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  At the time I was still feeling my way, unsure of what I wanted to be. Lyle on the other hand knew exactly what he wanted: status, advancement, prestige, a position in the Council bureaucracy from which he could work his way upwards. And when I lost Richard’s favour and with it any standing I might have had, Lyle had to choose between me and his ambitions. Supporting me would have cost him. So when I showed up, alone and desperate, Lyle’s response was to pretend I wasn’t there. Under mage law the master-apprentice relationship is sacred. An apprentice is their master’s responsibility, no one else’s. I’d defied Richard, fled from him, and it was Richard’s right to do with me as he pleased. The Light mages knew that Richard would come to collect his runaway and so they shut me out. . and waited for him to finish things.

  But something happened then that the Light and the Dark mages did not expect. When Richard sent Tobruk to kill me-the cruellest and most powerful of his four apprentices-it was Tobruk who died. And in the aftermath, instead of coming to take vengeance Richard vanished, along with his last two apprentices, Rachel and Shireen. I was left alive, safe. . and alone.

  Technically, under mage law, I hadn’t done anything wrong. It’s not illegal for an apprentice to successfully defend themselves against their master; it’s just so bloody rare no one’s ever bothered to pass a law against it. But I’d broken tradition older than law. An apprentice is supposed to obey their master for good or ill, and no other mage would take me on-after all, if I’d rebelled against one master, I might rebel against another. Besides, no one was quite sure what had happened to Richard. He might be gone for good-or he might suddenly reappear, in which case nobody wanted to be anywhere near me when he did. So once again, other mages distanced themselves from me and waited.

  They waited and waited, and kept waiting so long they forgot all about me, by which time I was glad to let them do it. I started to make a new life for myself. I travelled, had some adventures. As a result of one of them I inherited a shop, a little business in the side streets of Camden Town. I’d been planning to run it only a few months, but as the months turned into years I realised I enjoyed what it brought me. The shop and the flat above it became my residence, then my home. I made new friends. Gradually I began to remember what it was like to be happy again.

  And then one day Lyle walked into my shop and brought me back into the mage world with its politics and its alliances and its dangers. This time I was prepared. And this time, to my surprise, I found I liked it.

  I snapped out of my reverie. Lyle was talking and seemed to have regained his confidence, though it was obvious that he’d prefer it if I wasn’t here. “-remember that in a duel, you’re representing both your master and the Council,” Lyle was saying. “Now, I know some of you have done this before, but it’s very important that your form is exactly right. Let’s go through the basic greetings one more time. . Yes?”

  The one who had raised her hand was Luna. “Um,” Luna said. “Could you explain how these duels work?”

  Lyle blinked at her. “What do you mean?”

  Luna looked around to see that everyone else was watching her. “Well. .” She seemed to choose her words carefully. “You’ve explained about the selection process. And the rituals and the salutes, and the withdrawal at the end. What about the part in the middle?”

  “What part?”

  “Um. . the actual duel.”

  “Well, it depends, I suppose.” Lyle looked confused. “Styles change and all that. Personally, I find the performance is more important.”

  “We’re supposed to be practising for the tournament today,” the Sikh boy said. He sounded unfriendly.

  “Oh.” Lyle looked around. “Well, um. . yes, maybe a practice match then.” Lyle glanced quickly over Luna, then pointed to the other two girls. “Natasha and, um, Anne. Why don’t you go first.”

  The round-faced girl, Natasha, looked at Anne in anticipation. Anne bowed her head slightly to Lyle. “I’m sorry, but I can’t.”

  Natasha made a rude noise and the boy with glasses rolled his eyes. “Oh God, not this again.”

  “Er. .” Lyle looked taken aback. “Is there some medical reason-”

  “No, she’s fine,” Natasha chipped in. “She just won’t do it.”

  “Anne?” Lyle said. “Is there a reason?”

  “I’m sorry,” Anne said again. She had a soft, quiet voice. “I don’t mean to cause any trouble.”

