Alex Verus 5: Hidden Read online

  “Crystal was responsible for the deaths of four Light apprentices over several months without anyone suspecting her,” Sonder said. “We wouldn’t expect to see any evidence that it was her, not easily.”

  “Let’s go back to Sagash’s apprentices,” I said, looking at Caldera. “Luna found out a bit about them, but I guess you’ve got their files?”

  “We’re not Big Brother,” Caldera said. “We don’t have files on every mage in the country.”

  I looked at her with eyebrows raised.

  “I know a little bit of common knowledge about them,” Caldera said with a scowl. “Sagash has three apprentices—Darren Smith, Yun Ji-yeong, and Samuel Taylor. First two are living family, third is an elementalist. The two boys have been his apprentices for at least one year, the girl at least six months, but those are lowball estimates.”

  Luna stirred. “Wait. Elemental and living?” She looked at Sonder. “Wasn’t that what you saw when Anne was kidnapped?”

  “Not exactly . . .”

  “You said lightning and death magic.” Luna looked around. “Doesn’t that fit?”

  “We don’t know that. They could—”

  “They’re both guys,” Luna interrupted, and started ticking off points on her fingers. “They’re the right height and weight and skin colour. Their magic types match. They’ve got a connection to Sagash. Isn’t this making kind of a pattern here?”

  “They said it wasn’t them.”

  “And there’s no way they could possibly be lying?”

  “But they . . .”

  The argument went on. Variam and Luna were convinced that it had to be Sagash and his apprentices, while Sonder held out stubbornly. At last Caldera spoke up. “Enough. This isn’t getting us anywhere.”

  And this is where she tells us what to do again, I thought.

  “Sagash’s apprentices should be the focus of the investigation,” Caldera said, then raised a hand when Sonder started to object. “I know it’s not conclusive but so far they’re the closest match to our suspects and we don’t have any other active leads.” She looked around. “Variam, you’re with me—we’re going to try and track them down. Sonder, I’ll send you the Crystal report. Maybe you can get something out of it that I missed. Luna, Alex, you’re on standby. Once we find those apprentices I’ll call you in.” She gave me a look. “Ordering you to stay out of trouble doesn’t seem to work very well, so I’m going to keep you where I can keep an eye on you instead. Do you think you can manage not to start any wars with Dark mages while I’m gone?”

  “I’ll do my best,” I said with a straight face.

  The meeting broke up, Caldera and Variam heading out. Luna and I were following when Sonder broke in. “Luna? Can I speak to you privately, please?”

  Luna gave him a curious look. “Okay . . .”

  Sonder gave me a pointed look. I shrugged. “I’ll wait for you outside.”

  I went out of Sonder’s flat and down to the first-floor landing. It was carpeted and well heated, and I looked out the window to see a carefully cultivated area of grass and bushes. The buildings were a doughnut-block design, with a small park at the centre where some children were playing, supervised by an equal number of adults. The buildings muffled the noise from the streets outside and it all looked very peaceful. I’ve always felt that Sonder’s flat suits him pretty well—well off and sheltered. I could have eavesdropped on him and Luna easily enough but didn’t.

  After five minutes or so I started to hear raised voices. The volume rose, then cut off and there were rapid footsteps. Sonder’s door opened and Luna appeared; she shut it with a bang and walked quickly down the stairs. The silvery mist of her curse was lashing and twisting around her, reaching out to twice its normal length. I leant back into the wall and she pulled the tendrils in as she passed, then let them expand again as soon as she was out of range of me. “Didn’t go well?” I said.

  Luna gave me a look from the landing below and kept going. I started to follow her down, keeping a careful distance. Luna’s become much better at controlling her curse, but there’s no point tempting fate. “What was that about?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “Seriously?” Luna didn’t answer, and I shook my head. “Maybe not, but it sounds like I’d better.”

  “He wanted me to leave you and be a Council apprentice instead.”

  I stopped. “He did what?”

  Luna had reached the front door; I was halfway down the last flight of stairs. “Told you you wouldn’t like it,” Luna said.

  “What did you say?”

  “I told him to get lost, what do you think?”

  I stared at Luna. “Okay, screw this,” I said after a few seconds. I turned and started back up the stairs.

  “Alex . . .” Luna said warningly.

  “We’re just going to talk,” I called over my shoulder as I disappeared from her view.

  When I reached Sonder’s flat I didn’t use the bell but banged on the door with my fist. I kept banging until Sonder yelled, “All right, all right!” and opened it. As soon as he did I pushed past into his living room.

  Sonder followed, looking peevish. “Would you mind—?”

  “Okay, Sonder,” I said, turning on him. “I am officially out of patience. Not wanting me around, I can put up with. Your whining last night—that was just annoying. But this? This is over the line.”

  “What?”

  “You know exactly what!”

  “It’s not your business what Luna does,” Sonder said.

  I took a deep breath, trying to control my temper. Sonder was still young; he couldn’t be expected to know how insulting it was to headhunt another mage’s apprentice . . . actually, screw that, he’d grown up as a Light apprentice and he had to know exactly how insulting it was. “If you have a problem with Luna being my apprentice, you bring it to me,” I said. “You do not go behind my back. Clear?”

