And she did have the fourth group member’s name to give Lewis. Lindsay Perez.
She also ought to warn him that the fifth group member might be on heightened alert. She reached for her phone, and stopped. He’d asked her if he could use a burn phone. So, it probably wasn’t safe to phone or email him on a known account.
A small smile, that of a woman consciously playing with fire, curved her mouth. The wicked, impulsive part of her had wanted to see Lewis, again. Now, she had the perfect excuse. “I guess I’ll just have to deliver this message in person to my pretend boyfriend.”
Chapter 6
The Collegium boardroom had the hushed magnificence of money. Wood paneling on the walls and luxury chairs at the mahogany table were tangible expression of its wealth. The Forecasting Department was mostly responsible for that wealth as they invested the money other Collegium mages earned hiring out their skills and experience. For while the Collegium served the magical community by working to neutralize threats, other work, commissions such as holding back a river while a dam went up or changing weather patterns, were undertaken on a fee-basis for those who knew to ask.
Lewis questioned to what extent that ability to make money had skewed the Collegium’s operations. He’d told Gina that ninety percent of the work the Collegium undertook was in response to the magical community’s reports of risks. He hadn’t added that the Collegium assessed those risks, and by its own judgment, responded to some freely and others at a price.
About a third of the senior mages who headed the Collegium’s twelve departments were present when Lewis walked in. The meeting was due to start in three minutes. He had two hours, then they’d break for lunch. At which point the mages would scatter to consult with the other senior mages in their respective departments before returning at two o’clock to resume hostilities.
Hostilities was too strong a word.
He set the stack of reports on the table in front of his chair, aligning the pages with sharp, impatient nudges.
Bad temper still rode him. To return home and discover Shawn lurking to inform Kora, the commander of the guardians, of Lewis’s whereabouts and activities brought back the rage he’d buried. The dragon Morag had removed three significant spells from him. It was a point he intended to open with. It was intolerable.
The Chair of Demonology took the chair to his left. “Good morning, Lewis.”
“Good morning, Gilda.”
The last two senior mages wandered in, a weather mage and geomage, elderly men both. They set cups of coffee on the table.
Lewis looked over their heads and nodded to Haskell Mondo to close the doors. His PA and guardian bodyguard would also seal the doors and wait outside.
Kora sat midway down the table, two seats from the Chair of Demonology, and opposite the doors. Her expression was calm and watchful. How had she reacted to his suggestion, conveyed via Shawn, to disband the Collegium? Which of the spells on him had she cast?
He stood, and that silenced the conversation around the table. He didn’t waste a good morning on the gathering. “To bespell the president of the Collegium without his permission is tantamount to treason. On a personal level, I consider it a betrayal. Last night, I had three spells removed from me. One to track me, one to lock my words in my throat, and one to poison those around me.”
“Hellfire and toad’s skin,” Gilda, the Chair of Demonology, swore.
He hadn’t thought any of the spells her style. She was as new in her role as he was, taking over after her predecessor’s death, the man having repulsively aligned himself with the demon and dying for that wrong a month ago. Gilda had her own concerns without worrying about Lewis’s actions as president of the Collegium. She had to restore the Demonology Department’s reputation. It would be a long, fraught process.
The other mages responded with disbelief, anger and open doubt.
Kora regarded him straightly. “Who did you have identify and remove the spells?”
The tracking spell had been hers. He knew it without proof.
Unexpectedly, Zhou Tan, the Chair of Forecasting, turned on her. Apparently, he shared Lewis’s suspicions. “You! This is intolerable. The president might have no magic, but he has rights as a person. It is to protect such rights among the mundanes that we serve the Collegium. To bespell him without his consent is unethical. You are unfit to command the guardians.”
Kora’s head jerked at the verbal blow. Her eyes narrowed. “Be careful, Zhou. Many are already questioning why your mages did not see the demon’s taint within the Collegium. All those patterns you study, all the data you collect, all your secret ways and—”
“Are you responsible for the other two spells, Kora?” Lewis intervened.
She stared at him, defiant and guilty of her sins. “No. I admit to the tracking spell.” She scowled at Zhou. “But if I had asked your permission, Lewis, you’d never have agreed.”
“That makes what you did worse,” Zhou said. “You knowingly acted against his wishes.”
“Who cast the other spells?” Gilda stayed focused.
Lewis didn’t bother trying to read the body language around the table. Guilt, shock and suspicion could blur into one another. Everyone looked uncomfortable. Dismayed.
“Do you know who cast the spells?” Gilda pressed.
He’d expected the question. “The spells were cast on me. As such, I consider them a personal attack and will deal with them personally.” He might have burned out his magic, but no one ridiculed his intention.
In fact, Kora’s gaze dropped. She stared at the unmarked notepad in front of her. She was a tall woman, leanly muscled, in her early forties. Her hair was short and brown, her eyes light brown, her lips thin, not softened even by the pink lipstick she’d swiped over them.
He’d known her for years. They’d never been friends, but he’d respected her work ethic, and when he’d been a guardian trainee, he’d respected her as a new guardian, someone to emulate.