  “It’s nothing to do with trouble,” Lyle said with a frown. “Unless you or your master can give a good reason, you’re required to participate.”

  Anne didn’t answer. “All right then,” Lyle said, gesturing to the centre of the hall. “Off you go.”

  No response. “Anne?” Lyle said irritably. “Did you hear me?”

  Anne stood silently, looking back at Lyle. “This is an order,” Lyle declared, pointing to the mats. “Get over there and participate.”

  Anne still didn’t move and Lyle was left standing with one arm outstretched. He looked vaguely ridiculous and everyone else in the room was watching him. Lyle hesitated, then lowered his arm quickly. “Anne, will you do as you’re told, please?” It was probably supposed to sound authoritative, but it came out more like a pleading.

  Anne shook her head mutely. “Oh, this is such crap,” Natasha said angrily. “How come she gets to do this?”

  “Just do the duel already,” the other boy said.

  “Yes, er. .” Lyle said. “I need to impress upon you the seriousness of this. Refusing a direct order from an authorised teacher is-”

  “Why don’t you guys ever do anything about her?” Natasha demanded. “She always does this and you always let her get away with it.”

  “Leave her alone,” Luna said.

  “You stay out of this.”

  “What makes it your business?” Luna said. “You want a duel so badly, try me.”

  “I don’t have to-” Natasha started saying angrily. The boy with glasses started to talk over her, and both Luna and the Sikh boy started talking over him, raised voices making a clamour.

  “Quiet,” Lyle said. “QUIET!” Gradually, he was obeyed. The five students fell silent, glowering at each other.

  “As I was saying,” Lyle began, then looked at Anne and trailed off. Anne hadn’t moved. Her stance wasn’t confrontational, but she was looking at Lyle with a sort of quietly polite expression. Lyle looked at Luna, then at Natasha.

  It was easy to read Lyle’s thoughts. He wanted to force Anne to do as she was told, but he couldn’t think of any way to make her do it. The alternative was to let Luna step into her place, and he didn’t want to do that either, in case that ticked me off. In the end Lyle did what Lyle always does: pass the buck. “Er,” he said, looking up at me. “If your apprentice doesn’t mind. .”

  I nodded at Luna. “Ask her.”

  “Er,” Lyle said again. “Right. Well. Natasha and, er, Luna. Take your focuses.”

  Natasha was whispering something to the boy with glasses. I walked towards Luna, aiming to meet her by the table in the corner, but Anne got there first. “You didn’t have to do that,” Anne said quietly.

  Anne is tall and slender, only a few inches shorter than me, with dark hair framing a face the shape of a downwards-pointed triangle. She looks about twenty-two, Luna’s age, which is on the old side for an apprentice-most graduate to journeyman by twenty-one or so. Her eyes are an odd red-brown colour, set at an angle that gives her a slightly catlike look, and there’s a stillness to her movements. She’s striking, but she has a quiet unobtrusive manner that tends to make her fade into the background.

  Luna looks very different. She’s average height, with wavy brown hair worn up in bunches and a fair complexion inherited from both her Italian father and her English mother. She’d blend into a crowd, if she’d ever willingly step into one, which she wouldn’t. She used to always have a distant look, but these days she feels more animated, connected to the world. As Anne spoke, Luna gave her a quick glance and mo
ved automatically away. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “I don’t want you to get in trouble because of me.”

  Luna shrugged. “She was getting on my nerves anyway.”

  Anne had been standing with her back to me, but as I came up to them she turned and dipped her head slightly. “Hello, Mr. Verus.”

  “He hates it when people call him that,” Luna said without looking up. “Just call him Alex.”

  Anne looked between me and Luna. “Ah. .”

  A sharp voice spoke from a little distance away. “Anne.”

  I looked up to see the Sikh boy frowning at us. He made a quick beckoning motion to Anne. “I’m sorry,” Anne said. “Could you excuse me a second?”

  I watched Anne walk away. “Very polite, isn’t she?” I said once she was out of earshot.

