I scowled. I knew RAD by reputation. They were largely unknown to the general public and that was the way they preferred it, but they were well known in the government and security sphere. They provided everything from private security guards to entire commando forces that had the best training the West could provide, which they hired out to all kinds of governments and intelligence agencies. They claimed to be completely independent, but I knew that they had done work for the CIA on occasion…and the Guardians as well. There were times when even we needed a completely deniable force.
“I’m still doing a breakdown,” Dolly said, when I remained silent. “It’s starting to look, however, as if he’s been taking money out, converting it into cash…and then we lose track of it. We cannot trace dollar bills so effectively, any more than we can trace Euros, or Yen, or anything else, so the money could have gone anywhere.”
To Maxwell, I thought. The mystery woman had paid him very handsomely indeed. Millions, perhaps even as much as a billion, of dollars had changed hands…and Faye could have funded it with ease. Maxwell had obtained, in turn, enough illegal items to perform any number of rituals, including some that required a living sacrifice. God alone knew what Faye intended to do with the power, but somehow I doubted that it would be anything good. It might even lead to the disaster that Drak Bibliophile had warned me about, in his enigmatic way…
But how could I prove it? How could I convince Wilkinson to assemble the Guardians and allow me to lead them in a raid on Faye’s house? The answer was bitter, but simple; I couldn’t. Faye had too many friends in Washington. If they heard even a hint of a suggestion that we were going to raid him, they would tip him off at once. He would either carry out the ritual or flee…and we would be unable to stop him. I needed to do something else.
“Thank you,” I said, finally. “I’ll call the Circle later.”
“You heard all that,” I said, to Aylia. “Do you know what your father has in mind?”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. She looked terrified, as if she were in way over her head. I had the same feeling, but I couldn’t allow myself to flinch. “What can he want to do that is so important that a dragon comes to warn you to prevent it?”
“I wish I knew,” I said. “What about the second question? Why can’t the dragons do anything themselves about it?”
Aylia nodded in understanding. The dragons could have intervened quickly and destroyed Faye and his entire family. The mysterious entity who’d been dogging our path wouldn’t have fazed them. Instead, they’d settled for mysterious and cryptic pronouncements…and saving our lives. It had to be important to them, but why weren’t they being more communicative themselves? If they told us what was going on, I was sure I could convince Wilkinson to authorise a quick raid to put an end to it all. If, of course, we could break through the wards.
“All right,” I said. “We’re going to have to go to your house and put an end to this. Are you willing to come with me?”
“Cecelia is still alive,” Aylia said. I hoped that her faith wasn't misplaced. Apart from Brother Andrew, the only proof we had that Cecelia was still alive was that nothing apocalyptic had occurred. I had a feeling that when she was sacrificed, if that was what her father had in mind, we’d all know about it. “I’ll go into Hell itself to rescue her.”
“Very good,” I said. I stood up. “Go change into something more…comfortable for working in the dark. I’ll meet you back down here when you’re ready.”
I spent the next ten minutes writing out a complete account of everything we’d seen and done since my first visit to the dragons, followed by an explanation of my actions. If we were trapped, or killed, another Guardian would have to go in our place, or perhaps our deaths would push Wilkinson to take direct action. I toyed with the idea of calling him and pleading directly for action, but I knew it would fail. He couldn’t act quickly unless there was a very clear and present danger.
“Varsha,” I called, finally. She came in at once, still glowing with excitement. The dragon would give her something to brag about for years. “I want you to take this envelope. If we don’t come back in a day, take it to Washington and put it directly into Director Wilkinson’s hands, understand?”
“Yes,” she said, slowly. “Glass…is it that bad?”
“Yes,” I said, equally firmly. “If we don’t come back, we may be dead, or trapped.”
I had made a will, of course, leaving Varsha most of what I owned. The remainder I had packaged out to various different friends and allies. If I didn’t come back, I hoped they would remember me, but I had the feeling that if I failed, all hell was going to be let loose.
“I understand,” Varsha said. “I won’t let you down.”
I smiled as Aylia came down the stairs, wearing a simple pair of black jeans and a black jumper. She had tied her long hair into a simple bun and pinned it in place with a charmed pin. The look suited her, I decided, although perhaps a little too suspicious. A policeman who looked at her might wonder if she had burglary in mind.
“I’m ready,” she said. “Where are we going?”
“Your house,” I said. “We’re going to break in and save your sister.”
Chapter Thirty
Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger.
-The Fellowship of the Ring
It was growing dark again when we reached the Faye house. I had decided not to teleport close, for fear of detection, and so we had taken my car instead. It had been a long drive, but we had made good use of the time. Aylia had filled me in on everything she knew about the house’s defences, and the wards her father’s friends and allies had added to the pile. I was glad I hadn’t known half of it before deciding that searching Vincent Faye’s house was the only way to go; it had been a thoroughly depressing conversation. The one consolation I had was that it would take even Faye time to dismantle the wards and react to any attack on his house. He hadn’t built the entire system himself.
