Alex Verus Novels, Books 1-4 (9780698175952) (122 page)

Sonder was standing next to Caldera, wearing the kind of get-up city dwellers buy from camping stores when they want to go hiking. “What?” he said.

“Why is he here?” I asked Caldera.

“Because he's a time mage,” Caldera said, glancing between us. She was wearing old workman's clothes, patched and mended from long use, as well as a webbing belt with sealed pouches. “You've worked together before, right?”

“I thought this was supposed to be a quick in-and-out.”

“We know the place is empty,” Caldera said. “I need to know if anyone's been using it, and that means timesight.”

“Timesight only shows you one location at one time,” I said. “Scanning the whole mansion is going to take hours.”

“Then we better get started, hadn't we?”

I looked around reluctantly. Sonder looked a little offended, but that wasn't why I was feeling uneasy. All my instincts told me that visiting Richard's mansion was dangerous. Trying to do a full search, like it was some sort of crime scene . . .

But I'd given my word and it wasn't enough to make me back out, at least not yet. “All right.”

Caldera raised a hand, weaving a spell under the cover of the trees. A pale brown light sprang up next to the tree trunk, growing and widening until it steadied into a vertical oval. Shapes appeared in the oval, the colours changing from pale brown to green and grey and then sharpening and becoming clear, forming an image of earth and grass and trees. For a moment it was only an image, as if seen through a window, then the window was gone and we were looking through a gateway. A cool breeze blew through, ruffling my hair; the place we were going was a few degrees colder than the summer heat of the park.

I led the way. Sonder followed and Caldera came last, letting the gateway vanish behind her.

* * *

Y
ou can tell a lot about a mage by where they live.

Apprentices usually live with their masters. Sometimes they'll have a flat or shared rooms, but it's still generally the master who arranges it. They're not really expected to be responsible for themselves; it's their master who provides for them, and in return they're expected to do as they're told.

Once an apprentice graduates to journeyman status, things change. Now they're free to do as they like, and usually one of the first things they do is get themselves a place of their own. Mages rarely have to worry about money and it's easy for them to buy themselves a house, as long as they don't go for anything extravagant. Of course, lots of them
do
want something extravagant, and it's common for established mages to own a mansion. Some of it is about status—my house is more ostentatious than yours—but there's a practical element too. Some of the things mages get up to require a fair amount of space, and if you're trying to perform a large-scale ritual then there are a lot of benefits to being able to stage it in your own home rather than an unsecured area.

The next thing to sort out is location. Light mages like to place their mansions in the hearts of big cities or in attractive and well-populated areas of the countryside near towns and main roads. It makes it easy for guests to get there, and it makes it easy to get hold of servants and catering staff to entertain the guests. A mage who chooses an easily accessible location is making a statement; he's saying that he's willing to entertain visitors (though probably only select visitors). Other mages go for a compromise, choosing to live in the suburbs or in slightly more removed areas of the country. You can still reach them easily enough but they've got a little more privacy.

And some mages don't want to live near anyone else at all.

Richard's mansion was the last type. It was in a remote corner of Wales, hidden away amidst forest and rolling hills. The mansion itself was an oblong with two jutting wings but with no car park, no driveway, and no roads. Rail lines didn't go anywhere near the place and there wasn't so much as a gravel path leading to the front door.

It's very rare to build a house in a place so isolated, and there are only a few reasons anyone would want to do it. It can be because you don't want visitors. It can be because you don't want anyone getting in. And it can be because you don't want anyone getting out.

I stood in the shade at the edge of the tree cover, looking across at the mansion. When I'd last seen the grounds they'd been cleared, but now they were wild and overgrown; the old plots had been reclaimed by the forest around us, wildflowers and bushes a tangled riot in what had once been an ordered garden. The lawn was now a meadow, and behind the mansion green hills rose up into the blue sky. It would have been beautiful if I hadn't known what the place had been used for.

“Anything?” Caldera said from behind me.

