Veiled (31 page)

Footsteps sounded from inside the vault, and Vihaela appeared. She looked much the same as she had when I'd seen her out in the grounds, with one change: she had a light satchel slung over one shoulder. She looked unsurprised to see us. “Oh,” she said. “You.”

“Mage Vihaela,” Slate began. “Under the—”

Vihaela waved a hand. “Can we skip this part?”

“Suits me,” Slate said. He was standing in a ready stance, feet spread wide. “You coming quietly?”

Vihaela looked between us for a second before answering. “Three of you.” She frowned slightly. “I'm actually a little insulted.”

“Yeah, sorry to burst your bubble,” Slate said. “We got better things to do than go after freaks like you.”

“I mean, three Keepers would be one thing,” Vihaela said. “But two Keepers and an auxiliary? You aren't even taking me seriously.”

“We're crying,” Caldera said.

“Just out of curiosity, what are you charging me with? It's not as though I hurt your boss.”

“Bullshit,” Slate said.

“Sorry,” Vihaela said. “Didn't lay a finger on him. You can check with him when he wakes up.”

“If you didn't,” Caldera said, “then who are you saying did?”

“Now you want me to solve your case too?” Vihaela shook her head. “Come on. If I really wanted Haken dead, you think I couldn't have done it already? There's no point offing Keepers. Sometimes we have to hurt you a little, just to teach you to stay out of our business, but killing you? Why bother?”

“Keep talking,” Slate said. “Your men are losing out there.”

I still couldn't hear or sense any people moving in our direction, but the longer this went on, the better the chance that Council reinforcements would arrive. Caldera stayed quiet, and I knew she had to be thinking the same thing. If Vihaela stuck around, sooner or later she'd be overwhelmed.

Vihaela turned towards the right-hand corridor. “Well, fun as this has been, I've got places to be.”

“You aren't going anywhere,” Slate said.

Vihaela paused, then turned her head to look back at Slate and raised an eyebrow. “Do you really want to do this?”

“You don't want to pick a fight with Keepers, Vihaela,” Caldera said.

“Times are changing, Keeper.” Vihaela smiled. “The people you work for are going to be changing too. Might want to think about staying on their good side.”

I stared at Vihaela. “Now,” Vihaela said. “I'm going to walk away. If you're smart, you'll tell your captain that I was gone when you got here. If not . . .” She shrugged. “Your call.” She started towards the corridor.

Caldera stepped in her way. Vihaela kept walking, unhurried. She was ten feet away from Caldera, then five. Caldera hesitated and for a second I could tell she was thinking about
backing off. I knew I should be doing something, but I found myself staring, fascinated. There was something hypnotic about Vihaela's movements . . .

The moment broke and the futures settled. Caldera reached out to seize Vihaela as the Dark mage came into range.

“Don't!” I shouted.

I was almost too late, but Caldera heard my warning and twisted aside at the very last second, just as Vihaela moved. Green-black light flashed, Caldera went staggering back, and Slate struck instantly, death energy lashing out.

The blast hit Vihaela and . . . something happened, then Vihaela was advancing. Slate hit her again, crackling black lightning flashing from his hands into Vihaela's body, but the dark green light of Vihaela's spells met Slate's attacks and it was Slate who was driven back. Even watching it clearly, I couldn't make out what Vihaela was doing. She was so
fast
, her movements flowing and precise. I've met a lot of battle-mages, but in all my life I'd only seen a handful who moved like that. The closest thing that Vihaela's fighting style reminded me of was a Dark mage named Onyx, but Onyx had relied purely on speed and power. Vihaela was different; every move she made was like a step in a dance, so natural that it seemed effortless. I'd been about to join the fight, but as I looked at the futures, I realised that I was utterly outclassed. All I could do was watch.

Caldera recovered and charged Vihaela from behind. Without turning Vihaela sidestepped the rush, directed a spell into Caldera that sent the heavier woman staggering, and struck again at Slate in the same motion. Caldera sent a ranged spell of some kind: it soaked into Vihaela and slid off, and Vihaela's next strike snapped Slate's head back. I understood now why Vihaela had looked so relaxed. She was fighting Caldera and Slate at the same time, and she didn't even look as though she was going all-out.

Green and black light was thrown back from the walls, mixing with the brown of Caldera's earth magic. The floor shook with heavy blows, and deflected spells punched holes
through the plaster; the air was thick with ozone and the scent of blood. Caldera stumbled over one of the bodies and Vihaela hit her in the instant she was off balance. Caldera shook it off with a snarl. Her protective spells had kept her standing through Vihaela's attacks, but she was moving more slowly and I could tell she was being worn down. She moved right to flank Vihaela, her back to the other corridor.

