I cast a spell to soften my footfalls so I could move without making a sound. My memory of the room guided me. The person stopped in front of the window and opened it. Whoever it was stood only feet from my location—much too risky. I turned back and circled around to watch from a greater distance. No moonlight filtered through the window, and the darkness of the room was absolute. I couldn’t make out whether the person was a man or woman.
Without a word, a wand lifted to the window. It lit with magic as it shot off sparks. The filament glowed a dark green. Green. Not the pink of Thaddeus’s wand. Little bursts of light went into the air in different colors and rhythms. It seemed to be in a pattern like Morse code. What did it mean? The wand disengaged, and the mage stood still.
After a few minutes during which I assumed he received a return message, the wand relit and sent a reply. The mage stood at the window for a minute longer then turned and left. I never got a clear look at who it was, but I didn’t want to risk the person returning and finding me, so I ported back to my room.
Astonishment filled me. I wasn’t any closer to knowing who the mole was, but I knew who it wasn’t. A dark green wand. That meant Thaddeus and Calista were both innocent. Thaddeus’s wand was the same pink color as Lilibet’s eyes, and Calista didn’t use a wand. Her talisman was a bracelet. This whole time I could’ve trusted them, should’ve trusted them if for no other reason than because Millhook said so, and I trusted him. Too late for that now. I had to figure out what message the traitor had sent. That would require research.
Relief flooded me at knowing it wasn’t Calista or Thaddeus, but I still couldn’t tell them anything. If I told him about tonight, I’d have to reveal that I was a pidge. How else would I have gotten into section five? I may be loyal to the Council and the CCS, but that didn’t make them loyal to me. I was a pidge, an outsider who had lied. The fact that Calista and Thaddeus were stalwart members of the CCS meant they’d have to look upon me with suspicion, even ostracize me as the rest of mage society would.
If I could just decipher the message, I felt sure I could uncover who the mole was. Then, perhaps with that valuable intelligence, my sins could be overlooked.
Twenty-Four
Books lay scattered on the table in front of me. I’d been at this for hours. Section three of the library was the section most often used by the CCS. There were loads of volumes on code breaking and ciphers. As a field agent, I’d been taught the basics about code, just enough for me to eavesdrop on cloaked conversations, but not enough to decipher complex codes. That’s what analysts were for.
I contemplated giving the code to Priya and having her decipher it if she could, but knowing nothing about the contents of the message, I couldn’t risk it. Anyways, Priya had her hands full assisting Darian with his work in the field. That’s what I should’ve been doing, but this was more pressing. Besides, I had been trained for the field, not to be an analyst. There was only so much help I could offer in a support position at base.
Darian had found a forest sprite who created the portal for the Directorate. Given enough gold, she had been persuaded to send Darian to the same place she had sent the Directorate operatives. When Darian had traveled there, it was the middle of the rain forest, but he had found teleportation rings hidden by some brush. Priya was working to determine where those rings led. I wouldn’t be much help there.
On Earth, I knew cryptographers went through years and years of specialized training, usually after getting a degree in something like mathematics. That couldn’t be further from my experience as a poli-sci major. The more I read in section three, the more convinced I became that I wouldn’t find any answers here. For starters, it would be foolish for the mole to use a code that the CCS was familiar with. While no one supposedly knew of the mole’s presence, it would’ve been somewhat easy for the message to be seen. As it was, it appeared as nothing more than a mage, probably a child, trying to make pretty designs with a wand.
My head bobbed forward off my hand, and I jerked awake. A lovely little string of saliva marked the book I’d been reading. I hadn’t even realized I was dozing off. It might do me good to take a short nap. I put the books away and headed to my room.
When I saw what waited for me on my bed, all thoughts of sleep fled. Once the door closed, leaving my ever-faithful guard outside, Millhook hopped up and greeted me.
“It’s about time. I’ve been stuck in here waiting for you. I didn’t want anyone else to know I’m here. I promised him I’d get back as soon as possible.”
“Alex? Is he expecting a reply that quickly?” I held out my hand for the letter Millhook was here to deliver.
“Oh, I don’t have a letter for you. No, no, no, way too much information to write it all down, and we didn’t have the time or patience.”
“What are you talking about?” This was supposed to be simple.
“I’m talking about the genius work we’ve been doing on your behalf. It’s quite impressive actually. As soon as I showed your letter to Alex, we got to work figuring out what that clue meant. Meglana sure was a tricky woman. Lucky for us, we have a friend with access to what’s called interwebs…spiderwebs…intranets…something anyway.”
“Wait a minute, what?”
“Nicole, that friend of yours. She was mighty helpful. It came in handy that we didn’t erase her memory like we had planned. So she knew exactly who I and Alex were as soon as we showed up at her door. She was quite eager to help, even if she was a little sad that you weren’t there with us. Gotta say, it did feel a bit strained without you there. Maybe you should leave this CCS gig and we could form a little group of our own, take on cases, make a pile of gold.”
I fought to keep the fury from my face. They had only been trying to help, but I did not want Nicole involved in all of this. I already felt bad enough about leaving things the way I had with her. She deserved better. She deserved to hear from me and not have an imp and a panther shifter randomly show up in her life endangering her.
