The fox crept closer, revealing a red coat with splashes of white and black on its underside. A low pile of rubble hid it from the birds by the pool. It came to the edge of the rubble and froze, head down, eyes locked onto the birds in a stalking posture. I watched with interest, taking care not to move and draw attention; I’ve always liked animals, especially predators. The fox was quite still, focused on the birds, and it looked hungry. The doves didn’t seem to have noticed it yet, but there wasn’t any more cover. As soon as it took another couple of steps it’d be seen.
The fox held still and I kept a casual eye on it, my attention still taken up with scouting us a way out. It didn’t look as though anyone was searching for us just yet, but I was still worried about the possibility of some kind of magical detection. The shroud over the place looked as though it would block most standard tracer spells, but my divination still worked, which meant other techniques might too. The shroud also wouldn’t rule out more mundane methods of searching, such as just sending out scouts. I already knew those shadows could fly—if I were Sagash’s apprentices, I’d be using them for aerial recon. They probably didn’t have enough of them to cover the entire castle, but . . .
The fox crouched to spring, and I looked at it curiously. It was still the best part of forty feet from the birds—
The fox leapt, vanished. There was a scuffle and explosion of wings and the doves were airborne, flapping frantically up and away. I’d been about to turn; now I looked down in surprise. What just happened?
The fox was by the pool, its weight on one of the doves and its jaws locked tight. The bird was flapping feebly, trying to get away; the fox sank its teeth into the neck and twisted. There was a crack and the dove went still. The fox hoisted the bird up, looking quickly around, then trotted back towards where it had come, head tilted high so that the dove’s wings trailed on the grass. It covered the distance back to the archway and disappeared into the darkness. The surviving doves were still in the air, circling; the whole thing had taken less than twenty seconds. Nothing was left except a scattering of feathers by the pool.
Footsteps sounded from below and Anne appeared in the stairwell, looking past me out through the window. “Did you see that?” I said.
“The bird?” Anne asked. She was still wearing my greatcoat. “I felt it die, but . . .”
“Not the bird, the fox. Did you see it move?” I’d seen the fox jump, a short bound of a foot or two, then all of a sudden it had been coming down on the bird.
Anne frowned. “No. I think it’s the same one that was here two days ago. It was on the other side of a wall, but when I got closer it just disappeared.”
“Holy crap,” I said. “Blink fox.”
“What’s a blink fox?”
“Magic-bred species—some twentieth-century mages made them as spy familiars. They look like a red fox, but they’ve got human-level intelligence and they can do short-range teleports.”
“You mean it was looking for us?”
I shook my head. “No, it was hunting. If it was under a mage’s control it wouldn’t be that hungry . . . hmm.”
“Hmm, what?”
“I heard those two apprentices saying something about trying to catch a fox. Maybe we could strike a deal with it.”
Anne looked at me with raised eyebrows. “Seriously?”
“It’s been hiding out in this castle, probably longer than you. It’d know a lot about the place.”
“It probably belongs to those apprentices,” Anne said. “Can’t we just get out of here?”
“I guess.” I was reluctant—when I run into a new type of magical creature, my first instinct is to make friends with it, an old habit from my days as Richard’s apprentice where the magical creatures tended to be better company than the humans. But Anne was right; we were on a clock. “You said something yesterday about another way out?”
“There is, but . . . I’m not sure how useful it’s going to be.”
I made a go-ahead gesture and Anne crouched next to me. She drew one finger across the flagstones of the stone floor, tracing out lines. “These are the edges of the castle.” She seemed to have recovered from last night, at least physically—her movements were quick and her voice soft and clear again. “The outer walls are the lines of the stone, the bridge is here. Front gate.” Her finger drew back, tapped a marking a quarter of the way across. “Sagash’s keep.” She drew her finger back farther, placing it on a spot in what would be the north-centre of the castle, mirroring the keep’s position. “This is the other exit.”
I studied the map. If Anne was getting the distances right, we weren’t far away at all.
I should probably take a second here to explain some details about gate magic, because if you’re not familiar with it, it’s probably not obvious just how bad a position we were in here. Gate magic shapes portals between locations, creating a similarity between points in space so that you can step from one to the other. It can be used to travel from place to place within our world, to go from place to place within a shadow realm, or (with more difficulty) to go from our world to a shadow realm or vice versa.
Gate magic can be blocked though, and the wards over this shadow realm were designed to do exactly that. Within the central keep, they would block any use of gate magic or teleportation at all. Outside the keep, the wards wouldn’t stop you gating around the castle, but they would prevent you from using gate magic to get out of the shadow realm unless you were at one specific point (the front gate) and holding the key. It’s a fairly standard security setup—it makes it easy for the residents to travel around but hard for anyone else to enter or leave.
Unfortunately, neither Anne or I could use gate magic. We could use gate stones, but gate stones will only take you to one place, which would only be any use if we had gate stones keyed specifically to places in the castle, which we didn’t. The same did not apply to Sagash’s apprentices—it was more or less a guarantee that between them they’d have gate magic, gate stones, or (more likely) both.
