere in that time Vitus Aubuchon did emerge, leaving his sanctuary for one last time in a final desperate attempt to defend his home. If he did he died there, alone and unnoticed in the blaze. A moment later the internal structure of the mansion groaned and broke, and Fountain Reach collapsed in an enormous crash, throwing a storm of smoke and sparks into the sky as the wards that protected it and linked it to that other copy of itself flickered and died.

  The mages below didn’t stop. They kept the fire going as the ruins of Fountain Reach dwindled, burning the wreckage to splinters and the splinters to ash. They weren’t here to find or confront Vitus, they were here to eliminate him, as efficiently and safely as possible. Only when there was nothing left but dust did they finally let the fire die.

  Talisid and Luna and I looked down the hillside in silence. Where Fountain Reach had stood was an open patch of scorched ground, still glowing with heat. “I think we’re done here,” Talisid said. “Was there anything else?”

  “No,” I said.

  “You did a very good job,” Talisid said, giving a nod to Luna to include her. “Call me any time you need my assistance. Good night.”

  Talisid walked down into the forest and disappeared into the darkness between the trees. I gave the scorched patch one final glance, then turned away. “Come on,” I said to Luna. “Time to go home.”

  * * *

  “Run through it for me one more time,” I said.

  “Again?” Luna said with a sigh.

  It was a few hours later and we were standing outside a coffee shop in Soho. Now that we were back in London the winter night was a little bit warmer but much less clear, the fuzz of the city glow clouding the sky above. Neon lights shone from the buildings and scatterings of people moved past in twos and threes. “I’m going to stay here until you pick me up,” Luna said in her why-do-I-have-to-do-this? voice.

  “Or?”

  “Or until it’s been one and a half hours.”

  “And after that?”

  “I go somewhere safe and call Sonder and Talisid and read them the message in this letter.”

  “And if I call you and tell you it’s all clear?”

  “Then I run like hell. Is this about that thing you had Sonder research for you?”

  “Yes.” I handed Luna the envelope. “If everything goes to plan I’ll be back within an hour.”

  “Why can’t I come?” Luna asked, accepting it. “I did last time.”

  “If you open that letter you’ll know. Enjoy the coffee.”

  * * *

  Tiger’s Palace looked pretty much the same as when I’d last seen it. The shark-eyed bouncers let me pass, and the roar of music washed over me as I crossed the dance floor. I caught a glimpse of one of the kids who’d picked a fight with me and Luna. The instant he saw me his eyes went wide and he vanished into the crowd. I smiled to myself and walked up the stairs.

  Jagadev’s throne room was filled with a smaller entourage than last time, and Jagadev wasn’t there. The Asian guy with sunglasses stopped me once again. If he was still bruised from the last visit, he didn’t show it. When I said I was here to see Jagadev, he gave a curt “Follow me” and led me farther in. The bead curtain parted to reveal a small maze of corridors. I passed a couple of heavies with badly concealed guns under their jackets who gave me unfriendly looks before Sunglasses stopped in front of a door. “Inside.”

  I opened the door and walked in. It swung shut silently behind me.

  Jagadev was there, and he was alone. The chamber was a dining room, wide and tall, with hangings of red and dark gold. Gold statuettes stood on tables, and curved swords and intricately woven tapestries hung on the walls. A fire blazed in the fireplace, its flickering light illuminating the long table at the centre, and at the middle of the table sat Jagadev. A meal was laid out before him but he sat with his clawed paws clasped and still. His dark eyes watched me opaquely as I approached the table and stopped.

  Jagadev made a gesture towards the chair opposite him. “Sit.”

  “Thanks.” I pulled out the chair. Jagadev’s plate was piled with some sort of meat I didn’t recognise and his glass was filled with red wine, but both seemed untouched.

  “You wished to speak to me,” Jagadev said in his growling purr once I was seated.

  “I did,” I said. “First, I’d like to thank you for the pointer towards Fountain Reach. It was very accurate, as I’m sure you know.”

  I stopped. “Is that all?” Jagadev said.

  “No,” I said. “I think I might have figured out who’s been trying to kill your ward Anne. I thought you might be interested.”

  “Speak.”

  “Thanks.” I settled back in the wooden chair. “It interested me because once I looked back on it the first thing I noticed was just how much bad stuff has been happening to Anne over the last week. First there were those assassins in Archway, then there were those constructs at the motorway café, then she got arrested by the Council and could easily have gotten executed, and then she nearly got killed off by Vitus. When you think about it it’s actually pretty surprising she’s still alive.”

