Cursed av-2

by Benedict Jacka

  As you’d guess from the name, Canary Wharf wasn’t always a financial district. Only a few decades ago it was a dock, part of the vast wharf network running along both sides of the Thames in what used to be the greatest port in the world. Nowadays it’s steel and glass, skyscrapers rising up past the Docklands Light Railway and mixing with cafes and shopping malls, but the layout is still that of the old Docklands. Channels are carved out of the mud, inlets flowing in from the Thames. It’s gracefully landscaped and framed with stone but there’s no hiding the huge bodies of water, enough to make the skyscrapers feel almost like islands. I walked along one of the old piers, watching the crowds thronging the plazas. The concrete was warm from the late-afternoon sun but the breeze off the water was cold.

  Meredith was still with me. She seemed to have come out of herself since meeting Belthas and I could tell she was about to speak. There was a stone bench near the waterside, and I sat down on it. “Thank you,” Meredith said.

  “For what?”

  “Agreeing to help.” Meredith sat down next to me, close enough that our knees were touching. It might just have been the cold. “I know you didn’t have to.”

  Meredith’s dark eyes looked up at me but I avoided meeting them; I probably would have said yes to Belthas even without her, and I felt uncomfortable being thanked for it. “What about you? Why did you sign up with him?”

  Meredith’s gaze drifted down and she looked out over the water. “I’m not sure.” Her voice was doubtful. I looked at her as she gazed away, watching her brush her long hair back as she stared over the Thames. “I mean, he offered the same things … favours, credit, you know. It’s been so much harder since last year, since …” She seemed to realise what she was saying and looked back at me. “Do you think I should have said no?”

  “I’m not sure.” Meredith was right next to me, looking into my eyes, and it was really difficult to think straight. I forced myself to look away. “It’s your choice to make.”

  Meredith sat quietly. “What should we do now?” she said at last.

  “I can think of a couple of things,” I said. I braced myself and turned to Meredith. “The question is what you’re doing.”

  Meredith looked up at me in surprise. “What do you mean?”

  “Look, Meredith, it’s pretty obvious you’re not too keen on the parts of this that involve people trying to kill you. And I can promise you it’s not going to get any safer. Are you sure you want to stick around?”

  “Belthas said-”

  “I don’t care what Belthas said. The investigation side of this is going to be dangerous. If you want to stay out of it, it might be best if we found you a place to stay out of trouble.”

  Meredith hesitated, and I felt the forks of a decision opening up before her. She was really thinking about this. Then the futures settled and she shook her head. “No.”

  “Are you-”

  “I want to stay with you. And I won’t be useless. I can help.”

  Now it was my turn to hesitate. But Meredith’s answer had put me on the spot and it was likely I really would need the help. “All right,” I said at last. “We could ask around to find out more about this cabal. But that was what you were doing when you got targeted, right?”

  Meredith nodded. “Did you have any leads?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure. I thought I was getting somewhere but …”

  “But some of the people you were asking tipped off the people you were looking for.”

  Meredith looked at me in surprise. “How did you know?”

  I shrugged. “Not hard to guess.” Asking around about a mage is dangerous. Mages who aren’t prepared for trouble tend not to live very long so one of the first priorities of most mages is to establish an early-warning network to spot potential threats, in the same way I’d been warned by Starbreeze. And anyone willing to sell you information about the mage you’re looking for is just as likely to sell the information to them the instant you turn your back. “Anyway, it sounds like this cabal’s gone into war mode. I don’t think there’s much point going fishing. Last thing we want is for them to jump us halfway through.”

  Meredith nodded with obvious relief. Apparently she hadn’t been looking forward to that idea either. “So let’s try Belthas’s plan,” I said. “Check out the factory.”

  “Right now?”

  I shook my head. “Not yet. I need to make some calls.”

