Favours Read online

  Now why would burglars have a Council shroud?

  I file that thought away for later. Right now, the important thing is that I know how these shrouds work and how to break them. The lines of the lattice are strong, but if you focus you can punch through the holes and get little glimpses. Keep circling, keep viewing from different angles, and you can piece those glimpses together into a picture. It’s a bit distorted, but you can make out enough.

  “Got them,” I tell Caldera.

  “Them?”

  I nod. I don’t see Caldera at all, not now – all of my sight’s focused on the murky past, watching as it gets clearer piece by piece. “Two of them. Both men, I think . . . yeah, both men. One was holding the shroud. The other one disabled the alarm.” I can see his shape, shadowed in the darkness of last night, operating some kind of tool.

  “Can you see their faces?” Caldera asks.

  “No, they’re wearing masks.” The shroud-bearer’s using a balaclava that covers his head completely. The other one’s mask leaves his lower face clear, but that’s not enough for me to recognise him.

  “All right, keep going.”

  I speed up my time-walk. The figures seem to blur in fast forward, finishing their break-in and speeding into the facility. I follow in their footsteps, heading down a corridor towards the evidence storage. I’m blind to the present while I do this, and all I can do is hope that no-one’s going to get in my way.

  The storage room has rows of metal lockers lined up like bookshelves. One of the burglars takes up position on the door, keeping a lookout, while the other heads straight for a locker on the far wall. He doesn’t hesitate or look around; he checks the number on the locker then gets to work. He leans in close and—

  There! Magic. It’s only a flash, but I recognise the type. I watch the man pull the locker open and loot the contents, then once I’ve seen everything I need I let the effect drop.

  The veils and darkness fade away, and I’m back in the present. I’m standing in a brightly lit room full of evidence lockers. There’s a Keeper admin just outside, keeping anyone else from coming in, and right in front of me is a locker hanging open and empty with a small blackened hole burnt through its door.

  “Anything?” Caldera asks. She’s standing right next to me.

  “They came straight here,” I say. “And they didn’t search around. They knew what they were looking for.”

  “No shit.”

  I reach up to point at the locker door. The locking mechanism’s been obliterated by heat. “Then they burnt through the door with—”

  “With a heat lance, yeah. We figured that out from the giant melted hole.”

  “Are you going to let me finish?”

  Caldera lets out a breath. “Go on.”

  I wait and look at her, but she doesn’t say anything. “A heat lance is a focus, right?” I say once it seems like she might actually listen.

  Caldera nods.

  “It wasn’t a heat lance.”

  Caldera frowns.

  “It’s the same spell, but it wasn’t generated by a focus,” I explain. “It was cast natively.”

  “A fire mage?”

  “Or an adept. But if he did the gate too, then yeah, almost certainly a mage. Narrows it down, doesn’t it?”

  Caldera’s silent for a second. “You get a look at his aura?”

  “Not enough to identify him,” I say. “But I mean, that’s pretty good, right?”

  Caldera doesn’t answer and I give her a curious look. Fire mages might be common – actually, they’re the most common magic type out there – but still, ‘male fire mage or adept’ rules out, what, ninety-nine point nine nine percent of the UK? That’s pretty good going!

  “Try and get more identification,” Caldera says at last. “Narrow it down as much as you can.”

  There’s something she’s not telling me. I don’t think I’d have noticed, once, but I’m starting to pick up on these things nowadays. “All right.”

  ∞

  I track the fire mage in and out of the facility, but there are no more lucky breaks. He doesn’t cast any more spells, and he doesn’t talk, at least not loudly enough for me to hear. I’m hoping he might push up his balaclava to scratch his nose or something, but he’s too careful for that.

  The alarm-breaker isn’t so careful.

  “Got him,” I tell Caldera. We’re standing out in a narrow, rubbish-strewn alleyway two streets over from the facility. It’s the first time I’ve been out in the open in Southampton; the air smells of salt.