What all this meant was that as long as Anne and I were in this castle, Sagash and his apprentices had a huge home-ground advantage. The only thing stopping them from gating to our position right now was that they didn’t know where we were. As soon as that changed, they could just jump right on top of us and we’d have a hell of a time getting away from them. And even if they couldn’t find us, they could just set up camp at the front gate with a bunch of shadows and wait for us to show up. Where else were we going to go?
But if there was a back door, that opened up some options. “It’s definitely an exit?”
“Back then it was. It might have changed.”
“Have you been there since?”
Anne shook her head. “I couldn’t have used it. It needs a key.”
“The same as the one for the front gate, or a different one?”
“Sagash never let me get close enough to see.”
“Probably a different one,” I muttered. Worth checking, though. “What about surveillance? Is there any way for Sagash to pick us up while we’re here?”
“He uses the shadows, mostly,” Anne said. “He’s got enough that he can turn the sky black with them, but most of the time he keeps them down in the tombs. He just relies on the fixed sensors instead.”
I looked up sharply. “Fixed sensors?”
“At the front gate. They log everything that comes in or passes through.”
“So they would have seen us both come through?” I frowned. “Why hasn’t Sagash done anything?”
Anne shrugged helplessly.
“There’s something strange going on. If Sagash was acting against us, the whole castle should have been mobilised by now.” I looked up at Anne. “I don’t think Sagash was the one behind the attack on you. I think it was just Darren and Sam, and now they’re trying to keep it secret from everyone else.”
; “But why?” Anne looked dismayed. “I’ve never even met those two!”
It was my turn to shrug. From their conversation, it had sounded as though Darren and Sam had been afraid of Sagash finding out what they’d been doing, but if Sagash really did have that sensor net, wouldn’t he have found out already? None of the explanations quite fit—there was some missing piece I hadn’t figured out. “I’m going to take a look at that back entrance,” I said. “I need you to stay still and quiet for a bit.”
I found a place to sit with my back resting against the wall, while Anne sat cross-legged opposite me and watched quietly. As soon as I was settled, I closed my eyes, looking into the future in which I went downstairs and started going east. It didn’t take long before I found the building Anne was describing, tall and rectangular and surrounded by high walls and colonnades. It looked as though it was—
The vision fragmented as the actions in Anne’s immediate futures expanded to disrupt the point earlier in the chain at which I left. I frowned, routed around the disturbance, and patiently traced my way back to the same building. A search of the ground floor discovered a circle made out of some greenish material which would show up to my magesight. Looked like a transport pattern. I looked to see what would happen if I used a gate stone within the circle . . . nothing. If I used the key focus as well? Also nothing. I wanted to try some command words, but the distance was hampering my ability to search. Maybe—
The vision fragmented again. “Could you please stop doing that?” I said with my eyes closed.
“Doing what?” Anne asked.
“Talking to me.”
“I’m not.”
“You’re thinking about starting a conversation, and each time you do it changes the futures.”
“I can’t even think about talking to you?”
“You can think as much as you like, so long as there’s no possibility of you actually doing it.”
Anne didn’t answer. The back gate didn’t look good—maybe not hopeless, but I couldn’t confirm that without getting closer. I switched directions, looking through the futures in which I headed towards the castle’s main gate. My future self worked his way south, following the mental map I’d worked out last night, around the keep. No sign of shadows or patrols. The future was starting to thin out, becoming delicate, hard to steer. A little closer and—
—again it broke apart.
“Anne.”
“I’m trying!”
“I know it seems like I’m just sitting here,” I said, “but this isn’t as easy as it looks and it’d really help if you could stop distracting me.”
Anne didn’t say what she was thinking. I tried yet again to trace out the route to the south . . . the same thing happened.
Maybe I was going about this the wrong way. We needed a way out of here, but escaping this castle wasn’t something I could solve alone. I was going to need Anne’s help, and that wasn’t going to happen as long as we kept putting off this conversation. “All right,” I said. “Go ahead and ask.”
“Ask what?”
“What you’ve been thinking about asking me since I got up.”
Anne was silent. I waited, counting off the seconds, watching the futures fork and twist, shifting with Anne’s thoughts. “Last night,” she said at last. “Was that you?”
I just looked at her.
Anne let out a long breath, leant her head back against the wall. “How much of it do you remember?” I asked.
“Bits and pieces. Like something you hear as you’re falling asleep. It’s hard to remember which parts are real and . . . She told you about the last time, didn’t she? What I . . . when I was here.”
I nodded.
Anne closed her eyes. “I wish she hadn’t.”
“She . . .” I paused, mentally trying out different pronouns. “That person I was talking to. Do I call her ‘she’ or ‘you’?”
“I don’t know,” Anne said with a sigh. “Maybe that’s the problem.”
“Why didn’t you tell anyone about all this?” I asked. “I know you’ve got your issues with me, but what about Luna? Or Vari?”
“I don’t want them to see that side of me,” Anne said. “I didn’t want you to see it either.”
“Are you that ashamed of what you did?”
