Alex Verus 5: Hidden

by Benedict Jacka

  Sonder entered Anne’s flat and stopped as he saw me. “Why are you here?”

  I sighed. When you’re dealing with people who aren’t going to be happy to see you, being able to see the future isn’t as much fun as you’d think. “Is everyone going to say that?”

  Sonder turned to Caldera. “What’s he doing here?”

  Caldera finished her call and started typing into her phone instead, giving Sonder a shrug. “He says same reason as you.”

  Luna stuck her head in around the door. “Something wrong?”

  Sonder turned distractedly from her to Caldera. “Can’t you get rid of him?”

  “It’s your investigation,” Caldera told Sonder without looking up.

  I blinked. Sonder’s investigation?

  “I don’t think you should be here,” Sonder told me.

  “Not this again,” I said. “Look, I’ve just spent half an hour telling the story to Caldera. Are you here because of Anne or not?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Then you need to check the bedroom. I think something’s happened to her and whatever it is, it’s a lot more important than arguing with me. If you look back and there’s nothing to see, then great, you can interrogate me afterwards. But if something has happened, then we’re wasting time we probably don’t have.”

  “Sonder?” Luna said. “What’s the problem?”

  Sonder hesitated. It was obvious he didn’t want me around, but he was rational enough to realise that what I was saying made sense. And there was another factor, which had been behind my reason to send Luna after him; Sonder’s had a not-very-subtle crush on Luna for years, and he had to be aware that starting a fight with me in front of her wouldn’t end well.

  “All right,” Sonder said at last with poor grace. He started past me.

  “The bedroom’s—” I began as Sonder passed.

  “I know where it is.”

  I watched Sonder go, then turned to Caldera, who’d been observing the whole thing with undisguised amusement. “Why is it that whenever I actually try to help someone I never get any credit for it?”

  “Now you know what every day of my job’s like,” Caldera said. “Quit whining, you’ve got it easy.”

  “What’s the problem?” Luna asked.

  “Don’t ask. Did Sonder tell you why he was here?”

  “Yeah, he said there was an alarm triggered last night.” Luna looked worried. “Some kind of passive sensor. Where’s Anne?”

  “Sonder’ll know what happened soon enough.” I knew that if I walked into the bedroom right now I’d see him staring into space, lost in the trance of his timesight. I looked at Caldera. “How did you get involved?”

  “How do you think?”

  “Look, it’s not that I’m not grateful for having you around,” I said. “But given that Anne isn’t covered by the Concord, why are you here?”

  Caldera paused for a moment. “Why are you here?”

  “Because I’m worried about Anne,” I said. “Luna thinks something might have happened, and I think she’s right.” Not to mention that I was looking into the future to see what Sonder was going to tell us, and the signs were looking worse and worse.

  “That’s the only reason?” Caldera said. “No vigilantes chasing you this time? You doing this just to save your own neck?”

  “No.”

  Caldera studied me for a long moment and I looked back at her, holding her gaze. “My boss said the same thing you did,” she said at last. “That it wasn’t a Concord matter.”

  “And?”

  “And Sonder pointed out that the last person known to have attacked Miss Walker was someone who very definitely does come under our jurisdiction. A mage named Crystal who’s a wanted fugitive.”

  “Ah,” I said. Crystal is a mind magic user and an ex–Light mage who came to the Council’s attention a year and a half ago when she made use of her abilities and position to kidnap several Light apprentices, all of whom ended up murdered in a particularly horrific way. The Council might not care much about non-Light apprentices, but that is very definitely not the case when it comes to their own apprentices, and they’d gone after Crystal in a fury. She’d managed to evade capture so far, but she was still on the Council’s most-wanted list and even the off chance of finding her would be enough to get the Keeper orders very interested. “And if investigating that should happen to mean helping Anne . . . ?”

  “Well, that’s just the way it goes, isn’t it?”

  I gave Caldera a half smile, but it faded quickly. Sonder might have just made that argument to enlist Caldera’s help, but the more I thought about it, the more plausible it sounded. The last in the series of apprentices that Crystal had kidnapped back then had been Anne, and Crystal hadn’t picked her at random—she’d been researching a method of magical immortality, and she’d come to believe that by taking Anne’s life she could extend her own. We’d stopped Crystal before she could complete her ritual . . . but nothing was stopping her from trying again.

  Over the last hour my priorities had shifted. Step by step, the evidence for what had happened to Anne had gotten worse and worse, and my earlier worries about coming across as pushy seemed very childish now. If it really had been Crystal, we might already be too late.

  Luna looked bleak, and I knew she was thinking the same thing. Caldera seemed less anxious, but in an unpleasant sort of way this was probably something she was used to. The Order of the Star are the ones amongst the Keepers who deal with crimes involving Dark mages; kidnap and murder are old hat as far as they’re concerned. No one broke the silence, and I was left alone with my thoughts, waiting for Sonder to return.

  | | | | | | | | |

  When Sonder came back, the news was bad enough that he didn’t put up even a token protest about me listening in.

