Veiled

by Benedict Jacka

  “Yeah.”

  “So isn’t that going to filter down? Like that thing that happened with that Dark mage, Torvald. The next time that happens they’ll be even less likely to do anything, won’t they? It’ll just keep getting worse.”

  I sighed. “You might be right.”

  “So what are we supposed to do? It’s not like the Council’s going to listen to us.”

  “I don’t know. I wish I had some better answers for you, but I don’t. And it’s not as though the Council’s going to listen to me, either.”

  “But you’re still a mage.”

  “There is that. Look, how many are there in your circle?”

  The adept (his name was Lucian) hesitated for a second before deciding to tell the truth. “Five.”

  “So at least you’re not on your own. Okay, I’m guessing there’s something specific you’re worried about, so why don’t you give me a rundown on which of your friends you think are in danger and why. I can’t promise anything, but I can probably give you some advice that’ll make it more likely that if something goes wrong, it won’t happen to you guys.”

  We talked it over. It took a while because the conversation kept on being interrupted by other customers: a girl who wanted to sell a dagger focus, three people buying various mundane items, two different guys wanting to buy magic tricks, and a latent mage just starting to come into her power who’d gotten in touch with me via e-mail. I bought the dagger off the first, sold the next three the things they wanted, gave the two would-be magicians business cards from the box on the counter, and booked a time with the last girl for a longer chat.

  “Anyway, that’s the best advice I’ve got,” I said at last. “Look, you can give me a call if anything happens. Doubt I’ll be able to do anything directly, but I can give you some suggestions.”

  “All right.” Lucian started to leave, then hesitated. “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “No, I mean . . . Kath said I shouldn’t come. She thought you were supposed to hate adepts.”

  “I’ve heard that too.”

  “But you don’t, right?” Lucian said. “I mean, that thing with the Nightstalkers. You didn’t go after them because you wanted to, did you?”

  “I wish everyone else would believe that. Look, you want to do me a favour back? Tell the other adepts you know that I’m trying to be one of the good guys.”

  “Oh.” Lucian paused. “Okay.” He left, and I went back to dealing with the rest of the customers.

  When you’re forced to see things from someone else’s point of view, it helps you put things in perspective. I often feel vulnerable in mage society—in both power and influence, compared to someone like Caldera, I’m a lightweight. But just as other mages are above me, there are others that I’m above in turn. I might be weak by mage standards, but I’m still a mage, and that gives me a certain automatic level of status and bargaining power. For adepts like Lucian, and for novices like that girl, magical society is a very scary place. Things can go wrong very fast and very badly, and when they do there isn’t much of a safety net. It was a reminder that my life could be a lot worse.

  It was also a reminder that this wasn’t just about me. Whatever Richard and Morden were planning, it was going to have trickle-down effects to everyone. More lives than our own were going to be affected by this.

  | | | | | | | | |

  The sun was setting when I finished with the last customer and locked up. I used to spend most of my days like this, but over the last couple of years the amount of time I’ve spent running my shop has been going steadily down. Officially the Arcana Emporium’s supposed to be open six days a week, and okay, I don’t think I’ve ever consistently kept to that, but I used to average about four and a half. Nowadays it’s more like three. Either there’s a job, or a problem, or I’m training Luna, or researching . . . and when push comes to shove, running my shop is one of my few responsibilities where if I skip out, then nothing immediately bad is going to happen. Over the last few months I’d actually got into the habit of having Luna run the place every Tuesday, just so there’d be one day the place would consistently be open.

  If things kept going the way they had been, though, then before long the average number of days I was putting in at the shop per week was going to hit zero, and that bothered me a little. Weird as it sounds, my shop’s one of the only public faces for magic in this country; for people like Lucian who have some sort of magic-related problem but aren’t plugged into mage society, this is one of the few places they can go. Maybe I needed to start taking steps so that the shop could survive without me . . . I shook it off and checked my e-mail. There was a message from Carol, one of the Keeper admins; they’d received the report I’d sent about yesterday and had sent a form-letter acknowledgement back, which for some reason left me vaguely disappointed. I’d been half-expecting to get chewed out, but it didn’t sound as though they’d even particularly noticed.

  Luna had sent me Chalice’s address. I sent her an e-mail agreeing to meet, then spent a couple of hours trying to dig up information. She was a Dark chance mage, but beyond that her affiliation was unknown. No apprentices or dependents that anyone knew about. Trained (and presumably born) outside the U.K., so there wasn’t as much information as there would have been if she’d grown up here. No obvious red flags, and no connection to Morden or Richard that I could find, but I was still uneasy. Dark mages always have an agenda. What was hers?

  I was so lost in thought that I didn’t even see it coming when the phone rang. I picked up absently. “Lensman.”

  “Hello, Verus.” Lensman is a mage with a voice that sounds like he should be on the BBC. He’s in the same business as me, more or less—while I sell items to adepts and apprentices, Lensman sells to mages. It’s higher profit but a lot more dangerous. I get some of my items from him, and over the years we’ve become friends of a sort, though we rarely meet in person. “Just to let you know, that focus you delivered looks excellent. I’ve already got a buyer lined up.”

