Veiled Read online

  “I thought you were only charging the ones who could afford it.”

  “I am . . . well, I guess I’m not really the entrepreneur type. Though they do seem to treat me better than when I did it for free.”

  “I noticed that too,” I said. “Back when I first took over the shop, I tried giving stuff away. Never seemed to turn out that well. I think people value something more if they pay for it.” I paused. “Are you still seeing Dr. Shirland?”

  Anne nodded. Dr. Shirland’s an independent mind mage. She’d offered to treat Anne a year and a half back but had been turned down. After last spring, Anne had reconsidered.

  “Going okay?”

  “It’s not easy, but it helps. I’m glad you and Luna pushed me into it.”

  “Have you been talking about . . . ?”

  “About her?”

  I didn’t need to ask who the “her” was, and Anne didn’t need to say it. Anne has her own problems, and there’s a side of her she doesn’t get on well with. “She calls her my shadow,” Anne said. “Other things too, but . . . She thinks I can work something out, but it’ll take a long time.”

  “I guess now’s as good a time as any to start.”

  Anne smiled slightly. “Let’s hope so.”

  My phone rang, and I put it to my ear with an inward sigh. So much for quiet. “Hi, Caldera.”

  “Are you at home?” Caldera said.

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m on my way. Don’t go anywhere.” She hung up.

  I lowered the phone. “Well, it was nice while it lasted.”

  Anne rose to her feet. “I guess that’s my cue to go.”

  I looked at her in surprise. “You don’t have to.”

  “I think it might be easier.”

  I started to answer, then stopped and looked down. The bell was about to ring. Already?

  I went downstairs and opened the door to see Caldera, dressed in her work clothes. “Hey.”

  Caldera gave me an up-and-down look. “You all right?”

  “I got better.”

  Caldera pushed past me. “Then how about you explain,” she said over her shoulder, “how the hell you managed to nearly get yourself killed on the bloody DLR?”

  I closed the door and followed Caldera upstairs. “Nice to see you too.”

  “One job. You had one job. All you had do was investigate.”

  “You were the one who sent me there. Shouldn’t I be the one blaming you?”

  “I should have known it was a bad idea to send you on your own. I could—”

  Caldera walked into the living room and stopped. I followed her in to see that Caldera had come face to face with Anne. Anne was in the middle of packing up her bag with her medical gear. She looked up at Caldera. There was a pause.

  “You could what?” I asked when Caldera didn’t go on.

  “In a sec,” Caldera said. She didn’t take her eyes off Anne.

  “It’s okay,” Anne said. “I was just going.” She did up the straps on her bag and slung it over her shoulder. “Give me a call if you need anything.”

  “You don’t have to,” I said with a frown.

  “I should probably be getting back.” Anne walked to the door. Caldera let her pass, moving noticeably farther out of Anne’s way than she really needed to, and I saw her eyes track Anne as she went by. Anne disappeared down the stairs, and a moment later I heard the sound of the front door opening and closing.

  I turned to Caldera. “Was that really necessary?”

  “She’s not a Keeper or an auxiliary,” Caldera said. “She’s not cleared for this information.”

  “She just patched a giant bloody hole in my side. You don’t think that earns at least a thank-you?”

  “A thank-you, yeah,” Caldera said. “Just leave it at that next time. You know there are Keeper-sanctioned healers.”

  “Anne’s saved my life at least twice.”

  “She’s also—” Caldera checked what she’d been about to say, shook her head. “Never mind. All right, I want you to go through exactly what happened last night. Don’t leave anything out.”

  I still felt annoyed, but suppressed it. I sat down at the table with Caldera and started the debriefing. It took the best part of an hour, and by the time we were done I felt strung out.

  “You were lucky,” Caldera said once I’d finished.

  “Lucky would be not getting attacked by an assassin-mage in the first place,” I said. “Seriously, can you stop acting like this was my fault?”