“Yes.”
“It doesn’t really sound as though you had much choice.”
“I did have a choice. I could have lost. I thought about it, each time. But I didn’t. I’d use my magic to . . . kill them, and afterwards I’d cry and I’d hate myself and I’d promise it was the last time, and then I’d do it again anyway.” Anne looked up at me with haunted eyes. “Most people, when they hurt each other, they don’t really understand what they’re doing. When I look at someone I see everything, every layer of their body, skin and muscle and bone. You have to, before you can heal them. When you use that to hurt them, it’s . . . vile. You’re destroying something beautiful. You drain the life out from a body and you can see it, watch the blood vessels shrivel and the tissue wither. It’s like their body trusts you, opens itself up, and you betray it. And you know the worst part? It gets easier each time. You still know how horrible it is, you just . . . feel it less.”
“That’s why you wouldn’t duel, isn’t it? Back when I first met you.”
“Sagash told me once that in the end you don’t feel anything at all,” Anne said quietly. “You can still see what you’re doing to someone’s body, you just . . . don’t care. I’ve . . . I’ve wondered how many more it’ll take. Before I become like him.”
“I don’t think it’s just about the numbers. I mean, if something was going to push you over the edge, I don’t think it’d be that.”
Anne gave a half laugh, half sob. “Oh, great! So something else is going to turn me into a monster instead?”
Oops. Okay, so I probably wasn’t the most tactful person to be having this conversation. But as the other Anne had pointed out, there wasn’t exactly anyone else. “I think you’re setting much-too-high standards for yourself.”
“Not murdering anyone isn’t a high standard.”
“I’m not talking about what you did back when you were Sagash’s prisoner. That was just you being put in an impossible situation, and trust me, I know all about those. I was talking about what you’ve been doing afterwards. You took lives then, so now you’re trying to avoid any kind of violence and only use your magic for healing. And maybe if you were one of the Light mages and you lived in that kind of protected world, then you could get away with doing that. But you’re not, and you can’t.”
Anne was silent. “Second thing,” I said. “I think you’re too focused on yourself.”
Anne looked up with a frown. “What?”
“This stuff you’re beating yourself up over? You’re only thinking about what you did, what you’re responsible for. Everything you’ve told me about what happened back then, you’ve only talked about the choices you made. But that’s not how the world works. Everyone makes choices and they all have a part in what happens. The way I see it, in terms of responsibility for those deaths, the order goes: number one, Sagash, for setting up the fights; number two, those kids you were fighting, for agreeing to whatever Sagash promised them; number three, the Council, for letting Dark mages like Sagash get away with this crap and not helping Variam when he went to them; and number four, you, for not being able to figure out some miracle way to fix it all. Taking all the blame isn’t just wrong, it’s self-centred. The world’s bigger than just you.”
“Is that how you justify it?” Anne said quietly. “What you did?”
I thought about it for a few seconds, then looked at her. “Honestly? Yeah. I think after a certain point, if someone comes after you and won’t back down, then it’s on them.”
Anne was silent. “Maybe you’re right,” she said at last. “But . . .
it doesn’t change anything. They’re still dead, and I’m still that much closer to being like that.”
“Are you really that afraid you’ll end up like the Dark mages?”
“Isn’t that what always happens? Anyone who lives in our world, grows up as a mage—they only ever get worse. You meet apprentices, and they’re mixed. Kind, cruel, everything in between. But the older they get . . . look at them. Sagash, Vitus, Morden.” Anne looked at me. “I thought you were different. You’d been with a Dark mage, like me. But you were kind, you helped us. I thought . . . I thought if you could make yourself better, then I could too.”
I winced a little at that. She’d chosen a pretty bad role model. “Anne, I’m not a hero. I’m just a survivor, that’s all. If I ever seemed like I was trying to set myself up as more than that, that was my own mistake.”
“I know,” Anne said, sounding tired. “I was building you up into something you weren’t. It’s just . . . It feels like the longer you live as a mage, the more you turn into what you used to hate.” She looked down at the stone. “Maybe that’s how it works in our world. The only heroes are the ones who die young.”
I gave Anne a disturbed look. “That’s a pretty depressing philosophy to live by.”
“Is it?” Anne didn’t meet my eyes. “I can’t tell anymore.”
I looked at Anne a second longer, then shook my head. “All right, it’s time we got moving. Whatever the answer, we’re not going to find it sitting around here. Oh, and just so we’re clear, I am not on board with you dying in this castle just so you don’t turn into something worse. I like you alive and as you are, and nothing you’ve told me over the last day has changed my mind on that. Okay?”
Anne looked up in surprise. After a moment she smiled. It was a little halfhearted, but it was something. “Good,” I said, and offered her my hand. “Let’s get going.”
| | | | | | | | |
There were two ways out of the windmill—the bottom and the top. At the highest level a ladder led up to the roof, where a wooden bridge led away from the sails back onto the castle battlements. Anne and I did a quick check for flying shadows, then headed back down. “Are you going to be okay barefoot?” I asked.
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