“Yes—no! Luna, don’t even think about it!”
Luna’s expression didn’t change; she’d obviously expected my reaction. “Those stories are just to stop people trying it, aren’t they?” Martin said confidently. “They don’t want anyone else getting something this good.”
I looked at Martin in disbelief.
“I want to try it,” Luna said quietly. “If there’s any chance.”
I took a deep breath. “I want to ask you something,” I said once my voice was steady. “You’re hoping if you use it in the right way, the monkey’s paw will give you what you want, right?”
“Yeah,” Martin said. Luna nodded.
“What does it get out of it?”
Both of them stared at me. “What do you mean?” Martin asked.
“It’s what it’s made to do, isn’t it?” Luna said.
“If it were that easy, everybody would be using these things.”
“Unless they didn’t know how to use it right,” Martin pointed out. “People are smarter now.”
I restrained the urge to hit Martin over the head. “Look,” I said. “You don’t need my help to use the monkey’s paw. It wants to be used. Not using it is what’s hard.”
Luna and Martin looked back at me, and I knew I hadn’t convinced them. “I know it’s dangerous,” Luna said at last. “But it’s the best chance I’ve got.”
And that was that. There was some desultory conversation between me and Luna, but Martin’s presence put a damper on it. “I’ve got some new work,” I told Luna. “We’re going to do some investigating. Want to come?”
“When?”
“About an hour. Same place as Friday. I could use some help.”
Luna hesitated. “…I can’t.”
“You can’t?”
“Martin and I were going to do some more research.” Luna looked awkward. “Sorry.”
I looked at Luna. She shifted uncomfortably. “You’ve been asking to come on these jobs for months.”
“It’s not that,” Luna said. “It’s just …” She looked at Martin.
“Yeah, you’re right.” Martin glanced at his watch. “We better go.”
I looked between Luna and Martin. Luna avoided my eyes. “Okay, then,” I said at last.
“So yeah, great talking,” Martin said cheerfully, getting up. “Sorry again about the whole Saturday thing. Really appreciate you being so big about it.”
I didn’t answer, looking at Luna. “See you later,” she said at last, and walked to the door. Martin held it open. As the door swung closed I saw him put his arm around her again. And then they were gone.
I sat there for a long time, staring out the window. There was an odd feeling inside me. It had been a long time since I’d felt it, and it took me a while to remember what it was. It was the feeling you get when a relationship that’s been fraying finally breaks.
What do you call an apprentice who doesn’t train and doesn’t join their master on jobs?
You don’t call them an apprentice at all.
I started to get angry. I’d known Luna for more than a year. In all that time I’d helped her whenever I could and hadn’t asked for much in return. And now she was disappearing. I got up and started pacing up and down.
I might have kept doing that a long time, getting more and more pissed off, but a knock snapped me out of it. The help I’d been waiting for had arrived. I took a deep breath, cleared my head, and opened the door.
The boy standing on the doorstep was about average height, with glasses, untidy black hair, and scruffy clothes. He looked like a research assistant and the hand he stuck out was ink-stained. “Hey, Alex,” he said with a grin. “Need some help?”
I found myself smiling back. “Hey Sonder.” I stepped out into the street. “I’ll tell you the story on the way.”
chapter 6
We took the Tube to South London, changing at Bank. I’ve had an aversion to taxis ever since an incident with a fire mage five months back—it’s a lot harder to ambush someone underground. The noise of the train is also handy when you don’t want to be overheard.
I first met Sonder during the business with the fateweaver (the same day Cinder blew that taxi out from underneath me, in fact). Back then he was on probation, having just completed his journeyman tests. Although he was working for the Council, I found myself liking him, and to my surprise the feeling turned out to be mutual. After everything settled down he started dropping by, and kept dropping by even after my brief flurry of publicity faded. He’d helped me out several times since, usually without asking for any particular reward.
