Alex Verus 5: Hidden (22 page)

I studied the map. If Anne was getting the distances right, we weren’t far away at all.

I should probably take a second here to explain some details about gate magic, because if you’re not familiar with it, it’s probably not obvious just how bad a position we were in here. Gate magic shapes portals between locations, creating a similarity between points in space so that you can step from one to the other. It can be used to travel from place to place within our world, to go from place to place within a shadow realm, or (with more difficulty) to go from our world to a shadow realm or vice versa.

Gate magic can be blocked though, and the wards over this shadow realm were designed to do exactly that. Within the central keep, they would block any use of gate magic or teleportation at all. Outside the keep, the wards wouldn’t stop you gating around the castle, but they
would
prevent you from using gate magic to get out of the shadow realm unless you were at one specific point (the front gate) and holding the key. It’s a fairly standard security setup—it makes it easy for the residents to travel around but hard for anyone else to enter or leave.

Unfortunately, neither Anne or I could use gate magic. We could use gate stones, but gate stones will only take you to one place, which would only be any use if we had gate stones keyed specifically to places in the castle, which we didn’t. The same did
not
apply to Sagash’s apprentices—it was more or less a guarantee that between them they’d have gate magic, gate stones, or (more likely) both.

What all this meant was that as long as Anne and I were in this castle, Sagash and his apprentices had a huge home-ground advantage. The only thing stopping them from gating to our position right now was that they didn’t know where we were. As soon as that changed, they could just jump right on top of us and we’d have a hell of a time getting away from them. And even if they
couldn’t
find us, they could just set up camp at the front gate with a bunch of shadows and wait for us to show up. Where else were we going to go?

But if there was a back door, that opened up some options. “It’s definitely an exit?”

“Back then it was. It might have changed.”

“Have you been there since?”

Anne shook her head. “I couldn’t have used it. It needs a key.”

“The same as the one for the front gate, or a different one?”

“Sagash never let me get close enough to see.”

“Probably a different one,” I muttered. Worth checking, though. “What about surveillance? Is there any way for Sagash to pick us up while we’re here?”

“He uses the shadows, mostly,” Anne said. “He’s got enough that he can turn the sky black with them, but most of the time he keeps them down in the tombs. He just relies on the fixed sensors instead.”

I looked up sharply. “Fixed sensors?”

“At the front gate. They log everything that comes in or passes through.”

“So they would have seen us both come through?” I frowned. “Why hasn’t Sagash done anything?”

Anne shrugged helplessly.

“There’s something strange going on. If Sagash was acting against us, the whole castle should have been mobilised by now.” I looked up at Anne. “I don’t think Sagash was the one behind the attack on you. I think it was just Darren and Sam, and now they’re trying to keep it secret from everyone else.”

“But why?” Anne looked dismayed. “I’ve never even met those two!”

It was my turn to shrug. From their conversation, it had sounded as though Darren and Sam had been afraid of Sagash finding out what they’d been doing, but if Sagash really did have that sensor net, wouldn’t he have found out already? None of the explanations quite fit—there was some missing piece I hadn’t figured out. “I’m going to take a look at that back entrance,” I said. “I need you to stay still and quiet for a bit.”

I found a place to sit with my back resting against the wall, while Anne sat cross-legged opposite me and watched quietly. As soon as I was settled, I closed my eyes, looking into the future in which I went downstairs and started going east. It didn’t take long before I found the building Anne was describing, tall and rectangular and surrounded by high walls and colonnades. It looked as though it was—

The vision fragmented as the actions in Anne’s immediate futures expanded to disrupt the point earlier in the chain at which I left. I frowned, routed around the disturbance, and patiently traced my way back to the same building. A search of the ground floor discovered a circle made out of some greenish material which would show up to my magesight. Looked like a transport pattern. I looked to see what would happen if I used a gate stone within the circle . . . nothing. If I used the key focus as well? Also nothing. I wanted to try some command words, but the distance was hampering my ability to search. Maybe—

The vision fragmented again. “Could you please stop doing that?” I said with my eyes closed.

“Doing what?” Anne asked.

