Variam shrugged uncomfortably.
‘I’m afraid I’m going to have to go too,’ Anne said. She gave me a slight smile. ‘Fun though it sounds to hear Talisid second-guess everything we did in the mansion, I’ve probably got about fifty patients waiting. I couldn’t really get the message out that I’d be away.’
I nodded, fighting off a twinge of disappointment. ‘I’ll let you know how it goes.’
I waited until everyone was gone before taking off the vest. It had definitely been the right choice, but I still didn’t want to have to explain it to Variam, and especially not to Luna. After divesting myself of my heavier items, I returned to London to call Talisid.
Talisid, as predicted, was not happy. ‘The amnesty is one thing,’ he told me. ‘That’s to be expected. But handing over so many imbued items is really not acceptable.’
‘It’s not “so many”: it’s four. As of yesterday, there are eighty-five imbued items from the Vault lists still missing. I don’t really think that pushing it up to eighty-seven is going to make that much difference.’
Talisid paused. ‘Why not eighty-nine?’
‘Half in advance, half on completion,’ I said. ‘Onyx is fully expecting you to stiff him on the deal, by the way. And he’s also demanding proof that Morden’s actually on board with this.’
‘Why would he even care?’
‘Why, were you hoping you could cut Morden out of the deal completely?’ I asked. ‘For whatever reason, Onyx won’t move without hearing from him. You’ll have to figure out how.’
‘I suppose that’s possible,’ Talisid said. ‘Do you think it’s some kind of trick?’
‘Honestly, I think keeping Morden in the loop is probably a good thing,’ I said. ‘He’s probably smart enough to catch Richard, assuming he wants to. Onyx isn’t.’
‘All he needs to do is feed us a time and a place.’
‘I doubt it’ll be that easy, and even it if is, Onyx would find some way to screw it up.’
‘The Keepers are confident that they can handle Richard if they can reliably locate him.’
‘I suppose.’ I frowned. ‘Have you brought them in on this?’
‘We’re approaching the stage where we’re going to need them.’
‘I thought the idea was to keep this need-to-know.’
‘They do need to know. We can’t exactly expect them to cooperate in a major assault without some advance warning.’
‘So how much “advance warning” did you give them?’
‘It’s mostly in terms of hypotheticals at the moment,’ Talisid said. ‘But we’ve briefed the mission leader and told him to start assembling his squad.’
‘Mm.’
‘Well, I’d better report to Bahamus,’ Talisid said. ‘Good job, by the way.’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘See you.’
The communicator cut off and I sat down, frowning as I stared at the focus. All of a sudden I was feeling uneasy. How many people had Talisid told?
According to him, it was just the mission leader. But the mission leader would probably have told his assistant. And it wasn’t just Talisid. There was Bahamus, and Maradok. Figure that each of them had probably told one other person too. And those were just the bits of the operation I knew about. Talisid hadn’t brought up the Keepers until I’d pressed him, which meant there could be others. Actually, it meant there probably were others.
There’s a saying that the chances of a secret leaking is proportional not to the number of people who know, but to the square of the number of people who know. By my count that number was now way too high. And the Keepers are filled with people who hate Dark mages, which by their reckoning includes me. There was a very good chance that word had already leaked to Sal Sarque and the Crusaders.
What would the Crusaders do if they heard rumours of me having secret negotiations with Morden’s cabal? They’d want to know more, and judging by their past behaviour, they’d probably go about it violently. In fact, the last time something like this had happened, their approach had been ‘kidnap/torture it out of them’.
I checked the futures. No immediate threat. It’s pretty hard to catch a diviner unless you have some way of getting around their precognition. The Crusaders nearly managed it last year, but since then I’d been more careful.
But then, the last time, they hadn’t gone after me, had they? They’d gone after Anne. And now that Anne was my aide, that gave them a double reason to think that she might know something. I checked to see if Anne was answering her phone … she wasn’t, which didn’t necessarily mean anything, but it was worrying enough for me to investigate further. What if I gated to her flat … ?
It’s scary how life can go from zero to a hundred so fast. I sat looking at that future for exactly two seconds before jumping to my feet so quickly I knocked over my chair. I fumbled out my gate stone and started channelling while also pulling out my phone and typing the alarm code, trying to juggle both tasks at once. I saw the sending bar fill and light up, the ‘delivered’ notification appearing below. That code would bring Variam and Luna running at full speed, no questions asked, but I didn’t know how long it would take them to notice, and right now every second could mean the difference between life and death. I poured power into the gate stone, gambling that it would still function. The air shimmered, then flickered as the gate began to materialise faster than was safe, the spell hanging on a knife edge between completion and catastrophic failure; I snatched half-glimpsed threads out of the futures, changing the frequency of the channelled spell without checking to see what would happen, and it wavered and settled. A portal appeared in mid-air and I jumped through.
I came down into the living room of a small flat in Ealing, decorated in blues and greens. There were plants on the window-sill, a sofa along the wall and three men all in the same room with me. Two had already turned towards the gate; one raised a gun.
Like I said, being a diviner is all about preparation. The three men around me were alert and ready, but I’d known that I was about to arrive in the middle of them and they hadn’t. The gunman hadn’t been ready to fire, and as I lunged he hesitated an instant before pulling the trigger. Too long. The bang was loud in the small room; the bullet went high and I hit him below the breastbone, then used my stun focus as he doubled over.
Air magic surged behind me and something slammed into my side, sending me spinning. I came up with my knife in one hand as the second man swung some kind of weapon; I blocked and slashed the wrist to send it bouncing to the floor. Another spell nearly hit me and I slid sideways to use my attacker as a shield. A fourth man had appeared from somewhere or other and for a few seconds it was a whirl of steel and magic, my blade against clubs and spells. It was three against one but the living room was cramped and they had to worry about hitting each other while I could go all out. Fleeting images: the mage at the back, face drawn and eyes set as he tried to line up a spell on me; sweat dripping down the brow of the nearest man as he swung a baton; the couch overturned, the cushions a trip hazard. Seconds stretched into an endless moment.
The third man tried to grab for the gun on the floor and I stabbed him in the back. He staggered and went to his knees; in the second that I was distracted a baton came down on my shoulder. My armour took the blow but I stumbled, the knife twisting out of my hand. A second blow cracked across my arm and I turned the motion into a roll, pulling out a pouch and dumping the contents into my hands in a single practised motion, and as the baton-wielder stepped in to aim the blow that would crack my skull, I threw glitterdust in his face. He yelled, dropping his weapon as he grabbed at his eyes, the sparkling motes clinging to the cornea, blinding him. I hit him low, and he dropped.