  “You still shouldn’t have gone back. If you suspected something—”

  “Suspected what? There was no evidence that it was going to—”

  “All right, all right,” Caldera said with a wave of her hand. “I’ll admit, you didn’t totally screw up.”

  “Is that supposed to be a compliment?”

  “Anyway, we’re officially assigned to the case. So you can consider yourself on the clock as of yesterday.”

  “Do we get anyone else?”

  “Rest of the Order are stretched thin right now,” Caldera said. “The ones who aren’t tied up with security ops are off looking for some missing Council guy. You get me.”

  “One case, one Keeper?”

  “It’s usually enough.” Caldera closed her notepad. “Okay, here’s how things stand. Liaisons are pulling the CCTV from Pudding Mill Lane and Stratford stations for the past seventy-two hours, so we should have that by the end of today. Next priority is this air mage. I’ve checked the watch list and there’s no one recently active who meets your description.”

  “He was speaking in French,” I said. “At least, before he was trying to kill me.”

  Caldera nodded. “We can try the French Council, but that’ll take time. Anyway, we’ll need a better description before we go to them. Once the CCTV footage gets in, we should have a photo.”

  “Timesight?”

  “The waiting list for time mages is a mile long,” Caldera said. “I’ve put in a request flagged as urgent, but don’t hold your breath.”

  “Maybe we can get this air mage to try to kill you, too. That ought to bump it up the priority list.”

  “Next up, this focus. You got it here?”

  “It’s with Variam’s master,” I said. “Landis. You know the guy, right?”

  “Yeah,” Caldera said, and sighed. “Fine, let’s see if he’s got anything.”

  | | | | | | | | |

  Gate magic makes travel so much easier. If I’d been on my own, getting up to Edinburgh would have meant either an overpriced rail ticket and hours on the train, or a path-finding exercise involving gate stones. With Caldera, we were there inside five minutes.

  Edinburgh’s a weird city; castles and ancient buildings and modern shops all piled together down the length of sloped streets, with that giant grass-and-stone hill looking down over the rooftops. In the summer it’s crammed with tourists, but this was February, generally accepted to be the most miserable month in the British year, and not too many visitors were braving the cold winds and drizzle.

  In magical society, Edinburgh’s famous for a different reason: it’s the location of the second and smaller of the Council’s two apprentice programs. Sometime back in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, there was a treaty signed giving the Edinburgh mages the right to run their own teaching establishment separate from the ones in the south. Over the centuries most of the mage schools were assimilated into the association that would eventually become the London apprentice program, but the Edinburgh faction resisted it for long enough that having a second apprentice program became a tradition. There’s still the odd attempt to merge the two, but the proposals have always fallen through, partly due to Scottish nationalism but mostly because a number of British mages find it useful to have a secondary power centre in the British Isles tha
t’s not quite so closely connected to the Council.

  We wound our way through the streets, away from the tourist centres and to a stone house down a side alley. We rang the bell and the door opened to reveal Variam. “Hey, Vari,” I said.

  “Hey,” Variam said. He looked more subdued than usual.

  “Landis in?” Caldera asked.

  “He’s up there,” Variam said, pointing his thumb at the rickety staircase behind him. “Good luck, you’ll need it.”

  Up until a year and a half ago, Anne and Variam were living with me. Anne moved out in the summer to a flat in Honor Oak, but Variam came here to Edinburgh, taking up the role of apprentice to a mage named Landis, a Council Keeper from the Order of the Shield.

  The Keepers of the Flame have three orders. The largest and most well known is Caldera’s order, the Order of the Star. The Order of the Star police magical society; if a crime is committed that breaks the peace of the Concord or the national laws of the Council, they’re the ones who are supposed to deal with it. Next is the Order of the Cloak, the ones responsible for preserving the secrecy of the magical world. They work with (and on) the mundane authorities, dealing with normals and sensitives, and they’re much less high-profile. They rarely deal with other mages, to the point that a lot of mages forget that the Order of the Cloak even exists.

