Cursed av-2 Read online

  The land mine was already almost hidden. The man had tucked it behind a heating pipe and he was busy covering it with pieces of rubbish. It looked like a metal cylinder about the size and shape of a coffee can. Looking into the future, I could see that when it was tripped, it would hurl a bomb into the air to burst at about waist height. The explosion would throw a spray of metal balls in all directions, ricocheting off the walls and turning the corridor into a death zone.

  I stood quietly in the shadows at the end of the corridor, watching as the man finished setting the mine. He’d already placed the trigger mechanism. I didn’t know whether it was a trip wire or some sort of beam but I knew that once he armed the mine, anything going down the corridor at a certain height would set it off.

  I’m not all that proud of what I did next. All I have to say in my defence is that I had had enough. It was the fourth attack in two days and I was sick of it.

  The man twisted the switch to arm the mine and there was a click. I picked up a length of wood, then stepped out and threw it down the corridor.

  It took the stick just over one second to complete its flight. It took the man a quarter second to catch the movement, a half second more to snatch up his gun and see what was happening. And by the time he realised that the stick was on course to fly through the trigger area of the mine-the same mine he was next to-it was far too late.

  Sonder was looking in my direction as I walked back into the room. “What was that?”

  “What was what?”

  “I thought I heard a bang.”

  “Rats.”

  “And something that sounded like a scream?”

  “Big rats.”

  Sonder looked at me. “Sonder, trust me,” I said. “You don’t want to know.” Violent death is a long way outside Sonder’s comfort zone. The same does not apply to me, which is not really a good thing. “We should go.”

  Sonder’s not great at taking hints but he got the message. The two of us took the back way out, my divination magic picking the way through the obstacles. I didn’t know if the man I’d just killed had a partner and I didn’t plan on sticking around to find out. We negotiated our way through the council estate, and ten minutes saw us out in the sunlight again, on the main road.

  “So how much did you find?” I asked once I was satisfied no one was going to be coming after us.

  “A lot,” Sonder said, the distraction forgotten. “Want to know about the Dark mages first, or the ones fighting them?”

  “The Dark mages.”

  “Well, it was Cinder,” Sonder said as we turned onto another main road, heading towards a different Tube station. “And Deleo, just like you said. They hid on that gantry, waited for the barghest to show up, then stunned it.”

  “Was there anyone else?”

  “Just them.”

  That was a relief. Cinder and Deleo were bad enough, and I still had nightmares about the last guy they’d partnered with. “It was over really fast,” Sonder said. “Then they went down and started working on the barghest.”

  “What were they doing?”

  Sonder frowned. “I don’t know. Some sort of ritual. They had a couple of focuses I’ve never seen before: like sort of dark purple metal spikes. But it took a long time. They kept stopping and starting.”

  “Timing requirements?”

  Sonder shook his head. “I don’t think so. I think they were … working it out as they went along? Like they weren’t really sure what they were doing.”

  I hesitated. Something in that seemed off but I wasn’t sure exactly what.

  “That was when the others showed up,” Sonder continued. “There was one mage and eight auxiliaries. I think the mage tried to talk to them. At least he said something, but Cinder and Deleo attacked him on sight. He was under a shroud so I couldn’t see much.”

  “Huh,” I said. Shrouds are highly specialised items designed to block surveillance magic, rare and expensive. “So I guess you couldn’t see who it was.”

  “Actually, I did,” Sonder said. I looked at him in surprise, and he shrugged. “It wasn’t that good a shroud.”

  Sometimes I think Sonder doesn’t realise how talented he is. “Belthas?”

  “Belthas. I just got bits and pieces from there. The auxiliaries opened fire and so did Belthas, and they drove Cinder back. Cinder dropped one of those focuses-the purple things-and one of the men ran to grab it but Deleo disintegrated him.” Sonder shivered slightly. “Literally. There was nothing left but dust. Cinder grabbed the focus and they fell back to the east doorway. Deleo held them off while Cinder opened a gate, and they got out.”

  I frowned. “Wait. You mean Belthas was the only other mage?”

  Sonder nodded. “And he still forced them back. He’s an ice mage and he’s really good. I think he would have been a match for them on his own.”

  I remembered how calm Belthas had been at the prospect of facing the Dark cabal. If he was really that good, he had little to fear from anything short of an entire Dark kill team. It gave me another thing to think over as we turned into the station.

  I spent the trip back quizzing Sonder about what else he’d learnt. There were no revelations but a few useful titbits. According to Sonder, the barghest had died either before the fight had started, or as a result of Cinder and Deleo getting interrupted midritual. Either way it was clear the ritual hadn’t been a success: the barghest might have had its magic drained, but neither Cinder or Deleo had profited from it. While that was probably a good thing, what I really wanted was some way to track them down. “You’re sure they didn’t gate in?” I asked for the second time.

  “I’m sure,” Sonder said. “They walked in the same way we did.” He hesitated. “I got a look at their exit gate. I might be able to track it …”

  I shook my head. “It’ll be a staging point.” Smart mages never gate directly home; there’s too much risk of being followed. Instead they jump to another location, usually somewhere desolate and empty, walk a short distance, then do the same thing again, maybe two or three times if they’re being particularly careful. Experienced mages keep libraries of literally hundreds of staging points and it’s all but impossible to track them. “Anything else about them?”