Times changed. Did people?
He brought the meeting to order. “We have one agenda item, today. We are to decide the new structure of the Collegium. However, I realized last night that there is an option we had not put on the table, and I’m putting it there, now. We can disband the Collegium.”
Stunned silence greeted the suggestion before Zhou ventured carefully. “Is this because you don’t trust us?”
Zhou was a forecaster and a very clever strategist. He’d have always known that disbanding the Collegium was an option. Zhou prided himself on considering all contingencies, even the most unlikely.
“No.” Lewis sat down. “If my inability to trust you all was a problem, I’d resign as president. I wanted this final option on the table so that we make our restructuring decisions in a clear light. Either we serve the magical community and the mundanes, or we disband.”
Gilda’s voice pierced the hubbub of everyone telling Lewis he was overreacting. “Be quiet,” she snapped. She glared around at her fellow department heads. “This is not a small point Lewis is making. The Collegium has fallen into the trap of most large organizations. We began for the purpose of serving others, but now we act to serve ourselves.”
“Lies.” The weather mage and geomage denounced her together.
“Not lies.” Gilda glared at her colleagues from under drooping eyelids, her gray hair messy from a hand pushed agitatedly through it. “My department is proof of it. Do not wish for more proof.” Her voice shook before she steadied it. “Demonologists were among the first to join the Collegium. We joined knowing that we need oversight and a formal structure to protect against demon summoning. With the world so small and interconnected, there is little limit placed on what a demon unleashed can achieve. Geography doesn’t contain them anymore. We need an international organization to detect and banish them.”
She leaned forward, hands flat on the table. “You know what Angus did.” Her dead predecessor. “He used his power here in the Collegium to collect demons instead of banishing them. That is how s
erving others was perverted into serving himself. I speak for all the demonologists in the Collegium. We want to serve. We will abide by a restructure even if it deprives of us of resources and influence. That Angus abused his position is reason enough for us to be punished.”
“The restructure is not about punishment,” Lewis said.
Around the table, a couple of the mages shifted. For them, it was.
Lewis noted the slight movements of disagreement from the weather mage and the healer, William Mimea. When he’d been commander of the guardians, and given the guardians’ propensity for injury, Lewis had had frequent dealings with the man. William was a gifted healer, but he was also puritanical. For him there was only right or wrong, no shades of interpretation or ambiguity.
Silver light imposed itself over Lewis’s physical sight. His breathing stopped an instant in shock even as he guessed the trigger. He suspected William of responsibility for the poison spell that had enclosed him, and his emotions had triggered the silver sight. William had the ruthless assurance of a first class surgeon. If poisoning others kept the Collegium’s president safe and the Collegium stable, William would do it.
The silver light was so different to the golden threads of magic Lewis had previously seen. It deconstructed the people around the table, shining along their energy meridians and in odd patterns across the furniture and out through the walls. Lewis blinked as the walls vanished and the lines of silver went on.
A second blink and he banished the silver light. Clarity of sight was disconcerting. But his self-discipline held. No one appeared to have noticed his moment’s distraction. He ensured that continued by directing their attention firmly to the topic at hand, one guaranteed to absorb all their energies. “Let’s consider Option A for the restructure.”
Everyone opened the folders in front of them.
Five and a half hours later there was grudging acceptance of Option B in the restructure. As much as everyone hated the idea of adding a layer of management, there was no way around it. There’d be three new positions between the operational management of each department and the president.
The three departments that went out in the world responding to crises would report to the new Rapid Response Director; that meant the guardians, the healers and the demonologists. It would be challenging to lead. The natural science related departments would report to the Gaia Director; that covered the weather mages, geomages, marine, botanical and animal mages. The final grouping were the more cerebral mages—the forecasters, alchemists (not that they studied alchemy, rather they studied and tried to codify the science and history of magic), musicologists and enchanters (literally those who enchanted objects)—who reported to the Knowledge Director.
Even as they exited the boardroom, the department heads were obviously calculating the shifts and changes in the power structure and how they could best exploit them. Some might put their hands up for the new positions, but others would want to stay closer to the work of their departments.
Haskell, his PA and guardian bodyguard, began tidying the boardroom.
In other circumstances, this was the stage, with the weight of both achievement and anticlimax, when as president he’d talk to his assistant. She’d be someone to discuss the ebb and flow of the meeting with, what it revealed, and what the likely consequences were.
But Haskell couldn’t be confided in.
Lewis respected the chain of command. Anything he said to Haskell, she’d have to report to Kora. He could order her silence, but that produced its own tensions.
As always he opted for keeping his own counsel and ignored the couple of curious glances Haskell slid his way. He wasn’t lingering in the boardroom on a whim.
William Mimea stalked back in. Tall and black with graying hair, he was a skeleton with skin on. His purpose, his need to heal the world, burned in him. “We need to talk.”
Lewis nodded, once. “Your office.”
A momentary flicker of surprise crossed William’s face.
