Nine of Wands

by Mark Hayden

Saffron grimaced and started walking over. She wanted to put as much distance between her and the dead Gnome as possible, and I don’t blame her.

  ‘That was … I …’ she said. ‘I thought I’d feel differently.’

  ‘You nearly died, Saffron,’ I said. ‘And you’ve just taken another life. It doesn’t get any easier, and it shouldn’t. You did well enough, but it was close.’

  ‘I know, I know. I was cocky. Stupid, stupid girl.’

  I left it there. She knew what she’d done wrong, and that was the most important thing for now.

  Lloyd shouted across the room. ‘He’s gone. Slater’s gone.’

  Mina arrived with the painkillers. She gave Saffron two pills and a fresh bottle of water.

  I waited until Saffron had taken her medicine and turned to Irina. ‘I’m going to lift you and prop you against the wall.’ She wasn’t heavy and I moved quickly. She grunted with pain when her leg dragged across the floor. I could see the swelling pressing against her trousers already.

  Lloyd appeared with four camp chairs, and we all collapsed into them, making a ring around Irina. ‘I am very much going to enjoy locking you in a Limbo Chamber,’ I said. ‘I hope you’ll bear that in mind when we start asking questions.’

  ‘I will answer your questions,’ she replied, ‘but there will be no Limbo Chamber for me. I am pregnant.’

  ‘So what?’ said Saffron.

  A Limbo Chamber prevents the flow of Lux. I’ve been in one, and it’s bad. The more magick you have, the worse its effect. The jailers at the Undercroft have a saying: taking the short route. It means suicide, and a lot of Mages take it. However, it has been known for centuries that putting a pregnant Mage in a Limbo Chamber can have terrible effects on mother and child. It was finally stopped by George III, in one of the rare instances of direct royal interference with the world of magick.

  ‘She’s exempt,’ I said to Saffron. ‘No pregnant women or nursing mothers. The court might order her child to be taken away at birth, but that depends on what we charge her with, and whether she co-operates.’

  ‘She might be lying,’ said Saffron.

  ‘I’ll get Vicky to have a look at her. She’s a better pregnancy test than any blue stick.’

  ‘Really?’ said Mina.

  ‘Yes. Saffron, are you sure you don’t want a coat?’

  ‘Don’t tell me you’ve never seen a half-naked woman before.’

  I glared at her. That was a crass thing to say, and she should know better. If our prisoner wasn’t sitting there, I’d have called her out. She got the message and picked up her coat, drawing the sides loosely in front of her. She even got out her notebook.

  ‘Right. We’ll start with you full legal name, Irina.’

  ‘Irina Ispahbudhan. My family are from Persia. You will see that I grew up in Paris when you put me through your system.’

  Saffron was writing everything down. ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Were any other Gnomes or humans involved in Earlsbury?’

  ‘No other Gnome was involved. They would have been here if they were. Dixie was going to take his wife with him. She works at Flint House. Slater and Jackson were going to leave their wives behind.’

  Saffron shook her head but didn’t say anything.

  ‘Where did you get the Gold?’ I asked.

  ‘We are the Golden Triangle,’ she announced.

  ‘As in the stamp on the torus ingots?’

  ‘And fire.’

  Saffron looked up. ‘The triangle is the Alchemical symbol of fire. I should have twigged.’

  ‘Who are the other two members of your triangle?’ I said.

  ‘The Golden Triangle was forged by the Master. He created it,’ said Irina. She turned to Saffron. ‘Do you know of Eilidh Haigh?’ She pronounced the first name as Ayley.

  Saffron couldn’t believe it. ‘No! I’ve met her. She’s from a really big family of Scottish Mages. She moved down to London a few years ago and did a bit of teaching at the College. She’s an Artificer.’

  ‘When did you last see her?’ I asked.

  ‘About a year ago. Auntie Heidi mentioned that she’d got a better offer.’

  ‘That’s one way of putting it,’ I said.

  ‘You’ve met her, too,’ said Irina to me. ‘She was on the dock at Niði’s Hall.’