  Sonder held up his notebook. “I think I found out Cinder’s phone number. Would that help?”

  I couldn’t help smiling. “Probably not.”

  We’d come out of the Underground at Euston and were talking amidst the square concrete pillars of the bus station. The station was busy with the afternoon rush, people of all looks and ages crossing the plaza. “Thanks for coming today,” I said. “Anything I can help out with?”

  Sonder hesitated. “What are you going to do about Luna?”

  I sighed, my brief good mood fading. The attack at the factory hadn’t been fun but it was the kind of thing I knew how to deal with. This wasn’t. “I don’t know.”

  “But you’re not going to leave her with this guy, right?”

  “What am I supposed to do, Sonder?” There was an edge in my voice; Sonder was hitting too close to what I was thinking myself. “She wants this. If I push her, she’ll just say no and I can’t make her.”

  “But you’re supposed to,” Sonder said. “You’re her master.”

  “Am I?” I leant against one of the pillars, staring out at the hurrying people. “Luna’s not part of the mage world the way you are. She didn’t grow up with the customs. I’ve been teaching her, but she never really agreed to be an apprentice. I’m not even sure she knows what it means.”

  “Well, she ought to.”

  “You really think that?”

  “Yes. The master and apprentice system is important.” Sonder looked at me earnestly. “Yes, it goes wrong sometimes, and the kind of things Dark mages do with their apprentices are pretty awful. But it’s how mages learn-not just their magic, everything. It’s what everything’s built on.”

  I looked back at Sonder. He was serious, and for the first time I stopped and fa
ced up to the question of how I really felt about Luna.

  Partly I thought of her as a friend. I lead a fairly lonely life and Luna’s one of the few people I like and trust. Partly I thought of her as a sort of protege. I’d been teaching her for months now and I wanted her to be able to make a life for herself in mage society. And partly I thought of her as something more.

  But as I thought about it I realised that I’d been acting like a mixture of all three. I’d been trying to treat her as a friend and as an apprentice and as a potential girlfriend all at the same time, and it wasn’t working. I remembered Arachne telling me that she wasn’t acting like my apprentice and that I wasn’t acting like her master, and I understood that Arachne had been right. I couldn’t be both Luna’s master and her friend, and I definitely couldn’t be both her master and her lover. I was going to have to pick one of the three.

  But no matter which, one thing I was sure of was that I wanted to keep Luna safe, and that meant the monkey’s paw came first. “What do you think we should do?” I said.

  “What if I went and talked to Luna?” Sonder said. “And I could find out some more about this Martin guy. He sounds dodgy.”

  I couldn’t help smiling; I couldn’t honestly see Luna paying Sonder any attention. But Sonder had surprised me before. “Can’t hurt to try,” I said. “But if that’s what you’re planning, do you think you could spend some time researching the monkey’s paw first? How it works, what it wants-anything you can find. The more we know about this thing, the better.”

  Sonder nodded immediately. “I will. And, um, be careful.”

  “You too.”

  I got back to my flat and started trying to figure out how to find Cinder and Rachel. It took a long time.

  A lot of people think divination magic can tell you anything you want to know, but it can’t. What it can do is tell you the consequences of a possible action. If I want to know what’s behind a door, that’s easy. I look into the future in which I open the door. Cracking a password is easy too: I look into the futures in which I try every possible password and see which one works. If there are a lot of choices it might take a while, but sorting through even millions of passwords is easier than you’d think because all the possible futures except for one are so similar. In 999,999 futures the lock doesn’t open; in the last one it does.

  But once you start dealing with people instead of machines, it gets much, much harder. With people, all the possible futures are different. If I look into the futures of searching two different houses I see totally different things, and I have to look at each one individually to see if it’s right. Cracking a password is like spotting one white marble in the middle of a million black marbles. Finding a person is like spotting one white marble in the middle of a million multicoloured marbles. One is a hell of a lot harder than the other.

  That doesn’t mean divination can’t find people; it can. In fact, it’s really good at finding people. If I know who I’m looking for and the rough area that they’re in, I can pinpoint them in seconds. But I need a place to start. Otherwise, divination magic is just a slightly faster way of taking a wild guess.

  I had three points of contact for Cinder and Rachel: the construct attack at my shop, the burning of Meredith’s flat, and their battle with Belthas at the factory. Unfortunately, none of those were any use for finding them. They’d be operating out of a base and there was absolutely no reason that base had to be anywhere nearby. The fact that they’d used a short-range construct did suggest they were somewhere in London, but that didn’t narrow it down anywhere near enough. I didn’t have anywhere to start looking.

  Although … I frowned. Maybe I did.

  I’d been to one of Cinder and Rachel’s bases, five months ago. It had been a brief and not very pleasant visit but I’d managed to identify the place: a disused warehouse in Battersea. It was deserted now of course; there was no way Rachel or Cinder would go back again. And there was no reason for them to have picked a similar place this time.