The futures shifted. “Caldera!” I shouted. “Behind!”

Caldera turned—too slow. Air imploded, striking with enough force to pulp flesh, and Caldera went down. Slate moved to cover her, dropping his own attacks as he did so.

Vihaela paused. Green-black energy glowed around her; her hair was mussed, but as far as I could tell she hadn't been scratched. She turned her head to look down the corridor. “I didn't need the help.”

A man stepped out into view, dressed in grey. A beard covered the lower half of his face, and he wore dark glasses. It was the assassin from two nights ago, Chamois. He inclined his head back very slightly.

“Protecting his investment?” Vihaela said. She shrugged. “Fine.” She turned to leave.

“Hold it!” Slate called.

“Or you'll do what?” Vihaela said without looking back. She walked away.

Slate half-moved after her. Chamois met his eyes and shook his head very slightly. Slate stopped.

Then Chamois looked at me. He stood studying me for a second, then reached into his pocket, took something out, and tossed it at me. I felt the surge of a minor spell, giving extra force to the throw. As it spun in midair the futures flashed before me—no danger. I caught the thing one-handed, then looked down at what I'd been thrown.

It was a brown cloth pouch. Looking into the futures where I opened it, I saw a condenser. The same one I'd decoyed Chamois away with on the train.

I looked back up to see Chamois watching me. He turned and was gone.

Slate made a move after him. “Don't,” I said tightly. I
hurried to Caldera's side. She was down on one knee, bleeding from her ears. “Caldera. You okay?”

Caldera looked up at me with a frown and shook her head wordlessly. She hadn't heard me. “Slate,” I called.

Slate touched Caldera's shoulder, frowning. “She's deaf, eardrums busted. Be fine if we can get her to a life mage. We need to go after them—”

“With
what
?”

Slate clenched his fist. For a moment I saw the flicker of arguments, then he abandoned them. “I'm going to get them.” Slate's voice was tight and furious. “This isn't over. Understand?”

I didn't answer. In the distance, from where Vihaela and Chamois had disappeared, I felt the signature of a gate spell, and I knew they were gone. Slate punched the floor with a sharp
crack
.

I didn't move. Caldera shrugged us off and got to her feet, still unsteady. From behind, I could hear shouts and footsteps, and looking into the futures, I saw that they were friendly. The three of us stood in the anteroom, alone with the bodies, and waited for our reinforcements to arrive.

T
he rest of the battle was mop-up.

Slate, Caldera, and I fell back to rejoin Haken and Trask. I kept us away from the remaining White Rose forces, and we linked up with a Keeper strike force. Haken and Caldera were shipped out to the back lines, and I went with them.

Slate and Trask went back into the fight, although by this point they didn't have much to do. In the end, the battle was more one-sided than it had felt. White Rose's power was in political influence, not in military strength, and their wards and defences weren't anything like enough to hold off a full Keeper attack force. After half of the defenders had been killed or incapacitated, the rest started surrendering. By the time the Keepers finished rounding up their prisoners, they found a lot of foot soldiers and workers, a lot of slaves, and a scattering of mages and adepts. Vihaela, Cerulean, and Chamois weren't amongst them.

I went looking for Luna and Variam once the fighting had stopped. They were out on the front lawn, a little way outside the ring of lights. Variam was resting against a tree
and wrapping a bandage awkwardly around his arm one-handed. “Look, I can go get them,” Luna was saying.

“Nah,” Variam said. He glanced up as I approached. “Hey, Alex.”

“Hey,” I said. “Glad you both made it.” I nodded at Variam. “Gunshot?”

“He won't go to the Keeper medics,” Luna complained.

“It's not like it's serious,” Variam said.

“You got shot! How is that ‘not serious'?”

“I'll just go see Anne,” Variam said. “She's better than the Keeper life mages anyway.”

“I know, but . . .” Luna looked away.

Variam grinned at her. “Upset?”

“Screw you.”

I sighed and dropped down onto the grass near to them. “Luna? You hurt?”

Luna shook her head, but didn't turn around. I gave Variam a questioning look.

“We were with the security teams around the hill,” Variam said. “One of them caught a bullet from those machine guns right in the head. Splattered like ketchup.”

Luna twisted around to glare at him. “Vari!”

“What?”

“Can you not joke about it?”

“Hey, you were the one who wanted to get in on the battle.”

“Guys.” I raised a hand. “Enough, okay?”

Neither Luna nor Vari argued. We sat quietly for a little while. After you go through a battle the adrenaline rush keeps you going for a while, but once that's gone you crash and all of a sudden it feels as though you can barely move. All I wanted to do was sit there.

