Veiled

by Benedict Jacka

  I drew back, slightly shocked. Caldera held my gaze for a few seconds more, then leant back again.

  The silence stretched out. I knew it was supposed to be my place to say something, to keep things moving, but I felt jarred, out of place. “You know where the War Rooms are, right?” Caldera said once the pause had gotten long enough to become awkward.

  “Yeah.”

  “You’ll probably be with Haken.”

  “Okay.”

  “You got a number for him?”

  “Not yet.”

  “I’ll get you one.”

  Caldera took out her phone. I sat uncomfortably as she typed. From outside, I could hear the cars and the motorbikes on the main road, the sounds of their engines echoing through the brick and glass.

  | | | | | | | | |

  We talked a little longer, but it felt forced and our rapport was gone. When I said that I needed to go, Caldera didn’t argue. I felt my shoulders relax slightly as I came out onto the Hackney street.

  As I walked, I puzzled over what had just gone wrong. It wasn’t the first fight I’d had with Caldera but it bothered me in a way the others hadn’t. Mostly it was the unexpectedness. All the previous times that Caldera had been pissed off at me, it had been a direct consequence of something I’d done, and usually something I’d known full well she wouldn’t be happy about. This was the first time we’d had a fight and I didn’t know why.

  It occurred to me that Caldera and I might have very different assumptions about loyalty. Amongst Dark mages, betrayal is an occupational hazard, something that comes with the lifestyle. It’s like having one of your co-workers change jobs—you know it’s going to happen sooner or later. Apprentices talking to each other about their masters’ plans, journeymen discussing whether the leader of their cabal is going to sell them out once the job is over . . . That kind of thing isn’t a betrayal of trust, it’s just good sense. It’s not a big deal.

  Maybe for Keepers, it was a big deal. They had an actual organisation, an ethos. Maybe there was a code, a way you were and weren’t allowed to talk about it. Except . . . that hadn’t been how Landis had reacted. I’d been pretty sure he’d understood what I’d been getting at last night, and he’d agreed with me, or at least hadn’t told me to keep quiet.

  So maybe it wasn’t the Keepers. Maybe it was just Caldera. Now that I thought about it, I’d never really thought about her as a person. To me she’d always been a representative of her organisation, Keeper Number One. I wondered what her membership in the Order of the Star really meant to her, and what she thought of when she saw her other Keepers. Did she fit in? Or in her own way, was she an outsider too?

  I shook my head. Whatever the reason, I needed to know more, and I wasn’t going to get it from Caldera. I took out my gate stone and started looking for somewhere secluded.

  | | | | | | | | |

  Once I was back in my flat, I dug out my synchronous focus, programmed in a code, then channelled through it and waited. After only half a minute, it chimed and lit up. A figure appeared at the centre of the disc, carved from blue light.

  “Hey, Talisid,” I said.

  “Verus,” Talisid said. “I wondered when you’d call.”

  “Isn’t acting all-knowing supposed to be the diviner’s job?”

  “You’re not as unpredictable as you think.” I heard Talisid sigh slightly. “Go on, then. Ask your question.”

  “Given your contacts, I’m pretty sure you already know what Caldera and I have been doing,” I said. “I just asked her about how our case connects to White Rose. She didn’t react well. Can you fill me in?”

  “You don’t ask much, do you?”

  “It’s just information,” I said.

  Most exchanges in magical society come down to trading favours. Cash is handy, and so are magic items, but all too often they just don’t go far enough. Help from another mage, though . . . that’s always useful. Over the past year, I’d done a lot of jobs for Talisid. They’d been for us as much as for him, but we’d still been helping him, and we hadn’t asked for much in return. I didn’t say You owe me, but Talisid understood exactly what I meant.

  “All right,” Talisid said. “How much did Caldera tell you about White Rose?”

  “That they’re an organisation that provides dark and highly illegal sexual services to mages, and they have a whole load of blackmail material on the Council.”