  Except … I knew Rachel. And one thing I knew about Rachel was that she tended to do things the same way. It had always been Shireen who had been the original one, Shireen who had come up with the ideas. Rachel had liked to think of herself as unpredictable, a rebel, but the truth was she’d always been more conservative than she’d been willing to admit.

  So I worked on the assumption that she’d do things the same way again. I took out a map of London and started making a list of warehouse districts and industrial parks within close distance of the city centre. Then I struck out all the ones that saw high traffic or were otherwise too busy for secrecy. That still left too many, so working on a hunch I limited it to places near water.

  By the time Meredith returned, it was late afternoon. “Hey,” I said without looking up as she walked in.

  Meredith leant over next to me to look at the map. She’d replaced the ash-stained dress with a dark jumper and pair of jeans, and she smelt of some fragrance I couldn’t place. “What are you doing?”

  Meredith was giving me an odd feeling at the moment. When I was with her, looking at her, I couldn’t stop thinking about how beautiful she was. But as soon as I spent any time thinking of something else, Meredith seemed … less important, somehow. So despite how close she was, I didn’t meet her eyes, keeping my attention on the map. It wasn’t that I didn’t want her around or anything-I did. I liked having Meredith there, because …

  …because …

  …I couldn’t think of anything. When I tried to think past Meredith’s beauty and her magic to what kind of person she was, I came up blank. And that was odd, wasn’t it? We’d spent enough time together, the last couple of days. But somehow all our conversations seemed to end up being about me or our work, rather than her.

  For some reason, that bothered me. “Trying to find those Dark mages,” I said.

  Meredith pointed to the map. “What are those tags?”

  “I think we should try searching there.”

  Meredith looked taken aback. “All of them?”

  I looked up at Meredith. “Unless you’ve turned up any leads.”

  “No, but … Isn’t there a better way?”

  “Like?”

  “Tracer spells?”

  I shook my head. “These two aren’t stupid. If it were that easy Belthas would have done it already.” Cinder and Rachel had made use of those spells to track down prey before. They’d be ready and waiting for someone to try the same trick against them.

  Meredith hesitated. “All right,” she said at last. “If you think so.”

  Five hours later, the sun had set. It had turned into one of those clear, freezing autumn nights, where the stars are sharp and bright and your breath makes puffs of vapour in the air. We were huddled by the side of a long, deserted road, only a few parked cars breaking up the emptiness. To the south was the Thames, far wider and darker than it had been at Deptford, and from the north, over the rooftops, came the distant roar of aircraft. The air smelt of river and cold stone.

  I was tired and cold and wanted to go home to bed. We’d been searching our way eastwards along the river as the light faded from the sky and the crowds of commuters poured out of the city and towards the suburbs. By the time we’d reached Silvertown, all but a few stragglers had been driven away by the deepening cold, and now the streets were deserted.

  “Can we stop for the night?” Meredith asked. She was wrapped in a coat bigger than she was, hunched over with her arms engulfed by the muffler, but she was still shiv-ering.

  “Just three places left,” I said.

  Meredith sighed but fell in behind me as we started down the road. In truth, I didn’t think we had much chance of finding anything. It had been a lonely, cold evening, walking though lonely, cold parts of London, looking through warehouse after warehouse with my magic, and it was looking like my hunch had been wrong. But we were here and we might as well finish the job. Besides, there was another reason, one that I didn’t especially want to say out
loud: Cinder and Rachel might be looking for us too and it’s a lot harder to find someone who keeps moving.

  Meredith stayed quiet for the length of the road, and as we reached the next industrial park she went smoothly into the routine, moving to the front gate to talk to the security guard at the checkpoint. The guard looked up from his desk with a what do you want? expression. It didn’t last-he was smiling in seconds and had told Meredith everything she wanted to know within a minute.

  “There’s a maybe,” Meredith told me after he’d waved her good-bye. “A couple renting a unit who might match.” I nodded and the two of us walked past the guard unchallenged. He was staring after Meredith with his mouth slightly open and I don’t think he even noticed I was there.

  Ten minutes of scanning the park turned up nothing. I hadn’t really expected much-the place didn’t feel right, not deserted enough. But as we were finishing up, I caught a glimpse of an older pair of warehouses behind the back wall, cut off from the road. “I’ll check there and we’ll move on,” I said. I had to speak loudly-we’d come in close to London City airport, and it was hard to talk over the roar of planes. Meredith nodded with another shiver and we split up, Meredith heading back towards the exit while I went further into the maze of buildings.

  The back warehouse was dark and windowless, and passing the outer fence, I found that the building itself was sealed. I couldn’t pick up any magical wards, but that didn’t prove anything: Cinder and Rachel weren’t stupid enough to leave obvious defences. But there was something off about the place all the same, even if I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what it was.

  I took a look around. The warehouse was built right between the industrial park and another complex of buildings next to the airport. Apart from the way I’d come in, there didn’t seem to be any other way out; trying to go in any other direction led me to a dead end. High walls limited vision, giving the place a cramped, uncomfortable feel, and the nearby airport made it hard to hear anything.