“Wait a sec,” Luna said. “We’re not going to have the ‘this is why it’s dangerous for you to learn martial arts’ conversation again, are we? Because you agreed—”
“It’s not that. I don’t think these lessons I’m giving you are doing enough.”
That made Luna pause. The breeze blew her hair across her face and she brushed it back absently. “But I like them.”
“You like the parts that are dangerous,” I said dryly. “That was about a tenth of a second away from being a really nasty accident.”
“I can control it better—”
I shook my head. “Your control’s good. Not perfect, but good. The problem’s me, not you. For a while now all of the exercises I’ve been giving you have been hands-off. I’m not teaching you how to use your magic, I’m just sticking you with some sort of problem and making you figure out a solution.”
“I thought that was the only way we could do it?” Luna said. “It’s not like you can learn to use chance magic.”
“And that’s the issue. You’ve gotten good at directing your curse, but it’s been a long time now since we’ve made any real breakthroughs. If chance magic were an academic subject, I’d be qualified to teach it up to high school. You need a professor.”
Luna hesitated. “So am I still your apprentice?”
I looked at her in surprise. “Of course.”
“Oh.” Luna relaxed a little. “Okay.”
“Wait, was that what you thought this was about?”
“Well, I was wondering . . .”
“I’m not kicking you out or anything. We just have to find you a part-time teacher, is all. You’re still my apprentice, and you’ll stay that way until you decide to leave or until you pass your journeyman tests. Okay?”
“Okay,” Luna said with a smile. “So are you going to find a chance mage?”
“Try to, anyway. But we can ask.”
We started walking back towards the stairs. “This isn’t going to be like when you were trying to find Anne and Vari a master, is it?” Luna asked.
“Let’s hope things go a little more smoothly this time.”
“So you’re getting a new job, and I’m getting a new teacher.”
“Pretty much.” I pulled the door open for Luna, then followed her through. “Should be an interesting few weeks.”
Chapter 2
Ever since I broke away from Richard, my life’s tended to go in cycles. There are short bursts of chaos and danger, then there are longer periods where things are relatively calm. The month that followed that conversation with Caldera was one of the calmer ones.
Just because things were calm didn’t mean they were safe. Richard was still out there, along with all my other enemies. But there were no more missions, and beyond a couple of brief check-ins, Talisid didn’t contact us again. I took advantage of the breather to search for someone who could read those notes that Variam had brought back. None of the people I asked could do it themselves, but one acquaintance claimed to have a friend due to return to the country soon who’d be able to help. While I waited for that I kept sniffing around, but as January turned into February with no further movement on Richard’s end, it began to look as though my old master had put his operations on temporary hold.
Richard’s sudden inactivity probably had something to do with events in the political world. Morden’s proposal was edging closer to a Council vote, and as it gained attention, old arguments were raised. The anti-Dark side dug up every crime and atrocity the Dark mages of Britain had committed over the past hundred years, while the pro-alliance side accused them of witch-hunting and pointed to everything the Council had done wrong over the same period. Neither side had any shortage of material to draw upon, and as the date drew closer, the arguments became increasingly nasty. For most members of magical society the events in the Council were way over their heads, but you didn’t have to know much about mage politics to see that battle lines were being drawn.
In the meantime, I kept looking for a teacher for Luna. I didn’t make any instant progress, which was more or less what I’d expected. Chance mages are underrepresented on the Council, and the one or two I found who seemed as though they might be a good fit weren’t taking new students. I put out some feelers, let my contacts know that I was looking for a chance teacher, payment negotiable, and kept looking.
But mostly, the thing keeping me busy was my new job with Caldera.
“This is so utterly stupid,” I told Caldera.
Caldera didn’t look up from her screen. We were in her office, and she’d been typing for the past ten minutes.
I leant back in my chair in disgust. “We could have caught this guy two days ago. We knew where he was and where he was going to be. Now he’s God knows where and we’ve got zero chance of finding him.”
“We didn’t have authorisation for an arrest.”
“You mean ‘don’t.’ We still don’t have authorisation, despite the fact that we asked the day before yesterday, and again yesterday, and again today, which your higher-ups still haven’t gotten around to answering, which would have taken them all of ten seconds—”
“Would you stop whining?”
“How can you be so calm about this?”
The subject of our conversation was a Dark mage who went by the name of Torvald. He’d drawn Council attention by shooting up an adept bar—according to the reports, Torvald had been given the brush-off by some girl he’d had his eye on, and while he was still smarting from that, an adept had made the mistake of hitting on the same girl and succeeding where Torvald had failed. Torvald, who clearly did not handle rejection well, had expressed his unhappiness with this turn of events by applying lightning bolts to the adept, the girl, the bar, and several other people in the vicinity. The casualty count at the end of the evening had been six injured (two seriously) and most of the bar—luckily Torvald left before the police and fire brigade showed up, or there probably would have been fatalities. Caldera had been out in Shepherd’s Bush on another call, so she’d sent me to handle things instead.
Given that Torvald had displayed all the discretion and subtlety of a stampeding elephant, tracing him hadn’t been hard. It had taken me an hour to learn his name, a day to track him down. I’d called it in to Caldera, she’d reported it to her captain, we’d been told to wait for authorisation before taking further action . . . and we’d sat around for forty-eight hours without hearing anything.
During which time Torvald had figured out that he was being traced, and promptly vanished.
“We know what the guy did,” I said. “We know where he lives. Or where he lived, anyway, God knows where he is now. What was the point of following this up if we weren’t going to do anything about it?”
“He didn’t break the Concord.”
“Oh, bullshit. Maybe he didn’t hurt any mages, but this was a blatant breach of the secrecy-of-magic clause. Besides, even if he didn’t break the Concord he must have broken half a dozen national laws.”
“Probably.”
“Did you tell them that?”
“No, I turned in a blank report. What do you think?”
“Then why haven’t they authorised us to do anything about it?”
Caldera sighed and finally looked up at me. “How am I supposed to know?”
“Well, give me your best guess.”
“The fight got reported as a bar brawl that started an electrical fire,” Caldera said. “The police threw out the supernatural stuff, and the only witnesses who believed what they were seeing were adepts and sensitives. Fourth clause of the Concord is only gross violations of secrecy; this doesn’t qualify. Without that there isn’t enough to justify a raid, especially when we don’t know anything about his master or potential allies.”