Or, on the other hand, he could seal himself in and dare us to take him out, I thought. If Aylia was correct, it would take the Guardians weeks to break down the wards and force access to the house, during which Faye could get on with his actual plan in peace and privacy. He had an entire wing of servants in his home; he had enough food and drink to keep himself healthy for years, stored in great vaults under the house. If I hadn’t known better – and I didn’t – I would have thought that he was preparing for a siege.
“They normally take the servants into the house at nightfall and they go to bed,” Aylia said, grimly. The Faye Household sounded like something out of the Dark Ages, but no medieval King or Prince could have hoped to command such enforced loyalty. The werewolves weren’t the only ones wearing collars, she’d warned, and no matter how the servants felt about it they would be compelled to defend the family if there was an attack. I was surprised that they had agreed to it, but the pay was apparently out of this world. A maid could retire for life after two or three years. “Should we wait…?”
“Perhaps not,” I said. We had mingled, under a concealing glamour, with the reporters bunched outside the gates, looking for possible scoops. It was another mystery. Why had Faye even bothered to report his own daughter’s absence if he had kidnapped her himself? “We don’t want your father to see us when the reporters are gone.”
Aylia nodded. The reporters were already drifting away as the darkness continued to fall. The magic in the Faye House would have attracted all kinds of creatures over the years, and most of them were unfriendly to humans. Out in the open, the reporters would be tracked down and killed before they could get somewhere safe…and they knew better than to think that Faye would give them sanctuary. He would be more likely to cheer the monsters on, but that wasn’t the only reason. Only a fool would open their doors between sunset and sunrise these days. God alone knew what could get in.
“This way,” I said, leading her around the rear of the walls. I had seen it as a pos
sible access point when I had first studied the mansion; a low wall, concealed from the house by a bunch of trees. We’d have to move quickly, but it could be done. Unlike Maxwell’s house, there were too few trees – I hoped – for a supernatural creature to have turned into a nest – but I kept the Faerie weapon at the ready, just in case. The thought of striking back at one of the night creatures was almost intoxicating, even though it would definitely reveal our position to Faye’s guards. “Come on.”
“I used to scramble over here when I wanted to go out and mother wouldn’t let me,” Aylia said. “She used to think that a young girl should have a mind filled only with dresses and make-up and perfume and nothing else. She used to boast that she knew nothing else, despite going to a finishing school in Switzerland. She used to drive me absolutely mad.”
I smiled. “I don’t think she’ll be doing that for much longer,” I said. We reached the trees and peered through the bushes towards the Faye House. The lights on the ground floor were going out, one by one, as the servants went to bed. The one thing I hadn’t been able to confirm was where the other members of the family actually were. If we encountered Vincent Faye himself, or one of the others, we would probably be unable to brazen it out unless we had the proof we needed first. “This is pretty much your last chance to back out.”
“I’m coming,” Aylia said, firmly. “What do we have to do now?”
I smiled. The interesting point about having so many wards interlocking together is that it isn’t actually easy to reprogram them in a hurry. A Warden could do it, of course, but Faye and the rest of his family definitely moved in and out of the house at will. No sorcerer ever born would trust his security to someone outside the family; hell, I’d be very surprised if they trusted someone inside their own family. Paranoia didn’t just run in magic-users; it moved at the speed of light. Even Faye would have problems with his own wards…
And wards only reacted to what they were told to watch for, nothing else. A ward might be programmed to keep out everyone, but the family…and it would do just that. Anyone who wasn’t part of the family would be denied access, such as reporters, or a semi-rogue Guardian. I suspected that they would have been altered to keep out friends and other casual visitors, at least without permission, but wards really aren’t very bright. It would be much harder to program one to keep out Aylia after she’d left…and, with a bit of luck, we could both slip though the wards.
“All right,” I said, reaching into my magic satchel. The tool I pulled out looked rather like a test tube, little else. “Hold out your bare arm.”
I pushed the tool against Aylia’s arm and a moment later it began to fill with blood. “That tickles,” Aylia said, smiling faintly. “Is that one of dad’s inventions?”
“No,” I said. It wasn’t a bad guess though. “It came from an English sorcerer who was trying to develop chemistry tools for potion-making. That was just before his experiments created radioactive chloroform and he was locked up for his own good, and everyone else’s. It’s much kinder than a simple needle, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” she said, as I pulled the tool away. “Now what?”
“Hold this,” I said, passing her a small compact. She grinned at it. It was rather more feminine than she might have expected. “Just open the mirror and hold it so I can see my face.”
“A mirror for makeup?” Aylia asked. “Is there something you want to tell me?”