“Talking to me.”

“I’m not.”

“You’re thinking about starting a conversation, and each time you do it changes the futures.”

“I can’t even
think
about talking to you?”

“You can think as much as you like, so long as there’s no possibility of you actually doing it.”

Anne didn’t answer. The back gate didn’t look good—maybe not hopeless, but I couldn’t confirm that without getting closer. I switched directions, looking through the futures in which I headed towards the castle’s main gate. My future self worked his way south, following the mental map I’d worked out last night, around the keep. No sign of shadows or patrols. The future was starting to thin out, becoming delicate, hard to steer. A little closer and—

—again it broke apart.

“Anne.”

“I’m trying!”

“I know it seems like I’m just sitting here,” I said, “but this isn’t as easy as it looks and it’d really help if you could stop distracting me.”

Anne didn’t say what she was thinking. I tried yet again to trace out the route to the south . . . the same thing happened.

Maybe I was going about this the wrong way. We needed a way out of here, but escaping this castle wasn’t something I could solve alone. I was going to need Anne’s help, and that wasn’t going to happen as long as we kept putting off this conversation. “All right,” I said. “Go ahead and ask.”

“Ask what?”

“What you’ve been thinking about asking me since I got up.”

Anne was silent. I waited, counting off the seconds, watching the futures fork and twist, shifting with Anne’s thoughts. “Last night,” she said at last. “Was that you?”

I just looked at her.

Anne let out a long breath, leant her head back against the wall. “How much of it do you remember?” I asked.

“Bits and pieces. Like something you hear as you’re falling asleep. It’s hard to remember which parts are real and . . . She told you about the last time, didn’t she? What I . . . when I was here.”

I nodded.

Anne closed her eyes. “I wish she hadn’t.”

“She . . .” I paused, mentally trying out different pronouns. “That person I was talking to. Do I call her ‘she’ or ‘you’?”

“I don’t know,” Anne said with a sigh. “Maybe that’s the problem.”

“Why didn’t you tell anyone about all this?” I asked. “I know you’ve got your issues with me, but what about Luna? Or Vari?”

“I don’t want them to see that side of me,” Anne said. “I didn’t want you to see it either.”

“Are you that ashamed of what you did?”

“Yes.”

“It doesn’t really sound as though you had much choice.”

“I did have a choice. I could have
lost
. I thought about it, each time. But I didn’t. I’d use my magic to . . . kill them, and afterwards I’d cry and I’d hate myself and I’d promise it was the last time, and then I’d do it again anyway.” Anne looked up at me with haunted eyes. “Most people, when they hurt each other, they don’t really understand what they’re doing. When I look at someone I see
everything
, every layer of their body, skin and muscle and bone. You have to, before you can heal them. When you use that to
hurt
them, it’s . . . vile. You’re destroying something beautiful. You drain the life out from a body and you can
see
it, watch the blood vessels shrivel and the tissue wither. It’s like their body trusts you, opens itself up, and you betray it. And you know the worst part? It gets easier each time. You still know how horrible it is, you just . . . feel it less.”

“That’s why you wouldn’t duel, isn’t it? Back when I first met you.”

“Sagash told me once that in the end you don’t feel anything at all,” Anne said quietly. “You can still see what you’re doing to someone’s body, you just . . . don’t care. I’ve . . . I’ve wondered how many more it’ll take. Before I become like him.”

“I don’t think it’s just about the numbers. I mean, if something was going to push you over the edge, I don’t think it’d be that.”

Anne gave a half laugh, half sob. “Oh, great! So something
else
is going to turn me into a monster instead?”

Oops.
Okay, so I probably wasn’t the most tactful person to be having this conversation. But as the other Anne had pointed out, there wasn’t exactly anyone else. “I think you’re setting much-too-high standards for yourself.”

“
Not
murdering anyone isn’t a high standard.”

“I’m not talking about what you did back when you were Sagash’s prisoner. That was just you being put in an impossible situation, and trust me, I know all about those. I was talking about what you’ve been doing afterwards. You took lives then, so now you’re trying to avoid any kind of violence and only use your magic for healing. And maybe if you were one of the Light mages and you lived in that kind of protected world, then you could get away with doing that. But you’re not, and you can’t.”