  Jagadev watched me silently. “So,” I said. “I looked at Anne and tried to figure out why someone would want her dead so badly. And I really couldn’t come up with a good explanation. Okay, Vitus was after her because she was an apprentice who was the right age. And the Council were after her because they thought she was Vitus’s accomplice. But the assassins and the constructs didn’t fit with that at all. So I tried to figure out who was behind those.

  “The obvious person to blame was Crystal, because she was the one who kidnapped all the others. But if it was Crystal then she should have been trying to kidnap Anne,
not kill her. And there was something else—the more I thought about it the more it seemed to me that neither of the attacks would have done Crystal or Vitus any favours. They wouldn’t have led us away from Fountain Reach—if anything they would have done the exact opposite. If I’d been killed in the middle of investigating that place it would just have convinced the next few investigators that I was on the right track. So whoever was behind it, they weren’t on Crystal and Vitus’s side. But they weren’t on Anne’s side either, because they were trying to kill her. And they weren’t on my side or Variam’s side, because they could have killed us too, and they weren’t on Morden or Onyx’s side, because those guys wanted me alive, at least until they found Vitus. In fact, it didn’t seem like they were on anyone’s side, which didn’t make any sense.

  “So I decided I’d been going about this the wrong way. I threw out all my ideas and started from square one. And when I looked at it with a fresh eye the first thing that jumped out at me was that every time Anne had been in danger, your name seemed to crop up. That first time in Archway she’d gone there in your car with your driver. Same with the motorway services. Vitus trying to kill her wasn’t your doing . . . but it was your doing that she was in Fountain Reach in the first place. And that’s a bit odd, isn’t it? Anne doesn’t duel, so why send her to a duelling tournament when there’s someone out there kidnapping apprentices? Especially when you knew that Fountain Reach was the place those kidnappings were coming from? And finally there was the Council arresting her. It didn’t seem like that could be your fault . . . until I remembered that habit of yours of asking Anne about her classmates. The Keepers are probably going to decide that Crystal got that information out of Anne’s mind, but they’re not a hundred percent happy with that explanation and neither am I. Of course, if the information was getting passed on to Crystal by someone she told it to . . . well, then that would make Anne a perfect spy, wouldn’t it? She’d be Crystal’s accomplice without ever meeting her. But as long as she was alive, she’d be a link that could be traced back to you.”

  I stopped and waited. The only sound was the crackle of the fire. “Are you accusing me of attempting to kill my own ward?” Jagadev asked.

  “It doesn’t seem to make sense, does it?” I said. “After all, you pointed me towards Fountain Reach. It’s almost as if you wanted to get rid of everyone. Anne and Variam and me and Vitus and Crystal and Onyx . . . and a whole lot of random apprentices in England.”

  Jagadev extended his hand to pick up his glass of wine and drank from it, his eyes not leaving mine. “Then there were those gunmen who went after Anne,” I said “I always had the feeling they were killed to stop them from talking about their employer, but it was interesting how they were killed, wasn’t it? Those weren’t gunshot wounds, more like claws. Almost like a big cat.”

  Jagadev set the glass down. “Please come to the point.”

  “Sorry. Anyway, the problem was that I still couldn’t figure out any reasonable motive. So I did some historical research. I eventually found what I was looking for but I had to go back a long way. All the way to 1865.”

  I felt Jagadev go still. “For Americans, that was the Thirteenth Amendment,” I said. “For Indians, it was the British Raj. And for mages, it was the rakshasa wars. That was the year a group of British and Indian mages supported by an auxiliary force attacked the palace of a rakshasa named Lady Arati. Arati was killed, but the other rakshasa in the palace—her husband—escaped.” I paused. “Just out of interest I tried to trace the family trees of the mages who carried out that attack. It was very difficult. Over the decades nearly all of them seem to have suffered mysterious deaths or just disappeared. In fact as far as I can tell, there are only two direct descendants of those mages alive today. Their names are Anne Walker and Variam Singh. And the name of the rakshasa that escaped that attack was Lord Jagadev.”

  Jagadev didn’t move or speak. “Mages like the idea of immortality,” I said. “But I don’t think many of us understand what it would really mean. What would it be like to lose someone with whom you were going to live forever? What would you do about it?” I paused. “You could take revenge. It wouldn’t be hard, with all that time to do it in. But in the end, no matter what you did, all the men and women who did the deed would be dead of old age if nothing else. So what then? What price to avenge the death of an immortal? Maybe going after the children of the ones who killed her, following the line down and down until every one of their descendants was gone. Or maybe going after all mages, manipulating events to cause the deaths of as many apprentices as possible, reducing the number of mages in the world one by one.” I stopped and looked at Jagadev. “What do you think? When is it enough?”

