Now that I thought about it, this was probably the first time I’d been to a Keeper facility voluntarily. All the other times that I’d been here or to one of their other stations, it had been because I’d been forced to. I’ve never been officially arrested, but in practice there isn’t very much difference between “you’re under arrest” and “you’re going to come here and answer our questions or we’ll make you.” It tends to colour one’s memories of a place. I didn’t have good associations with this building, and I wasn’t really looking forward to talking with Caldera. A small but definite part of me was hoping she’d say no and give me a reason to leave. After fifteen minutes an apprentice came and escorted me upstairs.
Once you get past reception, Keeper HQ gets a lot busier, filled with noise and people. The stairs and corridors are narrow and there are always people squeezing past, and there’s a clamour of typing and talking in the background. If you were dropped in the middle of it and didn’t know what to look for, you’d probably think it was a civil service building of some kind. Keepers don’t wear uniforms or carry weapons (they don’t need to), and to most people they just look like ordinary men and women. But if you do know what to look for, it’s not too hard to spot them. Keepers move differently from ordinary people; there’s a sort of unconscious power and arrogance in how they carry themselves. They have a different way of looking at you too—a quick once-over, sizing you up as a suspect. I didn’t let myself get visibly tense, but I’d be lying if I said I was comfortable. I might not be a suspect, but I didn’t belong here.
Caldera’s office was on the second floor. It was medium-sized, with two desks, two computers, some paperwork, Caldera, and another Keeper I didn’t know. Caldera gave me a glance, held up a hand, then turned back to the other guy. “I know what it says,” she was saying. “This isn’t a Section Three.”
“So you want to do what?” the other Keeper said. He was tall and athletic-looking, with blond hair. “Just let the guy go?”
“There’s sod-all we can charge him with.”
“Karla’s not going to be happy.”
“Fuck Karla,” Caldera said. “She wants this guy so badly, she can do it herself.”
“Or she’ll just take it out on us,” the man said, then held up his hands to forestall Caldera’s answer. “All right, all right. I’ll try and sell her.” He walked out, giving me a curious glance as he passed by.
“Hey, Verus.” Caldera typed something into her computer and blanked the screen, then waved me over. “Grab a seat.”
Caldera is a member of the Order of the Star, the division of the Keepers that enforces the Concord and national laws amongst adepts and mages. She’s an Englishwoman of thirty or so, shorter than me and a fair bit heavier, broad and stocky.
I first met Caldera about a year and a half ago. I was being chased around London by a bunch of adepts who wanted to kill me for something I’d done while still an apprentice, and Caldera had become involved because of the Richard connection. The whole thing ended badly for pretty much everyone concerned, but if there’d been one silver lining from my point of view, it had been the working relationship I’d developed with Caldera. I’d seen her a few more times since then, usually under similar (if slightly less dangerous) circumstances—I’d want some favour or a bit of information, she’d want something I could find out with my divination magic, and we’d figure out some sort of deal that gave us both what we wanted. We’d even had a couple of drinks together, from time to time. But we’d never quite made the jump from acquaintances to friends, and to be honest that was probably because of me—I could never quite forget the organisation she worked for.
If I was going to do this, that was probably something I’d have to get over.
“Right,” Caldera said after we’d exchanged the how-are-you-how-have-you-beens. “So you want to be a sanctioned auxiliary.”
“That’s the idea.”
“Why?”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s not a difficult question,” Caldera said. “Why do you want to join?”
“Excitement and glamour?”
Caldera gave me a look.
“Well, we’ve worked together a few times before and it’s more or less worked out, right? I just thought it was worth giving it a try.”
“Uh, yeah,” Caldera said. “The times we’ve worked together, you only did it because you needed the help.”
“Hey,” I said. “What about last April? Anne was the one in trouble, not me.”
“And you disobeyed every single order I gave you.”
“There were extenuating circumstances?”
Caldera gave me a flat look.
“Okay, okay,” I said. “I know there’s been some friction, but I was hoping to mend fences with the Council, and this seemed like a place to start. Besides, I’m a good diviner and I know you guys are shorthanded.”
“It’s not about whether you’re a good diviner,” Caldera said. “Working as a sanctioned auxiliary is different from being a freelancer. You need to pass a security screening.”
“Okay, how do I do that?”
“You don’t. They investigate you.”
“How long does it take?”
“Yours is finished.”
“That was fast.”
“I don’t think you quite understand,” Caldera said. “Council security screenings are current for two years. They didn’t do a security screening because you called me. They’d already screened you because they’d investigated you anyway.”
“What for?”
“Do you really need me to answer that?”
“I’m just curious about what I was being charged with.”
“Well, first on the list, you’re one of three people listed as being responsible for the destruction of the Nightstalker group the summer before last.”
That wiped the smile off my face. “All right,” I said. “As far as I know, it was the Nightstalkers who broke the law that time, not me.”