Anne was silent. “Second thing,” I said. “I think you’re too focused on yourself.”

Anne looked up with a frown. “What?”

“This stuff you’re beating yourself up over? You’re only thinking about what
you
did, what
you’re
responsible for. Everything you’ve told me about what happened back then, you’ve only talked about the choices you made. But that’s not how the world works. Everyone makes choices and they all have a part in what happens. The way I see it, in terms of responsibility for those deaths, the order goes: number one, Sagash, for setting up the fights; number two, those kids you were fighting, for agreeing to whatever Sagash promised them; number three, the Council, for letting Dark mages like Sagash get away with this crap and not helping Variam when he went to them; and number four, you, for not being able to figure out some miracle way to fix it all. Taking all the blame isn’t just wrong, it’s self-centred. The world’s bigger than just you.”

“Is that how you justify it?” Anne said quietly. “What you did?”

I thought about it for a few seconds, then looked at her. “Honestly? Yeah. I think after a certain point, if someone comes after you and won’t back down, then it’s on them.”

Anne was silent. “Maybe you’re right,” she said at last. “But . . . it doesn’t change anything. They’re still dead, and I’m still that much closer to being like that.”

“Are you really that afraid you’ll end up like the Dark mages?”

“Isn’t that what always happens? Anyone who lives in our world, grows up as a mage—they only ever get worse. You meet apprentices, and they’re mixed. Kind, cruel, everything in between. But the older they get . . . look at them. Sagash, Vitus, Morden.” Anne looked at me. “I thought you were different. You’d been with a Dark mage, like me. But you were kind, you helped us. I thought . . . I thought if you could make yourself better, then I could too.”

I winced a little at that. She’d chosen a pretty bad role model. “Anne, I’m not a hero. I’m just a survivor, that’s all. If I ever seemed like I was trying to set myself up as more than that, that was my own mistake.”

“I know,” Anne said, sounding tired. “I was building you up into something you weren’t. It’s just . . . It feels like the longer you live as a mage, the more you turn into what you used to hate.” She looked down at the stone. “Maybe that’s how it works in our world. The only heroes are the ones who die young.”

I gave Anne a disturbed look. “That’s a pretty depressing philosophy to live by.”

“Is it?” Anne didn’t meet my eyes. “I can’t tell anymore.”

I looked at Anne a second longer, then shook my head. “All right, it’s time we got moving. Whatever the answer, we’re not going to find it sitting around here. Oh, and just so we’re clear, I am
not
on board with you dying in this castle just so you don’t turn into something worse. I like you alive and as you are, and nothing you’ve told me over the last day has changed my mind on that. Okay?”

Anne looked up in surprise. After a moment she smiled. It was a little halfhearted, but it was something. “Good,” I said, and offered her my hand. “Let’s get going.”

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T
here were two ways out of the windmill—the bottom and the top. At the highest level a ladder led up to the roof, where a wooden bridge led away from the sails back onto the castle battlements. Anne and I did a quick check for flying shadows, then headed back down. “Are you going to be okay barefoot?” I asked.

“I can heal any cuts faster than I get them,” Anne said. She was still wearing my coat, bare legs showing as she moved. “Do you want to try the back gate or the front?”

“Back. If there’s a password I might be able to hack it if I get a good look.”

“If you can’t?”

“Then we look for a backup plan,” I said. We left the windmill and began crossing the grass towards the entrance into the next courtyard. A few scattered feathers by the pool marked where the blink fox had made its kill. “If worst comes to worst we can go to ground and hope Luna and Vari and Arachne work out some way to get in touch, but that’s not . . .” I stopped walking.

Anne came to a halt and looked at me. “What is it?”

“I’m not sure.” I frowned, looking ahead. I’d scanned the futures from the top of the windmill only a few minutes ago and everything had looked clear, but for some reason something was catching at my attention, some sort of encounter. It looked as though it was in the
immediate
future, but that didn’t make sense—I would have seen that coming. “Hold on.”