Necessary Sacrifices

by R. L. King

  That was for later, though, after he’d found Desmond. Perhaps he could invite her out to dinner before he returned home, and they could have one of those deep conversations they used to have all those years ago. He knew you couldn’t go home again, not really—but that didn’t mean the occasional visit couldn’t be pleasant.

  Right now, however, he had work to do.

  Desmond’s posh London apartment was located in a four-story building in one of the most exclusive parts of Kensington. Stone had found out many years ago that Desmond owned the entire building, with the spacious apartment taking up the third and fourth floors. Desmond had commissioned extensive renovations on the place many years before Stone had met him, and Stone was certain both that the workmen who’d performed the renovations had been paid handsomely to forget about them (and in any case were probably either dead or retired by now), and that no official floorplans or other records of them existed in any government office. Though they’d never discussed it directly, Stone was equally certain that Desmond’s influence extended to some of the highest levels of government, at least to the extent that he could arrange for details that would prove inconvenient if they came to light to be so snarled in bureaucratic red tape that it would take an entire cadre of dedicated and persistent searchers to turn them up. Unlike in America (as far as he knew, at least) the magical community in Britain was very old and had its fingers in many official pies.

  Although Desmond rarely had visitors who weren’t aware of the magical world, if any had stopped by and done any exploring, they’d quickly have noticed that there were no obvious ways to access large parts of the building. Plush-carpeted stairways led up to each of the upper floors, but on the first and second floors hallways appeared to lead to doors, but opening any of them took the visitor into generic-looking, mostly empty rooms. Even magically talented visitors, if not properly attuned to pass the powerful wards encircling various parts of the building, would only see these empty rooms. While the London house was situated on only a single ley line—as opposed to the five that intersected at Caventhorne—the power was sufficient to maintain the potent illusions keeping the unwary away from the hidden areas.

  Stone didn’t have to worry about any of this. Shortly after he’d finished his apprenticeship and had begun collaborating on magical research with Desmond during his free time while attending University, the older mage had retuned his wards to allow Stone full access to the hidden and restricted areas of both the London house and Caventhorne. The facilities here were much more abbreviated than they were at Caventhorne, but the place still contained a fully stocked magical lab, a sizeable ritual area, and, hidden behind yet another layer of wards, a teleportation portal.

  Stone mounted the stairway to the second floor and took a left down what looked like an unused hallway. Several doors lined the hallway, but Stone passed them all without opening any, heading instead to what appeared to be a dead end featuring fine, dark-wood paneling, an oil painting of a pastoral scene that probably belonged in a museum, and a marble table with a bust of some old man Stone had never identified.

  He put his hand on the old man’s head and muttered a few words, infusing his hand with magic. The wall swung aside, revealing an extension to the same hallway. Stone slipped through and the wall swung shut behind him with a faint click.

  Once inside, it took him only a few minutes to determine that Desmond wasn’t here. He checked the lab, the library, the storage rooms where magical components were kept, Desmond’s office, the ritual area, and even the closets, calling Desmond’s name as he went. He switched to magical sight and did a second search, watching for his old master’s brilliant aura in case he was unconscious somewhere. He didn’t think that was the case, though—Desmond wasn’t the sort to trip and hit his head, and despite his age Stone had never seen him in anything but vigorous good health. No, if anything had gone wrong it likely would be related to something magical he’d been attempting, and if that were the case he’d probably be in the ritual area, the lab, the library, or the office. Even for someone of Desmond’s significant power level, it was never wise to take magic for granted, and Desmond knew it as well as anyone. Gods knew he’d spent enough effort trying to pound it into Stone’s thick skull during his apprenticeship.

  Right, then. If Desmond wasn’t here in London, that meant he’d probably taken the portal—either up to Caventhorne, just as Imogen had said—or somewhere else.

  Stone headed down another hallway and passed through a locked door and an illusionary wall with the familiar ease of walking through his own home, and in a moment stood before another shifting, glowing magical portal similar to the one he’d used to travel here from A Passage to India.

  He paused a moment, examining the room. It looked the same as it always had: a mostly featureless space around fifteen feet square, with the portal in the center.

  He’d often wondered—but of course never made any effort to find out—just how wealthy William Desmond was. Magical teleportation portals were prohibitively expensive to construct—despite the rare materials needed to make them function and the magical knowledge required to plan and build them in the first place, they sometimes simply fizzled out and failed to thrive. That meant as far as Stone was aware, nobody had even tried building a new one in the last fifteen years or so. Making it even worse, the specialized knowledge required to do it was slowly being lost. Portal science was a difficult, complex, and dangerous corner of magic that required a lot of study and a certain mindset, and most modern-day mages didn’t have the combination of mental horsepower and willingness to devote the level of focus it required. Stone himself was one of only a handful of mages he was aware of who still possessed both the knowledge and the ability, and even he feared he might be losing his touch due to lack of practice.