  “Well, what if the problem is you?”

  “And what exactly do you mean by that?”

  “Maybe if you actually cared about her you wouldn’t be teaching her at all,” Sonder said. “You’d be finding someone else.”

  “Not that it’s any of your business,” I said, “but finding chance mage teachers isn’t easy. Especially not with Luna’s curse.”

  “I don’t mean that! I don’t want you teaching her to be the same kind of person you are!”

  My anger vanished and I looked at Sonder. He was glaring at me; he’d obviously been working himself up to this. “Okay,” I said, holding quite still. “Now we’re getting to it. What exactly is your problem with me?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think I can guess, but why don’t you tell me?”

  “Remember back when we went after Belthas?” Sonder said. “Two years ago with that Dark mage, Cinder? Up on the mountain, we were trying to find a way in to Belthas past his security men.”

  I paused. “Okay.”

  “Then before that. When we went to that factory, and that man followed us there?”

  This wasn’t how I’d expected the conversation to go—I’d been expecting a repeat of the argument with Anne. “Yeah . . .”

  “And before that. When Griff tried to get the fateweaver. Remember that?”

  “Are you going somewhere with—?”

  “I’m not finished. Those three men that tried to kill Anne, while we were investigating those disappearances running up to the White Stone? Remember them?”

  “Yes, I remember them. What are you getting at?”

  “Why don’t you tell me what they’ve all got in common?”

  “I don’t know. What have they got in common?”

  “They’re all dead.”

  Sonder was glaring at me. “What’s your point?” I said.

  “You know
last year, when I found out you’d killed all those adepts?” Sonder said. “It really shook me up. I couldn’t believe you’d do something like that. And then I started going back and thinking about it, and you know what hit me? It wasn’t anything new. Every time you’ve gotten into something like this, every time someone goes after you, they end up dead. You killed those adepts because that’s what you do.”

  “Okay, wait a second.” I was starting to get angry again. “Pretty much every single one of those guys you just listed was trying to kill me at the time. What exactly do you think I should have done?”

  “That’s what you said back on the mountain. You said it was self-defence, that there was no other way. You made it sound really convincing, but that’s always your line, isn’t it? It’s never your fault.”

  “I don’t care whose fault it is,” I said tightly. “It’s about surviving.”

  “Well, you know what?” Sonder said. “There are lots of Light mages around in Britain who’ve survived pretty well. And you know what they haven’t done? They haven’t killed anyone. Most people don’t; that’s why we have laws against murder! It’s just you who can’t seem to go a whole year without killing someone. Maybe it’s not about surviving or self-defence, or because there’s no other way. Maybe it’s you.”

  I rocked back slightly, feeling a stab of fear. “I see,” I said, once I’d gotten myself just barely under control. “And you’ve felt this way for how long?”

  “It’s not just me,” Sonder said. “People in the Council are talking about you. The longer Luna stays with you, the harder it’ll be for her to find anyone else. If you really want to help her, you should find her another teacher.”

  I looked back at Sonder and counted silently to ten, forcing myself back to calm. “Thank you for your honesty,” I said at last, my voice cold. “Allow me to retort. I’m quite sure you’re right—your friends on the Council don’t kill, not personally. They have people to do that for them. But the orders they pass down cause more deaths than I ever will. I would also note that you didn’t seem terribly bothered about my methods when it was your life on the line. Remember that little episode with Griff? If I hadn’t dealt with him and Onyx, exactly what do you think your chances would have been of getting out of that bubble alive?”

  “You didn’t have to kill him! You could have found some other way!”

  “It’s easy to say there’s another way when you’re not the one who has to find it.” Sonder started to answer and I spoke over him, my voice hard. “Shut up, Sonder. You had your say, now it’s my turn. I’d also like to point out that while you might not like the way I do things, the times in the past that you or Anne or Luna have been in trouble I’ve done a pretty good job of helping them. So you might want to ask yourself what’s more important to you: helping Anne, or your issues with me?”

  Sonder stared at me. I turned to leave.

  “Anne thinks the same thing, you know,” Sonder said just as I was turning the handle. I didn’t answer, and I banged the door behind me exactly as Luna had.

  | | | | | | | | |

  I went home, but I had trouble concentrating. Sonder’s words kept going around my head; I was angry at how unfair he was being, and afraid that he might be right. It was distracting me from trying to find Anne . . . not that there was much I could do in the first place, and that wasn’t making me feel any better either.

  Novices and adepts think a diviner can find out anything, and I usually let them believe it—a slightly exaggerated reputation never hurts—but it just doesn’t work that way. Most “finding” uses of divination come down to a very long string of if-then conditions. You come up with an avenue of investigation, then you test it. If you don’t have anywhere to start, then divination just amounts to wild guessing, with about the same odds of success . . . and that was a problem because time was running out. I used to know an independent mage who specialised in missing-persons cases, and he told me about something he called the seventy-two-hour rule: if you don’t find someone within seventy-two hours, then odds are you won’t find them at all. Anne had been missing for nearly sixty.