  Time magic falls into two branches: direct manipulation of the flow of time, such as accelerating or slowing the timestream, and perception of past events. Sonder’s competent at the first, but it’s timesight he’s really good at. By using his magic he can look back into the past of his current location, perceiving what happened at an earlier point in time. He can only see what his ordinary senses would, but it’s still an incredibly powerful tool for investigation. The more recent the event, the easier it is to view, which meant that for Sonder, seeing what had happened last night was very, very simple.

  Anne had been kidnapped. Her attackers had gated into the living room, walked into her bedroom as she slept, and hit her with a bolt of lightning before she’d even woken up. There had been two of them, both mages, and Sonder hadn’t been able to identify either. Caldera questioned Sonder meticulously for descriptions, but as they’d both worn ski masks there was little Sonder had been able to see. Both were male, one light-skinned and one dark, but beyond that all he could give were vague guesses as to height and weight. Anne had apparently been knocked out by the second lightning blast, and while one of them went back to recast the gateway the other had heaved her up with a view to dragging her through.

  But that was where things had gone wrong.

  I hadn’t known everything that Sonder was going to say—conversations are hard to predict, and while you can get a general impression if you concentrate it’s usually easier just to wait for them to tell it to you—but I’d known the news was bad. As he kept talking, though, something made me look up. Sonder was acting as though the news was bad, but there was more. “It was here,” Sonder said, pointing to a spot in the middle of the room. “That one had just opened a gate and he was about to carry Anne through.”

  “Then what happened?” Caldera asked.

  “There was a green flash and this guy just dropped. He was—”

  “Which guy?” Caldera said.

  “The one carrying Anne.”

  “I thought she wasn’t awake?”

  “That was
what I thought too,” Sonder said excitedly. “Anyway, he goes down just here and she falls on top of him, but the gate’s still up. I think he must have been using a focus with a safety buffer, because I don’t think he could have kept concentration with—”

  “Forget about the focus,” Caldera said. “What happened next?”

  “Anne gets up here and the other guy comes out of the bedroom.” Sonder pointed back towards the door. “I think the one on the ground was half stunned, but he hit Anne with another spell, death magic I think—it hurt her but it didn’t stop her. The other one aimed another lightning bolt, but she jumped back through the gateway . . .” Sonder shifted position, squinting as if trying to see something.

  “And then?” Caldera prompted.

  Sonder stared at her. “It closed.”

  “What closed? The gate?”

  Sonder nodded uncertainly. “The cutoff must have triggered.”

  “So she ended up on the other side of the gate, and the two of them were left back here?”

  “Where did the gate go?” Luna asked.

  “Hang on a second,” Sonder said, frowning. He shifted position, peering from side to side, while I made myself stay still. I wanted to tell him to hurry up, but I knew that would just make things worse.

  “The gate’s black,” Sonder said at last.

  “So what, somewhere dark?” Caldera said.

  “No, if it were just dark I’d be able to see reflected light from the room. I think it’s masked.”

  “No signature?”

  “No.”

  Caldera frowned, thinking. “So these two were left behind? What did they do?”

  According to Sonder they’d started arguing. It had taken them a couple of minutes to finish blaming each other and follow her, reopening the same gate and disappearing through. Caldera started cross-questioning Sonder, picking through their conversation for clues, but my thoughts were elsewhere.

  It was still bad news, but at least whoever Anne’s attackers were, they weren’t having it all their own way. They’d underestimated her, and she’d managed to turn the tables on them and get away though the gate . . . but where? If the gate had been masked, then Sonder wouldn’t be able to see where it led, no matter how long he tried. That meant the only clue we had was the people who’d created it. Where would two hostile mages want to take a kidnapped and unconscious life apprentice?

  I didn’t know, but I didn’t think it was going to be anywhere pleasant.

  Sonder and Caldera were winding down, and Sonder belatedly seemed to realise that I was there. “We need to find her,” he told me. The tone of his voice made it clear that the we wasn’t meant to be inclusive.

  “Us as well,” I said.

  Sonder hesitated. I knew he was about to object, but that future faded out as he reconsidered. He looked at Caldera.

  “I’m not crazy about it,” Caldera said. “But we’re not exactly overstaffed.”

  “All right,” Sonder said reluctantly. He braced himself and turned to me. “But I’m in charge, not you. You have to follow my orders.”

  I kept my face carefully straight. “Okay.”

  Sonder gave me a suspicious look, then Caldera told him she was going to start gathering the materials for a tracer spell and he got distracted. I arranged with Caldera to meet tomorrow and left with Luna before Sonder could change his mind.

  | | | | | | | | |

  “Who were they?” Luna said once we were out of the flat. “Why would they want to go after Anne?”

  “Until we get something more concrete, there’s no point guessing. Have you talked to Vari?”

  “Yeah, I just got a text. He hasn’t heard from her.”

  I grimaced, even though it had been what I was expecting. “She left her phone back there,” Luna said. “Maybe that’s why she hasn’t called?”