  Ah, yes. Lloyd and I had been ambushed outside Niði’s front door, not the back one we’d used yesterday. Irina had pretended to be Hannah, and when I saw through her, she’d sprayed me with acid. The back-up crew had been led by a Mage, and that must have been Eilidh. When Lloyd and I fought them to a standstill, Eilidh had retreated, killing one of her mundane bodyguards along the way to stop him talking to us.

  Irina spoke again. ‘I would never have killed anyone like she did. We had to get that diamond back.’

  ‘You tried to kill me,’ I said.

  ‘I sprayed your head, not your eyes, Watch Captain.’

  I didn’t believe her, but I couldn’t get too personal about it. That diamond was our only link to the Fae who’d bought the Codex Defanatus, and the magick they’d used to make the Gold had definitely come from the Codex. This could be a big breakthrough.

  ‘Why did you need the diamond, Irina?’

  ‘The Master ordered us to. He threatened us all, and said he’d kill us if we didn’t get it for him.’

  Damn. This don’t sound promising. ‘Is the Master one of the Fae, Irina?’

  She shook her head. ‘He is human. Completely human, but he used a mask whenever we met. He found the lost Works that allowed us to Reduce the gold, and he set up the forge. Eilidh ran the forge, he took the reduced metal to a Collector to enrich it, and I picked it up from a safe place in the Old Network.’

  ‘Where is the forge?’

  ‘I do not know.’

  ‘Then how do you know Eilidh?’

  ‘We would meet occasionally, and after you turned up at Flint House, I had to contact them urgently. I had been told that if anyone ever started asking about Niði, especially the Watch, I had to crash out and call an emergency number. Eilidh picked me up and we were based at a hotel until we tried to snatch the diamond.’ She coughed. ‘Could I have some water? And I think I deserve some non-opioid painkillers.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. Mina was already out of her seat.

  We were done for now, and we all knew it. I could see that Irina was using her magick to block some of the pain (a nice trick if you can manage it), but she did need medical attention. There was nothing we could do immediately, and it was time to clean up and re-group. Mina returned with the ibuprofen, and I stood up.

  ‘Is there a stretcher down here?’ I said to Lloyd.

  ‘Close enough. We can put her on a pallet and use the pallet truck.’

  ‘You will not,’ said Irina.

  ‘It’s smoother than being carried out on a plank, believe me,’ said Lloyd. ‘This is gonna take a while. Any chance of a cuppa?’

  Mina said, ‘I will go, if I’m not needed to keep watch on the prisoner.’

  ‘Arrest her, Saffron.’

  She perked up. ‘What? Me?’

  ‘I haven’t got my Badge of Office, remember? I’m sure you’ve got the words written down somewhere.’

  She had. They were in the back of that notebook of hers, and she took great delight in placing Irina under magickal arrest. Lloyd beckoned me over to his brother. He’d placed the severed head next to the body. It was gross as it sounds. Try not to picture it.

  I am not immune to these things; I’ve just had more practice at looking away.

  ‘Have you ever seen Antigone?’ said Lloyd.

  ‘No. Greek, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s right. Sophocles. Propaganda, through and through.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘In the play, the king of Thebes, Creon, gets in trouble for not allowing this lass to bury her brother. He orders her to be bricked into a cave, alive, and she tops herself. His son dies, too.’

  ‘Sounds about right. Not
keen on happy endings, those Greeks.’

  ‘It’s a travesty. There was a Gnome called Crane, of Clan Marten. The first and only clan to venture south until the Roman Empire came along. It’s a long story, but he was betrayed and attacked. He left all the dead Greeks to be eaten by the wolves and the birds, as he should. Sophocles called him Creon and changed the story.’

  That was interesting, but there wasn’t much to say. It clearly had a bearing on the current situation, so I waited for Lloyd to say his piece.

  ‘Jackson, Slater and Dixie will not lie in the First Mine. They will be minced up and fed to the pigs. I’m only telling you that because you have a right to know, as Swordbearer. If you want to resign, that’s up to you. If you don’t resign, then it stays within the clan. Fair enough?’

  ‘If Slater hadn’t died, what would the clan have done?’

  ‘Patched him up and kicked him out.’