  And then there’s the Order of the Shield. Once the biggest of the orders, their name’s a hint at their original function: they were battle-mages, meant to protect the population from magical predators. But as magical creatures declined, so did they, and nowadays they’re the Council’s military reserve, called in when a situation is violent or expected to get that way. Ninety-nine percent of their time is spent sitting around doing nothing or guarding against threats that never show up. The last one percent involves getting sent into the most horrendously dangerous situations imaginable. Let’s put it this way—the Order of the Shield are the ones who get sent in when the Council thinks that mages like Caldera aren’t enough.

  It shouldn’t be a surprise that Keepers of the Order of the Shield have a reputation for being weird. The Council gives them more leeway than the other orders, probably because people who were entirely sane wouldn’t be volunteering for the job in the first place. Mostly, they just point them at a problem, then get out of the way. I’d met Landis two or three times, but this was the first time I’d visited his house.

  The top floor of the building was a wide room with a beautiful view out over the Edinburgh skyline. The room was a workshop, with desks and benches covered in half-built or disassembled clutter, and papers and books were stacked in piles or scattered in the corners, and bent over the desk at the centre was Landis. He’s tall and rangy, with sandy-brown hair and an angular face, and he always seems to be moving. As we walked in he thrust a finger towards us without looking. “Caldera! Lady of the hour! Excellent timing, I’m quite sure you did it on purpose, and don’t think it’s not appreciated. Or was it you, Vari?”

  “It’s not that.” Variam had followed us into the room and was looking at Landis in a long-suffering sort of way. “They just wanted to know—”

  “Wanting to know, the source and saviour of our problems, but there’s no escaping it, is there? Oh, hello, Verus, of course I don’t need to tell you that. Right then, let’s be about it!” Landis bounded up and covered the distance to Caldera in three long strides, holding something out to her. “There! No goodly state in the realms of gold, but a thing of beauty in its way.”

  I peered at the thing warily. It looked like a wide-bodied dart, about the size of my hand, with a body of beaten copper that gleamed in the daylight through the window. I could also feel fire magic radiating from the thing, and a lot of it, which made me more than a little nervous. Fire magic’s good at what it does, but “what it does” mostly involves burning things.

  “It’s very nice,” Caldera said. “But what we came for—”

  “But time and tide wait for no man, eh? Or woman, or child, or elemental spirit, so no sense admiring the weather.” He tossed the dart to Caldera, who caught it; I felt Variam flinch. “Now just take a twiddle at the top and we’ll be on our way.”

  Caldera sighed. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Disassembly, my dear girl—give that gadget you’re holding in your delightful hands a closer inspection by way of its inner parts, field-strip and cleaning, don’t you know?”

  “Oh, I give up,” Caldera said. “Fine—like this?”

  Caldera fiddled with the dart, trying to find a way to open it as Landis watched eagerly. After a moment, she found the right angle and unscrewed the top until it came off in her hand. Beneath was a complex arrangement of crystal rods, each glowing with a small but powerful orange light. Together they looked like a weird miniaturised furnace, and very dangerous. Out of reflex I started searching through possibilities, figuring out whether this thing was safe.

  “Excellent!” Landis clapped his hands happily. “There you go, Variam! Doubting Johns, eh?”

  “Are we done here?” Caldera said. “It’s not as though—” She started to move her hand towards the glowing crystals.

  A future suddenly jumped into my sight in horrible clarity. “Don’t touch that!” My voice came out as a yelp.

  Caldera paused. “Don’t touch what?”

  “That thing’s a bomb!” I couldn’t take my eyes away from Caldera’s fingers, only a few inches away from the central rod. I’d just had a vivid image of what would happen if she touched it. “The crystal in the centre’s a pressure sensor. You hit it and it’s going to blow up the whole room!”

  Caldera stayed still for a second, then, very carefully, moved her hand away from the trigger. “Landis?” There was a dangerous note to her voice. “Would you mind explaining?”

