by Juliet Kemp
“I was expecting to see you,” she said, glaring at him. “This afternoon.”
Yes, she did seem quite annoyed. But he hadn’t seen any particular reason to reply to her message, so she shouldn’t have expected him to show up. He’d guessed that it would take her a while after his non-appearance to come round and yell at him.
“I don’t really respond well to demands,” Cato drawled.
“For the love of the angel, sit up, you lazy sot.”
Cato didn’t move. “Still not responding well to demands.”
“I didn’t send you a demand,” Reb said. “I sent you a request. To discuss something that you must agree is important. To both of us. To Marek. To Beckett.”
Cato winced a little. He preferred not to name Beckett out loud too often. Names had power.
“Sounded like a demand to me.”
“It was a request. And if it didn’t suit you, you should have replied to tell me so.”
“Not many reliable messengers round here,” Cato said. Not at his end of the squats. Not many reliable people of any sort, form, or description, in fact; though that depended on your definition of ‘reliable’. If you paid the right rates, people could be surprisingly ‘reliable’, in that they mostly stayed bought; and of course, very few people were prepared to risk crossing a sorcerer, which was handy.
“You could have got off your damn arse and walked two minutes down the road,” Reb said. “Where there are a great many perfectly reliable messengers.”
This was also true. Lots of messengers lived in the rest of the squats. But Cato didn’t see why he should walk down the road purely to make Reb’s life easier.
He shrugged, which was surprisingly hard when lying down.
Reb appeared to be searching for something especially cutting to say. Cato was quite looking forward to it for the entertainment value. She opened her mouth, then shut it again as the air in the room shuddered. She looked over at Cato, alarmed, and Cato pulled an expressive face back at her, experiencing a sudden surge of fellow-feeling. The air shuddered again, glittering in spirit-side colours that didn’t belong on this plane. A soundless thump reverberated through Cato’s bones, and suddenly Beckett was standing between them.
Cato sat up in a hurry. He was happy to piss Reb off. Not so much Beckett. He had no idea what exactly would piss Beckett off, but starting with basic good manners seemed wise.
The cityangel still looked the way they had during their brief time on the human plane: paper-pale skin, a white fuzz of hair, wearing a long tunic in nondescript grey-brown cloth over their tall, angular body, and nothing else. They didn’t look like a human body fit naturally. Cato wasn’t sure why they were keeping to it, but perhaps it was for the same reason they had kept the name they’d acquired on the human plane. Which was to say, Cato had no damn idea why, and didn’t particularly want to enquire.
Had Reb arranged this? Her wide eyes as she looked across at Beckett suggested not. That implied Beckett had decided to barge in of their own accord, which was not an idea Cato liked in the slightest.
“You waste time arguing about the past,” Beckett said. “You are both here now.”
Cato chose not to contemplate how Beckett could know the content of their conversation thus far. What theory he was familiar with suggested that the cityangel had, in some sense, access to the city as a whole. Presumably Beckett couldn’t actually engage with that all the time; it was a spirit, but it wasn’t a god, since there were no such beings, and it didn’t have godlike powers. Cato’s best conceptualisation of the matter was that Beckett could somehow treat the city and its history as a library of sorts.
Or the cityangel had already been deliberately watching him and Reb, which was more than possible and also something Cato had no wish to think about.
He caught Reb’s eye, and got the strong impression that she felt similarly. Which, given that she undoubtedly had a better relationship with Beckett than Cato did, was either reassuring or entirely the opposite.
“We are indeed both here now,” he agreed. “Reb, I apologise for my terrible lack of manners.” Beckett might or might not pick up on his tone, but Reb certainly would. It cheered Cato up a bit when her eyes narrowed. “I fully agree with Beckett that we should move onwards with… uh, whatever it was you were after me to talk about.”
Reb glanced over at Beckett, who did something with their face that looked like it was supposed to be a smile. It was, frankly, creepy.
