Burned (19 page)

Caldera frowned. ‘Alex, if this relates to what’s going on—’

‘It’s not that I don’t want to, I literally
can’t
,’ I said. ‘It’s covered by Council secrecy.’ Which was true. ‘All I can tell you is that it’s the reason I’m on this job in the first place. I’m guessing you already noticed I didn’t get called in the usual way.’

‘Had been going to ask you about that, yeah.’ Caldera looked at me, but I already knew that she wouldn’t push it further. ‘Does it relate to last night’s attack?’

‘Not directly, as far as I know.’ Which was also true. I was pretty sure that it was Symmaris and her friends who’d been behind the assassination attempt, even if I couldn’t prove it.

There was an awkward silence. ‘All right,’ Caldera said at last, and got to her feet. ‘Let’s go see if we can find these new friends of yours.’

On my suggestion, our first stop was the room in the building opposite my shop, where the fire mage had launched his initial attack. It was still in the cordon, and I didn’t particularly want to deal with the police again, so Sonder and I waited nearby while Caldera talked her way in. Once she was alone in the room, she opened up a gate and the two of us stepped through.

‘Your work, I’m guessing,’ Caldera said as she closed the gate behind us.

‘They started it,’ I said. Grenades make quite a mess. The walls had been shredded by shrapnel, and feathers from the ruined bedding were everywhere.

‘Sonder?’ Caldera said. ‘What are you getting?’

‘Give me a sec,’ Sonder said, frowning as he stared into space. Sonder is a time mage, and his speciality is timesight, the ability to look back through past events in your current location. Most time mages can do it, but Sonder’s particularly good at it. For obvious reasons it’s a highly in-demand skill among Keepers, which is one of the reasons Sonder’s become quite successful in his career.

I nodded down at the feathers. ‘Any bloodstains?’

‘The cops got a few,’ Caldera said. ‘They’ll be in the lab for analysis.’

‘Any chance we could get them?’

‘Not for at least twenty-four hours.’

‘Eh,’ I said. There are some powerful tracking spells you can pull off if you have a piece of the target’s body, but that was too long. ‘They’ll have used an annuller by then.’

Sonder stirred. ‘Anything?’ Caldera asked.

‘Just glimpses,’ Sonder said. ‘They were using a shroud. And a radio, giving directions, I think. One of them gated out, the explosion went off and wounded the other, he called for help, then he gated away too.’

‘Any ID on the mages?’

Sonder shook his head. ‘Shadow masks.’

‘Guess we can’t expect them to be stupid all the time.’ Caldera held up her hand and brown light gathered around it as she started working on another gate. ‘You guys head back before those guys start wondering why I’m talking to myself. I’ll meet you at the park.’

Caldera’s gate led us back to the park we’d arrived from. It was the same one I’d used earlier in the day: a small secluded circle of greenery fenced in by high buildings, with tree cover heavy enough to hide a gate spell, even in winter. I stepped down on to the hard earth and waited as Sonder came through behind me. The gate winked out, leaving us alone.

‘When are you going to tell her?’ Sonder asked.

I sighed. ‘Hopefully never.’

Sonder frowned. ‘That’s not—’

‘If everything goes to plan, the resolution won’t pass,’ I said. ‘It fails and goes into the archives in a file marked “Secret”. If things
don’t
go to plan, then Caldera’s going to be the least of my worries. Either way, I don’t see how telling her about something that is illegal for us to know is going to help very much, given that the first thing she’d be obliged to do would be to prosecute us for breaking Council secrecy.’

‘What if it turns out it
was
Levistus who sent those men?’ Sonder asked.

‘It wasn’t Levistus.’

‘How do you—?’

‘Because Levistus has me under a death sentence.’ I tried not to let my impatience show. Sonder is intelligent, but he’s no strategist. ‘There is absolutely no reason for him to work this hard to get me killed when as far as he knows he only has to wait a few days and the Keepers will do it for him.’

‘Caldera is going to find out sooner or later.’

‘Yeah, she is,’ I said. ‘So if you’re so keen on making sure she’s informed, why haven’t you told her already?’

‘Me? Why?’

‘Why not?’ I said. ‘If you care that much.’

Sonder was silent.

I looked at Sonder. The winter sky was overcast and the light filtering through the clouds made him look older than he was, but to my eyes he still looked young. ‘You know, Sonder,’ I said, ‘one of these days, you’re going to have to figure out whose side you’re on.’