For that reason, I made sure he knew about the possible dangers on this one. “So it’s Cinder and Deleo?” Sonder asked.
“Cinder definitely,” I said. “Deleo almost definitely. I haven’t seen her but it’s a safe bet she’s around.”
“Any others?”
“Maybe. I’m hoping you can narrow it down.”
Sonder nodded. “I was wondering what those two were up to.”
It was a pretty calm reaction, but as I’ve learnt, there’s more to Sonder than meets the eye. He looks like a history geek (which, to be fair, he is) but he’s smart and surprisingly cool under pressure. The biggest reason I like him, though, is that he’s honest. If you ask Sonder a question, his first reaction is to tell you the truth. That’s pretty rare among mages.
“So is Luna coming?” Sonder asked.
Of course, his social skills could use some work. “No.”
“Is she meeting us there?”
“She’s not coming.”
“Why not?”
I resisted the urge to tell Sonder to stop asking. It wasn’t fair to take it out on him and he was Luna’s friend too. “She’s gotten involved with some idiot who’s taken up the monkey’s paw.” I sketched out the story in a few short sentences.
“That’s … really bad,” Sonder said. His eyebrows had climbed up beneath his hair.
“Yeah.”
“But she knows the thing’s dangerous, right? You’ve told her?”
“Yes, Sonder, I told her.”
Sonder fell silent. I could tell from his expression that he was worried. “Don’t focus on it for now,” I said. “I don’t think there’ll be anything dangerous waiting for us, but let’s not get distracted.”
Unfortunately, now that Sonder had made me start thinking about it again, I couldn’t stop. The worst part was that even though I hated it, I could kind of see Luna’s point. This was what she’d always wanted: a way to deal with her curse. My training was slow, hard, and boring. The monkey’s paw was fast, simple, and easy. It wasn’t hard to see why she’d want it.
And there was the nagging worry underneath it all. What if I was wrong? What if the monkey’s paw really was Luna’s best chance of a normal life? I didn’t like Martin, and when it came to magic he had the common sense of a gerbil, but the uncomfortable truth was that so far it was working. Maybe by luck or cleverness, he really could manage to get the monkey’s paw to do what he wanted. It didn’t make any sense that the monkey’s paw should be a meal ticket … but life doesn’t always make sense. Sometimes stuff happens that you couldn’t have expected and you just have to deal with it.
And following up on that was an even nastier thought. Luna had come to me in the first place because she needed help with her curse. If Martin and the monkey’s paw could cure that … then maybe she didn’t have any reason to stay.
The factory didn’t look any better by day. The sunlight did a little to reduce the general aura of creepiness but it also enhanced the view of the rubbish scattered around the yard and the rust on the barbed wire. The street outside was emptier than any healthy neighbourhood should be, and the couple of people I could see seemed to be trying to avoid being noticed. “There’s nobody inside, right?” Sonder asked.
I did a scan, taking my time to do it thoroughly. In the futures before me, Sonder and I explored every room of the factory, branching at every tu
rn. All that greeted us was empty darkness. “We’re clear.”
The Council search team hadn’t bothered to lock the place behind them, which made it much simpler to get in this time. The midday sunlight faded into gloom before we’d gone five steps and the sounds from outside died almost as quickly. The walls seemed soundproof. “This place is really creepy,” Sonder said under his breath, clicking on a torch.
I nodded. There really is such a thing as a good or bad aura when it comes to places, and the factory had a bad one—dark, rotting, and cold. It wouldn’t do any harm on a visit but you wouldn’t want to live here.
The journey into the factory was uneventful, beyond Sonder tripping a few times. “This is it,” I told Sonder as the corridor opened out into the factory floor. There was still a space where the barghest’s body had been, but not much else.
Sonder nodded. His eyes had that abstracted look that I knew meant he was concentrating. He pushed his glasses up as he looked around. “What am I looking for?”
“The battle,” I said. “It—”
“Found it. Eighty-four hours ago … no, eighty-five. Thursday midnight.”
