Chapter 11
Sagash’s keep looked even more intimidating up close. Black walls stretched up to the sky, battlements topped the towers, and small arrow-slit windows peeked out over nearby courtyards. The main entrance was a small inset door. Looking at the keep from here, the out-of-place feeling was stronger. The rest of the castle might be ancient, but it was cohesive. The keep didn’t fit; it felt darker, colder. Two shadows stood guard outside.
A quiet whine made me turn aside from where I was crouching, overlooking the front gate. The fox looked towards the gate, looked back at me, and blinked twice. “I’m not even thinking about it,” I said. “Even if I got past the shadows, they’d see me coming.”
The fox trotted a few steps away, then looked back at me again. “That way? Okay . . .”
The fox led me down some steps, around the corner of a building, through a ground-floor window into a room filled with wooden crates, and to a dark stairwell leading down. It trotted down two steps and then looked back, amber eyes shining out of the blackness. I followed it down.
The steps led down into tunnels. It looked as if it had once been some sort of sewer, but the tunnels were bone dry and covered in dust. The fox led me left and right and left, winding back and forth, and before long I’d lost all sense of direction. The tunnels were pitch-black and I used my torch to navigate, freeing up my divination magic to try and map out the maze. The fox led the way, slipping through narrow passages, pausing at intersections for me to catch up. Twice I had to squeeze through gaps that were roomy for a fox but only just big enough for a human, the second of which had been caused by a very unstable-looking rockfall. I held my breath the whole way through.
At last the fox led me to a solid wooden door, dark brown in the glow from my torch. I tried the handle; it didn’t open and I inspected the keyhole. “Looks like it’s locked”—I glanced down at the fox—“not that you care. Is it bolted or barred?”
The fox seemed to think about this for a second, then winked out in a flicker of space magic. A few seconds later it reappeared, then blinked twice.
“All right.” I set to work with my picks. Lockpicking isn’t a specialty of mine, but I keep my hand in. The lock was stiff, but its design was old and simple, and after a few minutes there was a scraping sound and a click.
The door opened into an ancient storeroom. It didn’t look very different from the tunnels, but I knew I was getting close. A ladder led upwards, and I could feel the presence of a gate ward above.
I closed the door without locking it. This time the fox didn’t move ahead, staying by the door. “I know,” I said. “You don’t want to go into the gate ward.”
Blink.
I couldn’t blame the blink fox. If my only defence was teleportation, I wouldn’t want to go into an area that blocked that either. “I’m going up,” I said. “You should find a place with a view of the exits and sit and watch for a while. I haven’t forgotten my promise. If you see me come out, link up with me and we’ll try to make it out from there. If you don’t . . .” I trailed off, wondering how to finish that sentence.
The fox tilted its head, watching me, then there was a flicker of space magic and it was gone, leaving me alone in the room. I started climbing.
The ladder came up into another storeroom. The door wasn’t locked this time, and I came out onto a ground-floor corridor.
I could tell the instant I stepped into the keep. The walls here were smooth instead of rough, dim sunlight filtering through the narrow windows onto black stone instead of the yellowish bricks of the rest of the castle. The air was cold, and I found myself shivering. I could feel magical auras overlapping around me, but I didn’t stop to analyse; it was only a matter of time until Crystal or the other apprentices picked me up. Speed was my best defence now, and I moved quickly down the corridor, scanning ahead. At the end was a staircase, leading up and down. I wasn’t sure, but I thought I could hear a very faint murmur of sound from below. The sub-basement Ji-yeong had told me about; Anne would be down there. I went up.
Sagash’s laboratories on the first floor were very easy to find, marked by a cluster of wards and protective spells. The door was solid metal and wouldn’t have looked out of place on a missile silo. I studied the adjacent panel on the wall, then touched a finger to a small recessed sphere and channelled a thread of magic through it. I stood back and waited.
Twenty seconds passed, forty. I forced myself to stand still and look relaxed. I knew I was being watched but didn’t let myself glance up. At last there was a click from the panel.
“Mage Sagash?” I said. “My name’s Verus. If it’s convenient, I’d like to have a word.”
The silence dragged out: fifteen seconds, thirty. Then there was a muffled thump and a grinding sound, and the metal door swung open, moving very slowly before stopping with a clang. I stepped inside.
The room within was shaped like a wide cylinder. The door I’d entered by led onto a balcony that ran around the upper level, looking down onto a bare circular floor on which a ring was marked. At the opposite side of the balcony, another open door led deeper into the keep. A set of metal stairs curled down from the balcony to the lower level.
It didn’t look like a laboratory. It looked like an arena. Why Sagash kept an arena between his personal lab and the rest of the keep was a question I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer to.
Sagash himself was standing in the open doorway leading through to the labs, and the past few days hadn’t improved his appearance. He was dressed in black, the clothes dusty and ragged, as though they’d been worn for a very long time, and he stood very straight with his hands clasped behind his back as he watched me. He didn’t speak.
“Sagash,” I said. “Thank you for seeing me. I understand you’re quite busy.”
“Explain why you are here,” Sagash rasped. His voice was just as unnerving as I remembered.
“Well, I did try to set up an appointment, but you’re a hard person to reach.”
“Do not play games. If your master has sent you here for some purpose, reveal it.”
Ding. I didn’t let anything show on my face, but I felt a little surge of excitement. Maybe I could pull this off after all.
Light mages think all Dark mages live in a state of violent anarchy. They’re half right . . . but only half. Dark mages might compete with each other and they might prey on each other, but they’re not completely stupid. If they always fought on sight they’d have wiped themselves out long ago, and what’s developed over the years to regulate that is a kind of code of conduct. The catch is, the code only applies if they consider you a Dark mage in the first place. When I’m with the Light mages, the fact that I’m Richard’s ex-apprentice is an albatross around my neck, but when I’m with Dark mages then in a strange way it makes me part of the club. Dark apprentices like Darren and Ji-yeong fight first and talk later. Mages like Sagash and Morden talk first, then decide whether to fight. Dark negotiations are a razor’s edge, civility side by side with the potential for sudden violence. Light mages have trouble with that, even when they know intellectually how it’s supposed to work—there’s just something about it that they’re never quite comfortable with. Maybe you have to grow up with it.
The funny thing was that really, all the work I’d done to get the blink fox’s help and sneak in had just been to make a first impression. My plan centred on talking to Sagash—in theory I could have just walked up to the front gate and rung the doorbell. Of course, that would have meant getting past his apprentices and Crystal. Showing up like this was a statement: I was telling him that his shadows hadn’t been able to keep me out, and his apprentices hadn’t either. It was a provocation, but still less dangerous than to let him feel as though I was weak enough to be brushed aside. I needed to treat with him as an equal.