Veiled (26 page)

“So how about you go first?” Slate said. “They're your kind, right?”

I gave Slate a look. He grinned and looked at Haken. “So we doing it?”

Haken shook his head. “No.” He threw me a phone; I caught it one-handed. “From one of the guys downstairs. Get me the password.”

I nodded, thumbed the display to reveal the unlock screen, and started working through the numbers. Slate looked at me, then at Haken. “Seriously?” he said in disbelief. “You're still trying to talk to her?”

“We are trying,” Haken said, “to do this peacefully.”

“Hey, Haken,” Slate said. “You might have missed it so here's a newsflash for you: Dark mages don't go peacefully. This is a fucking waste of time.”

Haken looked levelly at Slate. “Go down and help Coatl.”

Slate gave us a disgusted look and stalked off. “Well, this is the place,” Abeyance said. “Vihaela's used this gate. At least once in the past week, maybe more.”

“Good,” Haken said. “Keep looking for anything else with her. Verus?”

I'd found the passcode and had been scanning the past calls and the messages. “Code is 1535,” I said, tossing the phone back to Haken. “Look for the contact listed as B. It's not Vihaela, but he's got access.”

“Uh,” Lizbeth said. “Not to point out the obvious, but how's calling her going to help?”

Haken didn't look up from the phone. “Is there a problem?”

“Yeah, the fact that these guys haven't turned up shit and we've got nothing on Vihaela. You think she's going to just roll up?”

“If she doesn't,” Haken said absently, “she'll be disobeying the Council.”

“Oh yeah, that'll scare her.”

Haken looked up at Lizbeth. “I want you and Trask up here. Set up a defence in case anyone comes through that gate. Verus, you're on early warning. I want to know at least two minutes before anyone steps through.” He looked between the three of us. “If you make contact, you notify me immediately. You are
not
to attack first under
any
circumstances. Clear?”

Trask nodded. “Fine by me,” I said.

Haken looked at Lizbeth. “Clear?”

“Your funeral,” Lizbeth said.

Haken turned and left. “This is the most fucked-up operation I've ever seen,” Lizbeth said. “Can you believe this?”

“Mm,” I said. I was trying to see if I could eavesdrop on Haken's call, but he wasn't making it yet—he was just heading downstairs. Maybe if I followed farther . . . no, he was going to gate away first.
Is he on to me?
Worrying thought . . .

“Hey!” Lizbeth told me. “You awake?”

“I can watch for trouble, or I can talk to you,” I said. “Which would you prefer?”

Lizbeth glowered at me, then crossed her arms and looked away. Trask still hadn't spoken, and Abeyance was still lost in the trance of her timesight. I looked between the three mages and inwardly sighed.

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T
wenty minutes passed, then forty. The noise level from below diminished as the Council security cleared out the building. A team arrived and set up on the landing, weapons ready. I wanted to go down and find out more, but I was too concerned about the possibility of what Haken had said. It sounded as though he was inviting Vihaela here to talk. By now she'd have to know what had happened here. Would she really leave her fortified base to walk into the middle of a Keeper team like this?

If I were Vihaela and I wanted to talk, I'd do it remotely. If I wanted to fight, I'd just blow up the building. There was no scenario I could think of in which Vihaela's best option was to come walking through that gate, yet that was what Haken had set me to watch for. I checked future after future, looking for alternate lines of attack: a gate to a different part of the building, a triggered explosive, a toxin or gas. Nothing pinged. Maybe Haken was talking to Vihaela right now . . .

Something shifted in the futures, a ghostly possibility, there and gone again. I stopped, searched, lost the strand, found it again. Movement, lots of movement. A person . . .

My eyes went wide and I looked up. “Trask! Get Haken. Vihaela's coming.”

Trask put a hand to his ear and started speaking, his voice low and urgent. Lizbeth snapped out orders to the security men on the landing and all of a sudden the room was full of movement. Footsteps came running up the landing. Cerulean was first in; he must have been very close. Haken and Slate followed. Within a minute the small attic was crowded with people. Slate and Trask were at the front, Lizbeth and Haken a step behind. Abeyance had made herself scarce. Half a dozen Council security took up positions covering the gate, kneeling with their submachine guns ready. They weren't about to fire . . . yet, but between them and the mages, there was enough firepower trained on that gate to kill anyone. Vihaela wasn't going to step through into that, was she?