  “This was where they gated out?” Caldera asks.

  “This was where they gated in, too,” I say. I can see the paths of the two men, like a very long and narrow four-dimensional V. I point at the middle of the alley. “They formed the portal right here. And the second guy was still pulling on his mask when he stepped through.”

  “The fire mage?”

  “No, the other one,” I say. I try not to show it, but I’m pretty pleased with myself.

  I love timesight. Not all time mages do. There are some who focus on acceleration: mostly they specialise in personal haste effects, always trying to figure out how to go faster than everybody else. Others are more interested in effects that can move a person or a bubble of space in or out of the timestream. Some even focus on the really out-there stuff, like time travel, which has always seemed insane to me – that sort of thing makes combat magic look safe. But what those kinds of mages all have in common is that for them, timesight is just a way to pay the bills. They’ll work for the Keepers, but once they’ve got enough money in the bank, they’ll get back to what they actually care about.

  For me, though, timesight is what I care about. Back when I was an apprentice, I had these dreams of becoming a historian. Timesight gets harder the further back you go, which makes it pretty useless for any history except the very recent kind, but there have been a few time mages who’ve claimed it should be theoretically possible to develop techniques of really long-range timesight that could look back decades or centuries. I used to think I’d get a placement with the Council’s research division, pick some time period I especially liked, then spend years and years writing the best account of that historical period ever.

  Things didn’t work out that way – turns out there’s a lot more demand for Keeper auxiliaries than there is for research historians – but this is still timesight, and I still enjoy it. There’s something so satisfying about seeing the past and getting it right, figuring out exactly where and when and how something happened. I think it’s the certainty that I really like. I can’t always understand what’s going on in the present and I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future, but the past . . . that, I can do.

  And I’m good at it. Most time mages probably wouldn’t have been able to see through this shroud at all, and even if they could, it’d have taken them the best part of a day to spot the one half-second in that whole break-in where the burglar had his face uncovered. It’s taken me less than an hour. So as I look at Caldera, I’m kind of expecting her to be impressed.

  But Caldera just stares at the air as if she’s expecting it to tell her something.

  “Okay.” I spread my hands. “What is going on here?”

  Caldera’s still staring, and she takes a few seconds to answer. “I’ll tell you at the station,” she finally says. “You recognise the guy?”

  “No, funnily enough, I don’t know the face of every random burglar in England.”

  “Figures. All right, let’s get back so you can get us an ID.”

  A little appreciation would be nice, I think. But Caldera’s already turned away to start making her gate.

  ∞

  Getting a look at someone’s face doesn’t tell you their name, but that’s a problem Keepers have had for a long time, and they’re used to dealing with it. The official solution is a system called Silhouette where you have a mind mage do a (consensual) scan of the time mage’s thoughts. Trouble is, there ar
e never enough mind mages who are qualified on it, so most of the time we end up doing it the old-fashioned way.

  “Male, mid-twenties,” I tell Caldera. “Call it twenty-two to twenty-eight.”

  We’re in Caldera’s office, with Caldera bent over her computer. She types in the parameters slowly, her thick fingers clumsy on the keyboard. “Okay.”

  “Brown hair, brown eyes,” I say. “Caucasian.”

  “No-one says ‘Caucasian’ here, Sonder.”

  “They do in the States.”

  “We’re not in the States.” Caldera raises her head and speaks into her earpiece. “Caldera, receiving,” she says. She listens for a second, then gives a short nod. “Got it. Caldera out.” She looks at me. “Features?”

  “Low forehead,” I say. “Eyes were narrow . . . okay, not that narrow. Eyebrows . . .”

  A computer-generated face slowly takes shape on the screen. The software’s pretty old – the Council got it from the Metropolitan Police God knows how long ago, and it was out of date even then – but it does the job. Caldera takes ages to input the data and I have to fight the urge to lean over her shoulder and do it myself.