“I wasn't looking,” I said. It's a weird feeling, seeing something that was once the centre of your life. For a moment the old memories flooded back; my last glimpse of the mansion, lit windows against the black night, snatched over my shoulder as I fled. I'd sworn never to come back—or if I did, it would have been to destroy the place. In the end I never did return . . . not physically, at least. For a long time I saw it every night in my dreams.

But emotions fade, and as I looked at the mansion I realised to my surprise that most of the old hate and fear was gone. For all that it represented, for all the danger that might still be inside, it was just a building—steeped in history, ancient and dangerous, but for now at least, deserted.

“When you're ready,” Caldera said.

I shook off the memories. Time to focus. “The grounds are clear. Let's move up.”

We picked our way through the overgrown trails, brushing through the grass. Birds sang from the nearby trees and the air smelt of pollen and of summer. Richard's mansion grew larger as we approached; despite its age the building didn't look weatherbeaten or damaged, and apart from a little roughening around the edges it looked just as it had when I'd lived here. The walls could have been mistaken for brickwork but weren't. Despite its sprawl, the mansion only had two storeys. “I thought it'd be bigger,” Sonder said.

“Most of it's underground,” I said absently, scanning ahead. “That's funny.”

“What's funny?” Caldera said.

“There are wards.”

Caldera looked at me in surprise. “After ten years?”

I shook my head. “No, the old gate and scrying wards are gone. But there's a trigger there.” I pointed at the front door. “It's not locked, but if you walk through you'll set off a silent alarm.”

Caldera frowned at it. “I can't see anything.”

“It's not designed to be visible,” I said. There are ways of shrouding or inverting wards that make them difficult to detect. This one was hard to spot, but the design was familiar. In fact it was
very
familiar . . . “Wait a minute,” I said, my heart sinking. “Let me check something.”

Sonder and Caldera waited for me. “Deleo,” I said after a moment. “Great.”

“She's here?” Sonder said in alarm.

I nodded at the door. “If we set that thing off she will be. It's designed to alert her.”

“What's her response time?” Caldera asked.

“Fast. Minutes.”

“I thought this place was deserted?” Sonder said.

“I think we might just have found out
why
it's deserted,” I said. The futures of Deleo gating in were chaotic and unpredictable, but I was pretty sure I didn't want a closer look. I had the feeling that if she found us here she'd kill first and ask questions later.

“Can you disarm it?” Sonder asked.

I nodded. “It'll take a while, but yeah.” I studied it with narrowed eyes. “Doing it safely is going to be slow but we can probably—”

“Yeah, let's speed this up,” Caldera said. She pointed at a section of wall to the right. “Is
that
bit warded?”

“Uh,” I said. “No.”

Caldera walked up through the bushes and placed both hands flat against the stone wall. Brownish light flared and the stone melted and flowed. The section of wall in front of her thinned and vanished, becoming an archway, the stone that had occupied the empty space moving to buttress the gap. The stone stopped flowing, Caldera took her hands away, and the light faded. Where there had been a blank wall was a reinforced arch, leading into darkness. “There,” Caldera said. “We clear?”

“I guess that's a faster way to do it,” I said, walking up to the gap and taking a glance through. “Clear.”

Caldera summoned up a light and the three of us walked in.

* * *

T
he inside of the mansion hadn't aged as gracefully as the outside. Dust covered everything and bits of furniture had been overturned. “You two stick together,” Caldera said. “I'm going to take a look around.”

I gave her an exasperated look. “Do the words ‘safety precautions' mean anything to you?”

“Yeah, people keep telling me something about that,” Caldera said. “Be right back.”

“Just don't go below the ground floor,” I called after her as she left. Her footsteps faded away and I shook my head. “And people tell me
I
take risks.”

Sonder didn't answer. He played the light of his torch around the hallway, the glow flicking over dusty paintings. “Well, this is your party,” I told him. “Where do you want to start?”

“Is there any kind of meeting room?” Sonder asked. “Somewhere people would assemble?”