Sonder gave me a sideways look. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean that if you keep sitting on the fence, then sooner or later someone is going to come along and push you off.’

‘I just work for the Council,’ Sonder said. ‘I don’t want to take sides.’

‘Yeah, well, “the Council” isn’t one side,’ I said. ‘Why do you think they have so much trouble dealing with mages like Richard? If they had their act together they’d be telling him to back the hell off. But they can’t, because they spend too much time fighting among each other and going after people like me.’ I shrugged. ‘They’re going to fall apart at this rate. When you’ve got people like Levistus running the show, it doesn’t matter that you’ve got people like Caldera lower down.’

The crunch of footsteps announced Caldera’s arrival, and we both turned to look. ‘Well, looks like your hunch was right,’ Caldera said to me as she walked up. ‘The three bodies in the stairwell were too badly burned to ID, but the cops have managed to finger one of the ones they found on the roof. He was a low-level thug with ties to some of the more radical Crusader groups. Good bet the others are the same.’

‘Have you got any leads on Symmaris?’

‘We’ve got her address in Kew. What are you planning to do with it?’

‘Go over there and shake her down a bit.’

‘We haven’t got enough for an arrest.’

‘I know.’

Caldera gave me a curious look. ‘What are you hoping for? Rattling the tree to see what falls out?’

‘It’s worth a shot, but I’ve got something else in mind.’

‘Do you still need me?’ Sonder asked.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’ll explain along the way.’

Kew Gardens is to the south-west of London what Hampstead is to the north: pretty, clean air, lots of trees and flowers and incredibly expensive. Symmaris’s house was on a corner and looked bigger and more spacious than the norm, set slightly back from the street but still not all that excessive by mage standards. There was a front garden with a hedge.

‘Okay,’ I said. The three of us were at the end of the road, out of sight. The street was empty, with the vaguely deserted feel that the middle-class parts of London always seem to have during the daytime. ‘Caldera, you’ve got enough links to Symmaris to justify a visit, right?’

‘Sure.’

‘So here’s the plan. The three of us go in and you and I question her. I figure that just seeing me there is going to scare her. Important thing is that we make sure that we do it in whichever room she uses for day-to-day activities.’

‘Okay…’

‘Now, I don’t know if we’ll get anything,’ I said. ‘If we do, that’s a bonus, but it’s optional. The idea is to rattle her. We get her scared, then we leave.’

Caldera looked slightly puzzled. ‘How does that help?’

‘The impression I’ve got of Symmaris is that she’s not exactly brave. And she’s nowhere near the top of the food chain; she’s working on someone else’s orders. If we scare her enough, there’s a good chance that the first thing she’ll do is go call her boss. Right?’

‘I guess.’

‘So once we’re out of the house, we wait. I’ll use my divination and look through the futures in which we go back. Once I’ve got a fix, we go back for another talk. You say that there’s something you forgot to ask.’ I turned to Sonder. ‘That’s where you come in. While Caldera and I are talking to her, you use your timesight and look back at what’s happened in the room. With a bit of luck you should be able to make out the details of her conversation. You can figure out who her boss is, and maybe get something incriminating.’

‘The room’s going to be warded,’ Sonder said.

‘Against scrying, sure. Maybe not against timesight.’

‘It’ll be both,’ Sonder said. ‘I mean, time and space magic overlap anyway, it’s not exactly hard. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Light mage’s house that doesn’t have timesight wards.’

‘Okay, that makes it harder, but your timesight’s pretty good. It’s exponentially easier to see through a temporal shroud the closer that period is to the present, right?’

‘Technically it’s not an exponential relationship. It’s more like—’

‘You get the idea.’

Sonder thought for a second. ‘As long as the wards aren’t stronger than average, and as long as it’s within ten or fifteen minutes, I should be able get a clear read. Any longer than that and I might start losing fragments. Also, I’ll need to know where to look.’

I nodded. ‘So we need some way to make sure that when she has that conversation, it’s at a location we can reach.’

Caldera was looking unimpressed. ‘You don’t know that she
is
going to have that conversation. And even if she does, her boss isn’t likely to say anything incriminating over the phone. If he’s smart, he won’t even be using a phone.’

‘But there’s a good chance she’ll let something slip.’