  “Nose was a little longer,” I tell Caldera.

  Caldera slides a bar with her mouse. The nose on the screen stretches out to look like Pinocchio.

  “I said a nose, not a banana,” I tell her, trying not to laugh.

  Caldera mutters something and fiddles with the settings. I take a glance around. Caldera’s office is sized for two, but while her side’s cluttered, the other desk is mostly bare, with a lot of old stains and a powered-down PC. Discoloured A4-sized rectangles on the walls mark where sheets of paper had been stuck up with Blu-Tack. It looks like it was cleared out just a little while ago, although there are a few new binders stacked neatly to one side.

  Caldera adjusts the face for a few minutes more, then once I tell her that it looks close enough to what I remember, she clicks ‘Search for Matches’ and the computer starts chugging as it goes through the Keeper database. “Now are you going to tell me what’s going on?” I ask.

  “About what?”

  “You didn’t ask me where those two men gated to,” I point out.

  “Yeah, ‘cause it’s a waste of time. It’ll just be a staging point.”

  “Sure. But you’re supposed to look it up, just in case, right? It’s procedure.”

  Caldera doesn’t answer.

  “Is this something to do with that fire mage?” I ask.

  Caldera lets out a long breath, and her chair squeaks as she leans back. “All right,” she says. She glances back to check that the door’s closed. “You remember I used to have a partner?”

  “Haken, right?” I say. He’d been a tall Keeper with blond hair. I remember him being friendlier than usual for the Order of the Star. I haven’t seen him since I got back.

  “We used to share this office,” Caldera says. “He’s on personal leave. The mandatory kind.”

  I give her a puzzled look.

  “A lot of things came out after the White Rose raid,” Caldera says. “Turns out that Haken – my ‘partner’ – was on friendly terms with Councillor Levistus. ‘Friendly’, as in, ‘feeding him information behind our backs’ friendly. I got a sword through the ribs and lost my key witness.”

  “Was he . . . wait, how did anyone manage to stick a sword through you?”

  “Not in the mood for a play-by-play, Sonder.”

  “Oh.” I’m still curious – earth mages are kind of famous for how weapons just bounce off them – but I don’t push it. “Haken wasn’t the one who . . . ?”

  “No, he didn’t do it himself,” Caldera says. “Some mages sent a bunch of constructs into the house we were holed up in. Haken wasn’t there, he didn’t give the order. But he was the one who told them where to find us. And he was the one who made sure our backup didn’t get there until it was too late. Maybe he didn’t know what they were going to do.” Caldera’s silent for a few seconds. “Then again, maybe he did.”

  “Oh.” I’m not sure what to say.

  The silence stretches out. Caldera’s staring out the window. She doesn’t seem to want to talk.

  “Are you getting a new partner?” I suggest.

  “Alex’s using that desk for now,” Caldera says absently.

  I blink. When did Alex start working with the Keepers?

  Actually, come to think of it, when did Caldera start calling him ‘Alex’?

  “Anyway.” Caldera turns to me, seeming to come back to the present. “If you’re wondering what all this has got to do with our case, the answer is: Haken’s a fire mage.”

  I start to answer, then I suddenly realise what Caldera’s saying. My eyebrows go up. “Wait, you think . . . ?”

  Caldera sighs and scrubs a hand over her eyes. “I don’t know. I don’t know, okay? It doesn’t add up. Okay, yeah, Haken’s on suspension, but we’ve got nothing we can charge him with. Or at least nothing we can charge him with without bringing in Levistus’s name, and Rain’s made it pretty damn clear that’s not happening. Haken has to know by now that he’s in the clear. All he has to do is wait it out, keep his head down, and he’ll be back on the roster in a few months. Why would he do something like this?”

  “He’s still working for Levistus?” I guess.