  The classic thing to do in this situation would have been to go to the factory, magnifying glass in hand, and look for clues. There were several good reasons why I wasn’t going to do that, the main one being I’d already tried it and it hadn’t worked. I hadn’t been able to find much on a search even before a bunch of mages and Council security spent several hours tromping around the place. Besides, why root around when someone’s done it for you?

  I called Talisid but came up dry. The investigation of the barghest and factory hadn’t turned up anything else useful. In exchange, I relayed the information from Arachne. “Harvesting nonhumans?” Talisid said in surprise. “Really?”

  “Do you know anything about it being tried?”

  “God no.” Talisid sounded revolted. “In every instance I know of, the harvester went violently insane. If that was what they killed the barghest with, I’m surprised we didn’t find their bodies too.”

  “Why’s it so lethal?” I kept my voice casual, as if from idle curiosity, though I didn’t expect Talisid to believe it for a moment. “Harvesting works on humans, doesn’t it?”

  Talisid snorted. “If you can call that ‘working.’ It’s like ripping out half someone’s mind and injecting it into your own. Usually turns whoever did it into a deranged psychopath, though if they were willing to use Harvesting in the first place, most people probably wouldn’t notice much difference.”

  It matched with what I’d heard. Magical power isn’t something that can be given away; it’s part of who you are. The only way to take a mage’s power is to rip out most of him with it. I can’t imagine what it would be like to try to merge that maimed fragment with your own self, and that’s if what you were taking came from a human. Trying to assimilate something totally alien, like a barghest …

  “So now what are you up to?” Talisid broke into my thoughts. “Trying to track down the mages who did it?”

  “Yup,” I said. “Anyone still searching the factory?”

  “Empty.”

  “Okay.”

  “You didn’t have anything to do with that business on Hampstead Heath, did you?”

  “What would that be?”

  “Someone tried to settle a disagreement with military-grade weapons.” Talisid’s voice was dry and I knew he had his suspicions. “Anything you want to tell me?”

  “Yeah, but I shouldn’t.”

  “Hm. Watch yourself.”

  Talisid broke the connection and I dialled another number, and this time I had more success. It took only a few minutes to tell the story and fix a time for the meeting. I dropped my phone into my pocket and went back to Meredith. “We’re done.”

  Meredith looked up from her coffee. We were sitting in a Starbucks, the late afternoon sun slanting through the glass of the shop front. “Did you find the guy you were looking for?”

  “He won’t be here till tomorrow.” My meeting with Luna and Martin wasn’t until the morning either, meaning I had nothing immediate for the rest of the evening. “Want to get dinner?”

  “Really?”

  “Not much we can do for the rest of the day. Besides, we might as well relax while we’ve got the chance. There’ll be trouble enough soon.” Which was about to prove more prophetic than I would have liked.

  There was a beat, then Meredith nodded, looking at me appraisingly. “I’d like that.”

  Meredith wanted to go back to her flat, having been away for more than a day, and I went with her. Apart from anything else, the Dark cabal might be planning to take another shot at her, and if they were, her home was the natur
al place to set an ambush.

  Meredith’s flat was in Kensington and Chelsea, a little west of Cadogan Square. It’s expensive even by London standards and I don’t go there much. As we turned into the street, I saw that it was lined with old white-pillared terraced houses. Once upon a time, sixty or seventy years ago, those would have been used by the gentry and their servants and families; these days they’d been converted into flats for rich professionals. Some things change, some stay the same. The sides of the road were tightly packed with lines of well-polished sedans and sports cars. I stopped on the patio of Meredith’s house, my instincts warning me to check the area before going in. The sun had set during our journey and as I looked from west to east I could see the colour of the sky fading from a deep yellow sunset to midnight blue. There was a scattering of people but the street was quiet with the coming evening and nothing set off my alarms. I followed Meredith inside.

  Meredith’s flat was the top one of four, the stairs thickly carpeted. “I really need to change,” Meredith said. “Could you wait a few minutes?”