  I needed to do something, but I wasn’t sure what. Until Caldera got back in touch, there wasn’t much I could do to help with the search.

  Every few minutes I found my thoughts drifting back to Sonder, coming up with more things to say, justifications, arguments. Then I found it blending into my feelings about Anne, imagining that I was arguing with her instead. I wanted to talk to one of them or both of them, try to explain, work something out. But Anne wasn’t there and Sonder wouldn’t listen, and I knew it was a stupid thing to do anyway. Anne and Sonder weren’t the problem, not really. The problem was . . .

  My heart sank as I realised where the train of thought was heading. Yeah. That’s who I actually need to talk to, isn’t it?

  I looked into the future to see whether Caldera was going to call soon, half-hoping for an excuse to stay home. She wasn’t and I set out.

  | | | | | | | | |

  For the second time in four days, I was back at the Institute of Education.

  I was in the basement atrium, standing against one of the pillars. The lecture had just ended and students were streaming out, shouting and talking and checking their phones. None of them paid any attention to me. I searched their faces as they went past, boys and girls all with their school bags and middle-class clothes. They looked so young, and there was something dismaying about the thought. I was only ten years older than they were, less for the mature students, but it felt as though I had nothing in common with them at all.

  Watching the sea of students—children—pulled my thoughts away, associations from point to point. Crowds of teenagers, faces, classrooms. It reminded me of childhood, and they weren’t good memories. Things were never really good at home when I was young, even before the divorce, and they were worse at school. I’d been an introverted kid, intelligent and sensitive and socially clumsy. Bad combination if you go to a British state school. I once read an article which made the argument that modern Western schools have a good deal in common with modern prisons, and I’ve always thought it was pretty accurate. With both schools and prisons, the ones running the system have a very simple set of priorities for their inmates: they want them to stay on the premises, they want them to stay healthy and watered and fed, and they want them not to be gratuitously violent in a way that’ll draw public attention. Beyond that, they don’t really care. There are plenty of teachers who do their best to help, but they’re swimming upstream and most of the time the kids end up creating their own society. It’s ruthless and cruel, and it is not fun to be at the bottom of it.

  When my magic started developing, it only made things worse. Universal magic is the hardest of all the families for humans to use—it’s too abstract, too alien. When you’re a novice diviner your power comes in flashes; sometimes you just catch a glimpse of possibilities and sometimes you see all of them, every future at once, crashing into your mind like an ocean trying to fill a water bowl. It didn’t send me crazy, not quite, but I wasn’t exactly stable either and the fact that I had no idea what was happening to me didn’t help. Maybe if I’d had someone to talk to I might have tried to explain it, but there wasn’t anyone left by then, not really. My dad had lost custody, I didn’t get on with my mother, and my near-psychotic episodes had cut off the few friendships I’d had.

  So I learnt to control my power. I learnt to focus my mind, block out the futures I didn’t want to see, direct my perception instead of taking in everything. I learnt to select futures, search out along those not-quite-visible strands of possibility, shut them off when it was too much and I needed time to recover. And I did it alone, because I had to. And it worked.

  It didn’t make me any happier. My crude ability to see the future didn’t make me any friends—the opposite, if anything. I had knowledge, but there wasn’t anything I could do with it. I was left just as
isolated, hating the people who’d ostracised me. Until one cold autumn day when Richard had stepped onto the schoolyard where I was standing, promising me everything I’d secretly wanted if I’d follow him and call him master. And I’d said yes.

  Movement from inside the hall broke me out of my reverie. Nearly all of the students had disappeared up the stairs; only a few stragglers were left, one or two of them giving me curious glances now that I was the only person standing still in the atrium. A buzz of conversation from inside grew louder, then tailed off. A man appeared at the doors, white-haired, lecture notes tucked under one arm. He spotted me two steps into the room and came to a stop.

  “Hey, Dad,” I said.

  | | | | | | | | |

  The inner courtyard of the Institute of Education was cold. It had been a long winter—we’d had flurries of snow as recently as a couple of weeks ago, even though it was April. My father and I sat on one of the benches, the cold of the wood creeping through my clothes. Students passed by in ones and twos, coats closed against the chill wind.

  “I didn’t know you’d moved here,” I said.

  “Here?” My father looked at me, confused.

  “The Institute.”

  “What? Oh, no, I’m still at UCL.”

  I found myself watching my father out of the corner of my eye. His hair seemed a little thinner and the lines on his face deeper since the last time I’d seen him, his posture a little more stooped. Did he look older, or was I just noticing it now? His voice sounded frail, and watching him gave me a strange feeling. For mages, age isn’t a sign of weakness, it’s the opposite—white hair is a sign that they’ve lived long enough to be dangerous. My father didn’t look dangerous. He looked apologetic.

  “Teaching?” I said.

  “Yes, the usual courses. This is just a part of the spring schedule. Eight lectures.”

  “Cool.”

  We sat in silence. A few more students walked by.

  “So, congratulations on making professor,” I said.

  “Thank you. I mean, it’s not confirmed yet, but . . .”