“We need to reorganise magic in Marek,” Reb said.
“In what way?” Cato asked politely. “I personally have not felt any lack of organisation.”
“The Group no longer exists,” Reb said.
The Group – which Reb had once been part of, and Cato most certainly had not – had been responsible for, in a very loose sense, overseeing the practice of magic in Marek. It examined apprentices, placed some very loose limits on what sorcerers might do within city limits, kept the ban on blood magic, and dealt with any nasty little awkwardnesses that might arise in the magical realm. Like that business his sister had been involved with, a bit over a decade ago. Until the plague, when all its members except Reb herself had died; and Reb hadn’t been in the mood to return to the job all by herself. She’d barely kept working her own magic, come to that.
Cato approved, in a detached kind of way, of the last part of the Group’s responsibilities, owing as how he didn’t want the fabric of reality ripped apart, or demons rampaging through the city, any more than the next person. Back when teenage Marcia and that idiot Daril and his friends had got themselves into trouble, there was no way they could have controlled that thing if Reb and Zareth hadn’t stepped in to send it back spirit-side. Cato’s regret for Zareth’s death had been real. Cato had only been a teenager himself, but Zareth’s reputation was impeccable.
Cato was less convinced about the matter of blood magic – wasn’t it up to a sorcerer to make their own decision about that? Doing blood magic in Marek was damn stupid, if you asked him, given that the whole point of Marek magic, of Beckett’s commitment to the city, was that you didn’t need to. But if someone would rather open a vein than appeal to Beckett, surely that was their own business.
He wasn’t convinced at all by the need to certify sorcerers and oversee them thereafter. He didn’t care to be overseen.
And more pertinently, they’d been without the Group for two years now, and nothing much had come of it. Cato would quite happily see that situation continue.
“Good thing too,” he said, affably. “Your point?”
“If the Group had still been operational, we could have avoided everything that happened this summer,” Reb said. “Urso would have been spotted.”
By ‘everything that happened this summer’, Reb presumably meant the attempt by Urso Leanvit and Daril b’Leandra to instigate their coup by removing Beckett and inviting in a spirit who would lack Beckett’s restrictions. One that would, in particular, not be bound from interfering with politics as Beckett was. Daril b’Leandra – who had form on this kind of thing – had been driving the political side but had no sorcery whatsoever. Urso, on the other hand, had been a decent sorcerer, and Reb wasn’t wrong that he should have been spotted.
Cato himself had been involved with ‘everything that happened this summer’, albeit only after the most disastrous part had already happened and strictly for financial return, so the comment was more than a little pointy. Perhaps, after all, it wasn’t quite accurate that ‘nothing much’ had come of the Group’s absence.
“But it was all resolved,” Cato said, determined nonetheless to hold his corner.
“More by luck than good judgement,” Reb said, which must have cost her a bit to admit since she’d been the one trying to resolve it. “We can’t rely on luck to keep Marek magic running.”
“So what are you envisaging?” Cato demanded. “An emergency reaction group? An oversight committee? Is your new Group going to come barging in demanding information about every s
orcerer in the damn city?” All two of them, right now – three if you included Jonas, which Reb wouldn’t because she didn’t know about him currently – but that wasn’t the point.
“We need some kind of oversight,” Reb said. “We need to know that there aren’t more Ursos out there creating chaos.”
“It’s none of anyone else’s business what a sorcerer is up to,” Cato said, more fervently than he’d expected. “Or what their apprentices do, come to that. Why should one set of sorcerers have power over another set? Who decides which is who?”
“Well, I had in mind yourself and me,” Reb said. “Given that there’s not really any other option.”
Cato’s mouth dropped open. He’d assumed that Reb meant to be the new Group all by herself, and find more sorcerers to join it over time, presumably by training them up herself. He hadn’t thought for a moment that she would be prepared to work with him; or would consider him a suitable person to be pronouncing on the activities of other sorcerers.