“I didn’t tell you to go to Nicole. What is it with you two? Is Alex incapable of even pretending he has a human side?”
“We needed access to those intranets. I don’t understand why you call them nets unless it’s ’cause they catch information? That must be it.”
“You can get on the Internet in any public library.”
“No, I’m pretty sure you gotta have a special key or something. Anyway, I don’t know why you’re so upset. Nicole was happy to see us. Most people are happy to see me, ray of sunshine that I am. With her help, we narrowed in on this place called Inchnadamph in Scotland.”
Inchnadamph he could get but not Internet. Genius. “All right, is that supposed to mean something to me?”
“Got some real interesting caves there. Meglana used one of them.”
My heart leapt. It couldn’t be true. That was much too easy. “So you have the talisman?”
“Do I look like I have the talisman? No, if it was ever there, it was gone before we arrived. A mage had been there before us, I could feel traces of their magic. We don’t know that the talisman was there or if it was just another clue. You know how Meglana was. Why use one clue when you could draw it out to six?”
“So whoever was there was gone by the time you got there? There were no altercations or anything?”
“No, no, just some surprised tourists who I had to wipe. Made them think I was a leprechaun. Then Nicole pointed out that leprechauns are Irish not Scottish, but I don’t think they knew the difference. Anyways, they seemed happy enough when we left.”
“Millhook, I couldn’t care less about the tourists.”
“Ah, well I was able to get an imprint of the mage’s magic. I came to deliver it to you, figuring you’d be able to get more use out of it than we would.” Millhook handed me what appeared to be a clay tablet. When I touched it, I could feel something, like the hum of magic. “Maybe you can figure out who it is.”
“Thanks.” An imprint was a physical manifestation of a
mage’s magical signature. I could try to match it to imprints the CCS had on file.
“Now, if there’s nothing else you need, I’ll be on my way. Alex and Nicole are waiting, and I don’t want to let them get too far along without me.”
It was pointless to try to convince him to leave Nicole out of it. Millhook had taken a liking to her, and it’d be hard to convince him to wipe the memory of a friend. As long as she had her memory, she’d insist on helping.
But I had another problem. “Wait, there is something else. I observed a mage sending a message in code. I was wondering if you knew anything about code breaking.”
“What kind of code? What did it look like?”
I wrote it down on a piece of paper for him. His face didn’t register any recognition when he saw it.
“It’s nothing I’ve seen before. You think this is the mole?”
“Yeah, if I can figure out what message was sent, I might be able to determine who it was. I couldn’t get a good look at the person. All I saw was their wand color.”
“Ah, a wand color you say. So I take it then that the mole isn’t Calista?” Millhook’s smug look was insufferable.
I sighed. “No, it’s not Calista, and it’s not Thaddeus either. The wand was a dark green color. Do you know who that would belong to?”
“No, I don’t pay attention to stuff like that. I only know Calista uses a bracelet as her talisman ’cause I deal most with her. Can’t you access that kind of information?”
“No. There’s a registry, but that will only tell me if a mage has a wand or talisman and a general description of the talisman. Why would we care what color a person’s wand is who works in the Citadel?”
“Well, in case someone who works in the Citadel is a mole who’s sending a message and you can’t see them but can see their wand, obviously.”
“Obviously.” I matched Millhook’s nod.
“You may want to look into elven codes. They used to shoot magic into the air to communicate with each other when they emerged from their caves at night. Might be something there.”
“Thanks, Millhook.”
“All righty then. I’ll be on my way.”
I put a hand on his arm to stop him. “Wait, tell Alex thanks. I appreciate it. And the same to Nicole. Though you two shouldn’t have involved her in this.”
“Nah, she’s having fun.”
“Fun tends to turn into near-death experiences rather quickly around us.”
“True, ‘near-death’ being the operative phrase. So far none of our escapades have turned into ‘death’ experiences, so we have that going for us.”
If I were in a different mood, I would’ve found that funny. As it was, I glared and actually growled a little.
“Now, now, no need to go all Furball on me. I will convey both your gratitude and your seriousness. I’ll let you know when we find more.” He made a portal and was gone.
My little favor had turned into a dangerous expedition for the people closest to me. This was exactly why I hadn’t wanted to tell them.
Twenty-Five
Once my anger at having included Nicole and endangering the others in this mission had subsided, I ate a quick meal and got back to work. The library had plenty of books on elves, but I couldn’t find anything that shed much light on any codes they may have used. The only information I could find was that they did send messages using light at night.
That was not at all helpful.
There had been a conflict ages ago that resulted in the elves retreating below ground. Now elves spent the daylight hours underground in their caverns and would emerge at night to engage in communion with the moons, whatever the hell that meant. During their nightly excursions, they could use a code to communicate with each other, but surely any code they used couldn’t be kept secret for long. Perhaps the code was used during the conflict, but I couldn’t find anything about that time period. Everything covered the time since their retreat.
So I showed up to work the next day frustrated and needing to find out something concrete. In the crypt with Kellan, I did my own research while he continued to go through reports from the Cushing Sea.
