The ravine that had once led to Arachne’s lair was deserted. The tunnel leading down into the earth had been sealed, and the spells that had opened and closed it were gone. If you didn’t know better, it looked like just a mound of earth. There were no guards or alarms: the place had been looted when the Council had raided it, and apparently they’d decided they were done with the place. With no one living there and nothing valuable to find, it would probably be abandoned. Over the years, fewer and fewer would have any reason to visit, until someday, in fifty or a hundred years, no one would remember it at all. Men and women would walk their dogs, and children would play, not knowing that a cavern complex lay beneath their feet.
Maybe Arachne would return sometime around then. It was a nice thought. I wouldn’t be around to see it.
I sat on a fallen tree and waited. Birdsong carried on the evening air. From far above, I heard the distant roar of an airliner, heading westwards.
Soft footsteps sounded, shoes on earth. “This,” Anne said, “had better be good.”
I turned to see Anne half-lit beside one of the trees. Spatters of sunlight fell across her bare arms and legs, swallowed up by the black of her dress. Her expression was shadowed, but didn’t look welcoming. “Sorry about the wait,” I told her.
“I hate waiting.” Anne took a step forward into brighter light. “You made me wait five hours.”
“I told you my best estimate was four to eight, and I explained why.”
“No, you didn’t. You ran off some random crap about deep shadow realms and I stopped listening. Now how about you go back to explaining why I’ve been hanging around these woods all day?”
“If you’d bothered to listen the last time I explained,” I said, “you would have had to wait an hour or two at the most. And if you’d stopped being so paranoid and just given me a phone number, you wouldn’t have had to wait even that long. The reason it’s taken this long is that I had to wait for the Council to—”
“Bored.”
“Okay, let’s try this another way. It took five hours because the time flow—”
“Bored.”
“Do you want me to explain this, or not?”
“Too many words.” Anne made a spinning motion with one finger. “TLDR.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll explain this in terms that are simple enough for your attention span. What do you think we’re here to do?”
“You want me to kill Levistus.”
“And as soon as we go after Levistus, the Council is going to send a response team to kill us. A response team that’s going to have their best combat mages and their best weapons. Right now, that response team is stuck in a deep shadow realm for the next few hours. We’re going to kill Levistus before they get out. Clear?”
“See, you should have explained it like that the first time.” Anne folded her arms. “What’s stopping them sending more?”
“The Council’s first priority is to protect itself,” I said. “Right now, they think there’s an attack being launched against the War Rooms.” Morden was seeing to that. It wouldn’t be a very thorough feint, but it wouldn’t have to be—the Council would be in a state of maximum paranoia after losing contact with Talisid. “They have enough reserves left to defend the War Rooms against a full attack from Richard’s cabal, and they have enough reserves left to send a strike force to crush us. They don’t have enough to do both.”
“And what if they pick Option B?”
I shrugged. “What’s life without a little risk?” I held out a hand. “Coming?”
Anne looked back at me, then a smile flashed across her face. “You know, I’ve been waiting for you to do that for a really long time.” She jumped lightly across the ravine, then strode up to me, the sunbeams casting her in alternating dark and light. “Let’s do this.”
I gave Anne a nod. Together, we walked away.
chapter 11
You can tell a lot about a mage by where they live. Some live in little terraced houses in the suburbs. Some live in mansions out in the country. Others live in places that are so well hidden you’ll never see them at all. Levistus’s house and base of operations was a house on a street in London called Kensington Palace Gardens.
Calling Kensington Palace Gardens rich is like saying that Heathrow Airport is big. It’s true, but doesn’t explain the scale. Let’s say you live in the U.S. or the U.K. or some other Western country, and let’s say you work full-time earning an average sort of salary. If you managed to save fifty percent of that pretax salary, then the amount of time it would take you to save enough money to buy a house on Kensington Palace Gardens is longer than the amount of time between today and the birth of Christ. If you decided to get the money by playing the lottery, you’d have to win the U.K. national jackpot five times running to get even halfway there. The people who live on that street are the sort who buy Ferraris without noticing the difference in their bank balance.
So I have to admit, I got a particular satisfaction out of watching Anne blow Levistus’s front door into a thousand pieces.
Wooden splinters went skittering across the floor. The doors had been warded against scrying, three or four different types of sensory magic, and against any attempt to pick or bypass the lock. They hadn’t been warded against overwhelming force. Anne and I came through side by side and scanned the front hall, seeing a room floored in white marble, with black veined pillars flanking open doorways, all decorated in an elegant, minimalistic style. A curving staircase disappeared upwards. Running footsteps sounded from several directions, and Anne and I halted.
Men appeared from both sides. They were wearing polished shoes and well-tailored suits, but they were clearly security guards. More interesting to me was the way the lines of their futures moved: they were human, but unnaturally rigid and constrained. I suppose it shouldn’t have surprised me that Levistus had mind-controlled guards, but I hadn’t expected quite so many. All six of the guards were holding handguns, which they levelled. “Freeze!” one shouted.
Anne stared at the men, eyebrows raised. “Seriously?”
“Stay where you are,” one of the men called. “Hands up and get down on your knees.”
Anne looked at me. “These guys aren’t even worth my time.”
I shrugged.
“Second warning,” the man announced. “Hands up, now!”
Anne sighed. She raised a hand and clicked her fingers.
Black death streamed in out of the night, flowing around us and into the mansion. There was the flash and bang of gunfire. It wasn’t aimed at us. Claws flickered; screams rang out in stereo; blood painted the walls. A bullet hit the chandelier, sending a tinkle of broken glass falling to the marble.
As quickly as it had started, it was over. Six corpses lay on the floor. Spindly figures stood over them, man-sized but thin and inhuman, moving in fits and jerks. These were jann, lesser jinn that Anne could summon. Or that the jinn could. I’d fought against the things, but it was a new experience to have them on my side.
“This is what he sends to stop us?” Anne said. “I’m honestly kind of insulted.”
“These were just the sentries,” I told her. Glass crunched under my feet as I advanced. A jann looked up from where it was crouched over a body, hissed, then flitted away. I heard a scream from deeper in the mansion: the jann had fanned out ahead. I felt a flicker of conscience and ignored it. Gunfire sounded from the first floor, and I sensed the signature of spells; I headed for the stairs.
The stairs led into a big drawing room which had been converted into an office. Desks near the bay windows provided work spaces for the men and women who worked here. Or had worked here. Two bodies were shapeless heaps on the carpet: near to them, one jann was dissolving and another was kicking weakly as it died.