As we watched, a group of people started to trickle out from the front of the White Rose estate, escorted by Council security. The oldest were in their early twenties; most were younger. The clothes they wore ranged from simple robes and nightgowns to outfits with implications I consciously didn't think about. They moved in an aimless, straggling way, and
kept stopping to stare around them, blinking at the lights as though they hadn't been outside for years. Maybe they hadn't.

“Those are the White Rose slaves, aren't they?” Luna asked. “What's going to happen to them?”

The Council security were trying to chivvy the slaves towards an open meadow to the south. It was slow going. “They'll take them to the facility in Southampton,” Variam said. “See what they know.”

“What about after that?” Luna asked. “I mean, it's not like the Council runs social services, is it?”

Variam shrugged. “Dunno.”

A small figure dressed in white had fallen behind the rest of the slaves. As I looked more closely, I saw it was the little girl from the bedroom. She was moving haltingly and kept turning to stare back at the building behind. A security man was standing over her, trying to get her moving, and from his body language he seemed to be getting frustrated. When she didn't react he grabbed her by the upper arm and started dragging her.

There was a commotion and a short, heavyset figure came stalking out into view. As he came into the light I saw that it was Slate. He snapped something at the security man, who let go of the girl. Slate said something, his voice harsh, then pointed back in the direction of the house. The security man backed off quickly; Slate watched him go, then crouched down next to the girl. His back was to us, but there was something oddly protective about his stance.

“They're just going to put them out on the street, aren't they?” Luna said. She was looking towards the main body of the group.

“I don't know,” I said, watching Slate. “Maybe they'll have a little help after all.”

Slate stood up, guiding the girl gently with one arm. As he looked up he saw me and the scowl returned to his face. I looked away, careful not to smile.

Movement in the futures caught my attention. A Keeper was headed towards me; it was Slate's partner, Trask. “Verus,” Trask said as he walked up.

“Hey.”

“Wards are down,” Trask said. “Going to need you to come back to HQ.”

“Oh, right,” I said with a sigh. “That.” I was still wanted for questioning. “So am I under arrest?”

“Not technically.”

“Seems to be a habit.” I climbed wearily to my feet. “Come on then.”

“Alex?” Luna asked.

“I'll be okay. Make sure he gets to Anne.”

“Hey,” Variam said. “I can take care of myself.”

“I will,” Luna said.

I walked with Trask towards the gate point, leaving Luna and Variam alone on the hill. Getting out of here was probably a good idea anyway. Right now everyone was running around trying to get things back in order; once they managed that, they were going to start looking for people to blame. There was going to be a lot of fallout from what had happened here tonight, and I was pretty sure I'd just made some extra enemies.

Then I glanced over at the teenagers and children in the meadow. Slate was still with them, along with a couple of other Keepers. As I watched, a gate opened, and the White Rose slaves started to file through. One boy who reminded me a little of Leo had stopped and was staring back at the building behind him. As we passed by, he turned and stepped through the gate, disappearing from the meadow and leaving White Rose behind.

I turned back to see that Trask was watching me. “Worth it?” he asked.

I considered it briefly, then nodded. “Yeah.”

The two of us walked away.

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T
he next few days were busy.

I spent the first forty-eight hours in meetings and interviews. All the different Council factions wanted to hear the details of how my trip with Haken had gone, and all of them
also
wanted to make sure I reported said details in such a way that would work to their advantage. Before the first day was out, I'd been threatened with death, imprisonment, exile, and demotion (not necessarily in that order), and had been instructed by five separate people to follow four different and contradictory stories. There was no possible way that I could make everyone happy, and I didn't even try. I just stalled, and waited.

I didn't have to wait long. As the days went by, the mages in the Council had their attention pulled away from me to the political crisis unfolding around them. Now that White Rose's organisation was in ruins, all the dirty laundry was coming out. The really secure files had been kept on keyed data focuses or in the heads of Vihaela and Marannis, but as with any security system, the weakest part is the human element, and with the number of prisoners the Keepers had taken, they had a lot of witnesses to interrogate. Some Council members tried to make covert attempts to shut the interrogations down. It didn't work. Within a week, everyone knew who White Rose had been in bed with, with more juicy details coming out every day.

Oddly enough, being in Keeper custody ended up working out in my favour. No one was really interested in prosecuting me anymore, and being held in Keeper HQ ended up isolating me from the worst of the political storm. The only drawback was that it was hard for me to find out what was going on, but in that regard I got help from an unexpected source. Caldera was still off on medical leave, but Coatl started showing up to bring me meals and escort me around—for some reason he'd taken a liking to me, and through him I learnt what was happening in the Council as the political casualties started to mount up.

