Veiled (10 page)

“I got stabbed!”

“Actually, you're completely recovered.”

“You know, that lifesight of yours really takes the fun out of acting injured.”

“You seem to get injured often enough anyway.”

“I didn't use to!”

Anne fed Hermes while I (reluctantly) got in touch with Caldera. I wasn't looking forward to the conversation, so I put the story in an e-mail in the slim hope that that way I wouldn't have to tell her face to face. With that done, we settled down to breakfast.

I suppose if you're not used to how my life works, the way I was acting probably seems pretty weird. I'd just had
someone try to kill me and my response had been to call my friends over for dinner. If this had been some episode of a TV series, we'd have spent the night racing around interrogating people, having dramatic adventures, and trying to find the suspect in forty-five minutes plus commercial breaks.

There were two reasons I wasn't doing that. First, on a strategic level, that's not how conflicts between mages work. If you're trying to catch a mage, the rule of thumb is that once he breaks contact, you've got one to five minutes to find him. After that, he's gone. He'll have gated away, and you're not going to track him down without serious effort. Realistically, there wasn't anything I, Anne, Luna, or Vari could have done to find my would-be assassin, and given what had happened last time, finding him probably wasn't even that smart an idea in the first place. Caldera was the one with the resources to track him, and since that wasn't going to happen quickly, it made more sense to get a good night's sleep before calling her in.

The second reason was much simpler: I'd needed to recover. Having someone come that close to killing you is traumatic, especially when you hadn't had time to prepare. I'd been in a state of mild shock last night, and all of the others had known it. That was why Luna and Vari had dropped everything to come over, and why Anne had stayed the night. I've been in this kind of situation enough times to know that when something like this happens to you, the best thing to do is hole up somewhere safe, try to relax, and spend your time doing safe, everyday things, like arguing about what to feed a blink fox. Soon Caldera would arrive and everything would start moving, and before long I'd probably be in danger again. But for now, we could rest.

“How's the healing business going?” I asked Anne.

“It still feels weird thinking of it like that,” Anne said. “It's okay, I think. I'm making enough money. Actually more than enough. But it still feels awkward charging people.”

“I thought you were only charging the ones who could afford it.”

“I am . . . well, I guess I'm not really the entrepreneur type. Though they do seem to treat me better than when I did it for free.”

“I noticed that too,” I said. “Back when I first took over the shop, I tried giving stuff away. Never seemed to turn out that well. I think people value something more if they pay for it.” I paused. “Are you still seeing Dr. Shirland?”

Anne nodded. Dr. Shirland's an independent mind mage. She'd offered to treat Anne a year and a half back but had been turned down. After last spring, Anne had reconsidered.

“Going okay?”

“It's not easy, but it helps. I'm glad you and Luna pushed me into it.”

“Have you been talking about . . . ?”

“About her?”

I didn't need to ask who the “her” was, and Anne didn't need to say it. Anne has her own problems, and there's a side of her she doesn't get on well with. “She calls her my shadow,” Anne said. “Other things too, but . . . She thinks I can work something out, but it'll take a long time.”

“I guess now's as good a time as any to start.”

Anne smiled slightly. “Let's hope so.”

My phone rang, and I put it to my ear with an inward sigh.
So much for quiet.
“Hi, Caldera.”

“Are you at home?” Caldera said.

“Yeah.”

“I'm on my way. Don't go anywhere.” She hung up.

I lowered the phone. “Well, it was nice while it lasted.”

Anne rose to her feet. “I guess that's my cue to go.”

I looked at her in surprise. “You don't have to.”

“I think it might be easier.”

I started to answer, then stopped and looked down. The bell was about to ring.
Already?

I went downstairs and opened the door to see Caldera, dressed in her work clothes. “Hey.”

Caldera gave me an up-and-down look. “You all right?”

“I got better.”

Caldera pushed past me. “Then how about you explain,”
she said over her shoulder, “how the
hell
you managed to nearly get yourself killed on the bloody DLR?”

I closed the door and followed Caldera upstairs. “Nice to see you too.”

“One job. You had
one job
. All you had do was investigate.”

“You were the one who sent me there. Shouldn't I be the one blaming you?”

“I should have known it was a bad idea to send you on your own. I could—”

Caldera walked into the living room and stopped. I followed her in to see that Caldera had come face to face with Anne. Anne was in the middle of packing up her bag with her medical gear. She looked up at Caldera. There was a pause.

“You could what?” I asked when Caldera didn't go on.

“In a sec,” Caldera said. She didn't take her eyes off Anne.

“It's okay,” Anne said. “I was just going.” She did up the straps on her bag and slung it over her shoulder. “Give me a call if you need anything.”

“You don't have to,” I said with a frown.

“I should probably be getting back.” Anne walked to the door. Caldera let her pass, moving noticeably farther out of Anne's way than she really needed to, and I saw her eyes track Anne as she went by. Anne disappeared down the stairs, and a moment later I heard the sound of the front door opening and closing.

I turned to Caldera. “Was that really necessary?”

“She's not a Keeper or an auxiliary,” Caldera said. “She's not cleared for this information.”

“She just patched a giant bloody hole in my side. You don't think that earns at least a thank-you?”

“A thank-you, yeah,” Caldera said. “Just leave it at that next time. You know there are Keeper-sanctioned healers.”

“Anne's saved my life at least twice.”

“She's also—” Caldera checked what she'd been about to say, shook her head. “Never mind. All right, I want you to go through
exactly
what happened last night. Don't leave anything out.”

I still felt annoyed, but suppressed it. I sat down at the table with Caldera and started the debriefing. It took the best part of an hour, and by the time we were done I felt strung out.

“You were lucky,” Caldera said once I'd finished.