On the other side of the table, Haskell’s hands froze in their swift collection of abandoned papers and used cups. Wards and spells he’d approved kept Lewis safe in the presidential office, and the guardians watched outside. But now, he intended to leave his office.
He and William walked past Gilda as she spoke with Zhou. Alliances across the boundaries of the new structure would help glue the Collegium back together. But what would a demonologist and a forecaster have in common?
Mistrust of Kora. It was evident in their body language; their shoulders turned to her, excluding her but keeping her under observation.
The commander of the guardians stood by a window, obviously waiting for Lewis.
“My office, thirty minutes,” he said to her.
She nodded and walked back to the boardroom. “Haskell.”
Damn. Kora was too close to his bodyguards. It wasn’t only him who disliked the reminder. Zhou positively glared after her.
“A difficult situation,” William said as they took the stairs down six flights to the Healers’ Department.
Clustered in William’s outer office were seven of the senior healers, chatting with his PA, a middle-aged woman who looked as if they were trying her patience. Her face relaxed at the sight of William.
Not so the seven mages. They tensed up to see William accompanied by Lewis.
William ignored them all. He closed the door behind Lewis and undoubtedly warded it for privacy.
His office resembled an old-fashioned apothecary’s shop. Cupboards with multiple small drawers lined the walls, each drawer with a neatly inscribed card slipped into a brass label holder. Occasional gaps between drawers allowed for open shelving on which stood a diverse array of objects, including ostrich feathers in an ugly stoneware vase, massive conch seashells, a set of brass scales, a meteorite, and books. Many books.
Neither man sat.
“I set the protection spell on you.” William stood by his desk. Protection, he said. Not poison. “I acted alone.”
Lewis could respect William’s defense of his fellow healers. He couldn’t accept the spell. “Why?”
“For the Collegium. The death of its president, especially at this stage, would destabilize the Collegium.”
“Healers would be needed and respected without the Collegium.”
William moved abruptly around his desk and opened a drawer. He produced three bullets and laid them on the desk. “These were dug out of me when I was twelve. My mother, father and two sisters died. Violence. A home invasion on the outskirts of Cape Town. No institution, no force for good, can be allowed to be diminished. Evil is real and we have to fight it.”
“You’re a healer, yet you used poison as your spell.”
“It is where my strength is,” he said simply. His gaze remained on the bullets. One was misshapen. Probably from the impact of striking bone. “Gilda is a demonologist. She banishes demons which is the flipside of summoning them. The same thing. The difference between us and those who do evil is not our power, but how we choose to use it. For good or death.”
“Your spell would have killed.”
“It would have killed people who intended to kill you.” William scooped up the bullets and dropped them into the drawer.
“You bespelled me without my consent.”
“That I regret. It is as Kora said. I believed I wouldn’t receive your permission to protect you, so I acted unethically.”
“You acted from fear,” Lewis said deliberately.
William straightened, jerked out of his somber mood. “What?”
“Fear diminishes and tarnishes everything when you let it rule you. You were afraid to lose the Collegium, and so, you allowed yourself to believe that I couldn’t protect myself. You diminished me, betrayed me.”
“You have no magic.” William’s voice was raw.
“What is magic?” The silver light flared in Lewis’s vision. It danced over the office, linking and recoiling, rebounding between the herbal stashes in W
illiam’s apothecary cupboards. It broke through the walls; turned them translucent to his sight, so that silver pulsed and pounded out across the city.
Lewis wrenched in his attention. The walls of the Collegium and the solid three dimensional physicality of human reality returned. Only a single layer of silver remained.
“My magic is gone,” he said. “But I remain me. The guardians recognized it when they elected for me to continue as their commander last year. A month ago I accepted the role of president of the Collegium because I knew that even without magic I could fulfill it. Many of the senior mages elected me because they believe the role thankless. After the restructure and the fallout, someone will suggest I be replaced. They’re allowing me to bear the weight they can’t before they throw me out.”
“And you accept that?” William sunk into his chair, stunned.
“I serve the Collegium.” Lewis sunk his intent into that one word. He served the vulnerable.
The single layer of silver light that remained in his vision parted and realigned itself, the interlocking honeycomb pattern inviting and distracting him. Mentally, with the part of him that had cast spells, he reached out and touched it.
His mental touch gently vibrated the pattern where it hung like a cobweb over a corner of the office by the window.
The sounds of the ocean struck. The boom of the waves and the cry of a seagull.
William turned swiftly toward the window.
There was nothing there.
William looked at Lewis, suspicion narrowing his gaze. His thoughts were practically flashing in neon: had Lewis somehow regained his magic? Could he defend himself magically?
Can I? Lewis simply held William’s gaze. I have to speak with Morag. The dragon could explain what he’d just done. “If you bespell me again, I will consider it an attack on me as president and respond accordingly. Your membership of the Collegium will be revoked.”
A long beat of silence. William looked at the window and back to Lewis. “In the meeting you said you took the bespelling as a personal challenge. As a person, not as president, what do you intend to do?”
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