  If there was anything messy about her appearance, it was more than I could tell. “No hurry.” Meredith disappeared into the bedroom. I knew what “a few minutes” meant in girl talk and settled down to wait. A moment later I heard a shower start up from somewhere past the bedroom and I added another quarter hour onto my guess.

  Meredith’s living room was decorated in pale green, with tables and chairs of light wood, and a carpet lined the floor. A bookcase stood by one wall-the shelves were less than half full and most of what was there seemed to be boxes or CDs. There was a TV and stereo system, both new looking, the remote controls on the table next to a bowl of dried flowers. Two soft-looking white sofas were piled with cushions and the wall held a piece of artwork made of curves of black metal. The room looked nice but somehow I didn’t feel particularly comfortable. It was a room for receiving visitors, not a place where you could put your feet up and relax. I sat on the sofa and found it was as soft as it looked.

  “Where are we going?” Meredith called. I could make out her voice clearly, which meant the bathroom door was probably open … and I stopped that line of thought before it went any further.

  “It’s a surprise,” I called back. Actually I hadn’t thought ahead that far. I tried to think of somewhere to take Meredith and came up blank. There are a lot of things I’m really good at but entertaining women isn’t one of them.

  “So what should I wear?” Meredith called over the sound of the shower.

  “Meredith, I think you’re going to look good whatever you wear.”

  Meredith laughed; she sounded pleased and for some reason that put me in a good mood. The sound of the shower stopped, replaced a moment later by the whirr of a hair dryer. I got up and wandered over to the bookshelves. There wasn’t much there; it seemed Meredith was more into music than reading.

  “Alex?”

  I turned to see Meredith standing in the doorway wearing nothing but a small towel and a couple of hair clips. My brain kind of shorted out at that point and I didn’t notice much else. Gradually I realised that she’d just asked me a question. “Sorry?”

  “Which one do you like better?”

  I managed to tear my eyes off Meredith long enough to see that she was holding up a couple of dresses on hangers in front of her. “That one,” I said.

  “Which, this?” Meredith let one of the dresses she’d been holding in front of herself fall to her side, giving a very interesting view for half a second before she draped the other one over the front of her body. “Do you think?”

  “Yeah,” I said. Honestly, I was having trouble even noticing what colour it was. Meredith was looking down at the fall of the dress, apparently completely absorbed, thin tanned arms bare all the way to her shoulder blades. “Go with that.”

  Meredith disappeared back into her bedroom and I let out my breath, only then realising that I’d been holding it. This was getting dangerous.

  I still didn’t know what to do about Meredith. I knew she’d been recruited by Belthas and I knew she had a very different set of priorities than he did. I was tempted to think of her as a partner … except for that nagging voice of paranoia wondering what her real motives were. Was Meredith staying close to me because she wanted to? Or because she’d been told to? Or for some other reason I couldn’t guess?

  As if that weren’t enough, there was Meredith’s ability to manipulate emotions. I still didn’t have a clue just how much of what I felt towards her was my own feelings. She could be nudging me for her own ends … and then again she might not be, and the hell of it was I didn’t have any idea how to find out. So I hesitated, and the longer I hesitated the more I found myself thinking about her. The sounds from the bedroom suddenly went quiet and I turned to see that Meredith had returned.

  Even prepared, it was hard not to stare. Meredith had changed into a black dress trimmed with gold. A deep V-neck showed off her cleavage and the lines of the dress followed the curves of her body closely from the waist down to the knees. She’d somehow found the time to restyle her hair and it hung loose around her shoulders with a slight wave. “Well,” I said at last. “I feel underdressed.”

  Meredith smiled and walked forward, running her hand down the lapel of my shirt. “I think you look nice.”

  “You’re about the only one.” Stupid thing to say.

  Meredith didn’t take her hand away and I found myself staring down into her eyes. Her touch was soft and I couldn’t help thinking how nice it felt. It had been a really long time since I’d had a pretty woman do that. “Maybe we should …” I began, and tailed off.