“Verus?” Haken said.

“She's coming,” I said. “Two men with her. They're not going to shoot first.”

“Good,” Haken said. “Everyone hold fire.”

Seconds ticked by. The room was silent but for the sound of breathing. Council security shifted position, adjusting their guns. Ahead of me, I saw Lizbeth flex her fingers, eager. I took a step back. Cerulean was in the corner, arms folded. There was a lot of power in this room, and it was pointed away from me. So why was I suddenly so nervous?

The gate lit up in my magesight. I heard half a dozen men draw breaths as the surface of the arch darkened and went black, forming a lightless plane. An instant later, Vihaela stepped through.

T
here's a saying that military life is long periods of boredom punctuated by brief moments of terror. As soon as Vihaela stepped through that gate, things started happening very fast.

Vihaela was dressed in brown and black, similar to her image in the Keeper records—actually,
exactly
like her image in the Keeper records. She stopped abruptly at the sight of all the people facing her. Two figures in suits stepped out behind her, brushing past on either side. They looked like men, but their blank expressions and the solid lines of their futures marked them as constructs.

The futures went crazy. All of a sudden dozens of new possibilities started unfolding, combat and confrontation and magic and violence all blending together, overwhelming me with information. It was too much and for a second I froze. “Mage Vihaela,” Haken began. “Under the authority—”

Danger, pain, death. There was a threat, and it was directed at me. Instinct broke my paralysis. “Haken!” I snapped. “Trouble!”

“—of the—” Haken stopped.

Green-black light bloomed around Vihaela's hands, tendrils materialising out of the air. In an instant they'd formed into snakelike shapes with skull faces, rearing back like scorpion tails, ready to strike. The two constructs reached up under their coats, their movements perfectly synchronised, pulling out handguns.

“Gun!” someone shouted.

“Drop the—!”

Magical auras filled the room, overwhelming to my sight, air and fire and death and water. I couldn't see the spell behind Vihaela's green light; she took a step back, eyes going wide in fright, then the snakes lashed out with a piercing shriek, casting a hellish glow. Guns fired, deafening in the enclosed space. There was too much going on, and I could sense danger but it wasn't matching up with the spells Vihaela was using. One of Vihaela's snakes hit Slate; his shield was already up and the green light splintered into shards. A construct was in the middle of firing when an air blade severed its shoulder; I caught one fleeting glimpse of the arm pinwheeling, no blood from the wound, the fingers still tightening on the trigger to send a bullet into the floor. Then all of a sudden my precognition screamed, images of pain and death and blackness flashing in front of my eyes. Someone was about to kill me and I didn't know who or how, but I could see the futures in which I lived and that was all I needed to know. I dived left, twisting; something tugged at my shoulder and I heard a splintering
thud
. I hit the floor hard, pain jolting through my side, and rolled left. I came up to my feet . . .

. . . and the battle was over. Vihaela and one of the security men were down. One of the constructs had been cut to pieces, its body parts scattered across the floor; the other was thrashing, headless, its remaining arm thumping erratically against the wall.

“Cease fire!” Haken shouted. “Cease fire!”

I looked left and right. The attic room hummed with magic, a dozen shields and protective spells brushing against each other. No one seemed to be paying attention to me. But
someone had just nearly killed me. It hadn't been Vihaela—I'd been watching her. The constructs had been in my field of vision.

That just left the people who were supposed to be on my side.

Whatever had caused the threat on my precognition, it wasn't around anymore. Trask moved up to the thrashing construct and aimed a hand downward; there was the blue flash of a water spell. The construct went still and silence fell.

“No movement,” someone called.

“Rick, you okay?”

“Yeah,” a muffled voice said. It was one of the security men. “Just tripped.”

“Slate, Lizbeth,” Haken said. “Check her.”

Slate was staring at Vihaela's still form. The Dark mage was lying facedown, crumpled against the wall. From a glance through the futures, I knew she wasn't getting up.

“Slate!”

Slate started. “Yeah.” He and Lizbeth moved forward. Even though Vihaela looked out of it, the two of them treated her with wary caution. Lizbeth raised her hand, and I saw the grey flicker of a protection spell, then she cautiously kicked Vihaela's ankle. Lizbeth frowned.

“Is she out?” Haken asked.