Sonder’s a time mage. It’s one of the most difficult of all types of magic to learn; while elemental mages learn their craft in months or years, mastering time magic takes decades. Sonder doesn’t know many tricks yet, but what he does, he does very well. “I need to know what happened here,” I said. “Details of the battle, lead-up, conversations—anything you can find.”
Sonder nodded. He still had that absent look and I knew he was seeing the past, not the present. He took a notebook from his pocket and began circling the room, pencil in hand, while I watched out of curiosity. I always find it interesting to see the way Sonder does things; the types of magic we use are so similar and yet so different. Then I shook it off and got back to work. Sonder was pretty much oblivious while he was doing this, which meant it was my job to watch out for him. Scanning ahead, I saw that nothing much was going to happen while we were in the room. Sonder would finish, we’d head out, and—
Fire, pain, darkness. My reflexes took over and I forced the vision away and I was back in the present again, staring at the blackened walls. What the hell? We’d been walking down the corridor by which we’d come in, then …
I looked again and understood. A bomb. Someone had booby-trapped our way out. In fact, they were doing it right now. There was another assassin, here in the factory, fewer than eighty feet away, and he was trying to kill us.
I snapped.
“Hey, Sonder,” I said, not taking my eyes off the corridor. “Need to take care of something. Back in five.”
Sonder didn’t answer. I snapped off my torch and walked into the darkness.
The man was dressed in dark clothes and he was crouched halfway up the corridor. He’d placed his torch on a nearby box where it illuminated a splash of the hallway. In the white light, I could see a backpack leaning against the wall and a gun resting on the floor where it could be quickly snatched up. He wore a knitted cap.
The land mine was already almost hidden. The man had tucked it behind a heating pipe and he was busy covering it with pieces of rubbish. It looked like a metal cylinder about the size and shape of a coffee can. Looking into the future, I could see that when it was tripped, it would hurl a bomb into the air to burst at about waist height. The explosion would throw a spray of metal balls in all directions, ricocheting off the walls and turning the corridor into a death zone.
I stood quietly in the shadows at the end of the corridor, watching as the man finished setting the mine. He’d already placed the trigger mechanism. I didn’t know whether it was a trip wire or some sort of beam but I knew that once he armed the mine, anything going down the corridor at a certain height would set it off.
I’m not all that proud of what I did next. All I have to say in my defence is that I had had enough. It was the fourth attack in two days and I was sick of it.
The man twisted the switch to arm the mine and there was a click. I picked up a length of wood, then stepped out and threw it down the corridor.
It took the stick just over one second to complete its flight. It took the man a quarter second to catch the movement, a half second more to snatch up his gun and see what was happening. And by the time he realised that the stick was on course to fly through the trigger area of the mine—the same mine he was next to—it was far too late.
Sonder was looking in my direction as I walked back into the room. “What was that?”
“What was what?”
“I thought I heard a bang.”
“Rats.”
“And something that sounded like a scream?”
“Big rats.”
Sonder looked at me. “Sonder, trust me,” I said. “You don’t want to know.” Violent death is a long way outside Sonder’s comfort zone. The same does not apply to me, which is not really a good thing. “We should go.”
Sonder’s not great at taking hints but he got the message. The two of us took the back way out, my divination magic picking the way through the obstacles. I didn’t know if the man I’d just killed had a partner and I didn’t plan on sticking around to find out. We negotiated our way through the council estate, and ten minutes saw us out in the sunlight again, on the main road.
“So how much did you find?” I asked once I was satisfied no one was going to be coming after us.
“A lot,” Sonder said, the distraction forgotten. “Want to know about the Dark mages first, or the ones fighting them?”
“The Dark mages.”
“Well, it was Cinder,” Sonder said as we turned onto another main road, heading towards a different Tube station. “And Deleo, just like you said. They hid on that gantry, waited for the barghest to show up, then stunned it.”
