Cursed (11 page)

Luna rounded on me, glaring, and with my mage’s sight, I saw tendrils of silver mist reaching towards me. They were ten feet away, five, and I tensed … then the tendrils halted and slowly pulled back, thinning as they withdrew. Only once they had merged back into the aura around her did Luna speak. “That wasn’t fair.”

“Wasn’t meant to be,” I said quietly. I didn’t think Luna understood what she had just nearly done. But she understood what the lights burning out meant.

“It doesn’t even—” Luna started to say in frustration, then caught herself. She turned and walked to the corner, unscrewing the bulbs from the lights, and dropped them into the bin. There was a clinking sound as they joined the pile.

I waited for Luna to cross the room and come back, giving things time to settle. “We’re done for the day,” I said. “I need to speak with Arachne. Wait outside and I’ll catch you up.”

Luna obeyed silently. I watched her go with a frown, then turned to see that Arachne had stopped work. Her eight eyes studied me, unreadable. “Okay, so that could have gone better.”

Arachne didn’t answer and I looked at her. “What’s wrong?”

“I see why you were unsure about training her.”

I winced. “That bad?”

“She isn’t acting like your apprentice. And you’re not acting like her master.” Arachne crossed the cavern and settled down with her front legs brushing my sides, her head and fangs looming over me. “But that’s a matter for the two of you. What did you learn?”

I hesitated, then put Luna out of my mind. “A friend of mine had the barghest’s corpse looked at. He’s not a hundred percent sure but best guess is that the thing was killed from having its magic drained out of it.”

Arachne went still.

I waited but she didn’t speak. “Arachne?” I said after a moment.

“I … see.” The clicking sound under Arachne’s voice was stronger.

“All right.” I put one of my hands on Arachne’s front leg and looked up at her. “What’s going on? Something’s bothering you about this.”

Arachne turned and started walking slowly across the room. I followed her closely, keeping pace by her side and skirting around sofas and chairs. “You’re worried this thing might be coming after you, aren’t you?” I said. Arachne didn’t react and my eyes narrowed. “No, that’s not it. You’re worried
you
might die the same way.”

Arachne’s mandibles rustled. “You see clearly in such matters.”

“You mean when it doesn’t involve Luna?” I shrugged. “If you tell me what you know, I might be able to help.”

Arachne halted at the north end of her chamber. Arachne’s living room/workroom is huge and roughly circular. The south end is the exit out to the Heath, to the northwest are a few small changing booths, and to the east are some spare rooms in which Arachne keeps supplies and facilities for her few guests.

At the north end, though, just next to where we were standing, was a tunnel sloping down into darkness. It wasn’t lit, but from what light was reflected, I could see that it led into a T junction, forking away and down. Arachne’s never told me what she keeps down there and I’ve never asked. But from what I’ve seen, I’ve gotten the impression that the tunnels keep on going down … maybe a long way down. For all the time I’ve spent with Arachne, she keeps a lot of secrets, and there’s enough space under the Heath for those tunnels to spread a very long way.

I had to resist the urge to poke my head in and look. It wouldn’t be polite, but it would really satisfy my curiosity. “Do you know of the Transcendence movement?” Arachne asked.

I frowned. “Vaguely. They were that group of rationalist mages who thought magic was the next stage in human evolution. They were trying to find ways of boosting magical potential, turn everyone into a mage.”

“And what happened?

I shrugged. “They never got anywhere. People decided it couldn’t be done, they started losing members, and then the Gate Rune War kicked off and everyone had other stuff to worry about. Why?”

“Most of your account is true but there is one fact you leave out. There was a way to increase magical power and the Transcendents were well aware of it.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know it as Harvesting.”

I flinched. Harvesting is the act of ripping a mage’s magic from his body and taking it for yourself. It’s always fatal for the victim, often fatal for the harvester, and usually comes with a variety of horrible consequences. It’s the blackest of black magic, even forbidden by Dark mages, and that should really tell you something. “Are you serious? There’s a
reason
that ritual’s banned. Besides, it doesn’t make any sense—the Transcendents wanted to make more mages, and anyone with half a brain can tell you that if you go in for Harvesting, you end up with
fewer
mages.”

“Yes,” Arachne said. “They could not draw the magic from humans. So they drew it from magical creatures instead.”

I stopped. I’d never thought of that. “What happened?”

“They were successful,” Arachne said. “The recipients gained the power and strength of the creature they harvested. The process also drove them insane. After enough deaths, the project was abandoned.”

I frowned. It was the first I’d heard of the story; thinking about it, though, it made sense. Mages have a few (not many) compunctions about killing other mages but treating nonhuman creatures as living battery packs would suit them just fine. And mages don’t like to publish failure. If experiments go disastrously wrong, they usually cover it up. “What are you getting at?”

“There are rumours that a mage—perhaps more than one—has returned to the Transcendents’ research. I did not know whether they were true.” Arachne turned her eight opaque eyes on me. “It seems they were. I believe this will be our last meeting for some time.”

I nodded, resigned. Arachne hasn’t lived however many hundreds of years by being careless, and I’ve seen her do this before. When danger comes, she vanishes. I’ve never known where she goes but I suspect the answer’s somewhere down in those tunnels. “Well, I’ll tell you if anything happens.”

“I will be contactable for another two or three days,” Arachne said. “After that …” She gave an odd rippling motion that I’ve come to recognise as a shrug.

Walking up out of Arachne’s lair, I wondered just how many times she had done this over her long life, and how it worked. I’ve never heard of any other creatures like Arachne—giant intelligent magical spiders aren’t a known type in the way that, say, elementals are. I’ve wondered sometimes if Arachne is unique … but then where did she come from? Are there others of her kind, out there somewhere? Or was she once something else?

