Someone laughed from the back of the courtroom. The coroner shot a frown in their direction, which he then turned upon me. “Jokes are not appropriate to this inquiry.”
“I wasn’t joking.”
“Well. Returning to the matter at hand, you stated in your initial report that you did not have any further contact with Morden or Vihaela. Is this accurate?”
“Yes,” I said. “At the time, I was still under the impression that the only way for the two of them to have left San Vittore was via the main entrance. Unfortunately, when I reached it, I met a Keeper relief force who told me that they’d seen no one exit the facility. I was able to direct them to the location of Mages Barrayar, Solace, and Caldera, but I wasn’t able to pick up the trail.”
“You stated in your report that you were unable to track Morden and Vihaela thereafter.”
“That’s correct.”
“According to records, various Keepers and Council personnel made multiple attempts to contact you in that time,” the coroner said. “You did not respond to any of the requests for several hours, and when you did so, it was to provide a brief message stating that you were otherwise occupied. It wasn’t until the following day that you reappeared to deliver your report of events.”
“That’s correct.”
“Can you give an account for your movements during this time?”
This was the most dangerous part. “I hoped to trace Morden and Vihaela’s route before they could cover their trail.” I looked straight at the coroner as I spoke, eyes straight and voice level. “First I tried several staging points that I’d seen Morden use during my previous association with him. When that didn’t work, I attempted tracking spells using Morden’s chain of office as a focus. I was aware of attempts to contact me during this period but felt I couldn’t afford the distraction.”
“You didn’t consider the sequence of events important enough to report to the Council?”
“I felt that pursing Morden was time critical and as such was the first priority,” I said. “We now know that given the method by which Morden and Vihaela left the bubble realm, any such attempts to trace them were doomed to failure. However, I believe it was the correct decision given the knowledge available to me at the time.”
There was a pause. I saw the coroner glance towards the Senior Council table, but I didn’t turn my head to look. “Very well, Councillor Verus,” the coroner said. “That will be all.”
I nodded and walked back to my seat. Almost everything I’d told the coroner in those last two answers had been a lie.
“The court will now consider timesight evidence,” the coroner said.
The bench clerk spoke up again. “Mage Sonder.”
There was a pause, then one of the doors opened and a young man was escorted in, pale-skinned with black hair and an academic look. When I’d first known him, he’d been slender, with a pair of glasses that he’d fiddle with when nervous. Nowadays the glasses were gone, along with most of the nervousness. He was less slender too.
Sonder and I had been friends once. He’d joined me and Luna on our early adventures, and the three of us had formed a group to which Variam and Anne had been later additions. They’d stayed, but Sonder hadn’t, and when events brought us together again, he wasn’t very friendly anymore.
“If you could state your name and occupation for the court, please,” the coroner said.
“My name is Sonder, and I work for the Council Home Office,” Sonder said. “I’m also a Keeper auxiliary seconded on a semipermanent basis to the Order of the Star.”
“You are a timesight specialist?”
“That’s correct.”
“And were you assigned in the aftermath of the attack to perform a timesight scan of San Vittore?”
“That’s correct.”
“Can you give a summary of the attack for the court, please?”
“The attack unfolded as described in the initial report, but further scans have uncovered some additional detail,” Sonder said. “The lesser jinn were summoned in two separate areas marked on the fifth page of the report on figure C. Having been summoned into the facility, they then spread out, attacking facility personnel in the locations marked in figures D and E on the next page . . .”
I let my attention drift; this had been covered at the previous inquiry. Instead I tried to remember exactly where the rift between Sonder and me had come from. We’d been close, once. What had caused the split?
Five years ago, I’d been hunted down by an adept vigilante group called the Nightstalkers. Sonder, Luna, Variam, and Anne had gotten involved in the aftermath of the attack, and explaining why the Nightstalkers were after me had involved telling them some bits of my past that I wasn’t very proud of. Sonder hadn’t taken it well, and he’d liked the way I’d eventually dealt with the problem even less.
But while that had seemed like the obvious explanation at the time, it didn’t fit so well with hindsight. In the years since then, Sonder had become a rising star in the Council, and that meant buying into the things the Council does. I was pretty sure that by this point he’d have been involved in Council-sanctioned operations that were just as dirty as anything I’d ever done, if not worse. So while that might explain why he’d avoided me then, it didn’t explain why he was still doing so now.
Maybe it was more about beliefs. Sonder is a Light mage through and through—he grew up in the system and he belongs in it in a way that the rest of us don’t. I mean, our group’s all tied to the Council, at least on the surface—I’m a Junior Councilman, Anne’s a member of the healer corps, Variam’s a Keeper of the Order of the Shield, and even Luna graduated from the apprentice programme. But none of us really buy into the idea of the Council. We’ve had too many bad experiences to trust it completely, and even when things are going well, we try to keep its people at arm’s length. Sonder doesn’t. At a deep level, Sonder basically believes that the world would be a better place if the Council ran everything. Maybe if it hadn’t been the Nightstalkers, it would have been something else.
A split usually starts from something small. What had been the first serious disagreement I’d had with Sonder? I thought back to beyond the Nightstalkers. There had been something that was . . . oh. That.
Last night, Anne had mentioned her father’s death and Jagadev. I hadn’t said anything, but it had reminded me of something that I’d been avoiding for a long time. I was one of the few people who knew that Anne’s parents’ deaths probably hadn’t been an accident, that the death of Variam’s father probably hadn’t been an accident either, and that Jagadev—who had been Vari and Anne’s guardian at the time I met them—was probably responsible for both.
Back in the nineteenth century, India had been the site of the rakshasa wars. On one side had been the Light Councils of India and Britain; on the other had been the rakshasa, ancient shapeshifters who traced their origins back to before human history. The rakshasa were immortal and powerful, but they weren’t unkillable, and one by one they were hunted down. A hundred and fifty years ago, a team of mages had attacked the palace of a rakshasa lord and lady. The lady, Arati, was killed. Her husband was not. That rakshasa was Lord Jagadev, and he’d spent the century and a half since then nursing his hatred for humanity in general and mages in particular. And he’d worked from the shadows to arrange the deaths of the mages that had killed his wife, and their children, and their children’s children, until as far as I was aware there were only two descendants of those families still alive. One was Variam, and the other was Anne.