  “She’s always like that,” Luna said absently. “Okay, help me out here. I have no idea how to use these.”

  The Sikh boy was talking to Anne under his breath, making quick hand movements. He kept his face turned away, but from his stance he looked tense. I watched a second, then shook my head and turned back to Luna. “All right. How much has Lyle taught you?”

  “A lot of stuff about how to bow and curtsey.”

  “Square one then.” I nodded to the giant tuning forks at either end of the hall. “Those ceramic things are azimuth duelling focuses. When they’re activated, they maintain a conversion field around the person they’re targeted on. The conversion field takes any external magical energy that tries to penetrate it and transforms it into light. Basically, it’s a wide-spectrum shield. If a magical attack hits you, there’s a flash and nothing happens. The flash is used for scoring. One flash, one point.”

  Luna nodded. “Okay.”

  “That covers defence. But some mages can’t do direct magical attacks.” I gestured to the table. “That’s where the focus weapons come in. They act as conductors. You channel your magic through them. Hit the other guy with one and it’ll trigger the conversion field.”

  The table Luna had been looking at held what looked like training weapons. There wasn’t a great selection and they had a worn, chipped look; the kind of things I’d sell at a deep discount. Luna hesitated, then picked out a sword made out of some kind of pale wood. As she touched it the silver mist of her curse flowed around it, soaking in.

  Luna’s an adept, not a mage. Adepts are the next step down on the magical pyramid from mages, and the best way to think of them is as mages who can only cast one spell. That doesn’t mean they’re weak-in fact, since adepts spend so much time practising and refining their one spell, they tend to get really good with it-but they don’t have the range and breadth of abilities that mages do. Luna’s unusual for an adept in that her magic doesn’t come from within, but from without: Her spell is actually a curse, passed down from daughter to daughter. It brings good luck to her, and bad luck to everyone else, which can range from “paper cut” to “struck by lightning,” depending on how careful she is and how close you get.

  Usually a curse like that just keeps working on its subject forever, but in this case something unusual happened. The curse has grown up with Luna, woven into her so that it can’t be removed-but just as it’s a part of her, she’s a part of it, and over the last year she’s started to learn to control it. She can’t shut it off and she definitely can’t let herself touch anyone, but she’s gotten a lot better at guiding her curse away from people she doesn’t want to hurt-not to mention sending it at people she does.

  It’s not actually forbidden for adepts to train as apprentices, but it’s not customary either. So far it hasn’t come up, partly because no one wants to be the first to get between a mage and their apprentice, and partly because Luna’s area of magic is so poorly understood that not many mages can tell the difference between a chance mage and a chance adept anyway. It’s probably going to cause trouble one of these days, but that’s a worry for another time.

  Luna studied the sword as her curse twined lazily around it. To my mage’s sight Luna’s curse looks like a silver-grey mist, shifting and changing, constantly seeping from her skin and soaking into everything around her. To living creatures that mist is poison, invisible and utterly lethal. I’ve seen people survive brushes from Luna’s curse with nothing but a few bruises-and I’ve also seen a man die a violent death within seconds of touching her. That’s why it’s so dangerous-you can never predict what it’ll do. “What do I do?” Luna asked.

  “You’re doing it,” I said. “As long as you hold it, your magic’ll keep it charged.”

  Luna looked down dubiously. “It doesn’t look like. .”

  “Like anything’s happening?”

  “Yeah.”

  I smiled. “Focus items depend on who’s using them. Your magic’s subtle, so the effect’s subtle.”

  “Is it okay to hit her with this?”

  “The azimuth shield’s enough to take most of the punch out of a magical strike. Don’t go sitting on her, but a couple of hits won’t do her any harm.”

  I became aware that the rest of the room had gone quiet, and looked up to see that everyone was waiting for us. Natasha was standing at one end of the azimuth piste. Unlike Luna, she wasn’t wielding a weapon. “Luna?” Lyle said. “Are you ready?”