  “It’s been nearly a full day,” I said. “She should have been able to figure out a way to get in touch . . .” I shook my head. “I want you to find Vari. Tell him everything and make sure he’s there tomorrow. We’re going to need all the help we can get, and he knows Anne better than anyone.”

  Luna nodded. “What are you going to do?”

  “Dig up whatever I can find. We need to move fast.”

  | | | | | | | | |

  By the time I got back to my flat it was late. I spent an hour or two calling around and checking my contacts. None of them had seen Anne, which wasn’t surprising—as far as they were concerned, she was just another apprentice. I put the word out that I was in the market for news on Anne’s whereabouts and got a few promises to look into it, but I didn’t hold out much hope. If any of them found her, it’d be pure luck.

  The ugly thing was that what had just happened to Anne wasn’t all that unusual. Young people in the magical world go missing a lot, and the reasons are rarely good. If you have a master, you’re relatively safe—you have rights under the Concord, and (more importantly) there’s someone who’ll care if you go missing and who’s powerful enough to do something about it. But if you’re an adept or a novice mage on your own, then you’re in very real danger. The disappearance rate of unattached adepts and mages in the teenage bracket is worryingly high, and while some of those disappearances are benign (abandoning their magic, choosing to stay away from the magical community, signing up as apprentice to a secretive mage), most aren’t. It used to be that young and inexperienced mages were the favourite prey of nonhuman magical predators. Nowadays that particular spot on the food chain has been taken over by human magical predators, and being the same species doesn’t make them any less cruel.

  Luna had asked why a mage would go after Anne; there were a lot of answers to that question and none were good. Some mages like taking slaves, Dark mages in particular. The more able and powerful the slave, the more prestige they bring, and young and attractive ones are favoured. There are mages like Crystal who prefer human subjects for their experiments, and since those experiments generally involve magic, magic-using subjects are correspondingly valuable. Some mages target others for Harvesting, turning their victims into fuel sources. And then there are other reasons, running the gamut from the brutal and logical to the totally incomprehensible. In the end, all the reasons come down to the same thing: because they want to, and because they can.

  Enslavement, imprisonment, experiment, death . . . it wasn’t a happy picture. For all I knew Anne’s fate was being decided right now, and I couldn’t think of a single thing to do about it. Divination is great for finding people, but only if you know where to look; trying to find a specific person by walking down random futures has about the same chance of working as trying to get someone’s phone number by dialling random digits. Without something to go on, there wasn’t much I could do.

  The only plan I could think of that had a chance of working was to use Elsewhere, the half-real place somewhere between dreams and thoughts that I’ve used before. If you know someone well enough, you can touch their dreams through Elsewhere, talk to them across worlds. It’s a dangerous place and I’ve tried to avoid it in the past year—too many narrow escapes—but right now it was the best chance I had. I undressed, switched off the lights, and lay in bed staring up at the ceiling, searching through the futures to see if a visit to Elsewhere would find Anne.

  It didn’t work. I lay awake in bed for a long time, searching back and forth through the hours of the night, but every time I came up dry. Either Anne wasn’t asleep, or there was some other reason I couldn’t reach her. At last exhaustion caught up with me and I fell into restless dreams where I was lost in an endless maze of corridors, trying to reach someone whom I could hear calling but who never seemed to come any closer. There was somebody following me but I couldn’t see who it was, and every time I turned on them their footsteps would fade into silence and I was left alone.

  chapter 4

  It was early next morn
ing.

  Sonder’s flat is in St. John’s Wood, a London borough just northwest of the city centre. It’s famous for Lord’s Cricket Ground and for being one of the most expensive places to live in all of Britain, if not Europe. I used to come by often, but it had been nearly a year since my last visit.

  The inside of the flat was a mess; it didn’t look as though Sonder had tidied up since the last time I’d been here. Dust-covered computer equipment competed for shelf space with stacks of books; the books tended to win the argument, leaving cables and electronics to be pushed with old piles of paper into the corners. A new and well-cared-for PC sat on the desk, along with piles of notes and empty glasses. Caldera, Variam, Luna, and I were spaced around the room on whatever seating arrangements we could get, while Sonder was in front of the desk balancing a whiteboard on a stand. He’d brought a set of markers and was testing them on the board to see if they worked.

  “What’s with the board?” Variam said. He’d come down to London instantly upon Luna’s call and she’d caught him up on what had happened.

  “Maybe it’s Lupus,” Luna suggested with a grin.

  “Nah,” Variam said. “It’s never Lupus.”

  Sonder shot a slightly harassed look at them. “What?”

  “Now is not the time,” Caldera said, and Luna’s and Variam’s grins vanished. There was an uncomfortable silence for a moment, then Caldera gave Sonder a go-ahead nod.

  “Right,” Sonder said nervously, fiddling with a board marker. “Um. Okay. We need to find out where Anne is and what’s happened to her, and get her back.”

  “Then why are we sitting here?” Variam said.

  “We need to figure out what to do,” Sonder said. “We don’t know who’s behind this, so—”

  “Yes, we do. His name’s Sagash.”

  “That hasn’t been proved. Crystal has a more recent record of—”