  Lloyd had saved my life. He had killed his own brother rather than let him walk away with the treasure. There was only ever going to be one answer. ‘I accept your decision,’ I said. ‘But under protest, and I want the clan to debate it at some point. If Mina asks me a straight question, I won’t lie to her.’

  ‘Fair enough. Can we move them out of here?’

  We stashed the bodies in a nearby empty room, and Mina returned with the tea. Lloyd started work on fixing up a pallet for Irina. Before we left, he had one more surprise.

  He took two small boxes from a pallet in the far corner. He gave one each to Mina and Saffron and said, ‘You two defended the First Mine for no other reason than it was the right thing to do. Clan Flint is grateful. Thank you.’

  The boxes were made of cardboard. Highly decorated cardboard, but cardboard nonetheless. Mina and Saffron looked at each other, and opened them together. Inside the boxes were shiny, green velvet pouches, and inside each pouch was a small metal hammer and a piece of rock. The girls looked at each other again, then looked at Lloyd.

  ‘Fire kits,’ he said. ‘The rock is flint, the metal hammer is enchanted. They’ll light just about anything, but I’d save them for special fires. Shall we go?’

  Irina demanded a demonstration of the pallet truck before we lifted her carefully on to it. Lloyd took great care, and I walked ahead with Mina. I took her hand and said, ‘What happened?’

  She squeezed my hand. ‘I opened the store room door to come back, and there they were, leaving the Chamber of the Mother. I just picked up the first heavy object I could find and followed them. I wasn’t going to attack Irina until you started with the prophet of doom business.’

  ‘What made you change your mind?’

  ‘I was in darkness, yet you could see me. No one else could. I thought that was an omen from Ganesh. He had opened the door, and I had to step through.’

  We arrived at the entrance. ‘Talking of opening doors,’ I said. ‘We’ll have to be careful. Vicky and Xavi will be waiting outside as backstop. We don’t want them to think we’re Gnomes.’

  ‘No one would ever think you were a Gnome,’ said Mina. ‘And I wouldn’t have it any other way.’

  14 — Auntie Heidi, Auntie Hannah

  The heatwave rolled on. London was baked and dried out like tanned parchment stretched across a frame. At home in Clerkswell, Myfanwy was rigging up a hosepipe to the well until I told her that water for the Inkwell took priority at all times. It was cool down here though.

  Blackfriars Undercroft, located in the cellar of the old monastery, is buried under the new Blackfriars railway station, and the temperature is always the same. The physical temperature, that is. The emotional temperature can vary a lot.

  The Battle of the First Mine had taken place on Monday. It was now Friday the third of July, and we were wrapping up the last interview with Irina Ispahbudhan. Vicky, Xavi and Saffron had taken her from the Black Country to London where a surgeon had said he couldn’t operate on her knee until the swelling had gone down.

  Since then, she had been debriefed in teams, starting with Saffron (arresting officer) and Annelise van Kampen (Watch prosecutor). They had hammered out a confession to the crimes she would face in court. I hadn’t taken part in that interview because aggravated assault on a Watch Officer was one of the crimes. Once she’d signed her confession, we’d begun the interrogation in earnest, and this was the last session.

  Irina (and her unborn child) were propped up on a day-bed with a big brace around her knee. She wasn’t suffering from total withdrawal of magick, but the Undercroft has very little free Lux, and without her Artefacts, she was struggling.

  This was going to be a short, early morning session. Her breakfast things were still piled outside her cell, waiting for the deputy to remove them. I started the voice recorder and got the ball rolling. ‘When you attacked us – Lloyd Flint and myself – on the dock, how did you know that I would be in possession of the diamond? And why were you interested in it? It has nothing to do with your money laundering operation.’

  The guarded look came back to her face, the one that told us we were getting near things she wasn’t happy to give away, presumably because she was still scared of the people behind all this. ‘It was an obligation of the Master’s. He was told that he had to retrieve it, and that’s why he sent both Eilidh and me, plus her bodyguards, to intercept you.’

  ‘And what about the Fae Squire?’

  ‘He was sent to us to assist in the operation. You are not stupid, Mr Clarke. You can guess that it was a Fae noble who laid the obligation on the Master, and before you ask, I have absolutely no idea which one. The first and last time that I or Eilidh met the Squire was in the hotel the night before the operation.’