  The upshot of all that was that the vast majority of existing portals, the network that the world’s mages used to move quickly over great distances, were co-operatively maintained—a sort of “public transportation system” for mages. Those who used a particular portal regularly contributed to its upkeep, making sure it remained correctly calibrated and its location remained accessible to all those who needed to use it. Stone himself, for example, donated to a fund that ensured A Passage to India could remain open indefinitely even without a single customer, and that Marta Bellwood could maintain a comfortable lifestyle. It was much easier than trying to find a new custodian for the portal. Fortunately, the public ones didn’t require much upkeep; since they had to be constructed on a ley line, they remained powered indefinitely, so aside from occasional adjustments, they mostly operated without intervention.

  To have a private portal, one for personal use and not connected to the network of public ones, almost always meant one of two things (or possibly both): either you came from a very old magical family, or you were very wealthy. Stone’s, for example, had been constructed in his great-grandfather’s day, shortly after the ability to travel via the Overworld was discovered. Back then, the materials required to build them had been neither as rare nor as expensive as they were now, and the three ley lines intersecting at his home had made the process less difficult than it might have been.

  He knew of a couple other private portals in Europe, and none in the United States (though he suspected Stefan Kolinsky might be concealing one). But aside from Desmond, he knew of no one else who had two of them. Desmond had constructed them both himself, no doubt at great expense, many years before Stone had begun his apprenticeship. Some might consider them a bit of an embarrassment of riches, but he’d never argued the convenience of being able to pop back and forth between London and Caventhorne in a few seconds’ time.

  Stone focused on the portal, shifting to magical sight and reaching out to it to determine where it was pointed. He knew from experience that Desmond didn’t often clear the calibration between the two portals if he was only using them to commute between his two homes, as opposed to somewhere e
lse. Calibrating a portal wasn’t difficult, but it did take a few minutes, so there was no point in doing it every time he wanted to travel back and forth. As long as the way wasn’t open for some other traveler to come through from another location, there was no danger. If anybody unauthorized managed to pop into one of Desmond’s private spaces, the wards would immobilize them until he could deal with them.

  It didn’t take Stone long to figure out that the portal was indeed pointed at Caventhorne. Good—that probably meant Desmond was there, at least. He hoped that was true, anyway.

  He took a deep breath and stepped through the portal.

  The journey was without incident and took only a few seconds, as opposed to the five minutes or so required to travel between California and England. Stone had barely taken a glance around the familiar fog-shrouded tunnel before he was stepping through the glowing exit and into the portal room at Caventhorne. The light was off.

  He paused a moment to make sure nothing was odd about the wards, then hurried out of the room without switching the light on. He didn’t need to—he’d walked these familiar halls enough times that he could do it in his sleep.

  “Desmond?” he called. “It’s Stone—are you here?”

  No answer.

  The hidden area at Caventhorne occupied most of the ground floor and a significant section of the basement in the house’s vast east wing. The mansion itself was almost twice as large as Stone’s rambling old place in Surrey, and the part devoted to magic was correspondingly larger. For instance, Desmond’s magical library, protected behind another layer of wards, was at least three times as large as Stone’s, and larger even than the one Eddie Monkton maintained for general research in London.

  Stone checked the entire room, moving quickly among the stacks, peering down each of the neat rows of antique wooden shelves and calling out again, but Desmond was nowhere to be found there.

  The ritual area in the basement was protected by not only wards, but physical insulation in the form of the living rock that surrounded it. Nothing summoned in there would get out unless it was powerful enough to take out the wards—in which case Desmond would have bigger problems.

  But no, the ritual area lay quiet, dark, and unused. Stone checked with magical sight—Desmond would have no reason to conceal his activities within his own personal sanctum—but saw no evidence that any magic had been performed here in the last few hours, at least.

  Bloody hell, where was he?

  Stone hadn’t been too concerned before—despite his clockwork schedules and legendary punctuality, even someone like Desmond might, on rare occasions, encounter a situation where he might have to skip an event without letting anyone know. It happened, especially if he’d been on the track of some intriguing magical discovery and lost track of the time. Mages did that all the time when they were focused on something, and they all understood and made allowances for it.

  But now, Stone wasn’t so sure.

  He’d checked all the places in both the London house and Caventhorne where Desmond would likely be if he’d been caught up in magical research. He was sure Kerrick, Desmond’s loyal friend and manservant for as long as Stone could remember, had directed the staff to do a thorough search of the accessible areas of the house. Had Desmond left Caventhorne and gone somewhere else without telling anyone?

  If he had, there’d have to be some compelling reason for it.

  There were two more places Stone hadn’t looked yet that weren’t accessible to anyone but Desmond and himself. One was a small office, and the other was the house’s second ritual area, the one he used for training his apprentices.

  To get to the latter, Stone would have to exit this part of the restricted area and cross to the other side of the house, though, so he headed down another hallway to check the office first.