  Landis had disappeared to a bench in the corner and was digging through spare parts. “Yes, yes, the tragedy of our violent natures, but what can one do, hmm? Certainly can’t deny the artistry in the affair . . . Ah! There you are, you little rascal!” He strode back with a slim-handled tool in one hand.

  “Mind telling me why you wanted me to open it?”

  “Fluctuations, my dear girl! No use in setting the circuit if it’ll lose containment as soon as it brushes up against some unfriendly spell, eh?” Landis paused, stroking his chin. “Though earth’s not quite the ideal test, should really have brought a water mage—no chance you’re planning to spontaneously change to that type, is there?”

  “I don’t know why I expected anything else,” Caldera muttered. She thrust the bomb and its cap at Landis. “Take your little do-it-yourself suicide kit back, all right? I’m not your lab assistant.”

  Landis took the parts from Caldera and spent a moment juggling the things in a way that made me cringe. He ended up with the bomb in one hand, the tool (which I recognised as a conductor probe) in the other, and the cap in his mouth. “Look,” Caldera said, following him back to the bench. “You said you knew what that focus was, right?”

  “Mf crth uh dr,” Landis said around the cap, his attention on the bomb as he fiddled at it with the probe. “Brth urf yrr crld yrf way uh mrmuh . . .”

  “How often does he do this?” I said under my breath to Variam.

  “All the bloody time,” Variam said gloomily. He’d withdrawn to behind a bench, and I could sense he had a fire resistance spell up.

  “Hah!” Landis dropped the tool on the bench, spat out the cap, and looked at the bomb in delight. “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever, eh? Well, until it goes off, but only in life’s transience do we truly see, et cetera et cetera.”

  “Landis?” Caldera said.

  “Hm?”

  “The focus?” Caldera was obviously trying very hard to be patient.

  “Secrets hidden in the craftsman’s hands! Of course!” Landis flung himself into a chair and put his feet up on one of t
he desks, crossing his legs. “Variam, make us some tea, there’s a good chap. They must be parched.”

  Variam disappeared quickly, probably glad to be out of the blast radius. “Right then!” Landis said. He was still holding the bomb in his left hand, and the safety cap was still off. The pressure sensor glowed menacingly; I knew it would only take a strong tap to detonate it, and I had to restrain myself from flinching as Landis waved it in my direction. “Good old Vari told me the story. Fascinating account, wish I’d seen the fellow who went after you, Verus, must have been quite the spot of exercise, hmm?”

  “You could say that.”

  “Wish I’d been there, but we’re still on standby. Tedious business, but ours not to reason why.” He sighed for a moment, then visibly brightened, set the bomb down on one arm of the chair, and rooted around in his pocket to produce the same focus I’d given Variam last night. “Not much to look at, is it?” he said with interest, studying the green marble. “Hidden depths, though, the data array is mightier than the sword, hmm? At least when we’re talking Council politics.”

  I kept a wary eye on the bomb. Landis had balanced it on end on its fins. It would only take one jerk of the chair to knock it to the floor, in which case it had roughly a fifty-fifty chance of landing on its tip and blowing apart the chair, the benches, the floor, and probably us. “Data array?” Caldera said.

  “Indeed! Good old-fashioned storage device. Lovely craftsmanship, don’t see many of them these days.” Landis studied the focus admiringly, then glanced up as Variam came back. “Ah, man of the hour! Just in the nick of time.”

  Variam distributed teacups. Landis leant forward to take his, making the chair sway, and I winced. “Okay, so you’re saying . . . um . . . is there any chance you could put the cap back on that bomb?”

  “Eh? Goodness, you’re right! Memory like a sieve.” Landis caught up the bomb, twirled the cap back onto it, and then threw it without looking in the direction of the sofa. Even though I knew it wasn’t going to blow up I couldn’t help but close my eyes briefly. The bomb thumped into the cushions, bounced once, and lay still. I let out a sigh of relief and shared a glance with Caldera. She looked relieved too. Variam hadn’t moved—maybe he was desensitised to it.