  “Mmm?” It was a wordless sound, rising inquisitively, and my heart beat faster. I looked down at Meredith and wondered what would happen if I were to-

  The doorbell was loud, an electronic shrill, and it cut right through my head, making me jump. Meredith started as well and looked towards the door with annoyance. After only a few seconds it shrilled again, and Meredith sighed. “I’ll get rid of them.” She walked out into the hall. “Who’s calling this late …?”

  I stared after her, standing and feeling out of place. Something was nagging at the back of my mind but my thoughts were moving slowly. Meredith picked up the receiver just as the bell shrilled again. “Hello?” she said over the sound of the bell.

  Suddenly my head cleared and I saw what was about to happen. “Meredith!” I shouted. As Meredith turned in surprise I grabbed her around the waist, dragging her back into the living room as the handset clattered against the wall.

  Just as I did so, a column of searing flame tore through the door. The hallway of Meredith’s flat became an roaring inferno, red fires tinged with black. The walls crisped and ignited and the handset Meredith had been holding melted, the plastic liquefying and evaporating as the air heated to a furnace.

  Then just as suddenly, the torrent of flame cut off. The hallway was left burning fiercely, flames licking up the walls and reaching eagerly into the living room. Over the crackle of flames, I heard footsteps. Heavy boots kicked the burning remnants of the door aside and stepped into the flat.

  chapter 5

  It was a good ambush. Anybody caught by that blast would have been turned into a living torch, writhing and screaming in horrible pain for the few seconds it would have taken for the fire mage to finish them off (and yes, I saw that in more detail than I wanted to). The fight would have been over before it began, which was of course the point. There’s a duelling code under mage law for resolving formal challenges. The code is impartial, requires mages to give their opponent fair warning, and is completely ignored by almost everyone. Any mage with the tiniest bit of sense knows that combat is dangerous and that the best way to survive it is to finish the battle as quickly as possible. If you’re a diviner, like me, that means running away. For a fire mage, like the guy who’d just kicked down the door, it means killing your enemy with the first strike.

  Of course, for the same reason, mag
es who are easily ambushed tend not to live very long. I’d pulled Meredith far enough back that the first blast had done nothing but dry our skin, but in only a couple of seconds the fire mage would be in view, and I dug through my pockets for something to hold him back.

  But I’d underestimated Meredith. I hadn’t expected her to be any use in a fight, and to be fair, she hadn’t given me much reason to think otherwise: in the battle with the construct, the best that could be said was that she hadn’t gotten in my way. But it hadn’t occurred to me that the reason she’d been so scared was because she’d been facing something her magic couldn’t touch. The fire mage was deadly and powerful but he was still human, and even caught by surprise, Meredith didn’t waste more than a startled breath. She turned to face the door and my senses tingled as she sent something into the hallway.

  Over the crackle of flames, I heard the sound of staggering footsteps as the mage fell back. He recovered fast, though, and I saw the attack coming in time to snap “Down!” and pull Meredith to the floor.

  A beam of fire slashed through the doorway and sawed sideways through the wall, slicing through wood and plaster and sweeping the living room at waist height. I covered Meredith with one arm and tried to burrow into the carpet. A flash of terrible heat rolled over my back and I felt the hair on the back of my head crisp, then in an instant it was gone and I looked up just in time to see the beam cut through the shelves. The shelving and everything on it literally vapor-ised in the instant before the beam cut out, leaving the burning upper half of the shelves to crash to the floor.

  The beam had left a neat one-foot gash in the wall and past the red-hot edges I could see the upper body of the fire mage silhouetted against the flames. He’d only have to bend his head slightly to see us too, so before he had the chance to realise that I pulled what looked like a marble from my pocket and hurled it. I’ve picked up a few unusual ways to use my divination magic over the years and one of them is a way of accurately throwing small objects. All in all it’s probably one of my more useless skills, but it does occasionally come in handy. The projectile flew neatly through the centre of the gap, past the fire mage, and shattered against the opposite wall.