He didn’t consider himself a suitable person to be pronouncing on the activities of other sorcerers, although obviously his judgement was excellent in all regards.
Reb was waiting for a response. Her toe was tapping, even. Reb had very little patience.
“My objections don’t disappear if I’m the one with the power,” he said with his best attempt at dignity. It even had the advantage of being the truth.
Beckett was still watching both of them. Their presence didn’t help Cato think clearly. Or perhaps it helped him think far too clearly. One or the other.
“What exactly are your objections?” Reb asked. As far as he could tell, it was a genuine question.
“Well…” Cato said, drawing the word out to buy himself thinking time.
“Is there a form of the Group that you could subscribe to?” Reb prompted. “Because I wouldn’t wish to simply enforce it over your objections.”
Cato blinked, surprised yet again. Reb was being remarkably… sensible about this. Reasonable, almost, behind the tapping toe and the irritable expression.
“I could,” Beckett said, and both Cato and Reb jumped.
“You could,” Reb agreed, “but I’d rather you didn’t. Cato, we both know we’ve never got on, and that if there were anyone else I wouldn’t be here. But you are a very competent sorcerer,” she grimaced slightly as she said it, but Cato could see she was sincere, “and there isn’t anyone else. I don’t want to be at odds with you.”
“So if I don’t agree to this, you won’t do it?” Cato asked.
“If you don’t agree to this, I’ll do it alone, I suppose. If you’re actively against it – well. I would like to find a solution that we can both agree to.”
“You’d do it alone?” Cato said. “So, you’d be, ah, judge, jury, and executioner? Over me, specifically, in the absence of anyone else.” He wasn’t about to mention Jonas. Jonas wasn’t really a sorcerer yet, and whilst revealing his apprenticeship would muddy up the waters of the current discussion in a very entertaining fashion, it would be more trouble than it was worth. “That doesn’t sound like a group to me.”
“What do you want me to do?” Reb demanded. “If you won’t do it, that only leaves me.”
Cato shrugged. “Or not doing it at all.”
“And wait for another Urso to come along, but more successfully this time?” Reb demanded through her teeth. “I will not…”
“I could withdraw my co-operation,” Beckett said. Their voice fell into the conversation like a stone. “If that would help.”
Cato’s stomach lurched. ‘Withdraw their co-operation’. That was a disingenuous way of putting it. Without Beckett, Cato couldn’t do magic; at least, not Mareker magic. He swallowed, and tried to keep his face calm.
Reb was staring at Beckett. She didn’t look enthusiastic either. That was something.
“Could you?” Reb asked. “Within your compact?”
Rufus Marek and Eli Beckett, the original finders – founders – of Marek the city, had made the deal that bound the cityangel to the city and vice versa, thereby creating Marek’s unique form of magic. Cato wasn’t wholly sure of the details of the deal, but it worked, so he wasn’t going to pry.
“If I believe it best for the city,” Beckett said. After a moment, and with visible reluctance, they added, “Perhaps.”
“And then what, he starts in on the blood magic? Or drags other spirits in to mediate for him?” Reb demanded.
“I will not tolerate other spirits here,” Beckett said, seeming to grow slightly.
“Cato works with other spirits,” Reb said, irritably. “As we all know fine well.”
“Not here I don’t,” Cato pointed out, trying to sound relaxed.
It was a tricky point; he did indeed work with other spirits, always had, but he did it by creating a space partway between this plane and the spirit plane, so the other spirits never set foot into Marek, meaning the cityangel didn’t have to be bothered. He’d always assumed that Beckett knew about it, inasmuch as he’d thought in quite those terms prior to Beckett’s enforced sojourn on this plane.
“I could close that loophole,” Beckett said. “If I so wished.”
Well, at least his assumption that Beckett knew had been correct. On the other hand: he’d really rather Beckett didn’t keep thinking along these lines. Not that he had, as a matter of fact, done anything that way lately.