  The room was very quiet, and Jagadev was still. The futures weren’t. Looking ahead I saw futures branching, the room erupting into a blur of violence. “Before you make any decisions,” I said, “I should point out that there are people who know where I am. They’ve got copies of what we’re discussing and they’re under orders not to open them. Yet.”

  Jagadev and I sat and looked at each other. Ahead of me the futures flickered between two branches. In one, we continued to sit and look at each other. In the other . . . I’d come prepared, but even so I wasn’t sure I would make it out of the room. I expect to be threatened in these sorts of meetings, but Jagadev wasn’t going to make threats. If he started something it would be spectacular.

  Gradually the futures of violence began to recede and finally winked out. Jagadev stayed silent for a full minute before speaking. “I hope you have some proof for your assertions.”

  “Anne and Variam’s family history isn’t difficult to check,” I said.

  “Nor does it prove anything.”

  “Not on its own,” I agreed. “Of course, if those two were to suffer mysterious deaths as well you’d suddenly become a very likely suspect.”

  “What do you want?” Jagadev said.

  “First, no more assassins in the night,” I said. “Second, I want you to cut your ties with Anne and Variam. They go free and clear with no more plots against them.”

  “And if I do not?”

  “Then I’ll take everything I’ve told you and everything else I’ve found and publish it to every mage in the country,” I said. “Right now there are a lot of mages looking for someone to blame for their missing apprentices. They’d love to have someone to vent their rage on.”

  “Again,” Jagadev said. “You have no proof.”

  “They won’t care,” I said. “Not for a nonhuman.”

  “And you think they will listen to you, Alex Verus?” Jagadev said softly. “To one who betrayed his master, turned against his tradition, and is responsible for the deaths of so many other mages himself? One who holds himself apart from the Light Council and the Dark associations, with mortal enemies amongst both, and whose closest allies are adepts and nonhumans? They will accept your story on nothing but your word? I think not.”

  “Jagadev, let me tell you something about diviners,” I said. “You’re right that other mages don’t like us very much. But do you know the real reason they don’t want us around? It’s not because they don’t trust us to find out the truth. It’s because they trust us all too well.”

  “Then let me tell you something about myself,” Jagadev said. His voice stayed soft, but something about it sent a chill down my spine. “You are very far indeed from the first mage to threaten me. Do you think I hold this domain at the whim of your Council? I have resources you cannot conceive of. If you bring war to me, then let me assure you that the apprentices whose lives you seem to value so highly will be the first casualties.”

  We sat staring at each other for a long moment, then I broke the deadlock, leaning back in my chair. “That is the problem, isn’t it? If you ever really decided to cut loose you could do a lot of damage. On the other hand, by publishing this information I could do you a l
ot of damage. And if it came to war you’d eventually lose. You know it and I know it. It wouldn’t matter how many you killed. It’d be wolves pulling down a tiger. They’d bring you down by sheer weight of numbers.” I met Jagadev’s eyes. “So I guess what it comes down to is this. Is taking your revenge on two human apprentices more important to you than your own immortal life?”

  “And what do you gain from this?” Jagadev asked.

  “Does it matter?” I said. “Anne and Variam are a liability to you now. I’m going to be watching them and so will others, and if anything happens to them while they’re supposed to be in your care we’ll know it was you. Even if it wasn’t.”

  I could have said more, but stopped. Some instinct told me that trying to persuade Jagadev further wasn’t going to help. Instead I sat and waited, watching the futures whirl ahead of me. The fire crackled in the quiet room, throwing flickering light over Jagadev’s orange-striped face and glinting off his opaque black eyes.

  “Anne and Variam are banished from my domain,” Jagadev said at last. “As are you. Should any of you set foot in this place again your lives are forfeit.”

  I nodded.

  “Go,” Jagadev said.

  I did. My muscles were tensed all the way to the door; if Jagadev was going to try anything, now would be the time. Every step I half-expected to hear a sudden rush of movement behind me.

  But Jagadev did nothing. I reached the door and took a last look back. The rakshasa was still watching me from the table, lit up in the firelight, the meal untasted before him. I studied him for a moment and then turned and left. The guards let me go.

  * * *

  It was another clear winter’s day. The temperature had been getting lower and lower until it was close to freezing, and according to the forecasts there might even be snow this weekend. But for today the skies were clear, and we were taking the opportunity to do some moving.

  “That the last one?” I said as I came back out into the street and saw the solitary box by the van.