But . . . there were reasons to hesitate, too. There’s a reason I fell out with the Counciclass="underline" I don’t agree with half their policies and I don’t trust them to keep to the other half. I also have a small but significant number of enemies on the Council, including a nasty piece of work named Levistus, and getting closer to them wouldn’t do any favours to my life expectancy. Most of all, though, I wasn’t sure how well the Light mages of the Council would like me. Going from Dark to independent is one thing; going from Dark to Light is something else. Talisid might be able to get me in the door, but he wouldn’t be able to hide the fact that I was the ex-apprentice of a particularly notorious Dark mage, with a worryingly high body count of my own. Now, there are altogether too many Light mages who couldn’t care less about body counts, but the fact that a couple of the deaths attributed to my name were Light mages would probably make even them think twice. And ironically enough, the Light mages whose good opinion I’d most value and whose respect I’d most want to earn would be exactly the ones least likely to trust me.
Maybe staying outside the fold as an independent was better.
But was that wisdom talking, or fear?
Chapter 2
Anne lives in Honor Oak, a mostly forgotten part of South London with an abundance of hills. Pricewise it’s not as expensive as the inner city, but nothing in London is exactly cheap and I was pretty sure the only reason Anne could afford to live there was because Sonder had set her up in Council-owned property. (The Council is not known for its spontaneous generosity but it owns a lot of buildings it doesn’t use, and given the amount of stuff it’s responsible for, a lot gets by under its radar.) Anne’s place is near the top of a hill, by the side of a gateway leading down into a wooded area. It was after working hours, but as I looked ahead I was surprised to see a small crowd.
Anne’s flat was on the first floor of a converted building, and there was a line of people outside her door. As I studied them from a distance I realised that they were queued up (more or less) and waiting to go inside. Now that I thought about it, I remembered Luna had told me something about Anne running a clinic out of her flat. Luna had made it sound small-scale, though. By my count there were a good fifteen people there.
There wasn’t any danger, but it did pose a problem. Anne had never explicitly told me to stay away, but I knew that her current feelings towards me were ambivalent at best. Getting her to talk to me was not going to be easy, and having a crowd waiting outside would more or less guarantee a response of not-now-I’m-busy. No obvious solution presented itself, so I found a nearby spot to observe from.
The people outside Anne’s flat were a mixed bag: male and female, white and Asian, short and tall. The youngest was a babe in arms while the oldest looked to be fifty or so. Most were working class, a smaller fraction were middle class, and there were two or three that I was pretty sure were addicts. The different members of the queue were very obviously uncomfortable with each other, and there was the sort of low-grade tension in the air that you get in job centres and NHS waiting rooms. From within the flat I could just make out Anne’s soft voice, along with the sound of the man she was talking to.
I sat on the landing above Anne’s flat and waited. Twenty minutes passed, then forty. Every now and then Anne would finish with one person and admit a new one, or a new arrival would show up at the back of the queue. The queue seemed to be getting longer rather than shorter, which didn’t bode well for the “wait for her to finish” plan. I toyed with a few ideas to speed things up; the plan involving a smoke bomb and the fire alarm was tempting, but I had the feeling Anne wouldn’t appreciate it. In the absence of anything else to do, I fell back on my short-range eavesdropping to see what Anne was up to; it’s not as reliable as other methods of magical surveillance, but it’s virtually impossible to detect. (Yes, it’s spying. I’m a diviner, it’s what I do.)
Just as Luna had said, Anne was running a clinic, and she was getting a really big variety of patients. Some were what you’d expect, like the woman with flu or the man with backache. Some were odd, like the guy claiming he’d been bitten by his cat. And some were depressing, like the girl who’d cut her wrists and now was afraid someone would see it. Anne asked, gently, why she’d done it. After some probing, the girl revealed it was because her boyfriend had been threatening her. Anne asked if she’d considered leaving; the girl said she couldn’t, she loved him. The conversation more or less hit a dead end from there.
Watching Anne’s technique for treatment was interesting. She hardly used any active magic at all; she’d just do a quick check-over, then recommend a remedy. She’d make a show of doing a physical examination, but I was pretty sure what she was really relying on was her lifesight. It’s one of the signature abilities of life mages, letting them “see” someone’s physiology and the workings of their body just by looking at them, and it makes diagnosis really easy, not to mention being great for spotting people. Lifesight’s probably the weakest spell Anne knows, but in magic, as with many other things, the most powerful techniques aren’t necessarily the most useful. In theory Anne could just cure anybody who walked in, healing their wounds and rebuilding their bodies, but doing so would exhaust her quickly—healing spells consume a lot of physical energy, as well as being really hard to pass off as coincidence. By using her abilities to diagnose people and then recommending a nonmagical treatment, she could help them a lot more efficiently and without any risk of being revealed as a mage. It was a smart way to handle it.
As I kept watching, though, I started to notice something odd in how the patients reacted to Anne. Anne didn’t seem to be charging money, she was attentive and polite to everyone who came through the door, and she was faster and more accurate than any doctor. Her patients ought to have been grateful, and some were . . . but a surprising number weren’t. Many had a kind of entitled attitude; they didn’t seem to acknowledge anything that Anne was doing for them, they just treated it as their due. Others would argue when they didn’t get the diagnosis they wanted. Strangest of all, though, were the ones who seemed weirdly uncomfortable in Anne’s presence. They’d ask for her help but with reluctance, as though even being near her made them uneasy. And it wasn’t just one or two; it was something like every third person through the door.
After I’d been watching for somewhere over an hour, I heard a commotion. A new guy had arrived at the end of the line; apparently he hadn’t been pleased by the length of the queue, because he’d started shoving his way to the front. The people already in the queue—some of whom had been waiting for over an hour—objected. The shouting and swearing grew steadily louder until the new arrival barged into Anne’s flat. I listened to the raised voices for a few seconds before rising to my feet and slipping downstairs past the crowd, homing in on the noise.
The room inside Anne’s flat was sparsely furnished, obviously meant for public access rather than her own use, but there were touches of her personality all the same: green-upholstered chairs, potted plants by the window. Two doors led inwards, both closed. The crowd had spilled a few feet inside but were hanging around the door, apparently unwilling to get any closer.
The reason for their reluctance was standing in the middle of the room, shouting at Anne. He was a big guy, powerfully built with a scarred and shaven head. There was a spider’s web tattooed on the side of his neck, and ACAB was spelt out across the knuckles of his right fist in blue India ink. His speech was a little hard to decipher but he seemed to want something, and Anne was standing right in front of him.