“I’m not sure that’s what I want.”
“I know,” I said. “Thing is, so do they.”
“Can I be a mage without giving up on the normal world?”
“You’re asking the wrong question,” I said. “You are a mage. You’re the one who decides what that means.”
Luna was silent for a couple of minutes. “Why did you run the shop?” she asked eventually.
“This is your day for out-of-left-field questions, isn’t it?”
“I know how you got the Arcana Emporium,” Luna said. “You told me the story. But you never told me why you kept at it. I mean, you ran it for how long, six years?”
“Seven.”
“So why didn’t you sell up and go do something else?” Luna said. “I mean, you could have made more money somewhere else.”
“Pretty much anywhere else.”
“So why?”
I’ve been asked that question a lot over the years, and usually I throw off some pat reply. This time I told the truth. “Because of the one in a thousand.”
“The what?”
“You did enough shifts at the shop,” I said. “Out of every thousand people who walked through that door, about nine hundred are tourists or cranks. Another ninety are hobbyists or small-timers. That leaves ten. About nine out of those ten are there for business. They want information, or they’re buying, or selling, or they’re looking for something that’s not on the shelves. Sometimes it’s trouble, but usually it’s not. You add all those together, that’s nine hundred and ninety-nine. The thousandth person . . . that’s the one who needs help. I don’t mean they want help, like all those idiots who come in asking for love potions or a way to win the lottery, I mean they need help. A new mage who’s just started to wake up to their power, and who doesn’t understand what’s happening to them. An adept who’s being hunted by a Dark mage. Someone who’s in danger from an item or a creature or a spell, who doesn’t have anywhere else to go.”
“Like me,” Luna said.
“Like you,” I said. “The other nine hundred and ninety-nine? They don’t really need me. The tourists and the hobbyists can all buy their stuff from some other shop. The mages and the adepts have other places they can go. But what about the ones who don’t have anywhere else to go?”
“The one in a thousand,” Luna said. “Wait. Was that why you put me in charge of the e-mails?”
I laughed. A while back I’d given Luna the job of running the Arcana Emporium’s e-mail account, which mostly had meant writing answers to a seemingly endless stream of questions. She’d complained for months, but somewhat to my surprise, she’d stuck with it.
“It was, wasn’t it?” Luna said. “I thought it was just a way to make me study.”
“Well, that too,” I said. “But it was the same deal. For nearly every one of those e-mails, whether you answered them or ignored them didn’t make any real difference. But every now and then . . .”
“Yeah,” Luna said. She paused. “They still keep e-mailing, you know.”
“Would have thought they’d have stopped by now.”
“Actually, there are more than there used to be,” Luna said. “Mostly, they want to know when you’re going to reopen the shop.”
I was silent. I’d thought about it, from time to time. I could do it. I’d lost my stock in the fire that had gutted the building, but I could build that back up. I could rent or buy a new place, or even rebuild the old one. Then I could fit it out, spread the word that I was back in business . . .
. . . and someone else would probably blow the place up again. And maybe me with it. A shop is too visible, a shopkeeper too vulnerable. I’d been able to get away with it when I was a little fish and beneath everyone’s notice, but not now.
Or maybe ever. Somewhere at the back of my mind over the past six months, I’d had the vague idea that once this was all over and things were back to normal, I could start the Arcana Emporium up again. But were things ever going to get back to normal? The number of enemies I had was going up, not down, and the number of attempts on my life was doing the same. Even if Morden replaced me as his aide, even if I walked away from the Keepers, there’d still be Richard to deal with, and Levistus, and the Crusaders, and all of the other mages and mercenaries and monsters that I’d pissed off over the years. They’d come hunting me, and if I was standing behind a counter, it’d be that much harder for me to get away. And no matter whether they succeeded or failed, my shop wouldn’t be a safe place to visit. Now that I looked back on it, I was lucky the Arcana Emporium had lasted as long as it had. I didn’t think I’d be so lucky twice.
It was a depressing thought. For years, my shop had been part of my identity. Now I had to face the fact that I wasn’t going to be able to go back to it for a very long time, if ever. Maybe it wasn’t just Luna who needed to figure out who she was going to be.
“I don’t think it’s going to happen anytime soon,” I said at last.
Luna nodded. She looked sad, but not surprised. We sat together, listening to the birds singing in the trees.
| | | | | | | | |
There was one last thing which happened that August.
I was still going in to Keeper HQ, and for several days running I saw references in the department bulletins to “the Barnes inquiry.” It felt as though something was going on, and the next time I managed to catch Coatl alone, I asked him about it.
“Oh, that clusterfuck,” Coatl said. Coatl is a fat, cheerful mind mage from South America who arrived in London on an exchange program a few years ago. He was one of the few Keepers I was on speaking terms with, though we were still talking alone with the door closed. “You heard about the raid in Pimlico?”
I shook my head.
“Met were doing a drugs bust. There were adepts, we got called in, and it got messy.”
“So why the inquiry?”
“When the whole thing was done there were a few injured normals and some fire adept called Goldman was dead. Keeper at the scene was Reyes; he claimed the burns were from fires that Goldman started.”
“Isn’t Reyes a heat mage?” I said sceptically. I’d met the Keeper a few times and didn’t like him much. Back when I’d still been talking to Caldera, she hadn’t liked Reyes either; apparently he had a reputation for excessive force.
“Yep.” Coatl shrugged. “On the other hand, Goldman was a violent little shit. Only reason he was there was that he was trying to rip off those drug dealers so he could sell the stuff himself.”
“So what really happened?”
“God knows,” Coatl said. “Probably both were dirty. But people have been making noise, so the Council are holding an inquiry.”
I snorted. “Which means either they’re going to clear Reyes of everything, or they’ll find some minor fault and give him a slap on the wrist.”
“Probably.”
I checked things out for myself the next day, but everything I could find matched with what I’d heard from Coatl. I kept hearing rumblings about the case, both in the Keeper news and from my adept contacts, but I had more immediate things to worry about, and as the days went by, it became background noise.
Now that I look back on the whole thing, I wonder if there was anything I could have done. Maybe there was, but it’s a lot easier to see warning signs in hindsight. In any case, in the first week of September something happened that drove everything to do with the Keepers out of my thoughts.