I was silent, thinking. “Everyone’ll know he backed down,” I said after a moment.
“All of the successes Morden has had in the past year have come from being seen as the winning horse. If he commits his forces to an attack, he’ll lose. If he backs down, he will also lose.”
“Is that what all this is about?” I said. “Is that why you’ve called in so many Keepers to defend the War Rooms tonight? A show of force?”
“It’s the ideal solution, don’t you think?” Talisid said. “Regardless of what happens, everyone will know that Morden attempted to overthrow the Council, and failed.”
I thought about it. Suddenly the Council’s actions in calling in Vari and the rest of the apprentices made sense. They didn’t want a fight—they wanted to win without fighting, by forcing Morden to blink. It was a very Light-mage solution, and from their perspective, it made sense.
And set against that was . . . what? Why did I feel that things were going to go so badly? Maybe because I knew Morden better than the Council did. I’d spent a lot of time with the Dark mage over the course of this year, and over the months I’d been forced into a kind of unwilling respect for him. He was clearly and unapologetically one of the bad guys, but he was also very good at what he did, and I didn’t believe he’d be beaten this easily.
“Look,” I said. “The whole reason you wanted me in this position was so that I could report on Richard and Morden’s plans. Well, this is my best guess at what they are. Are you going to take it to the Council or not?”
“Yes,” Talisid said after a moment’s pause. “But I can already predict what they’re going to say. They’re expecting you to hold up your end of the deal.”
“Great.”
“Let me know if you hear anything more.”
| | | | | | | | |
I spent the last few hours before Morden’s deadline in the Hollow.
“So?” I asked Luna, turning. “How do I look?”
Luna studied me critically. “Pretty good,” she said. “Though I still think you should be taking that submachine gun.”
I was wearing my armour, the plate-and-mesh that Arachne had made for me, over a set of black clothes. Thin gloves covered my hands (partly for protection, more to avoid fingerprints) and I had a webbing belt around my waist and hips with half a dozen nondescript-looking pouches holding everything from gate stones to healing salves. My feet were covered with a pair of black running shoes, and I had a mask tucked away to hide my face if it became necessary. “Sends the wrong message,” I said. “Assuming it really is the War Rooms, the main people we’ll be running into are Council security, and I don’t really want to shoot them.”
“Won’t stop them from shooting you.”
“Which is why I want to be as unencumbered as possible,” I said. “Besides, if I look unarmed, there’s more chance they’ll yell at me to put my hands up instead of just shooting on sight.”
“Doesn’t carrying a handgun behind your back kind of invalidate the whole ‘unarmed’ thing?”
“I said I wanted to look unarmed,” I said. The gun was in the small of my back, held in a holster designed for concealment. I’d have to pull back the flap before I could reach the gun, which could cost me precious seconds in combat, but you can’t have everything. “I’m not leaving my knife behind, either.”
“I don’t know what’s weirder,” Luna said, “the fact that you carry a knife with the kind of people you run into, or that it actually seems to work.” She leant back against the tree and sighed. “I wish I was coming with you.”
“No, you don’t,” I said. “Besides, our deal with the Council only gives amnesty to me and to Anne.”
“I know, I know. You’ll call if you need backup?”
“I will, but I wouldn’t get your hopes up. If it really is the War Rooms then there’ll be gate wards, and without some way to get you in . . .”
“I’ll be sitting this one out,” Luna finished. “Great.”
I walked over to the table where I’d laid out my gear. “So if you’re attacking this place,” Luna asked, “and Vari’s been drafted to defend it, what’ll happen if you come face to face?”
“Then I guess we’ll be putting on an amateur dramatic performance where he shouts, ‘Surrender, Dark villain!’ while I yell that he’ll never take me alive.”
Luna grinned. “I’d like to see that. What are you staring at?”
“This,” I said, tapping the dreamstone.
“You’re taking it?”
“Thinking about it.”
“Not sure it’s really the time for experiments.”
“Normally I’d agree with you,” I said. “I’d do that kind of testing in a safe, controlled environment, using divination to make it as risk-free as possible. Which is what I’ve been doing for three months straight. Maybe it’s time I stopped being so safe and controlled.”
“Mm.” Luna watched me as I slipped the dreamstone into one of my pouches and sealed it closed. “Alex?”
“Yeah?”
“You said that if Morden did attack, then the Crusaders were going to do something.”
“Yeah.”
“Like sending a bunch of people to stop him?” Luna said. “Including those two mages who tortured Anne?”
“That does seem like a possibility.”
“Is that why you’re doing this?”
“No.”
“Really?”
“It’s more like a potential side objective.”
“Alex . . .”
“I’m not planning to take any chances I don’t have to,” I said. “But let’s just say I’ll be on the lookout for opportunities.” I checked my gun one last time and turned to go.
| | | | | | | | |
I got back to the real world to find a message from Morden giving me instructions to meet Vihaela via gate and follow her orders. I scanned through the futures, then once I’d found out what I could, I called Anne.
“All we have to do is survive,” I said once I’d finished catching her up. “If Morden’s going ahead with this attack—and it looks like he is—then the Council’s going to crucify him. We just have to stay alive until then. Once we do, it’s over. We’ll be away from Morden and out from under that death sentence, too.”
Anne was silent.
“Anne?”
“Yes.”
“You okay?”
“We’re going to be meeting Vihaela,” Anne said.
“Yeah.”
“She scares me.” Anne’s voice was distant. “It feels like she wants to take something.”
I sighed inwardly. That death sentence had been hanging over us for a really long time and I’d hoped that the news that it was lifted might have made Anne happy. So much for that. “Anyway, there’s good news and bad news,” I said. “The good news is that we’re not going to be immediately grabbed, accused of being traitors, and tortured for information the second we step through. So either Morden doesn’t know that we’ve gone to the Council, or he’s not planning to do anything about it just yet.”
“What’s the bad news?”
“The bad news is that Deleo is going to be there too.”
“All right.”
I paused. “There anything you want to talk about before we go?”
“Let’s just get on with it.”
The tone of Anne’s voice worried me. Fleetingly, it occurred to me that while dealing with Morden and Talisid and the Council hadn’t exactly been fun, it had at least kept me busy. Anne had had nothing to do but brood, and maybe that was making things worse. But we didn’t have time to talk things over. “Okay. Let’s go.”
| | | | | | | | |
We gated through into a small sitting room, the kind you’d find in a medium-sized house. Bright daylight was coming through the windows and the air felt warmer than the autumn chill of London—we were probably somewhere far south and either east or west, but I couldn’t tell where. Anne had arrived a few seconds before, and I stepped through my own gate and let it close behind me.