  “That’s good.” Honestly, I didn’t really care. The item in question had been a concentration-based shielding focus. Completely useless in a combat situation, but for some reason Light duellists love the things. My mind was still on Chalice.

  “Well, in the meantime, I’ve sure you’ll be glad to hear that I’ve finally heard back about that archaeological project of yours.”

  “Archaeological . . . ?”

  “The rubbings?”

  “Oh, right.” All of a sudden I was paying attention. I’d forgotten about those notes of Vari’s. “How did it go?”

  “Well, it took some time.” Lensman sounded entertained. “You certainly picked a puzzler. Where did you dig them up, anyway?”

  “Can’t really discuss it, sorry.” I knew that Lensman would assume that meant it was Council-related. “If you wanted somewhere more secure . . .”

  “No, no, nothing sensitive about the information.” I heard the rustling of papers in the background. Lensman doesn’t like using computers—like a lot of mages, he’s the old-fashioned type. “So, the long and the short of it is that the inscriptions are almost certainly Heraclian.”

  “As in the philosopher?”

  “Not Heraclitus, Heraclian.”

  “Okay, I have no idea what that means.”

  “Yes, obscure, isn’t it? They were a mage tradition dating back to the Byzantines. Heavy associations with magical creatures. It looks as though those rubbings were taken from a storage device of some kind. Probably their version of a Minkowski box.”

  “Any idea what was inside it?”

  “No, it seems that whoever took those rubbings left the box sealed.”

  “You said they ‘were’ a mage tradition,” I said. “Don’t suppose there’s any chance they’re still around?”

  “Unfortunately not. Apparently they got
a bit too close to magical creatures for their own good. Came under vampiric control and the Council had to wipe them out in the vampire wars.”

  “Anything else in the notes? Where it came from, what it could be used for?”

  “Sorry. We were lucky to get this much really.”

  Damn it. “Well, thanks.”

  I hung up and put the phone on the desk, staring down at it. I tried to puzzle out what all that meant and came up with nothing. Magical creatures in our world have been declining for centuries. Most of the types the Heraclians had been in contact with would probably be extinct by now. What would Richard want with relics of extinct magical creatures? It could mean anything, or nothing . . . and without more information, there was no way to know which. Another dead end.

  I leant back, closing my eyes with a sigh. Ever since I saw Richard last year, I’d had a sense of doom. As though I were stumbling around in the dark, blind and clumsy, while Richard was looking down on me from some place of power. He hadn’t contacted me since last year, yet wherever I went and whatever I did, I could feel his presence like a silent shadow. Worst of all, no matter what we did to move against him, I couldn’t shake the creeping feeling that Richard knew exactly what we were doing and wasn’t responding in kind for the simple reason that nothing that I or Anne or Vari or Luna could do was the slightest threat.

  I leant back and stared out of the window, wondering what to do. From above the rooftops, stars shone down from a clear sky, and I knew that it would be a bitterly cold night. It was hard not to feel hopeless. I was struggling and clawing to become a Keeper auxiliary, working for weeks and months at a time to gain a tiny bit more favour with the Council. Meanwhile, Richard and Morden between them had more power than I could gain in a hundred years. They could have us all eliminated at any time and place of their choosing, probably with no more than a phone call. Was I really accomplishing anything? Or were all my efforts with the Keepers and with finding a teacher for Luna just a way of passing time?

  Then I shook my head. This isn’t getting me anywhere. Maybe working with the Keepers would help and maybe not, but I’d chosen my course of action and all there was to do was stick with it. In the meantime, if I couldn’t do anything about Richard or Luna, I might as well concentrate on something more productive.

  All day long, in the back of my mind, I’d been puzzling over that focus I’d found last night and the question of how it had got there. Without it, I could have written off the 999 call as a waste of time. With it . . . well, focuses don’t get left lying around for no reason. Why had one been sitting by the train tracks of an all-but-empty DLR station?

  The bottom line was that I’d been told to find out what had happened, and I hadn’t. Yes, I’d followed orders, but I didn’t really want to leave it at that. Part of it was a sense of professionalism, but part of it was just simple curiosity. When you’re a diviner, you have this constant urge to stick your head in for a closer look, and when you don’t, it bugs you. If I wanted to find out what had happened at that station, how would I do it?

  The easy answer was time magic. Time mages can look back into the past of their current location, playing out the events before their eyes like a video recording. It’s a very useful ability, which naturally means that the supply of helpful time mages never meets the demand. I do know one time mage, a guy called Sonder, but we aren’t exactly friends anymore and I didn’t even think he was in London at the moment. That just left the mundane way. What would I do if I wanted to find out what had happened at a particular place and time and I wasn’t a mage?

  The obvious answer was CCTV. London has the dubious distinction of being the most spied-upon city in the world, with more security cameras per person than anywhere else on the planet. I couldn’t remember if the station had had any cameras, but logic suggested that the answer was yes. I glanced at the clock to see that it was ten P.M. Trains would still be running.