Nirvathis was one of the first to go. I never did learn exactly how he'd been associated with White Rose and what his apprentice had been doing meeting with Chamois that night, but it didn't matter; he was never going to have a shot at the Council again. One member of the Junior Council and one member of the Senior Council both resigned four days
after the battle, within an hour of each other, for “health reasons.” Along with the one Nirvathis had been gunning for, that left a total of three Council seats up for grabs. It was announced that the new Junior Council seats would be assigned first, and a political free-for-all began.

On the Dark side of the fence, Marannis found himself out in the cold. Vihaela had disappeared, the Council factions who'd lost influence were hungry for blood, and Marannis was the obvious scapegoat. He probably could have escaped if he'd been willing to cut his losses, but he hesitated too long. The Order of the Star raided his mansion while he was still trying to piece the White Rose organisation back together. Marannis was killed “resisting arrest.” Apparently someone on the Council had decided that they were tired of cleaning up White Rose's mess.

With Marannis and Vihaela gone and their main base destroyed, White Rose disintegrated. The houses operated by White Rose were closed down and the slaves and enforcers taken into custody, and the last remaining mages involved in running the organisation slipped away.

And by the time I was finally released from Keeper HQ, everyone was far too busy with all the political chaos to pay any attention to me.

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“I
still don't understand what Vihaela was doing,” Luna said.

It was a week after the battle and I was back in the War Rooms, sitting in the same alcove in the Belfry where Haken and I had waited to be summoned. Murmurs of conversation echoed across the polished floor, mages and their assistants speaking quietly as they walked. I'd been ordered to attend another hearing—a less important one this time—and I'd taken advantage of my newly acquired status as a Keeper employee to bring Luna along.

“You remember what we were saying about the three factions?” I said. There was no one very close to us, but I kept my voice down all the same. “White Rose, Levistus's
group on the Council, and whoever hired Chamois. Vihaela wasn't on White Rose's side.”

“But she was working for White Rose.”

“Yeah, well, once the Keepers started digging, they found some new information,” I said. “Turns out Vihaela was running the organisation a bit
too
well. Well enough that Marannis wasn't necessary anymore.”

“So Marannis thought she was going to betray him?”

“He might have been right at that. I had a look at Vihaela's history. Her bosses tend not to live very long.”

Luna thought about it for a second. “So he decided to get rid of her, but she found out and beat him to the punch.”

“That's what the Keepers think,” I said. “We know that she sent Leo to deliver the focus. Well, my guess is that she also leaked the time and place of the meeting. That was how Chamois knew where to find them.”

“Why?”

“She was turning the Council against White Rose,” I said. Now that I had a bit of distance, I could recognise the tactic. Take two of your enemies and set them against each other. I'd used the same trick plenty of times myself but this was my first time on the receiving end. It was a new experience for me and I was discovering I didn't like it very much. Maybe this was how it had felt for some of the people I'd gone up against. “Remember the rumour that the data focuses could be cracked? The only thing stopping the Council from moving against White Rose was the information they were holding. Once enough mages on the Council believed that all that blackmail material White Rose was holding on to was going to get out
anyway
 . . . well, that was it. Kidnapping Haken just sped things up.”

“So Vihaela wouldn't have cared about getting the focus back at all.”

I nodded. “She knew it couldn't be cracked. As long as it was out there, lost, it was doing its job. She hardly had to do anything, really. Once things were set in motion, she just had to wait for the Keepers to figure out what was going on
and move against White Rose themselves. Levistus was the one trying to put on the brakes.”

“So what are you going to do with that focus?”

“Keep it as a souvenir, I guess. Not like anyone can read the thing.”

“Levistus could.” Luna thought for a second. “He was the one behind that attack on you and Caldera, wasn't he?”

“Either him or someone on his team. I think they were hoping that by disappearing Leo they could dead-end the case. If Leo hadn't talked before they snatched him, it might have worked.”

“What do you think happened to him?”

“You mean once they finished ripping everything he knew out of his skull?” I shook my head. I knew there was no way Levistus would have let him live.

Luna was silent, and I found myself thinking about Leo. He'd been abused by White Rose, used as a slave and as a disposable messenger. And then when he'd fallen into the hands of Light mages, the people who were supposed to be his protectors, they'd abducted, interrogated, and finally executed him. It was a miserable end to what had probably been a miserable life, and to a certain extent, it had happened because of me—it had been Caldera and me who'd inadvertently led Levistus's agents to where Leo was hiding.