“And you and your associates were involved in the apprentice disappearances around the White Stone.”
“Oh, come on. I was working for the Council that time. It’s on file. And I was the one who found out what happened to those apprentices.”
“Then there was the break-in at—”
“Okay, look, I already explained how that one wasn’t my fault. And I offered to help, it wasn’t as though you were—”
“And,” Caldera continued, “the deaths of the mages Griff and Belthas three years ago.”
I shut up.
“Not going to justify yourself?” Caldera said.
“I didn’t kill either of them,” I said. I kept my voice level.
Caldera was watching me, apparently casually, and I noticed that her eyes stayed on me as I spoke. Cops tend to be very good at picking up on when people are lying to them, and I had the feeling Caldera had been paying close attention to how I answered that question. I hadn’t quite been lying. Technically I hadn’t killed either of them, in the same way that if someone comes after you and you lead them into a tiger pit, then from a certain point of view the ones who actually killed them were the tigers.
Unfortunately for me, both Griff and Belthas had been Light mages in good standing with the Council. The Council may turn a blind eye to infighting among Dark mages, and they really don’t care very much about what happens to adepts or Orphans, but that definitely does not apply when the victims are Council mages themselves. To make matters worse, Griff and Belthas had also been working for a Junior Council member named Levistus. Offing them (and messing up his plans in the process) had placed me firmly on his shit list. Levistus didn’t come after me personally—that’s not his style—but since then he’d taken the opportunity to bureaucratically screw me over in several ways, some of them quite lethal.
My past history with Levistus w
as one of the other reasons I wasn’t comfortable here. Logically, I knew that staying away from the Keepers wouldn’t actually make it any harder for Levistus to mess with me—if he really wanted to nail me, he could do it no matter where I was—but I still didn’t like the idea of being any closer to him than I had to.
But at the same time, I knew that Luna was right. For too long now we’d been just reacting to Richard, gathering up scraps of information and waiting for him to make a move. I didn’t know how we were going to beat him, but I knew we had to do something. Trying to make more friends amongst the Keepers was at least a place to start.
“Okay,” I said. “Cards on the table. Are you saying you don’t want me?”
“No,” Caldera said.
I paused. “No, you don’t want me, or no, you don’t not want me?”
“Do you know who makes the final decision on security screenings?” Caldera asked.
I shook my head.
“After that call last week, I wrote up your submission for auxiliary status and sent it off to personnel,” Caldera said. “They sent it to the Keepers in charge of your cases. Those Keepers have a dozen active cases already and didn’t have the time to go reopening yours, so they passed it to Rain. And Rain passed it down to me.”
I tried to follow all that. “So . . . ?”
Caldera looked at me. “So right now, there is exactly one person who’s been given the job of deciding whether to take you on or not. Me.”
“Oh. So is that a yes or a no?”
| | | | | | | | |
“So was that a yes or a no?” Luna asked.
We were in the Islington gym that we use for training. Luna was in her exercise clothes, white T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms, with a book balanced on her head. My clothes were similar to Luna’s, but instead of a book, I was holding a weapon: a simple but functional-looking katana.
“She didn’t say no,” I said. I stepped forward and aimed a two-handed blow at Luna’s head. The swing was at seventy percent speed, and my grip was angled so that the impact would be with the flat of the blade, not the edge. It wouldn’t break the skin, but it would hurt. Luna stepped back, spine straight and movements smooth to keep the book from falling, and I followed up, continuing to threaten her.
“So she said yes?” Luna asked. She adjusted her position on the mats slightly, keeping just enough distance that I had to move to come within strike range.
I made a couple more head-level strikes; Luna stayed out of range. “She didn’t actually say that either.”
“So what did she say?”
I began another step, then changed it into a low glide, striking at waist level. Luna was caught within the sweep and had to block cross-hand, the flat of the blade meeting her palm with a slap. The movement left me within striking distance and she had to block twice more before she could open the range again. “Making it onto the sanctioned list is out,” I said, glancing at the blade. The colour hadn’t changed. “At least right now.”
“That sounds like a no.”
“Kind of.” I closed into range again and began a series of attacks, measured and steady, switching targets from waist to shoulder to thigh, each strike flowing into the next one. Luna had to keep blocking, catching the blade against her hand each time. She couldn’t move too abruptly without making the book fall. “The deal she offered was a probationary membership. It means I’m not an auxiliary, but I’m allowed to be treated as one for a trial period, so long as she’s the one supervising.”
“So it’s what, a trial?”
“Pretty much. I’m still doing exactly what a Keeper auxiliary would be doing, it’s just not official.”
“So how—?”
I broke my pattern, sending the sword flashing up at Luna’s face. Luna had to jump back, both hands coming up instinctively to block the blade with a smack. The book wobbled and she had to catch it with one hand as she backpedalled. I paused to examine the blade. Where Luna had touched it, there was a pale patch on the metal. “You let a bit through.”
