Sonder didn’t answer. “What else did you see?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Come on, Sonder,” I said. “Our magic types aren’t that far apart. You were looking back for the last time I was here, weren’t you?”
Sonder’s not a good liar. He hesitated just long enough to make it very obvious what the answer was. “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I was going to ask you to do it anyway. Did you see any trace of Catherine?”
“No,” Sonder admitted.
“But the wards are down.”
“They’re down now,” Sonder said. “They’re not down then. Anything past about nine years just blanks out. And it’s at the edge of my range anyway.”
I nodded, hiding my disappointment. I hadn’t really been expecting it to be that easy but it had been worth a try. “I guess we keep looking.”
Caldera came back a few minutes later. “Anything?” I asked as she walked in.
“Waste of time,” Caldera said. “This place hasn’t been used in years.”
“Deleo was here,” Sonder said. “She killed three men who tried to loot this room five months ago.”
“Dark-style home defence, huh?” Caldera glanced at the ruined sofa. “A couple of the other rooms have been trashed too.”
“Should I check them?” Sonder asked.
Caldera shook her head. “No, it’s Richard I want. Deleo’s only important if she can lead us to him.”
“So we’re going?” I said.
Caldera raised an eyebrow. “In a hurry to leave?”
“I’m in a hurry not to run into Deleo.”
“So watch for her.”
“I’ve been watching for her nonstop since we gated in,” I said. “You know the best way of making sure we don’t run into her? Not sticking around any longer than we have to.”
“I’m a Keeper, Verus,” Caldera said. “If we ran scared every time we had to deal with a Dark mage, we wouldn’t be much good at our jobs.” She looked at Sonder. “Can you follow where Deleo went?”
“I don’t think she came in the front door,” Sonder said.
“She wouldn’t have to,” I said. “She knows the whole mansion and there are no gate wards. She can gate into any part she likes.”
“Then let’s check the basement,” Caldera said.
I sighed and started towards the doorway. “I knew you were going to say that.”
“It’s warded,” I said.
We were at the end of the main hallway on the ground floor. The entrance to the lower levels was a simple arch in the wall, and the glow from Caldera’s light illuminated stone steps leading down into shadow. “It’s another alarm ward, right?” Sonder said, concentrating on the archway. “It looks the same as the first.”
“It is.”
“Right,” Caldera said, walking to the wall. “Same again, then.”
“Don’t!” I said sharply. “It’s a trap.”
Caldera frowned at me. “I can’t see anything.”
“The alarm ward is just a cover,” I said. “It’s meant to make you think that you can get past it the same way you did the first. The real defence is there.” I pointed down into the darkness. “Anything that goes down there is going to summon a nocturne.”
“What the hell is that?”
“Darkness elemental. They hunt by sound. You don’t want to meet one.”
“So what’s the trigger?” Caldera said. “How do we get around it?”
“If there’s a limit to the trigger area, I can’t find it,” I said. I’d been looking through potential futures and I couldn’t find a single one where we went down there without fighting the thing. “And it’s sensitive. It’s not just set to living things, objects are going to trigger it too.”
“There has to be some way to avoid it, right?” Sonder said. “Maybe a password?”
“I’m not sure there is.”
“Really?”
“Look, I’ve seen a lot of magical defences and they usually have a pattern. They’re designed to let the right people in and keep the wrong people out. This one isn’t made that way. It’s the kind of ward you set up if you don’t want to let anybody in. Even Deleo would have trouble disarming this without setting it off first.”
“Why would she do that?” Sonder asked.
“If she wasn’t coming down here either,” I said. “This trap is the equivalent of filling a room with poison gas and then sealing it from the outside. You don’t do it if you’re planning to use it.” I looked at Caldera. “Deleo hasn’t been using this mansion. The only reason she comes here is if someone trips the burglar alarm, so she can reset the wards.”
“You mean that’s what she’s been doing until now,” Caldera countered. “She could have set this ward up to last for ten years and be planning to disarm it when Richard came back.”
“Which we’ve seen absolutely no evidence for.”
Caldera looked down the steps with narrowed eyes. “If we took this thing on, could we beat it?”
I looked at Caldera in disbelief. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“Well?”
“I have no idea! Combats are way too chaotic to see more than a few seconds ahead. I can tell the thing’s going to go out of its way to try and kill you, isn’t that enough?”
“Why her?” Sonder asked.
“Because she makes the most noise.”
“So make an educated guess,” Caldera said. She folded her arms and looked at me. “Can we get past this thing?”
It’s times like this that remind me just how big a gap there is between elemental mages and diviners. For me, combat is dangerous. A bullet or a blade will kill me as fast as anyone else and the best way to avoid that is not to be in a fight in the first place. I have to be afraid of physical threats, or I wouldn’t survive. For mages like Caldera it’s different. The shields and defensive spells of elemental mages aren’t invulnerable but they’re damn close, and the kinds of weapons that would kill an unarmoured human—guns, knives, grenades—don’t do much to an elemental mage except piss them off. Bringing them down in a straight fight takes the kind of firepower that the average person is simply not going to be carrying around, which means that when an elemental mage looks at an ordinary human being, they know that barring something unexpected they’ve got nothing to fear from them. It gives them a very different mindset from someone like me.
I looked at Caldera, sizing her up. Heavyset and overweight, she didn’t look like most people’s idea of an action heroine. But I’d been watching her on the way here and I’d noticed that she didn’t move like someone who was unhealthy, and also that she hadn’t gotten out of breath once. There might be a lot of fat on her but I had the feeling there was a lot of muscle too, and the way she acted gave me the impression that she knew how to take care of herself. A sparring match with her would be interesting.
“Well?” Caldera said.
“Probably,” I said reluctantly. I really didn’t want to encourage Caldera but I also didn’t want to lie. “Nocturnes don’t have the power of true elementals. But I can’t guarantee that the fight won’t tip Deleo off too. And I don’t care how good you are, you couldn’t take her and a nocturne at the same time.”
Caldera looked away. “Look, don’t you think it’s time to get out of here?” I said. “Maybe you’re right about Richard and maybe you’re not, but this place has been empty for years. If there’s anything to find, it’s not here.”
Caldera hesitated and, looking ahead, I could tell she was at last seriously thinking about it. I would have liked to know more, but I’d already spent too long focusing on the futures of us fighting the nocturne and I needed to get back to watching for danger. I sent my senses branching out ahead through the futures of us waiting where we were now, looking for any shift in the status quo.
And with a jolt I found it. We weren’t alone in the mansion anymore. There were people here—familiar people, heading straight for us. “We have to go,” I said. “Now!”
Sonder and Caldera looked at me in surprise. “Why?” Sonder asked.