  This bunch, the Golden Triangle, were a cut above some of the operations we’d come across before. Their internal security and implementation of a need-to-know protocol was worthy of the mafia. What she said had the ring of truth.

  After that, I sat in the corner while Mina rattled off some final questions for clarification. When Mina had made a note of the last answer, she looked up. ‘Thank you for your co-operation, Miss Ispahbudhan. Interview terminated.’

  Mina stopped the voice recorder and stood up to pack away. ‘One last thing,’ she said. ‘When I was pointing a gun at you, why didn’t you call my bluff?’

  Irina had been as good as her word. I didn’t doubt any of the answers she’d given us, nor did I think she was holding anything significant back. There hadn’t been much chit-chat, and nor was there now. ‘Because we’d heard all about you.’

  Mina stopped packing her bag. I stood up straighter. ‘What had you heard?’ said Mina.

  ‘The Master told us. He said, “Watch out for a little Indian girl hanging round with Clarke. She’s done time for shooting a man dead.” It wasn’t hard to guess that he meant you.’

  Mina and I exchanged glances. Very few people in the world of magick even knew I had a girlfriend, let alone her ethnicity or criminal record. It is from such little threads that you can build up a tapestry. Mina fastened the strap on her bag and pulled it over her shoulder. I pressed the button for the deputy bailiff and we left Irina to her fate.

  From the Millennium Pier at Blackfriars, you can get a River Bus direct to the Tower of London, if you get your timing right. It was pulling up to the pier when we jogged down to meet it, and we enjoyed the breeze on the river as it took us east.

  We didn’t go straight to Merlyn’s Tower, because I had a duty to perform. I signed us in through the staff entrance to the Big Tower and we went looking for the ravens. The main area was already packed with tourists in large groups and small huddles. I found a quiet place and got a small packet out of my pocket.

  There is a survival shop in London that sells curried giant worms as part of its Australian bush tucker range. They are very popular with all sorts of magickal creatures, and the staff at the shop think I am the ultimate mad Englishman, given the amount I’ve bought there. I opened the packet and put some on my palm. I tossed them up and down, and thought
about it. Did I really want to ask a god to eat out of my hand? Probably not.

  I put the withered, smelly worms on the low wall and stood back. I rubbed the Troth ring that the Allfather had given me and closed my eyes. For Mina’s survival, Allfather I give thanks. When I looked again, two ravens were standing by the worms, giving me the big eye. They cawed loudly and bobbed their heads to eat. A promise made, a debt paid.

  ‘Could you do that again, sir?’ said Warder Bradburn.

  ‘If I had to.’

  ‘Had to?’

  ‘Don’t ask.’

  He turned to Mina. ‘Morning, Ma’am.’

  ‘Namaste. You look rather warm in all that thick wool.’

  ‘Don’t get me started. Do you know it’s hotter in here than Helmand at the moment?’

  ‘But you’re not regretting it?’

  ‘No, ma’am. Second best decision I’ve ever made, after joining the RAF in the first place.’

  ‘Are you flying solo, yet?’ I asked.

  ‘No, sir. The senior warder is keeping watch on me from over there, in the shade.’

  ‘Wise man.’

  ‘I won’t keep you.’

  We shook hands and made our way to Merlyn’s Tower. I’d been in and out of the building a fair bit, because, wonder of wonders, Hannah had taken some leave and left me in charge of debriefing Irina. Her sister’s youngest is still under school age and they’d left Ruth’s husband, Moses, to sweat it out in London with the older girl while they went to the seaside for a week. Auntie Hannah. Until you’ve seen it, you wouldn’t believe it. Today is Friday and Shabbos begins tonight: Ruth wanted to be home for Friday night dinner and Hannah had called a Project Talpa meeting.

  Talpa is Latin for mole, and this whole journey had begun when I first encountered the late Lord Mayor of Moles. He’d been the first to sample the curried worms, too. After Saffron had interviewed Irina, I’d given my new partner a copy of the Project Talpa files. There was no doubt she’d proved her physical courage in the First Mine, and we couldn’t keep her out of the loop any longer if she was going to be my partner.

  The next day, I’d asked if she had any questions.