The nearest station the CCS had to Scotland was the London office. I scoured the records for anything that could be of use and came up empty-handed. Of course. No activity had been detected in the area, but I doubted they were looking at such a remote area in Scotland, especially when there was no specific reason to.
The only hit I could find on Scotland was a report about some fae impersonating vampires or something there. The station in London had gathered quite a bit of intelligence on the vampires who liked to call Europe home, especially their leader, a female named Amaia. Ever since Casper had confirmed the existence of vampires, the idea of them had fascinated and horrified me.
Searching through the London records, the only other interesting tidbit was that they had their eyes on a magic shop. A mage owned it and they wondered if it was a front for Directorate operations, but so far that investigation had yielded nothing. From all appearances, it was simply a mage who got a kick out of humans’ fascination with magic. Luckily for me, we had his imprint on file.
“Hey, Kellan, can you help me with something?” Ever since my apology, he had insisted things were fine between us, but they weren’t the same, not like they were before. He did his duty as my shadow, but the easy friendship that had developed between us had dissipated. I didn’t know if it would ever return.
Kellan looked up from his work. “What do you need?”
“How do I compare two imprints? I kind of dozed during that part of training.”
“First, you need something to put the imprint on. I assume you have an imprint already?”
I pulled the clay tablet from my pocket. “This is what I have. I want to compare it to an imprint we have on file.”
Kellan narrowed his eyes for a second, clearly wondering where I’d gotten this imprint from and what it was about but choosing not to make an issue of it, whether from indifference or trust in me, I couldn’t tell. “Lay that on the table. Now use your orb to access the imprint you want to compare it to. Once you have it, you’ll perform a transcription spell to transcribe it onto whatever material you have. It’s easiest if the materials you’re comparing are similar, and since this appears to be made of clay, you might want to make a clay tablet to compare it to.”
“Thanks.” That all sounded easy enough. I pulled up the imprint of the mage who owned the magic shop. After I created a clay tablet in my hand, I transcribed his imprint onto it. The imprints didn’t look like much, just a bunch of squiggly lines. Under a microscope, I think they would’ve looked different from each other, but the differences weren’t noticeable to the naked eye. Instead, they were felt. I placed one hand over each tablet and immediately jerked them away. I had worried it would be difficult to compare them, but they were so different that I doubted a single line was similar.
“Not what you were looking for?” Kellan asked.
“Nope, I thought I had a lead there for a minute.”
“Don’t worry. Keep at it. Remember, the majority of this job is rooting out bad leads. We fail a whole lot more than we succeed.”
“Was that supposed to be inspirational?”
Kellan laughed and I couldn’t help joining in. “Yeah, I guess it was. If I ever leave the CCS, I could always print that up on a poster and sell them on Earth. Humans are crazy for that shit.”
This threw me into a new fit of laughter. “Yes, they are.” It felt good to be laughing with him again. Perhaps someday he and I would get back to our old friendship. Though I expected it would get worse again before it got better. I had a lot of secrets I was keeping, secrets that would eventually come to light. I wouldn’t know the status of our friendship until after the fallout from those secrets settled.
“Is there any way for me to automatically check this imprint against all the ones we have on file?”
“You’d need an analyst. They’re t
he only ones with access to do something like that.”
Priya was in the pit, watching a live feed of Darian in the field. Even though the details of our mission were kept under wraps, he still appeared on the globe, same as the rest of the agents in the field. Priya sat at a workstation keeping one eye on the orb that gave her a point of view image of where Darian was and one on the globe in the middle of the room.
Over her shoulder, I made sure Darian appeared out of harm’s way before interrupting. “Priya, do you have some time? I could use your help on something.”
“Just a minute,” she answered without taking her eyes off the orbs. Kellan waited with me, my faithful shadow. It seemed like such a waste of resources to have him follow me around when he could be working.
“All right, what can I do for you?” Priya turned around to face us.
“I have an imprint I'd like you to check against all known imprints we have on file.”
“That will make all our imprints inaccessible to any other agent until my search is complete. What’s it for?”
“I think it may give us a lead to which Directorate operatives have been messing around near the Vortex.”
“Where did it come from?” Priya asked. Obviously Kellan trusted me more than I gave him credit for. He hadn’t voiced that very reasonable question.
“I have a source, a friend who’s a fae. I asked him to do some digging, and he came back with this. I don’t know, he probably cheated me out of my gold, but I think it’s at least worth a check.”
Priya nodded, admiration in her eyes. “Sure, let’s give it a go. It’ll take some time.”
Even with magic, things didn’t happen instantly. I looked at the globe, searching for activity around Scotland and didn’t find any. An operative for the London office was keeping the magic shop under surveillance. There was also a mage tailing some vampires. Our policy at the CCS was to not interfere with matters on Earth except to keep the Directorate from doing harm. The mission with the vampires was simply fact-finding. I thought of all the unsolved murders that happened each year, and I couldn’t help but wonder how many of them were actually vampires. Or did they have another way of feeding? A way that didn’t kill people? That would make fascinating reading when I had downtime. Ha, downtime. Did such a thing even exist?
[The Elustria Chronicles 03.0] Magic Betrayed Page 12