  Luna nodded. “Ready.” She walked out onto the piste. I saw Lyle concentrate, channelling his magic, and to my mage’s sight the two focuses lit up with power, energy extending from them to weave a shield around the two girls. Luna flinched and glanced back as the effect touched her, and I saw the silver mist of her curse flicker and twist, merging with the shield. Natasha just looked bored. Anne and the two boys had spaced themselves along the wall.

  “Er,” Lyle said. “Let’s say first to three. Ready and. . go!”

  Luna darted forward, sword raised, and blue light welled up around Natasha’s hands.

  The bout was to three points. The score at the end was 3–0. Natasha and Luna fought two more bouts. The score at the end of each of those was 3–0, too.

  It’s not that Luna’s clumsy or anything. And she’s no stranger to fighting; there are fully qualified mages who’ve seen less combat than Luna has. But all the fights Luna and I have been through have been the nasty, lethal, anything-goes kind, where you stab the other guy in the back before he does the same to you. A duel is very different. It’s not combat, it’s a sport, with rules and regulations and a referee. Winning a duel and surviving a combat are very different things, and being good at one doesn’t necessarily make you good at the other.

  Luna’s opponent, Natasha, wasn’t especially strong or quick. But like all elemental mages she had the great advantage of range. While Luna had to run all the way up to Natasha to hit her, Natasha could just smack Luna off her feet with a water blast.

  Which she did. Repeatedly.

  When Lyle finally called the fight I waited at the table for Luna to get back. She was moving stiffly, but I could tell she was more angry than hurt. “Good job,” I said as she reached me.

  Luna gave me a look.

  “I’m serious.”

  “That’s your idea of a good job?”

  “Everyone loses their first duel,” I said. “What matters is you put up a fight.”

  “Did you know I’d lose that badly?”

  “I didn’t check.”

  Natasha was talking and laughing with the boy with glasses, her hands moving in animation as she relived knocking Luna down. “All right,” Lyle called. “Charles and Variam, why don’t you go next?”

  I looked at Luna. She was annoyed, obviously embarrassed about losing. . and yet she looked better than I’d ever seen her. When she’d first walked into my shop a year and a half ago, she’d been silent and detached, never showing her feelings. Apprentice training isn’t easy, but Luna was engaged now; she had a place in the world. “Come on,” I said. “We’ve got a job offer.”

  I knew Lyle wouldn’t question my taking Luna out of the class, and he didn’t. As the
door swung shut behind us, I got a look at the two boys, Charles and Variam, facing off against each other on the piste. From a glance into the future I knew this match was going to be a lot more eventful than the last one.

  chapter 2

  “Apprentices are going missing,” Talisid said.

  The little room at the end of the hall had been fitted out as an office of sorts, with an old computer on a cramped desk. Faded photographs of sports teams were mounted on the walls, and a window looked out onto the London rooftops. Talisid was behind the desk while Luna sat quietly on a table in the opposite corner. She’d agreed to Talisid’s demand for secrecy and now was listening with her ears pricked up.

  “Since when?” I said.

  “You know there’s always been a certain washout rate in the apprentice program,” Talisid said. “Some give up. Some fail their tests. Some-not many, but more than we’d like-defect to the Dark. And some have something happen to them. That last one’s rare, thankfully. But a few weeks ago some mages noticed that there seemed to be more going missing than there should be. Well, we put someone on it, and we found a very disturbing pattern. Within the last three months we’ve had three apprentices vanish from the program. No sign that they quit or walked out or had an accident. They just disappeared.”

  “Just apprentices? No adult mages?”

  “We think so, but it’s hard to be sure. Journeymen and masters aren’t accountable for their movements in the way apprentices are.”

  “Any pattern to the disappearances?”

  “None that we can find.”

  “Any suspects?”

  “Well.” Talisid looked at me. “There’s the obvious, isn’t there?”

  I was silent. Luna looked from Talisid to me. “Um. .?” she said after a moment.

  “Dark mages,” I said. “They’ve been on a recruitment drive.” I looked at Talisid. “You think they’re headhunting.”