I
watched the earthen bank rumble back into place, the roots writhing and retwining themselves to lock the door closed, and knew I wouldn’t be going back there for a while. It made me a little sad. There aren’t many places where I feel comfortable, and Arachne’s lair is near the top of a very short list.

Luna was standing nearby. I started walking out of the ravine and she fell in by my side. With my mage’s sight I could see that the silver mist around her was muted. “What were you about to say back there?”

The sun shone down out of a blue sky, white clouds drifting with a brisk east wind. It was September and there was a chill in the air, but even so there was a scattering of people around the park, most wearing greatcoats or ski jackets. “When?” Luna said.

“You were about to say that trying to control your magic doesn’t matter.” I looked at Luna. “What’s up with you? I thought you wanted this.”

Luna walked silently for a few seconds. She was wearing her green coat, and the wind whipped at its sleeves and ruffled her hair. We reached a path that would lead us southeast and turned onto it. “What if there’s another way?” she said without looking up.

“What do you mean?”

Luna sighed quietly. “Look, I’ve been doing this for months, okay? And I
suck
at it. It’s been half a year and I still can’t get through a session without burning the lights out!”

“We always knew it was going to take time,” I said. “Luna, mages spend
years
learning to control their powers. It’s not just you.”

“Yeah, well, they don’t kill everyone around them when they make a mistake.” Luna stared down at the path. “I
know
what it means when one of those lights burns out. I can’t make it so that it never happens. What’s the point if I only
sometimes
kill people? It’s just as bad.”

The path crested the ridge and sloped into a wide, open hillside. We were in the part of the Heath just north of the tumulus, where the rolling meadows descend gradually in a long stretch of grassland before flattening out into the woods and ponds at the park’s edge. It’s open to the sky and we could see for miles. People, alone and in twos and threes and with dogs, were scattered across the great meadow, strolling. On the other side of the ponds, the ground rose again into the huge shape of Highgate Hill, the roofs of houses and a single church poking up between the trees. The valley between gave the illusion that the hill was much closer than it was, almost as if you could reach out and touch it. In the distance East London stretched away, clear in the autumn sun.

Luna and I turned off the path and started down the meadow. Beyond the ponds at the bottom was the main road. “So what are you going to do?” I asked. “Give up?”

Luna walked quietly for a minute. “What if there was another way?” she said again. “Make it safe without all the work. Wouldn’t that be better?”

I looked sharply at her. “Are you—?”

Something flickered on my precognition and I stopped talking. Precognition is a kind of mental discipline and
pretty much any diviner who spends much time in dangerous situations learns it by necessity. All diviners have the ability to see the future but we can only look in one place at a time. So what we learn to do is to recognise the outlines of the most important events that’ll affect us personally, things like sudden changes or danger, and then we train our awareness so as to always keep a vague eye on the immediate future, at the back of our mind. It’s like peripheral vision: you can’t see details, but you can sense if something’s about to happen, enough to turn your head and took a closer look.

I took a closer look.

Somebody was about to shoot me through the head in exactly eight seconds.

“Luna,” I said. I kept my voice calm, even as my heart sped up, dumping adrenaline into my system. “We’re about to get shot at. On my mark, go right and take cover.”

Luna stared at me. “Wait, what did—?”

From somewhere on Highgate Hill a rifle fired, and a supersonic bullet flew towards me.

M
ost mages don’t use guns. Mages will tell you that gunpowder weapons are crude and inferior, and it’s kind of true: While mages have whole libraries of spells and tricks, all a gun can do is kill people. What mages tend to overlook, though, is that guns are
really good
at killing people. If someone lines up a gun on the right spot and twitches their finger, you’re dead, end of story. Oh, it may not look impressive compared to battle-magic—a fire mage could incinerate your body, a life mage could stop your heart with a touch, a water mage could disintegrate you into dust—but when you get right down to it, most of that is just overkill. Dead is dead.

In a face-to-face fight, spell generally beats gun. Spells are just so much more versatile; a mage can counter pretty much anything with a second’s warning. If the mage doesn’t
get
that second’s warning, though … well, a shot in the back has been the death of an awful lot of mages. Once a bullet’s
gone through your heart, it doesn’t matter much how tough you are.

If I’d been an elemental mage I would have died on that hill. But I’m not; I’m a diviner, and while I have no power to affect the physical world, one thing I can do really well is spot an ambush. I shouted “Go!” to Luna and jumped to the left. An instant later a sniper bullet went through the space my head had been occupying.

A supersonic bullet makes a really distinctive noise and once you’ve heard it you never forget it. First there’s the high-pitched
crack
of the sound barrier breaking, then an instant later the pitch drops into an reverberating echo as the sound waves from the bullet’s flight path wash over you. The noise makes your heart jump, but hearing a sniper bullet is a
good
thing. The bullet outruns the sound wave; if it’s on target, it kills you before you ever hear the sound of the shot.

I broke into a sprint, racing down the slope at an angle. I couldn’t spare the time to look back at Luna; all I could do was hope she’d listened. The grass swished under my feet, and looking into the future I could see another shot coming. The hillside was open and bare, and I wouldn’t get to cover in time.

The sniper fired again and I went into a roll. Another
crack
lashed my ears as the bullet whipped over me, driving into the grass and earth. I came up without breaking stride and kept running. There was an old thick tree up ahead, on a low rise; if I could reach it I’d be safe. I could sense the sniper getting ready to fire again, and I’d had long enough to mark the delay on the shots. His bullets were taking about half a second to cross the space between us. Doesn’t sound like much but in combat that’s a long time. The next shot was aimed at my body, and just as he fired I braked, slowing enough that the shot
cracked
past a couple of feet in front of me. A final shot fell short as I dived behind the tree and hit the deck.