“Oh, come on,” Luna said. “That wouldn’t even give you a nosebleed.”
The mist that swirls around Luna is the manifestation of her curse, a spell of chance magic, and the fact that Luna’s spells are applications of her curse rather than effects she produces herself is the reason that she gets classified as an adept rather than a mage. Luna’s curse is very hard to spot, invisible to normal vision and difficult to see even with magesight, and it brings good luck to her and bad luck to everything that mist touches. “Bad luck” at low concentrations of that mist means stuff like tripping or breaking a nail, but at high concentrations it can do anything from making a building fall on your head to directing a serial killer into your neighbourhood to say hi. It’s also cumulative, and the more of it you get, the worse it’ll be.
The exercise was a simple one; Luna had to avoid the sword without letting her curse touch it. The sword is a simple focus, designed to react visibly to magic. Once upon a time just having Luna touch it would have turned the whole blade white in seconds, but Luna’s put a lot of time and effort into learning to control her curse, and nowadays she can touch something for a second or so without letting any of that deadly mist stick—which is long enough to push that something away. We’d been playing this particular game for six months or so and Luna’s become very good at it, which was the reason for the conversation and for the book on her head—I’d had to keep upping the difficulty.
In this case I’d managed to shake her concentration, although not by much. “Keep talking,” I said, moving in to threaten her again. “And take your hand off the book.”
Luna rolled her eyes and obeyed, retreating to a safe distance. “So how long does the probationary thing last?”
“Caldera didn’t say.” I aimed at Luna’s eyes again, but this time she was ready for it. The blade slapped into her palm less than twelve inches from her face. “But I’m guessing it’s going to be until she makes her mind up.”
“So what, you have to not piss her off for however many weeks it takes until she decides she can trust you?”
“Let’s not expect miracles.”
We kept going for another five minutes but I didn’t manage to break Luna’s concentration again. “All right,” I said at last, lowering the sword. “Free sparring.”
Luna perked up instantly, letting the book slide off into one hand as she headed for her bag. When she came back she was holding a short sword in one hand and an ivory-coloured wand in the other. “Ready?” I asked.
Luna took a stance. “Ready.”
I attacked, slashing down at an angle, and I wasn’t using the flat of the blade this time. Luna stepped back and I followed.
This particular part of our training sessions is the reason we use an empty gym. Last year someone saw one of my bouts with Luna and thought I was trying to murder her, which led to an extremely awkward conversation with a pair of police officers. Luna found the whole thing absolutely hilarious, but it’s the reason that these days I take the trouble to schedule our training sessions in a Council-owned gym.
Right now we were alone, which was just as well. My arms are longer than Luna’s, and coupled with the longer reach of my weapon I was able to pressure her, driving her back. Luna’s face was set in concentration as she defended against my attacks, stepping away from most, occasionally parrying offhand with a clash of metal. To anyone watching, it probably looked as though Luna’s life were at stake . . . but when it comes to magic, appearances are deceptive. Luna wasn’t in any serious danger. Her curse makes her hard to hurt at the best of times, and while I was trying to get through her defences, I wasn’t trying to cut her. With my divination, it’s easy to see if an attack has a chance of landing, and the half second’s warning is more than enough to pull a blow.
The one who was really in danger was me. Luna’s curse is tied heavily to her feeling
s and instincts. She’s learnt to bring it under conscious control most of the time, but if she ever feels genuinely threatened, all bets are off. But by that same token, if I didn’t threaten her, force her to struggle, then she wouldn’t gain the practice she needed to keep her curse under control when she really needed it. It was a game of brinkmanship, trying to push Luna just far enough to make her work for it, but not so far as to trigger a backlash.
The only sounds in the empty gym were the clash of metal on metal and the thud of our bare feet on the mats. Usually Luna has trouble holding me off in these matches, but this time to my surprise I realised she was holding her own. She couldn’t really strike back, but as long as she kept giving ground she was managing to hold off my attacks. All the duelling she’d done had made a difference.
Of course, I wasn’t really trying to hit her. There’s a big gap between a sparring match and combat, and I didn’t want to push it too far.
But then, if I didn’t push her in training, I wasn’t really doing her any favours.
Here goes.
I went up to full speed, and for the first time I moved with real killing intent. Instead of picking out futures where I nearly got through Luna’s defences, I searched for ones where the blade landed. Luna’s eyes went wide as the first stroke hissed by, and she jumped back. The second stroke she parried, the third she dodged—and stumbled. In the instant she was off balance I reversed the swing, striking down at her neck.
In my mage’s sight, the wand at Luna’s hand flared to life. A whip of silver mist leapt out, and for just an instant, all the visions I had of the future were of that silver mist surging into my body as the sword cut through Luna’s skin.
I dropped the sword, turning the attack into a dive and roll. As I hit the mat I heard a gasp and a thud—then silence.
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