“
Lucky
would be not getting attacked by an assassin-mage in the first place,” I said. “Seriously, can you stop acting like this was my fault?”

“You still shouldn't have gone back. If you suspected something—”

“Suspected
what
? There was no evidence that it was going to—”

“All right, all right,” Caldera said with a wave of her hand. “I'll admit, you didn't totally screw up.”

“Is that supposed to be a compliment?”

“Anyway, we're officially assigned to the case. So you can consider yourself on the clock as of yesterday.”

“Do we get anyone else?”

“Rest of the Order are stretched thin right now,” Caldera said. “The ones who aren't tied up with security ops are off looking for some missing Council guy. You get me.”

“One case, one Keeper?”

“It's usually enough.” Caldera closed her notepad. “Okay, here's how things stand. Liaisons are pulling the CCTV from Pudding Mill Lane and Stratford stations for the past seventy-two hours, so we should have that by the end of today. Next priority is this air mage. I've checked the watch list and there's no one recently active who meets your description.”

“He was speaking in French,” I said. “At least, before he was trying to kill me.”

Caldera nodded. “We can try the French Council, but that'll take time. Anyway, we'll need a better description before we go to them. Once the CCTV footage gets in, we should have a photo.”

“Timesight?”

“The waiting list for time mages is a mile long,” Caldera said. “I've put in a request flagged as urgent, but don't hold your breath.”

“Maybe we can get this air mage to try to kill you, too. That ought to bump it up the priority list.”

“Next up, this focus. You got it here?”

“It's with Variam's master,” I said. “Landis. You know the guy, right?”

“Yeah,” Caldera said, and sighed. “Fine, let's see if he's got anything.”

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G
ate magic makes travel so much easier. If I'd been on my own, getting up to Edinburgh would have meant either an overpriced rail ticket and hours on the train, or a path-finding exercise involving gate stones. With Caldera, we were there inside five minutes.

Edinburgh's a weird city; castles and ancient buildings and modern shops all piled together down the length of sloped streets, with that giant grass-and-stone hill looking down over the rooftops. In the summer it's crammed with tourists, but this was February, generally accepted to be the most miserable month in the British year, and not too many visitors were braving the cold winds and drizzle.

In magical society, Edinburgh's famous for a different reason: it's the location of the second and smaller of the Council's two apprentice programs. Sometime back in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, there was a treaty signed giving the Edinburgh mages the right to run their own teaching establishment separate from the ones in the south. Over the centuries most of the mage schools were assimilated into the association that would eventually become the London apprentice program, but the Edinburgh faction resisted it for long enough that having a second apprentice program became a tradition. There's still the odd attempt to merge the two, but the proposals have always fallen through, partly due to Scottish nationalism but mostly because a number of British mages find it useful to have a secondary power centre in the British Isles that's not quite so closely connected to the Council.

We wound our way through the streets, away from the tourist centres and to a stone house down a side alley. We
rang the bell and the door opened to reveal Variam. “Hey, Vari,” I said.

“Hey,” Variam said. He looked more subdued than usual.

“Landis in?” Caldera asked.

“He's up there,” Variam said, pointing his thumb at the rickety staircase behind him. “Good luck, you'll need it.”

Up until a year and a half ago, Anne and Variam were living with me. Anne moved out in the summer to a flat in Honor Oak, but Variam came here to Edinburgh, taking up the role of apprentice to a mage named Landis, a Council Keeper from the Order of the Shield.

The Keepers of the Flame have three orders. The largest and most well known is Caldera's order, the Order of the Star. The Order of the Star police magical society; if a crime is committed that breaks the peace of the Concord or the national laws of the Council, they're the ones who are supposed to deal with it. Next is the Order of the Cloak, the ones responsible for preserving the secrecy of the magical world. They work with (and on) the mundane authorities, dealing with normals and sensitives, and they're much less high-profile. They rarely deal with other mages, to the point that a lot of mages forget that the Order of the Cloak even exists.

And then there's the Order of the Shield. Once the biggest of the orders, their name's a hint at their original function: they were battle-mages, meant to protect the population from magical predators. But as magical creatures declined, so did they, and nowadays they're the Council's military reserve, called in when a situation is violent or expected to get that way. Ninety-nine percent of their time is spent sitting around doing nothing or guarding against threats that never show up. The last one percent involves getting sent into the most horrendously dangerous situations imaginable. Let's put it this way—the Order of the Shield are the ones who get sent in when the Council thinks that mages like
Caldera
aren't enough.

It shouldn't be a surprise that Keepers of the Order of the Shield have a reputation for being weird. The Council gives them more leeway than the other orders, probably because
people who were entirely sane wouldn't be volunteering for the job in the first place. Mostly, they just point them at a problem, then get out of the way. I'd met Landis two or three times, but this was the first time I'd visited his house.

The top floor of the building was a wide room with a beautiful view out over the Edinburgh skyline. The room was a workshop, with desks and benches covered in half-built or disassembled clutter, and papers and books were stacked in piles or scattered in the corners, and bent over the desk at the centre was Landis. He's tall and rangy, with sandy-brown hair and an angular face, and he always seems to be moving. As we walked in he thrust a finger towards us without looking. “Caldera! Lady of the hour! Excellent timing, I'm quite sure you did it on purpose, and don't think it's not appreciated. Or was it you, Vari?”

“It's not that.” Variam had followed us into the room and was looking at Landis in a long-suffering sort of way. “They just wanted to know—”

“Wanting to know, the source and saviour of our problems, but there's no escaping it, is there? Oh, hello, Verus, of course I don't need to tell you that. Right then, let's be about it!” Landis bounded up and covered the distance to Caldera in three long strides, holding something out to her. “There! No goodly state in the realms of gold, but a thing of beauty in its way.”