The natural choice for a job like this was Luna. Luna isn’t the best combat mage, but her chance magic is excellent for stealth operations. Just as important, I knew her, trusted her, and we knew how to work together. The problem was that while I was pretty sure we could get into the data centre without being detected, leaving would be another story. There was a very good chance that I was going to end up shooting my way out, along with anyone I brought with me. And if I did that with Luna, it was only a matter of time until the news got back to the Council. At that point, Luna would become an outlaw, just like me. The life as a shopkeeper and independent mage that she’d so carefully built would be destroyed. I couldn’t do that to her.
Going to Variam brought the same issues. He’d be worse at the stealth parts of the job, better at the combat ones, but again, it would only take one person recognising him for his career as a Keeper to be over. In fact, pretty much anyone with any kind of relationship with the Council was out for the same reasons, which ruled out all Light mages and most independents.
There was the option of Anne. She was more than powerful enough and couldn’t care less about getting into trouble with the Council, given that she was on their most-wanted list already. Unfortunately, she was on that list for very good reasons, the main one being that she was possessed by a human-hating, enormously powerful, and probably insane jinn. On top of that, Dark Anne was the one currently running things, and she was violent, impulsive, and unreliable. I didn’t want to trust her with something like this unless I had no other choice.
So I needed someone who was either a Dark mage or the next thing to it, but who could be depended on to perform a difficult and dangerous job. And it had to be someone I knew well enough to trust.
Put like that, I could only really think of one person who fit.
—
And that’s pretty much all of it,” I finished.
I was standing in a small park near to the old Arcana Emporium. Back in the old days, before my shop had been burned down, I’d used it as a gating point. Thick trees and bushes blocked out line of sight to the buildings all around, and provided some shade from the late afternoon sun.
The man standing in front of me was big and heavily muscled, as tall as me but with the build of a heavyweight boxer. His arms were folded, the muscle outlines visible through his sleeves, and he was staring past my shoulder, apparently deep in thought. He’d listened to my entire story without saying a word.
“So?” I prompted when Cinder didn’t speak.
Cinder looked up at me with a frown, then went back to studying the grass on the small hillock over my shoulder.
“Are you in?” I asked eventually.
“Thinking,” Cinder said in his rumbling voice.
A minute went by.
“Is this going to take a while?” I asked when Cinder still didn’t talk. “Because I could give you some time. You know, go for a walk, get some tea . . .”
Cinder didn’t answer.
“Learn a new language . . . work out the issues with general relativity . . .”
“You going to shut up?”
I stayed quiet.
“All right,” Cinder said at last.
“All right?”
Cinder nodded.
“Any questions?”
“No.”
“You don’t even want to hear the plan?”
“You’re about to tell me.”
“Well . . . yes.”
“So?”
I sighed. “You know, you’re much less fun to explain things to than Luna.”
Cinder just looked at me.
“Fine,” I said, handing Cinder a tablet. “You can see the blueprints for Heron Tower there. Levistus’s data centre is on the two floors in that top block, highlighted in red.”
Cinder took the tablet and zoomed in, studying the map. “Getting in is easy,” I said. “Getting in without the bomb going off is hard. The blast won’t threaten you but it’ll destroy the records I’m there to get. Unfortunately, whoever set up the security measures for the place was thorough. There are a lot of redundant and overlapping triggers.” I’d spent a good two hours path-walking, trying to figure out a way to disarm the alarm systems, and I hadn’t found one. Any attempt to disarm it piecemeal just caused another trigger to activate instead, and the frustrating thing was that I often couldn’t tell why my attempts were failing. Though I wasn’t sure, I suspected that Levistus might have put in security measures specifically to mess with diviners. “Opening the doors triggers the bomb, cutting through the walls triggers the bomb, gating inside triggers the bomb, and trying to interfere with any of those triggers also triggers the bomb. There’s a chance that if I get close I might be able to figure out a way through, but I don’t want to bet on it.”
“So?”
“There’s one weakness I can find,” I said. “Levistus didn’t want to use heavy ward coverage, because that would have made his spy station too obvious to magesight. So he’s had to rely on technological defences, mostly sensors and alarms. They need power.” I nodded at the tablet. “The main electrical switchboards are in the mechanical levels in the basement. The backup power is on the roof. If we cut the power at both locations, that should open up a way into the data centre.”
Cinder raised an eyebrow at me. “Should?”
“I haven’t been able to test it,” I admitted.
“If it doesn’t work?”
“Then I’ll improvise,” I said. “If it helps, I’d like for you to handle the basement while I take the roof. That means that any nasty surprises are going to be landing on me, not you.”
Cinder grunted and turned his attention back to the map. “What’s their backup?”
“Backup is going to be Levistus’s personal response team,” I said. “The leader is Levistus’s personal aide, a mage called Barrayar. Force mage, pretty dangerous. There’s also a small hit squad that I haven’t met. They look like either low-grade mages or adepts, but they seem like combat specialists. One teleporter, one force blaster, and one who uses hand-to-hand attacks. Once an alarm is triggered, they’ll gate in within minutes.”
“Keepers?”
“That’s the good news. Levistus’s alarms are set to alert him, not the Council, and he isn’t going to call for Council reinforcements as long as he has any other alternative. Given the contents of that data centre, the last thing he wants to do is draw attention.”
“Exit?”
“From the basement, you’ll be able to gate out anytime you want,” I said. “The upper levels are more difficult due to the gate wards.”
“Bringing that elemental?”
“That’s the plan.”
“All right.” Cinder tossed the tablet back to me. “I do this, you find me Del.”
“Okay. I can’t guarantee she’ll cooperate, but—”
“No,” Cinder said. “You find her, and you make sure I get a chance to talk to her.”
I grimaced. I didn’t like it, but it wasn’t like I hadn’t seen this coming. “All right.”
—
It was late that night before I was able to empty my pockets onto my desk, sit down on my chair, and start unlacing my shoes in preparation for bed. Outside my window, the stars of the Hollow were glowing in the purple-and-green nebulae of the shadow realm’s night sky. It was beautiful, but I felt tired and unhappy.
The plan I’d worked out for the attack on Heron Tower was sketchy, with a lot of places where things could go wrong. If this had been the old days and if the participants had been my old group—me, Luna, Vari, Anne—I never would have okayed it. But now I had the fateweaver, and Cinder. We might or might not get the data, but I was pretty sure we’d be able to make it out in one piece.