  Well, why not?

  | | | | | | | | |

  One of the drawbacks of being a diviner is not having access to the gate spell. Gate magic is one of the more useful tricks that mages have up their sleeves; it creates a portal between two points in space, allowing you to step from place to place instantly. You have to know the two places you’re gating between, but it’s still a really useful ability to have—it would have allowed me to get to Pudding Mill Lane station in about sixty seconds, using my mental image of the place from the night before. Unfortunately, gate magic is restricted to elementalists. There are a handful of non-elemental magic types that can use the spell (death and space being the most well known), but divination isn’t one of them.

  If you can’t use gate spells, the next best thing is gate stones. They’re small, cheap items that can be used to produce a gate effect at will, and like most focuses they can be used by any mage. Only problem is, they’ll take you to the same place every time, namely the spot the focus was keyed to. Great for going home, not so good for outbound trips.

  Which is why when I’m travelling around London, I usually just take the train like everybody else.

  | | | | | | | | |

  I stepped out onto the platform at Pudding Mill Lane, shivering in the cold air. Behind me, the doors of the train hissed shut and the carriages began to pull away from the station.

  Now that I knew what I was looking for, it didn’t take me long to find it. There were two CCTV cameras on the platform, pointing in both directions, and . . . there. Perfect. A third camera just a little way past the platform, pointing at the gate with the No Admittance sign and looking right down on the spot where I’d found the focus last night.

  I wanted to go through the gate and poke around, but despite the late hour there were a couple of other people on the platform: a man fiddling with his mobile phone and a woman carrying a bunch of Sainsbury’s bags. I didn’t want to do anything to draw attention while they were so close. Although now that I’d found the right camera, it occurred to me that I didn’t really know what to do next. How did you pull recordings off cameras? The Keepers would definitely have contacts at Transport for London, but I didn’t know whether they’d do something like that on my request.

  From the departure boards I could see that trains were coming every ten minutes. As I watched, a southbound train pulled up at the platform in a rumble of light and noise, newly arrived from the terminus at Stratford. The woman with the Sainsbury’s bags got on. The man with the mobile phone didn’t. The doors shut with a hiss and the train pulled away, heading south towards the towers of Canary Wharf, leaving the two of us alone on the platform.

  I tried to figure out how I’d go about getting the recordings. The camera had to be sending the data somewhere—maybe a local node? I walked down the stairwell in the centre of the platform, looking for some sort of office. No good. There was hardly any station beyond the platform, just a few locked doors. One was a lift, another a supply closet. The third was some sort of switch room. They were locked, but it was only a simple padlock. I could probably pick it . . . I looked up to see that the man was still up there on the platform, and annoyingly, he’d chosen to stand right near the top of the stairs. He was talking into his mobile in French, and ignoring me completely, but he’d have a perfect view of anything I did. Will you just get on your train and go away?

  Maybe there was some other way I could get the recordings. If I . . .

  Wait a second.

  That man had been here when I’d arrived. He hadn’t boarded the northbound train that I’d taken to get here. And he hadn’t boarded the southbound train that had just left.

  If he wasn’t waiting for a northbound train or a southbound train, what was he doing here?

  Without looking directly at the guy I studied him through the futures. He was a little taller than average, dressed warmly in a woollen cap and a long coat. Most of his face was hidden behind a beard and dark glasses. As I watched, he started strolling down the sta
irs towards me, still talking into his phone. “Allons, ma chérie, ne sois pas comme ça. Tu sais que ce n’est pas elle. Je viens de . . .”

  He still wasn’t looking in my direction. From his body language it didn’t even look as though he’d noticed I was there, but my instincts were starting to sound a warning. “Allez,” he said. “Allez, allez, allez. Ce n’est pas ce que j’ai dit. Non, tu sais . . . Je n’ai pas dit ca. Allez . . .”

  The two of us were alone in the station entrance. Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, reflecting off the white tiles of the walls. The man was halfway down the stairs; his course would take him behind me and out onto the long path heading through the construction site to the main road. Something in my precognition was trying to catch my attention, and I looked into the short-term futures of what would happen when he—

  Oh shit.

  All of a sudden I realised just how isolated we were. There were no staff in the station, no passengers on the platform, and the next train was still four minutes away. The construction site around us was deserted. There were still security cameras . . .

  . . . and how much help were they yesterday? I was on my own. Casually I shifted position, my right hand drifting to my belt. I didn’t turn around and the man disappeared out of my field of vision. He was still talking. “Tu sais que je n’ai pas . . . je n’étais—”

  I held very still, counting off the seconds. Four. Three.

  Now he was right behind me. “Je n’étais même pas là . . .”

  Two. One . . .

  “Pourquoi de vrais—” Magic flared behind me and I heard a whisper of movement, soft and quick.

  I was already twisting. Something slid past me and hit the door with a thunk. At the same time my hand came up in a flash of metal, stabbing upwards.

  He was quick, very quick. The knife hit home but he was already jumping back and a shield flickered into existence as the blow landed. He came down in a fighting stance, a translucent blade that hadn’t been there a second ago held in his right hand and pointing straight at me. He started to cast another spell, and before he could finish I lunged.