  “Strictly true, but a little misleading,” Talisid said. “If White Rose directly blackmailed its clients, they’d have been destroyed long ago. They’re more careful than that. They keep their client list absolutely confidential, and more importantly, that list is known to be confidential. However, they also make it known that should their organisation be seriously harmed, then that list would be released.”

  “So it’s what—mutually assured destruction?”

  “Yes. The number of Council mages who use White Rose’s . . . services . . . is relatively small. But still large enough to cause a great deal of trouble. And the Council, as you may have noticed, dislikes trouble.”

  “So they just let them get away with it.”

  “Yes. In the same way that you, as an ex–Dark mage, support the torture, murder, and abuse that Dark mages perpetuate.”

  “. . . What?”

  “Don’t make the mistake of thinking that the Council is monolithic.” There was a slight edge to Talisid’s voice. “The Guardians and the Keepers would love nothing more than to see White Rose eradicated. But Marannis, the Dark mage who runs White Rose, has no political ambitions. If he were using White Rose to expand his power base, he would be a strategic threat. But instead it seems he is quite content to preserve the status quo, which brings him into de facto alliance with the Centrists and Isolationists. As a result, White Rose has existed long enough for it to become . . . part of the landscape. A benign cancer. We have limited political capital, and making a concerted push to destroy White Rose would cause significant internal conflict in the Council. So for the past years our policy has been one of containment. Well, Vihaela’s arrival on the scene could have changed that given time, but . . .”

  I nodded, filing away the references to “our” and “we” to my mental dossier on Talisid and his position, and making a note to find out who Vihaela was. “Okay.”

  “So I hope you understand exactly how large a can of worms you opened when you and Caldera reported White Rose’s name to the Keepers last night. You see, for all the crimes Marannis has committed in his time leading White Rose, the one thing he has been very careful to do is never break the Concord. Now all of a sudden, the Keepers have evidence linking White Rose not only with Rayfield’s disappearance—or murder, as the case may be—but an attack on you and Caldera.”

  I still wasn’t sure that it was actually White Rose that had been behind that attack, but I got the point. “How does the Rayfield case fit in?”

  “Rayfield is—or was—apprentice to Nirvathis, who is attempting to secure a seat on the Junior Council. I assume you know this?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What you may not know is that Nirvathis is an empty suit,” Talisid said. “He was chosen by certain Light faction members to be a puppet. And the main controller of that puppet is your old acquaintance, Levistus.”

  “Shit.”

  “Yes. Levistus hopes to use this to secure himself a place on the Senior Council this coming year.”

  “Goddamn it,” I said. “So that brings the whole thing with Morden in, too.”

  “Actually, at a conservative estimate, I would guess that by now around fifty percent of the active political population of the Light Council is involved in this affair of yours at one remove or another.”

  “And I’m in the middle of it.”

  “Yes.” Talisid paused. “Verus . . . I haven’t said anything about your choice to work more closely with the
Keepers. I understand that in some ways it was a logical decision. However, given the direction things are taking, it might be advisable to reconsider.”

  “Right. Wouldn’t want your prospective mole with Richard to associate himself too visibly with the other side, would we?”

  “I understand that—”

  “I’m not going back to Richard.” My voice was flat. “Not as a double agent, not as a triple agent, not for you, and not for anyone else either. It’s not going to happen. Ever. Understand that.”

  “Becoming involved in a conflict between Council factions will not help that goal in any way.”

  “I’ll take that under advisement.” I looked at the clock: it was past eleven. I needed to get moving. “I have to go.”

  Talisid paused again, and futures of him trying to persuade me further flickered briefly before vanishing. “All right. Good luck.”