“Yeah, you could say that,” Lizbeth said. She straightened and looked at Haken. “She's dead.”

“What?”

“As in, not alive.”

“Are you serious?” Haken demanded. “Check her pulse.”

“I don't need to. Living people do this thing called breathing. You don't believe me?” Lizbeth nodded at Slate. “Ask him.”

“Slate?” Haken said. There was a dangerous tone to his voice.

“Well, I didn't fucking do it,” Slate said defensively.

“What are you getting in your deathsight?”

Slate hesitated.

“Jesus
fucking
Christ!” Haken spun around. “Which one of you did this?”

No one answered. The other mages in the room avoided meeting Haken's gaze. Behind him, the bodies of Vihaela and the two constructs lay still and silent on the floor.

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“I
didn't hit her that hard,” Slate said again.

Lizbeth passed a weary hand across her face. She was leaning against the wall. “Will you stop saying that?”

“Well, I didn't.”

“Trask?” Haken said. “Give me something I can use.”

The security men had all been shooed away, and it was just the mages—me, Haken, Slate, Trask, Abeyance, Lizbeth, and Cerulean. Abeyance was using her timesight, Cerulean had faded into the background, Trask was kneeling over Vihaela's body and examining her, and everyone else was arguing.

I listened with half an ear. I was less interested in the argument than in what I'd found in one of the walls: a pair of bullet holes. There was nothing especially remarkable about them . . . except for the fact that they were in the side wall, and Vihaela and her two constructs had been against the
far
wall. By my estimation, from the angle the bullets had entered, the only place they could have come from was the group of Council security and Keepers.

Which was highly relevant, since I was pretty sure those two bullets had been fired at me. I've been shot (well, seen my future self get shot) enough times to recognise it. That just left the question of who'd done the shooting . . .

“Nothing,” Trask said.

“What does that mean?” Haken said.

“Don't have a cause of death.”

“Then what
do
you have?”

“Stomach bruising.” Trask pointed down, then moved his finger up. “And a shot to the leg.”

“She got shot?” Lizbeth looked hopeful. “It was their fault then . . .”

Trask was shaking his head. “Why not?” Haken asked.

“Muscle wound,” Trask said. “Missed the arteries.”

“What did you hit her with anyway?” Lizbeth said to Slate.

“It was just an enervation bolt.”

“Well, those are dangerous.”

“I know how to do my job, all right?” Slate said. “Was the same thing I hit those guys downstairs with, and they're fine, aren't they?”

“People have died from enervation spells . . .”

“She's a fucking
life mage
,” Slate said. He gave Vihaela's body an angry gesture that seemed to imply that her death had been a personal insult. “You have any idea how tough they are to kill? They're like frigging cockroaches.”

Lizbeth shrugged. “Didn't seem that tough to me.”

Haken put a hand over his eyes. “Abeyance?”

“I'm not getting much,” Abeyance said. She'd stayed out of the argument. “Best guess is the bullet was from a burst aimed at one of those constructs. What took her down was Slate and Lizbeth's spells, but I can't tell what killed her.”

“What do you mean, you can't tell?” Haken said. “The more recent an event, the easier it is to timesight it, right? So why can't you see?”

Abeyance shot Haken an annoyed glance. “There's interference. A shroud maybe, or spell static. It's not as though I have lifesight—I'm not going to be able to tell you the exact moment she went from alive to dead.”

I ran my fingers along the bullet holes, then turned around, crouching slightly and angling my head to look back along the line they'd come from. I tried to remember who'd been in that position. It hadn't been Vihaela or the constructs. Hadn't been Haken or Slate, either. Coatl had been downstairs. That left Trask, Abeyance, Cerulean, and the Council security.

More to the point, no one seemed to have noticed anything. No one had said anything about my dive sideways, or about any shots going in my direction. That meant that either they'd seen it and said nothing, or there hadn't been anything
to see. The first was technically possible, but seemed like an unreasonable risk. I didn't believe that
everyone
on the Keeper team wanted to kill me, which leant me towards the second option. It was always possible that the shooter had just hung back and taken a shot while all eyes were turned on Vihaela, but even in the confusion, that seemed unnecessarily dangerous. With the number of magical senses around, there was too great a chance that someone would notice. The simplest explanation was that it had been done in such a way that no one had been able to see anything at all.