  “Maybe,” Caldera says. She drums her fingers on the desk: thud-thud-thud-thud, thud-thud-thud-thud. “I mean, that was the whole reason Levistus was involved, he was trying to hush up the White Rose case for some reason. Maybe these papers are more of the same? He got wind of it and was worried enough to set up a break-in?”

  “I mean . . . that does make sense,” I say. I lower my voice a little: it’s not a good idea to be too loud about this stuff. Still, I find myself getting interested. “Could anything from there tie back to him?”

  “I don’t know.” Caldera shakes her head. “I hate this political shit.”

  “We’re the Order of the Star,” I point out. “We deal with crimes involving adepts and mages. That kind of involves politics by definition.”

  “Yeah, well, it shouldn’t.”

  That doesn’t make much sense to me, but I have the feeling it’s better not to argue.

  “Haken and I were apprentices together,” Caldera says. “I’ve known him fifteen, twenty years. If he was the one who did it . . .” Caldera trails off and shakes her head again. “I hope to God he didn’t.”

  “So . . . are we going to go talk to him?” I venture.

  Caldera sighs, then straightens up and seems to focus. “They’re already bringing him in.”

  I look at her in surprise.

  “I gave the order soon as we got back,” Caldera says. “That message I got? That was Avenor telling me they’ll have him here in fifteen minutes.”

  I give Caldera an odd look.

  “What?” Caldera asks.

  “Um . . .” I say. “Weren’t you just saying you’ve known him since . . . ?”

  “And?”

  “You still had him arrested?”

  “You said the suspect was a fire mage,” Caldera says. “Haken’s a fire mage. You said the suspects used a Council shroud. Haken would have access to a Council shroud. On top of that, he’s connected to the White Rose case already. Any way you look at it, he’s the prime suspect.”

  I’m not sure what to say.

  But Caldera seems to know what I’m thinking. “There’s no room for feelings in this job, Sonder,” Caldera says. “You follow the evidence. End of story.”

  The computer beeps. “Finally,” Caldera says and turns back to the screen. “All right, I’ll print out the matches and you can look them over while I talk to Haken. Let me know if you recognise the guy from last night.”

  Caldera gets to typing again and I watch her from across the desk. She acts like she’s put it right out of her mind, and an uneasy thought comes to me. If she turned up something against me, would she arrest me, too?

  Yes. Yes, she would.


  ∞

  I wait in the observation booth, and watch the interview through the one-way mirror.

  Caldera and Haken are sitting in the interview room. The room’s fairly bare, with a table, three chairs, and nothing else. I can see the two of them talking, but there’s no sound. There’s a microphone and speaker setup, but it’s switched off.

  Haken looks pretty relaxed for someone who’s about two steps away from getting sent to San Vittore. He’s wearing faded jeans and a Danger Mouse T-shirt; you’d never think to look at him that he was a Council Keeper. Caldera looks tense. She’s asking short, sharp questions, her hands clasped tightly as if she wants to squeeze something. Haken’s body language is more relaxed, but none of the things he says seem to make Caldera any happier.

  At last Caldera shoves back her chair and strides for the door. I head out to meet her, taking a glance back at Haken as I do. He’s looking casually at the one-way mirror, as if he knows he’s being watched and doesn’t care.

  I meet Caldera out in the corridor. “He’s stonewalling,” Caldera says, biting off the words.

  “So he’s denying it?”

  “Course he’s bloody denying it.” Caldera looks around angrily. A couple of people are in sight, but no-one’s close enough to overhear. “Point is, he’s hiding something. Fuck. I really wanted him to be . . .”

  “Innocent?” I guess.

  “At least of this.” Caldera shakes her head. “Forget it. You look over those printouts?”

  I nod, handing over the binder. Caldera opens it and I lean over to flip through the pages. Each page has got a headshot and a profile, with biographical data underneath. Keeper criminal records. I don’t know why the Keepers still print everything out when digital is so much faster, but given the kind of mood Caldera’s in I’m not going to bring it up.