Footsteps sounded from below and Anne appeared in the stairwell, looking past me out through the window. “Did you see that?” I said.
“The bird?” Anne asked. She was still wearing my greatcoat. “I felt it die, but . . .”
“Not the bird, the fox. Did you see it move?” I’d seen the fox jump, a short bound of a foot or two, then all of a sudden it had been coming down on the bird.
Anne frowned. “No. I think it’s the same one that was here two days ago. It was on the other side of a wall, but when I got closer it just disappeared.”
“Holy crap,” I said. “Blink fox.”
“What’s a blink fox?”
“Magic-bred species—some twentieth-century mages made them as spy familiars. They look like a red fox, but they’ve got human-level intelligence and they can do short-range teleports.”
“You mean it was looking for us?”
I shook my head. “No, it was hunting. If it was under a mage’s control it wouldn’t be that hungry . . . hmm.”
“Hmm, what?”
“I heard those two apprentices saying something about trying to catch a fox. Maybe we could strike a deal with it.”
Anne looked at me with raised eyebrows. “Seriously?”
“It’s been hiding out in this castle, probably longer than you. It’d know a lot about the place.”
“It probably belongs to those apprentices,” Anne said. “Can’t we just get out of here?”
“I guess.” I was reluctant—when I run into a new type of magical creature, my first instinct is to make friends with it, an old habit from my days as Richard’s apprentice where the magical creatures tended to be better company than the humans. But Anne was right; we were on a clock. “You said something yesterday about another way out?”
“There is, but . . . I’m not sure how useful it’s going to be.”
I made a go-ahead gesture and Anne crouched next to me. She drew one finger across the flagstones of the stone floor, tracing out lines. “These are the edges of the castle.” She seemed to have recovered from last night, at least physically—her movements were quick and her voice soft and clear again. “The outer walls are the lines of the stone, the bridge is here. Front gate.” Her finger drew back, tapped a marking a quarter of the way across. “Sagash’s keep.” She drew her finger back farther, placing it on a spot in what would be the north-centre of the castle, mirroring the keep’s position. “This is the other exit.”
I studied the map. If Anne was getting the distances right, we weren’t far away at all.
I should probably take a second here to explain some details about gate magic, because if you’re not familiar with it, it’s probably not obvious just how bad a position we were in here. Gate magic shapes portals between locations, creating a similarity between points in space so that you can step from one to the other. It can be used to travel from place to place within our world, to go from place to place within a shadow realm, or (with more difficulty) to go from our world to a shadow realm or vice versa.
Gate magic can be blocked though, and the wards over this shadow realm were designed to do exactly that. Within the central keep, they would block any use of gate magic or teleportation at all. Outside the keep, the wards wouldn’t stop you gating around the castle, but they would prevent you from using gate magic to get out of the shadow realm unless you were at one specific point (the front gate) and holding the key. It’s a fairly standard security setup—it makes it easy for the residents to travel around but hard for anyone else to enter or leave.
Unfortunately, neither Anne or I could use gate magic. We could use gate stones, but gate stones will only take you to one place, which would only be any use if we had gate stones keyed specifically to places in the castle, which we didn’t. The same did not apply to Sagash’s apprentices—it was more or less a guarantee that between them they’d have gate magic, gate stones, or (more likely) both.
What all this meant was that as long as Anne and I were in this castle, Sagash and his apprentices had a huge home-ground advantage. The only thing stopping them from gating to our position right now was that they didn’t know where we were. As soon as that changed, they could just jump right on top of us and we’d have a hell of a time getting away from them. And even if they couldn’t find us, they could just set up camp at the front gate with a bunch of shadows and wait for us to show up. Where else were we going to go?
But if there was a back door, that opened up some options. “It’s definitely an exit?”
“Back then it was. It might have changed.”
“Have you been there since?”
Anne shook her head. “I couldn’t have used it. It needs a key.”
“The same as the one for the front gate, or a different one?”
“Sagash never let me get close enough to see.”
“Probably a different one,” I muttered. Worth checking, though. “What about surveillance? Is there any way for Sagash to pick us up while we’re here?”
“He uses the shadows, mostly,” Anne said. “He’s got enough that he can turn the sky black with them, but most of the time he keeps them down in the tombs. He just relies on the fixed sensors instead.”
I looked up sharply. “Fixed sensors?”
“At the front gate. They log everything that comes in or passes through.”
“So they would have seen us both come through?” I frowned. “Why hasn’t Sagash done anything?”
Anne shrugged helplessly.
“There’s something strange going on. If Sagash was acting against us, the whole castle should have been mobilised by now.” I looked up at Anne. “I don’t think Sagash was the one behind the attack on you. I think it was just Darren and Sam, and now they’re trying to keep it secret from everyone else.”
“But why?” Anne looked dismayed. “I’ve never even met those two!”
It was my turn to shrug. From their conversation, it had sounded as though Darren and Sam had been afraid of Sagash finding out what they’d been doing, but if Sagash really did have that sensor net, wouldn’t he have found out already? None of the explanations quite fit—there was some missing piece I hadn’t figured out. “I’m going to take a look at that back entrance,” I said. “I need you to stay still and quiet for a bit.”
I found a place to sit with my back resting against the wall, while Anne sat cross-legged opposite me and watched quietly. As soon as I was settled, I closed my eyes, looking into the future in which I went downstairs and started going east. It didn’t take long before I found the building Anne was describing, tall and rectangular and surrounded by high walls and colonnades. It looked as though it was—
The vision fragmented as the actions in Anne’s immediate futures expanded to disrupt the point earlier in the chain at which I left. I frowned, routed around the disturbance, and patiently traced my way back to the same building. A search of the ground floor discovered a circle made out of some greenish material which would show up to my magesight. Looked like a transport pattern. I looked to see what would happen if I used a gate stone within the circle . . . nothing. If I used the key focus as well? Also nothing. I wanted to try some command words, but the distance was hampering my ability to search. Maybe—
The vision fragmented again. “Could you please stop doing that?” I said with my eyes closed.
“Doing what?” Anne asked.
“Talking to me.”
“I’m not.”
“You’re thinking about starting a conversation, and each time you do it changes the futures.”
“I can’t even think about talking to you?”
“You can think as much as you like, so long as there’s no possibility of you actually doing it.”