“Was there anyone else?”
“Just them.”
That was a relief. Cinder and Deleo were bad enough, and I still had nightmares about the last guy they’d partnered with. “It was over really fast,” Sonder said. “Then they went down and started working on the barghest.”
“What were they doing?”
Sonder frowned. “I don’t know. Some sort of ritual. They had a couple of focuses I’ve never seen before: like sort of dark purple metal spikes. But it took a long time. They kept stopping and starting.”
“Timing requirements?”
Sonder shook his head. “I don’t think so. I think they were … working it out as they went along? Like they weren’t really sure what they were doing.”
I hesitated. Something in that seemed off but I wasn’t sure exactly what.
“That was when the others showed up,” Sonder continued. “There was one mage and eight auxiliaries. I think the mage tried to talk to them. At least he said something, but Cinder and Deleo attacked him on sight. He was under a shroud so I couldn’t see much.”
“Huh,” I said. Shrouds are highly specialised items designed to block surveillance magic, rare and expensive. “So I guess you couldn’t see who it was.”
“Actually, I did,” Sonder said. I looked at him in surprise, and he shrugged. “It wasn’t that good a shroud.”
Sometimes I think Sonder doesn’t realise how talented he is. “Belthas?”
“Belthas. I just got bits and pieces from there. The auxiliaries opened fire and so did Belthas, and they drove Cinder back. Cinder dropped one of those focuses—the purple things—and one of the men ran to grab it but Deleo disintegrated him.” Sonder shivered slightly. “Literally. There was nothing left but dust. Cinder grabbed the focus and they fell back to the east doorway. Deleo held them off while Cinder opened a gate, and they got out.”
I frowned. “Wait. You mean Belthas was the only other mage?”
Sonder nodded. “And he still forced them back. He’s an ice mage and he’s really good. I think he would have been a match for them on his own.”
I remembered how calm Belthas had been at the prospect of facing the Dark cabal. If he was really that
good, he had little to fear from anything short of an entire Dark kill team. It gave me another thing to think over as we turned into the station.
I spent the trip back quizzing Sonder about what else he’d learnt. There were no revelations but a few useful titbits. According to Sonder, the barghest had died either before the fight had started, or as a result of Cinder and Deleo getting interrupted midritual. Either way it was clear the ritual hadn’t been a success: the barghest might have had its magic drained, but neither Cinder or Deleo had profited from it. While that was probably a good thing, what I really wanted was some way to track them down. “You’re sure they didn’t gate in?” I asked for the second time.
“I’m sure,” Sonder said. “They walked in the same way we did.” He hesitated. “I got a look at their exit gate. I might be able to track it …”
I shook my head. “It’ll be a staging point.” Smart mages never gate directly home; there’s too much risk of being followed. Instead they jump to another location, usually somewhere desolate and empty, walk a short distance, then do the same thing again, maybe two or three times if they’re being particularly careful. Experienced mages keep libraries of literally hundreds of staging points and it’s all but impossible to track them. “Anything else about them?”
Sonder held up his notebook. “I think I found out Cinder’s phone number. Would that help?”
I couldn’t help smiling. “Probably not.”
We’d come out of the Underground at Euston and were talking amidst the square concrete pillars of the bus station. The station was busy with the afternoon rush, people of all looks and ages crossing the plaza. “Thanks for coming today,” I said. “Anything I can help out with?”
Sonder hesitated. “What are you going to do about Luna?”
I sighed, my brief good mood fading. The attack at the factory hadn’t been fun but it was the kind of thing I knew how to deal with. This wasn’t. “I don’t know.”
“But you’re not going to leave her with this guy, right?”
“What am I supposed to do, Sonder?” There was an edge in my voice; Sonder was hitting too close to what I was thinking myself. “She wants this. If I push her, she’ll just say no and I can’t make her.”
Alex Verus Novels, Books 1-4 (9780698175952) Page 41