  I cut the connection and prepared quickly for my trip, checking my phone as I did. There was a message from Luna: she’d arranged an appointment with Chalice for this afternoon. It was an e-mail rather than a voice mail, which I suspected she’d done so that it would be harder for me to tell her not to do it. I was still uneasy about sending her off to meet Chalice, but she had Anne, and I had too many other things on my plate already. I sent her a short message and put it out of my mind. Time to visit the War Rooms.

  chapter 9

  Beneath the Treasury in Westminster is an underground complex called the Churchill War Rooms. It’s a museum, though not a well-known one; the tourists that crowd London in the holiday seasons usually want to see places like the British Museum and the National Gallery, and the Churchill War Rooms get less than a tenth of the visitors of either of those. It was built on the eve of the Second World War, a concrete labyrinth designed to withstand bombing raids, and during those long dark years it was the place from where Churchill and his cabinet directed the wartime efforts of Britain.

  But the Churchill War Rooms isn’t the only tunnel network beneath this city. People have been living in London for a very long time, and while there have been people, there have been mages. It was inevitable that the Council would set up their headquarters there. The original centre for the Council was a sprawling complex of spires and towers situated near the old St. Paul’s Cathedral in the City. It was burnt to ash in the 1666 Great Fire of London, along with the old cathedral, the Royal Exchange, and pretty much everything else within the City limits. (Depending on who you believe, the destruction of Council headquarters might have been the reason for the Great Fire, and the “started in a bakery” explanation a cover-up, but that’s another story.)

  With their old base destroyed, the Council needed a new one, and an argument broke out as to where to go. The Isolationists wanted a place out in the countryside where they’d have as little interaction with normal humans as possible. The more moderate members wanted to pick a smaller city like Gloucester or Oxford. But the Directors wanted their power centre here, in the heart of the City, and as London was being rebuilt they took the opportunity to lay the foundations for what would become the new centre of magical government in Britain for the next three hundred and fifty years.

  One of the reasons the Directors won the argument was that they’d noticed which way the wind was blowing. Traditionally mages had lived in towers, way up above the ground, to the point where it had become a status symbol. Unfortunately for the status-conscious mages of that time period, spells and technology had been evolving at a good clip, and the seventeenth century’s brisk trade in Light-Dark warfare provided the more innovative mages on both sides with plenty of opportunity to give the new weapons a test-drive. Experimental data proved that that towers and artillery didn’t mix. After several well-publicised incidents of traditionally defended towers being brought down by cannon fire, even the slower-witted members of the Light Council figured out that while towers might work for personal residences, they probably weren’t the best choice for a military centre of government.

  Building a centre of government below ground, on the other hand, was a different story. Compared to a traditional tower or castle, an underground complex would be harder to attack, easier to defend, and much more likely to go unnoticed by any normal people living on the surface. So in the aftermath of the Great Fire, the first tunnels were burrowed into the area beneath what’s now modern Westminster. With earth and matter mages to do the bulk of the work, the tunnels expanded fast, and within a generation they’d become a sprawling warren. The Summer War did a good job of proving the security of the tunnel network, and the Council’s stayed there ever since. Somewhere during one of the various Dark-Light skirmishes the tunnels started getting called the War Rooms, and the name stuck.

  Or so the story goes . . . but I might have got it wrong. Light mages learn stories like this as they grow up, picking up the culture and the traditions, but I spent my childhood in the normal world and my apprenticeship surrounded by Dark mages, and a good part of my life since then has revolved around my shop. I’ve never really been inside the Light mage circles. For that matter, this was the first time I’d ever actually been to the War Rooms.

  I suppose I should look on the bright side. I might be going to an indictment, but at least it wasn’t mine. Yet.

  | | | | | | | | |

  Getting through security took longer than I expected. The security personnel hired by the Council are famous for their complete lack of any kind of a sense of humour, and I was kept answering questions until Haken finally showed up. “There you are,” Haken said, then addressed the man who’d been interviewing me. “He’s with me.”

  The security man checked Haken’s signet, then handed my card back without a smile. “Took you long enough,” Haken said as he led me into the tunnels.