‘She might not,’ Sonder said. ‘I mean, if she’s that scared, she might just run away or something.’

‘Yeah, let’s just keep it simple,’ Caldera said. ‘Take a look at her garden for me.’

I blinked. ‘Say again?’

‘That front garden,’ Caldera said. ‘Use your divination and tell me what it looks like.’

I gave Caldera a puzzled look, then examined the futures in which I walked down the road and pushed open the gate. ‘Okay, so … it’s a garden. Decent-sized hedge, some shrubs, and there are creepers growing on trellises. And there’s a fountain. What am I looking for?’

‘How neat does it look?’

‘Pretty neat, I guess.’

‘How about the house? Same way?’

‘Yeah.’ I looked at Caldera curiously. ‘Why?’

‘All right, let’s go,’ Caldera said. She started walking down the road.

I looked at Sonder, who shrugged. We followed Caldera.

Symmaris’s garden
was
nice. It would have been prettier if it weren’t midwinter, but even so, the wisteria climbing through the trellis looked well tended, and the grass was perfectly smooth. Caldera marched straight up the path to the front door and rang the bell.

There was a long silence, then the intercom clicked. ‘Hello?’

‘Mage Symmaris?’ Caldera asked.

‘Who is this?’

‘I’m Keeper Caldera of the Order of the Star. We’d like to ask you a few questions.’

There was a pause. ‘What about?’

‘Open the door, please.’

The intercom was silent for a moment as Symmaris hesitated again. ‘This isn’t a very good time…’

‘Mage Symmaris, we’re here on a Council investigation,’ Caldera said. ‘There are two ways this can go. Either you come out and talk to us, or you get a new door.’

My eyebrows climbed at that. While Caldera had been talking I’d been studying the wards on the house, and they were heavy-duty: the standard gate protections, as well as the shrouds that Sonder had been referring to, but there were reinforcement and attack wards as well. If Caldera tried to smash the door down I did not want to be in the blast radius. ‘Uh, Caldera?’ I murmured. ‘I don’t think—’

Caldera held up a finger to silence me. ‘Well?’ she said into the intercom.

‘Wait! Wait!’

‘You going to let us in?’

‘Give me a second!’

Caldera looked back at me. ‘She coming?’

I looked into the futures. ‘Yeah. About two minutes.’

We stood on the cold doorstep. Two minutes and twenty seconds later, there was the scrape of metal as a viewing slot opened in the door. ‘Can I— I mean, I want you to show me your signet.’

Caldera complied, holding up the leather wallet that concealed her symbol of office. There was a pause. ‘All right,’ Symmaris said hesitantly.

‘Open the door, please,’ Caldera said again.

To my surprise, Symmaris obeyed. The door swung open to reveal a neatly decorated hall with a mirror, hanging rugs and dainty-looking ornaments lined up on shelves. Symmaris was several steps back from the door, and as she saw me her eyes went wide. I’d deliberately stayed off to the side and out of the field of vision of the door slot and the hidden camera I’d spotted at the top of the porch. ‘You!’ Symmaris said.

‘Hello, Mage Symmaris,’ Caldera said. ‘How are you doing today?’

Symmaris pointed at me. ‘What’s he doing here?’

‘Mage Verus is a Keeper auxiliary,’ Caldera said. ‘He’s also not the one asking the questions. Are you aware that there was an incident involving a breach of the Concord last night?’

Symmaris seemed to be standing only a few feet away, within easy reach, but appearances were deceptive. There were wards ready to go; at least one was a force effect and … yes. If I lunged for her she’d say a command word and throw up a barrier blocking the entry hall. ‘What?’ Symmaris said.

‘An incident involving a breach of the Concord,’ Caldera said. ‘Know anything about it?’

‘I— No. I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

Not the best piece of deception I’ve seen.
Even if I hadn’t already been sure that Symmaris had been involved, the look on her face would have been enough to confirm it. ‘Were you in Camden Town last night, or involved in any way with mages operating there?’ Caldera asked.

‘No,’ Symmaris said. ‘Of course not.’

‘Mind telling me your whereabouts between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m. this morning?’

‘What? Why?’

Caldera nodded. ‘Get your coat.’

Symmaris stared at her. ‘What?’

‘We’re going down to the station.’

‘
What?
’

‘We’re going down to the station,’ Caldera repeated. ‘We’d like to ask you a few questions.’