Assuming that logic was correct, it gave me one very obvious suspect. And if
they
were a traitor . . .

I looked at Vihaela's body.
Wait a second.
Could that be it?

The others were still arguing. I crossed the room and knelt; Trask gave me a glance, then rose and stepped away. Vihaela was lying on her front, head turned towards me, eyes closed in death. Her face was drawn and still. I blanked my mind, put all thoughts of who Vihaela was out of my head, and simply looked at her.

She looked young. I've seen a lot of Dark mages, male and female, and Vihaela didn't really fit. It's hard to say exactly what it is, but there's something about a Dark mage's looks that marks them. Maybe an apprentice . . . no, I wouldn't even have pegged her as an apprentice. Not enough force. She looked like someone who'd had things done
to
her, instead of the other way around.

I thought back, remembering what I'd seen of the fight. In the few seconds I'd seen Vihaela alive, how had she looked? She'd looked afraid. Startled and frightened.

But looked at another way . . .

Yes.
I couldn't prove it, not yet, but I was sure I was right. I looked up. Slate was still arguing with Haken, something about giving the report to Rain. Cerulean and Lizbeth had been watching me; Cerulean glanced away, Lizbeth didn't. I was pretty sure I knew who was working for White Rose, and I knew how they'd staged this. What was I going to do about it?

Accusing them openly . . . bad idea. I didn't have enough status here, and I didn't have any hard evidence. I could report what I knew up the chain of command. That was the dutiful thing to do, and what I was getting paid for.

Problem with that: I didn't know who the people above me were working for either.

So let's find out.

“It wasn't Slate,” I said.

Slate frowned. Haken turned to look at me. “Say that again?”

I rose to my feet. “I know who killed her,” I said. “It wasn't Slate.”

Slate gave me a suspicious look. This obviously hadn't been what he'd been expecting. “Okay,” Haken said. “Then who?”

I glanced around the room, letting my eyes pass very briefly over everyone in turn. “You might want to hear this in private.”

Haken wasn't stupid. His eyes narrowed as he realised what I was saying. “So who?” Lizbeth said.

I didn't answer. “Rest of you, clear the room,” Haken said. “Wrap up downstairs.”

“Seriously?” Lizbeth said.

Haken looked at her. Lizbeth gave us both a disgusted look, turned on her heel, and walked out. Cerulean, Slate, Trask, and Abeyance followed. Abeyance lingered, looking curious, but when Haken waited pointedly, she shut the door behind her.

I listened to the footsteps going downstairs. Haken put a hand into his pocket and red light glowed. A shroud focus, possibly more . . . so that was why I'd had so much trouble eavesdropping on him. “This had better be good,” Haken said.

“It was Vihaela.”

Haken stared at me for a second. “You think it was suicide?”

“No. I'm saying Vihaela killed
her
.” I nodded down at the corpse.

“We don't have time for—”

“Think about it,” I said. “What did we actually see? We saw someone who looked like Vihaela walk through the gate. Then the fight kicks off and there's no time for anything else. She's dead before she has the chance to talk.”

“You're saying that wasn't her.”

“You remember the briefing. Vihaela's supposed to be the freaking death queen of White Rose. She shouldn't have gone down this easily. White Rose uses fleshcrafters, remember? Perfect duplicates of whoever their clients want. If you were a Dark mage and you had those kinds of resources, wouldn't you make some body doubles while you were at it?”

“She used magic—”

“Did she?” I asked. “Did your magesight actually see her cast any spells? Because mine didn't. Yes, those green snake things
looked
scary, but they didn't register as battle-magic, did they? Everyone was just so keyed up to fight that they reacted as if they were.”

Haken frowned at me for a second. “You're saying they were faked.”

I didn't answer. I didn't need to. There had been exactly one person in the room who'd had the ability to create that convincing a show. I wasn't openly accusing him, but there was only one way it pointed . . .

“What killed her?” Haken said.

“Here's how I think this went down,” I said. “Vihaela's on the other side of that gateway. She knows we're waiting, and she's got her body double ready. But she knows it won't hold up under any kind of stress. So she makes sure the girl won't be around to answer any questions. She uses some kind of spell before this girl steps through the gate. Time delay, maybe a triggered effect—but whatever it is, it was meant to make sure that this girl didn't survive the encounter. She was dead from the minute she stepped through.”