“I’d rather you didn’t mess around with Cato’s magic,” Reb said, and the statement had more weight behind it than her careful words indicated. “In any way.”
“Ditto,” Cato agreed. “Though while we’re on the matter – blood magic? No, thank you all the same.”
The bare idea of losing his magic had bile rising at the back of his throat. Magic was – he was a sorcerer; that was what he did. He was a good sorcerer. He’d chosen this.
“I don’t think it is suitable for you to be treating sorcerers differently,” Reb said. “The cityangel should not be enforcing anything on sorcerers in Marek. That is a job for sorcerers themselves. Which is why we need the Group.” She turned back to Cato. “Look. I don’t think either of us want to see Beckett dragged into this, do we?”
Cato licked his lips. “No. Indeed not. No offence,” he nodded politely at Beckett.
“So,” Reb said. “The easiest way to prevent that would be to come to our own agreement.”
“You’re sure you really can bring yourself to work with me?” Cato asked, genuinely curious. He and Reb had never got along. Among other disagreements, Reb thought that one should be bound by mundane law. Cato didn’t, in part because when he’d been disowned at sixteen with only a stack of magic books to fall back on, his options for keeping himself fed had been limited; and in part because he didn’t see why he should bother about mundane law when no one was going to enforce it on him or any other sorcerer.
Reb scowled. “I can’t say I’m madly enthusiastic. But yes, I am willing.”
“Marcia will be pleased,” Beckett observed.
Cato and Reb both winced at the same time. Cato, of course, knew about his sister’s burgeoning relationship with Reb; he’d spotted it almost before either of the participants noticed, in fact. But he preferred not to think about it or acknowledge it, and he greatly doubted that Reb wished to discuss it with him either.
“So what I want,” Reb said, ignoring the interjection, “is to find a description of the Group, and its duties, that we can agree on. For example: let’s not have any spirits invited into the city.”
Cato nodded reluctantly.
“And if you can’t bring yourself to agree to oversight, at least to the Group making sure they’re aware of who is performing sorcery in the city?”
“Ugh. Fine,” Cato said. He could see the wisdom of the idea.
“I will leave you to the details,” Beckett said, and disappeared with another thump.
Cato exhaled, and dropped his head into his hands.
“I have paper,” Reb said, pulling
it out of the bag attached to her belt. “Let’s write down what we can agree on. And a time to meet.”
“Ugh,” Cato said again.
“Or I can call Beckett back?” Reb suggested.
He didn’t want to do this at all, and he deeply resented Reb pushing him into it; but if the alternative was Beckett coming back and threatening his magic again…
Cato bared his teeth. “I am absolutely confident we are both going to regret this. Very well. Write.”
THREE
Selene was woken by one of the Guesthouse Emilia’s servants knocking on the door with her breakfast. If one could call it ‘breakfast’ when it arrived close on midday. Very shortly after her arrival in Marek, Selene had realised the wisdom of minimising morning appointments. The Houses were keen to ensure that they entertained the Lord Lieutenant of Teren suitably, and that meant late evenings; although Selene had noted that other than the host of any given evening, most of the Heads and some of the Heirs tended to imbibe with caution, and excuse themselves at a reasonable hour. The Houses were prosperous because they traded; and they worked for that prosperity.
Selene, of course, hadn’t seen that part of Marek. Her role, as far as the Houses were concerned, was simply to exist in public as the Lord Lieutenant, visible symbol of Teren in Marek. She wasn’t welcome to interfere in the real work of the city.
However, the early disappearance every evening of the most responsible House members gave Selene a freer hand in talking to the more dissatisfied ones. And enabled more private conversation with the hosts of any given event, in a setting where their guard might be a little down.
Last night had been less official: a late-night show at the theatre with some of the younger House members, who had taken full advantage of the refreshments. She imagined she felt better on waking than most of them would. They might or might not remember the detail of the conversations; but they would feel better about Teren than they had before she came, and that was her goal.
One goal, at least. She had other goals.