Ji-yeong cocked her head. “That was why you sent all those shadows to the main gate half an hour ago?”
Uh-oh. Getting out of here might be a little harder than getting in.
Sam and Darren didn’t answer. “Sending all eight of your shadows to guard the gate,” Ji-yeong said. “You must really want that fox. It’s funny. Didn’t you have that one guarding the gate already?”
“You going to get out of the way?” Sam was giving Ji-yeong a hard look. There was no trace of friendliness in his voice anymore.
“Okay,” Ji-yeong said, smiling suddenly. “Maybe I’ll go talk to Sagash.”
Both Darren and Sam stopped. “About what?” Sam said.
Ji-yeong shrugged. “Nothing.”
Darren took a threatening step forward. “What are you telling him?”
“What’s the problem?” Ji-yeong said. “You’ve got nothing to hide, right?” The smile didn’t leave her face, but suddenly her right hand was resting on the hilt of one of her swords.
“Okay, okay.” Sam stepped between them, arms out. “Look, let’s talk about this. Ji—” His voice lowered and I lost the rest of the sentence.
Damn, just when it was getting interesting. The trouble with divination-as-eavesdropping is that it’s got a very limited range. I wanted to sneak closer but I couldn’t risk it; living magic is very good at detecting people, and with three different mages the chances were too good that one would spot me. Instead I looked through the futures in which I approached, trying to pick through the ones in which I was noticed to the ones in which I caught a few words.
“—listening to her?” Ji-yeong was saying.
Sam answered, but he was turned away from me and I couldn’t hear what he was saying. “No, she isn’t,” Ji-yeong said.
“So what?” Darren said. He still sounded angry.
“So, she’s using you?”
Sam answered again, and Ji-yeong said something I couldn’t quite catch; Darren had moved in front of her. Will you get out of the way? I adjusted the futures I was watching, cycling through angles.
“—taking the blame,” Ji-yeong was saying.
“So get off your arse and help,” Darren said.
“Look, let’s go back to the keep,” Sam said. “We can—” He moved forward and again I lost the thread of the conversation. This time Ji-yeong let him pass and Sam headed for the northern exit, still talking. Darren and Ji-yeong followed, eyeing each other like a pair of wary dogs. The three of them disappeared through the archway and were gone.
I straightened up from where I’d been crouched, frowning as I tried to put the subtext of that conversation together. Secrets, Sagash, a fox . . . Apparently Darren and Sam had been hiding what they were doing from Ji-yeong. Maybe the House of Sagash wasn’t as united as it looked.
One very definite impression I was picking up from watching Sagash’s apprentices was that they were a step below Anne in terms of power. They might be ruthless, but they weren’t as skilled or experienced, and I suspected Sagash’s isolation might be a reason for that. He wasn’t as connected as Morden, and he hadn’t found apprentices as dangerous as Onyx. Maybe that was why he’d resorted to kidnapping the first time round . . . though this lot seemed to be here willingly.
I didn’t want to run into the three apprentices accidentally so I trailed them at a distance, using divination to track their passing while staying well outside their detection range. After only a few minutes they crossed a drawbridge over a lower courtyard and disappeared into a set of halls. Looming over the halls was the dark shape of the keep, and it didn’t take long to confirm that that was where they were going. Sagash was probably there.
A bigger worry was whether Anne was there. But I hadn’t heard anything about her being captured, and until I did I’d stick with the plan. I turned around and started working my way towards the castle’s edge. The high buildings of the castle made it hard to see the sun, but assigning that direction as west put the cliff to the south. The keep was south-central, relatively close to the exit. If I were Anne, I would have tried to put myself as far from the keep as I could. I began heading east, hoping to curve around the keep towards the north.
As I walked, I looked into the futures of what would happen if I yelled for Anne. I cycled through a variety of calls, eventually settling on “Hey, Anne, it’s Alex, could you come out, please?” To begin with I saw futures of movement from the direction of the keep, but as I put more distance and stone walls between Sagash’s apprentices and me, the chance of detection decreased until I could shout as loudly as I wanted.
While I walked, the back of my mind was turning over what I’d overheard. Ji-yeong had mentioned telling Sagash, and it had been a threat. What if Sagash didn’t know anything about the attack on Anne at all?
If that was true, then not only would it explain why Sagash had denied knowing about it, it would also fit with how crude the attack had been. Darren and Sam had caught Anne totally by surprise, yet they’d still botched the job and let her get away. Not the kind of performance you’d expect from a Dark master mage, but exactly the kind of performance you’d expect from a pair of ruthless but inexperienced apprentices.
But if they weren’t doing it on Sagash’s orders, why had they targeted Anne? From what Variam had said, it didn’t sound as though Anne had even met these three, much less given them a reason to go after her. And if they’d just been looking for a victim, why pick her? Had they chosen her at random? That felt like too much of a coincidence.
I was still missing something.
I wound my way through halls and across courtyards, up and down staircases, futures spreading through possible paths before me like spiderwebs. The castle had a strange brooding feel to it, hushed and watchful. It didn’t feel threatening, not exactly—it was more secretive, as though you could live in this place for years without ever really understanding it. I could hear the sea from over the walls and the wind around the towers, but after a while it just became background noise and the castle felt silent. Sagash’s apprentices were long gone and the only living things I could see were the white birds that soared over the castle towers and perched on the rooftops.
As I travelled I passed all kinds of strange constructions. A crane occupied one tower, a chain trailing from its tip down and down to a circle of grass far below. Other sets of rooms were filled with weird ancient machinery made out of black iron. There was even a railway, running along the outside of the castle’s northeast wall, with a horrifying drop to the rocks far below. I path-walked along the railway line and it curved around the castle’s northeast corner before ending as inexplicably as it had started. Sagash hadn’t built this place, of that I was sure. His life and Anne’s were just one more story out of hundreds, stretching back in time.
I’d been at it for more than two hours now and it was getting dark. The sun had disappeared below the western walls, and the sky was turning a dusky purple. I’d come to a section of high walls and narrow walkways; endless drops stretched down into darkness and the golden light of sunset cast long shadows on the walls. The wind had dropped with the coming dusk, and the castle felt empty and lonely, as though I were the only person left alive in a silent world. In the still air, my voice carried farther, and for the thousandth time I sent my future selves path-walking in different directions, calling for Anne. There was no response, but just as I was about to cut the spell I sensed something from the route through the lower archway. Someone there . . . I tried again, focusing on it this time, then started walking, matching my future self’s path. As I drew closer to the archway, I could hear a strange creaking sound.
The archway led into a small grassy area, enclosed on three sides. Grey-tinted walls rose up to the left and right, but up ahead the ground dropped away to a beautiful view of the ocean. The sun was setting beneath the clouds, its light reflecting off the waves in a long rippling beam. I was right on the edge of the cliff, and looking out at the sea it was as if the water stretched out to infinity.