Two minutes later, three more gates opened up and a Keeper assault force came storming in to find Sonder standing alone in an empty courtyard. I was long gone.
chapter 5
Morden got in touch the next day.
The gate shimmered and faded behind me as I stepped into the shadow realm and glanced around. I saw green, rolling hills, with tall trees rising up into the sky. To my right, the ground sloped down into a lake, while up ahead, a collection of white-roofed buildings peeked up from behind the trees. Behind were the fuzzy and indistinct shapes of mountains. The air was warm with a gentle breeze, like a pleasant summer’s day.
The beauty of the scenery was marred by scars of battle. The grass around my feet where I’d landed had been burnt black in a twenty-foot radius, and while some of the trees rose tall, others had been shattered, their stumps ending in jagged spikes. The remains of a jetty and boathouse were charred wreckage by the lake, and though I was still a long way from the buildings at the top of the hill, I could see that at least one had collapsed. Shoots of new grass were poking up from where the greenery had been burned away, but the damage was clearly recent.
Morden’s four apprentices were waiting for me a little way up the hill. The looks they gave me as I approached weren’t friendly, but at least they weren’t planning to attack this time. “Good morning,” I told them. “I assume you’re escorting me in.”
“This way,” the tall boy said curtly. I followed him, and the other three fell in around me.
“I didn’t catch your name,” I said as we walked.
“I didn’t tell you.”
I nodded. “Manticore, wasn’t it?” I glanced at the brown-haired girl. “And you’d be Lyonesse.”
The two of them shot me looks.
The other boy spoke up. “You’re calling yourself Manticore?”
“Shut up,” Manticore said.
“Oh, right,” I said. “You haven’t told them. Should I use your birth name?”
Manticore gave me an annoyed look. The other girl opened her mouth to say something, and the taller one—Lyonesse—shot her a glare that made her close it again.
I was tempted to keep teasing them but decided to ease off. “So I’m guessing the four of you used to be students here.”
“Before your people destroyed it,” Lyonesse said.
The name of this shadow realm was Arcadia. It had been something between a school for adepts and a military training camp, and Morden had been the one running it. The Council had invaded and destroyed it at the same time that I had my showdown with Richard and Sal Sarque. “They’re not really my people.”
“It was the Council who did the attack,” Lyonesse said. “And you were on the Council.”
“So was Morden.”
Lyonesse frowned.
“So how come—?” the other boy began.
“Stop talking to him,” Manticore said curtly. We walked the rest of the way in silence.
Morden was standing on what had once been the school’s front lawn. The rosebushes and hedges had been torn apart, but the grass of the lawn had mostly survived, probably because it had been too low to be hit by the crossfire. Behind Morden was what must have been the main entrance hall, built from white stone. It looked to me as though the defenders had fortified the front of the hall and used it as cover, and the Council forces had responded by calling in the heavy artillery. The entire building behind Morden lay in ruins: the only way you could even tell that it had been an entrance hall was by looking at the outline of the walls.
“Verus,” Morden greeted me. “I see you found your way here.”
“Your directions were fine,” I said. “You do seem to have a knack for finding pleasant places to live. Did you design Arcadia yourself?”
“I had some hand in it,” Morden said. Standing alone in the wreckage, he made an odd contrast, a figure in black on a field of green and white.
I gave Morden a curious look. “Does it bother you, what happened here?”
Morden gave a slight smile that didn’t touch his eyes. “Shall we get down to business?”
“Let’s.”
Morden’s four apprentices walked past me to stand near him, spreading out into a formation that left the five of them on one side and me on the other. “You asked me for a stepping-stone,” Morden said, “but it would be more accurate to say that what you need is leverage. Against the Council in general, and Levistus in particular. Would you agree?”
“That seems fair, yes.”
Morden nodded. “Do you know why Levistus was so strongly opposed to any action against White Rose?”
I frowned. I hadn’t been expecting the question, and it took me a moment to answer. “Because he wanted to keep you off the Council. Without all the blackmail material you got from there, you wouldn’t have been able to get your seat.”
“Correct,” Morden said, “but there is another side to it that you were never made aware of. White Rose, while it existed, held the largest reserve of blackmail material within the Light political landscape. The second largest reserve was held by Levistus.”
“Really?”
“You first encountered Levistus during his attempt to acquire the fateweaver,” Morden said. “He failed spectacularly, yet shortly afterwards advanced from the Junior to the Senior Council. His failure with White Rose was just as complete, yet that didn’t stop him from forging an alliance with Alma and Sal Sarque. And don’t forget his personal vendetta against you—pursuing a grudge against a lesser mage is one thing, but failing at it quite another. Levistus lacks Bahamus’s birth and connections, he does not have the proven war records of Sal Sarque and Druss, and he does not possess Alma’s administrative skill. So why is he perhaps the most powerful man on the Council?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted.
“Levistus’s power lay in secrets,” Morden said. “Many of which were also known to White Rose. The two of them had an arrangement where neither would disrupt the other. My actions threatened that.”
“Huh,” I said. I’d always wondered why Levistus seemed to have such a particular issue with Morden. Come to think of it, maybe that was one of the reasons he’d never liked me, either. Secrets only have power if they stay secret, and having a diviner around would cut into his territory. “So where did he get all those secrets? Mind magic?”
“I’m sure he would have gleaned the odd titbit, but every Council mage takes precautions against mind-reading. No, what Levistus has is much more interesting, and it was only relatively late in my time on the Council that I was able to discover it. Levistus has access to a bound synthetic intelligence.”
I frowned. “An imbued item?”
“Not exactly. It is a thinking, conscious mind, grown over time. Unlike most mage creations, this one was designed to interface with machines, and in particular computer and communication systems.”
“Communication systems? Like radio signals?”
“It intercepts, decrypts, and searches them,” Morden said. “Effectively, Levistus has a small, private version of the British government’s GCHQ, or the American NSA, able to collect and sort vast amounts of electronic intelligence. The overwhelming majority is useless or irrelevant, but not all.”
“I wouldn’t have thought he’d get much from the Council, given how low-tech they are.”
“You’d be surprised,” Morden said. “It only takes one bureaucrat or Council aide to make a phone call. The phone call is intercepted, flagged by an algorithm, and passed on in a daily report. Any clues in that message can in turn be investigated in more detail, whether by his agents or by Levistus himself. Levistus has been in possession of this synthetic intelligence for over twenty years. Twenty years of compound interest on information adds up to a very large amount.”