I nodded down the hall. “That way.”

The rooms on the ground floor of the mansion were the kitchens, storerooms, dining room, and servants' quarters. The room we entered had once been a living room, but as I walked in I slowed and stopped. The light from our torches showed broken chairs, and drawers and shelves had been emptied, their contents strewn over the floor. The sofa in the centre had been cut in half, a huge section of the middle missing and the stuffing spilling out.

“Was it . . . always like this?” Sonder said, staring at the sofa.

I shook my head. “No.” This was the room where Shireen, Rachel, Tobruk, and I had all gathered with Richard that first night, and where we'd kept meeting in the months afterward. “What happened here?”

“Wait a minute,” Sonder said, frowning. His eyes became distant.

I stood in silence, looking around. While we'd been Richard's apprentices this had been a kind of briefing room; it was where he'd given us our assignments and where we'd gathered to talk in our free time. My eyes drifted to Richard's old armchair; unlike the rest of the furniture it hadn't been touched and I unconsciously stepped away from it. The fireplace was dark and cold.

Sonder stayed in his trance for a long time, fifteen minutes at least. When he finally looked up at me, he looked uneasy. “It was Deleo.”

“She trashed the place?”

Sonder shook his head. “No. Three other men did. They were here five months ago. I think they were looking for something.”

“Looking for what?”

“I don't know,” Sonder said, looking around. “I don't think they got the chance to find it. Deleo walked in that door and she . . . killed them. All of them.”

I looked around the empty room. There was dust but no bones. “What happened to the bodies?”

Sonder pointed at the dust at my feet.

“Oh.” I stepped aside. “Right.” I'd thought there was something familiar about the way that sofa had been destroyed. Rachel had grown a lot more powerful in the years since I'd left, and she seemed to specialise in disintegration. “Did they have any kind of magic?”

“Not enough,” Sonder said.

We stood in the empty, dead room, the beams of our torches the only light. “You don't think Deleo's still living here, do you?” Sonder asked.

I shook my head. “Nobody's living here. I shouldn't have to tell you that.”

“Then why's Deleo still coming?”

“From the sound of it she only shows up if someone trips the burglar alarm,” I said. “I think she's just guarding this place. All she cares about is making sure no one else touches it.”

“But . . .” Sonder looked around. “It doesn't make sense.”

“What doesn't?”

“Doing it like this!” Sonder said. “There wasn't a warning anywhere or anything like that. The front door wasn't even locked! We could have just walked in without knowing any better and she would have tried to kill us!”

“From the sound of it that's exactly what she's been doing.”

“But why doesn't she do it the normal way?” Sonder said. “No one even knows that this is her house! She could have . . . I don't know, registered it with the Council or something.”

“She
is
letting people know that this is her house.”

“They can't spread the message if they're all dead!”

I shrugged. “She probably lets a few go. Or maybe she just assumes that if enough people go missing then sooner or later the others will take the hint.”

Sonder shook his head. “That's insane.”

I looked at Sonder for a moment. “If you want to be a scholar,” I said at last, “you have to learn not to see things so simply.”

“What do you mean?”

“Deleo and Dark mages seem insane to you because you're judging them by your standards,” I said. “You're assuming they have the same goals you do. What makes you so sure Deleo
wants
to warn people off peacefully?”

Sonder looked at me, puzzled. “What are you saying?”

“I'm saying that if you're the kind of person who likes to take out your frustrations on other people, then occasionally having to murder some burglars is less of a drawback and more a perk of the job.”

Sonder stared at me in revulsion. “Are you serious?”

I sighed. “I'm not saying that's why she does it, I'm saying it
might
be. The point is that Deleo doesn't live in your world. What you said about registering with the Council? To Dark mages that'd be a joke. They only respect authority if it's backed up by force. Registering might actually
attract
them—they'd figure that if she was trying to get the protection of Light mages, then she couldn't handle it herself. And it would mostly be other Dark mages she'd be worried about.”