  That’s odd, he thought as he approached it. The door was closed as he expected it to be, but a faint light shone from beneath the door.

  Had Desmond simply forgotten to turn it off? That seemed unlikely—the man was meticulous in his habits. But if he wasn’t here, then was it possible someone else had managed to find their way through the wards?

  Unconsciously, Stone slowed his pace and started to creep down the hallway, but realized after a few steps that it was pointless: if an intruder lurked behind the door, he or she (or it) would certainly have heard him calling out Desmond’s name. And they’d probably have turned the light off to avoid discovery. He walked faster until he stood in front of the heavy wooden door.

  “Desmond?” he called, knocking. “Are you in there?”

  No answer.

  He tried the knob; the door was unlocked. It swung open on silent hinges.

  Stone stopped, his body tensing at the sight that appeared before him.

  “Oh, dear gods…” he muttered. “No...”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  A lot of fast thoughts went through Stone’s head in the next few seconds. Time slowed to a crawl as he dashed across the room and threw himself down next to the prone figure on the floor, shifting to magical sight and looking for a sign—any sign, no matter how faint—that William Desmond’s life force had not departed.

  There was no sign. The body lay unmoving and silent, the familiar brilliant gold-and-blue aura stilled.

  “No, no, no…” Stone moaned. “Desmond…no…” He clenched his fists, a chill passing through his body and hot tears pricking at his eyes. For a moment, he could do nothing but sit there, staring in shock at the mortal remains of what had once been his master.

  It appeared Desmond had been involved in some kind of research. The light on his desk was on, with several books stacked or open across its surface. A notebook bound in leather lay open with a fine fountain pen across it. Stone couldn’t read the notes from where he was seated, but there would be time for that—he wasn’t ready to get up yet.

  Desmond lay sprawled on his back on the floor near the chair. Stone was no forensic investigator, but from the look of things, he had fallen from the chair and landed here. He was dressed in a white shirt, dark trousers, and leather slip-on shoes—about as informal as he ever got even when relaxing in his own home. His hair was neatly combed. A cursory glance without moving the body didn’t reveal any obvious causes of death: no one had shot him, stabbed him, zapped him with magic, or strangled him. In fact, as far as Stone’s untrained eye could tell, he looked very much like a man who’d suffered some kind of sudden health-related event—a heart attack, perhaps, or a stroke—while in the middle of a project.

  Stone let his breath out, his thoughts still moving fast. At this point, any sense of overwhelming grief at the sudden loss of his beloved mentor—a man he’d expected to be around for at least another fifty years—had not yet taken hold. He felt only an odd combination of numbness at the circumstances mixed with a heart-thudding rush of adrenaline as the implications began to sink in.

  The first and most immediate of them was that Desmond couldn’t be found here.

  It was a callous thought, but a necessary one. In the case of any unattended death, the authorities would have to be involved. Desmond was far too public a figure for his body to simply disappear—it would cast too much suspicion on those close to him, including Imogen, Kerrick, and the rest of the house’s staff. But the thought of a bunch of mundane cops, investigators, and other official personnel tromping through Desmond’s private magical sanctum—an area that could potentially harbor dangers to the uninitiated, not to mention a lot of things that would be difficult to explain—wasn’t one Stone wanted to contemplate. As it was right now, they wouldn’t even be able to get through the wards.

  He clenched his fists again. He didn’t want to think about this kind of thing, as he knelt here next to his old master’s body, staring down at the strong, resolute features that had gone slack now in death. He didn’t want to have to handle logistical details. He didn’t want to do anythin
g but remain here and let his grief—added to what he’d barely had time to process from the loss of Mortenson less than a month ago—take him over.

  Above all, he didn’t want to have to tell Imogen.

  But that was exactly what he would have to do—and soon. The longer they waited, the harder it would be to move Desmond’s body to a place where it could be found without pointing suspicion at the family or the staff or requiring access to parts of the house it would be best if no one else saw.

  Feeling suddenly very old, he pulled himself to his feet and took another look around the room. Nothing else appeared to have been disturbed; the scene looked exactly as it should have if Desmond had merely succumbed to a heart attack or stroke while bent over his work. He closed his eyes, took a few centering breaths, and switched back to magical sight, this time examining the room as a whole rather than focusing on Desmond’s body.

  As he expected, the room lit up with magical traces. Many of the books on the shelves lining one wall were magical in nature, as were all of those on the desk itself. Several items on the shelves and a couple small tables showed traces of faint, benign magic, but none of them looked in any way out of place or out of the ordinary. Everything appeared exactly as Stone had predicted. Certainly no sign of any other presences in the room, though that didn’t necessarily mean anything: anyone powerful enough to breach Desmond’s wards and get to him without alerting him would have the ability to hide their own traces. In this case, though, Stone suspected that the simpler and more obvious answer was more likely to be correct: Desmond had died of natural causes. It did happen, even to mages.