  “Sorry. First time.”

  “Fair enough. Just don’t go wandering off, okay?”

  We turned into a wider corridor, smaller passages branching off. To my surprise, the tunnels actually felt a lot more spacious than Keeper headquarters. The tunnel ceiling was high, a good twenty feet or so, and the walls were made out of some strange kind of stone, light grey with tiny white flecks that gleamed in the light. The tunnels were electric-lit, bright spherical lamps set at regular intervals along the walls, and the corridor was filled with people, men and women hurrying back and forth. There was a bustling, serious feel to the movement, brisk and impersonal.

  The corridor opened up into a huge hallway with an arched roof. Craning my neck and looking upwards, I saw that the ceiling was divided by gold buttresses, each supporting chandeliers that glowed with white light. Massive cylindrical pillars ran from the buttresses down to the floor. The floor itself was grey-white stone, inlaid with patterns that looked like ancient coats of arms, and made of some hard material that echoed with our footsteps. And there were a lot of footsteps; I could see at least thirty people, some crossing the wide-open space at the centre and others talking in the shadows of the pillars. Circular alcoves were situated along the walls, and corridors led off deeper into the War Rooms. There were wooden desks at the far end, and beyond them I saw three sets of guarded doors.

  “Come on, Verus,” Haken said. I’d slowed down to stare. “You look like a tourist.”

  I caught Haken up. “Okay, I have to admit, this is impressive.”

  “This is the Belfry,” Haken said. As we crossed the floor, he pointed out the doors beyond the desks. “Far doors lead to the Star Chamber and the Conclave. The ones on the right go to the Courts of Justice. If you’re not Inner Circle, you aren’t allowed in without a pass, so go to the clerk on the right.”

  We reached the far side and Haken spoke briefly with the woman behind one of the desks, then returned. “They’ve already started.”

  “What’s started?” I asked as Haken headed towards one of the alcoves. “The indictment?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So . . . how does this whole
indictment thing work again?”

  The alcoves were arched and lined in gold; a circular table sat in the middle of a curved bench. Haken dropped into the seat and leant back. “The indictment’s a formal statement by the Council that someone’s committed a crime. No indictment, no arrest.”

  I sat opposite. “I thought Keepers could make arrests on their own.”

  “Yeah, but it’s not our authority—it’s delegated. We can do small stuff on our own account, but anything important has to be authorised by a Council jury.” Haken nodded towards the doors. “Rain—he’s the Keeper in charge of the case—he’s making an argument to a panel of judges. They say yes, we go out and arrest whoever’s name’s on the paper. They say no, we go back to the office and find something else to do.”

  I looked across at the closed doors. There was something vaguely disturbing about the idea that someone—maybe a lot of someones—was having their life decided by others right now. What would happen if an indictment like that was brought against me? “Are we supposed to be there?”

  “We’re on the witness list,” Haken said. “They might call us up to give evidence, so we have to make ourselves available as long as the case is still going.” He shrugged and pulled out a folder and a pen. “You might want to get comfortable.”

  I looked back at him, raised my eyebrows, then took a look around the Belfry. The place was still busy; it didn’t seem as though nothing was happening. I settled down to wait.

  | | | | | | | | |

  It was three hours later.

  “Okay, this is ridiculous,” I said. “How long are they going to take?”

  Haken shrugged. He had his folder open on the table and was reading through a thick report, making notes in the margins. “You’re the diviner.”

  Watching the people walking back and forth over the floor of the Belfry had been interesting, for a while. After the first hour, I’d started checking everybody walking in our direction, looking to see if they were approaching us. I’d spent the second and part of the third hour writing e-mails on my phone. Now we were getting into the fourth hour and I still hadn’t spotted any future in which we’d be called for. “You know, I used to have all kinds of ideas about what working for the Council would be like. Never occurred to me that it mostly came down to sitting around waiting.”