“It’s just a tool,” I said, crossly. I held the blood-filled tube against my face and drew a circle around my left eye. A moment later, I did the same to my right eye, and then drew a larger pair around my nose and mouth, before drawing a final line across my forehead. The ritual was simple enough; properly energised, I should look like Aylia – more accurately, part of Aylia – to any ward that wasn’t being supervised by a Warden. “How do I look?”
“Ghastly,” Aylia said. She looked rather disgusted. “Do you have to do that?”
“Yes,” I said. “Consider yourself lucky. There’s a version of the ritual that requires menstrual blood.”
Aylia winced. “I didn’t wish to know that,” she said. I hadn’t either at the time. We hadn’t realised what those sorcerers had been doing until we’d stumbled on their warehouse of preserved body parts, including enough blood to feed an army of vampires and flayed skin, which they used for dark rites. “What now?”
“Stay close to me,” I said, as I stood up, returning the tools to my case. “We have to stay very close together.”
I could feel her breasts pushing into my back as we slowly walked across the garden. My sixth sense kept reporting that we were crossing line after line of wards, each one powerful enough to tear through even my protections and freeze us in place – or do something far nastier to us – before we could react. I could feel them at the back of my mind, but they seemed fooled by the blood ritual, convinced that Aylia was on her own. I didn’t know if the wards would report her presence, but it seemed likely. We would have to move fast.
We reached the main door and Aylia placed her hand on an innocent-looking stone. A moment afterwards, the stone glowed and the door swung open, having recognised her identity. The main hallway was dark, at first, and then it lit up as the electric lights came on. I hoped that there were no more security measures inside the house, but we would have to be very careful anyway. A paranoid mind like a normal sorcerer might have left other traps in his house…and Faye had had three young daughters. He would have had to keep them out of his labs for their own safety.
“Follow me,” Aylia said, grimly. I pulled my invisibility spell around myself and allowed her to lead me down the long corridor. Faye’s sense of art, I decided, was the tackiest I’d ever seen, although that might have been the influence of his wife. She certainly sounded like the type of woman to be influenced by any idiot preaching a new kind of art. Modern art clashed terribly with items so expensive that they could have paid for the whole house ten times over, statues and artworks from the distant past. I could almost sense Aylia’s disgust at the display of wealth. It was a minor miracle that she’d grown up relatively normal. Faye must have been doing something right.
We passed dining rooms large enough to seat a whole company of soldiers, a kitchen that looked as if it could produce enough food to feed an entire division and hundreds of sitting rooms, each one looking as if it were in permanent use. I had been embarrassed with the size of the house they’d given me when I’d become a Guardian and Varsha and I had rattled around inside, but there was no trace of embarrassment here. There was nothing, but conspicuous consumption, held out in a truly tasteless manner. Vincent Faye had never allowed his house to be featured on Lifestyles of the People who are Richer than You, I knew, which suggested a surprising amount of common sense. I wondered if his politician friends had ever seen his house.
I snorted inwardly. They were politicians. They probably admired it.
“Here,” Aylia hissed. We had reached a heavyset door, set firmly into a stone corridor. I could sense the spells crawling all over it, trying to repel unwanted visitors. A pair of charmed statues stood by the door. They were immobile now, but if the alarm sounded, they would leap to life and attack the intruders. I doubted that they would be lethal – there were three daughters in the house, after all – but they would still hold us until someone came to get us. “I never got past these things.”
I allowed the invisibility spell to dispel and stepped forward, placing my hand on the door and peering into it with my sixth sense. Unlocking a magically-sealed door normally requires a specific person, or a specific code, depending. Faye should have sealed it so only his touch could open it, but he had hundreds of men and women working for him who would need access to the room. It was just possible…I probed, carefully, and finally located the key. The door had to be touched in a particular fashion…
It took me another ten minutes to check around for unpleasant surprises, before I took the risk of opening the door. Aylia grew more and more nervous as I
worked, but I didn’t dare rush it. There are tales of thieves who allowed their own greed to lure them into a trap. The successful thieves were the ones who never lost their nerves at the important moments. Finally, I pushed right into the door…and it slid open.
I’d expected another lab like Maxwell’s, but it was more of a library. Faye had created a den that felt remarkably comfortable, crammed with bursting bookshelves and reference texts. I allowed the door to slide closed after we had both slipped inside and examined the room carefully. There were hundreds of books on every conceivable topic, ranging from medicine – both magical and mundane – to human history. It made little sense to me. I knew that there were odd connections to be made in the world of magic, but how did human history relate to Faye’s business?
Maybe he’s just interested in everything, I thought, sardonically. Who knew? I looked through the bookshelves for any magical texts and found none, apart from a handful of fantasy novels. Some of Faye’s most profitable ideas had come from the unpaid imagination of hundreds of fantasy writers, although he’d had to take care. The British Government had created their own Ministry of Magic and involved the wrath of the Lawsuit Gods. Who would have thought that a legal concept could take on physical form?
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