You can’t look at all that at once. If you opened your sight to all the possible futures of everything around you, even for an instant, the knowledge would destroy you, wipe away your mind like an ocean wave rolling over a drop of water. Seeing into the future is a constant discipline, always keeping your guard up, always focused. The real reason there are so few diviners is that most of them either go crazy or block their power off so that they don’t have to deal with it any more.
The diviners who don’t go crazy learn to see futures in terms of strength. Everyone develops their own code, a way of interpreting the information. To me, futures appear as lines of light in the darkness. The stronger and more likely the future, the brighter the glow. The next thing you learn is how to sort futures, search for groupings of events in which things happen a certain way. And once you’ve done that, all you have to do is look back along the strands and find out which actions lead to them.
In ninety-nine out of a hundred futures, opening the door and walking in led to me being spotted by the security guards. I searched for the future in which I wasn’t spotted, looked back to see what I had to do to make it happen, and did it. I didn’t have the faintest idea why I had to move that way. I just knew it would work.
To anyone watching, it looks like pure fluke. One guard points at something, and the other turns just as I open the door and close it behind me. They carry on talking and I stand quietly in the shadow of the doorway. One looks away briefly and I walk out across the floor as the second bends down to fumble in a drawer. I walk past, staying behind the first one as he turns back, and pass through the exit at the other side just before the second one looks up again.
Afterwards, when the balloon goes up, both guards will swear they never took their eyes off the door.
The Great Court of the British Museum is massive, more than fifty feet high with the huge cylinder of the Reading Room running from floor to ceiling at the centre. Floor and walls are painted white, reflecting the light and emphasising the empty space, and the ceiling is slightly domed. An equestrian statue stood to the right; to the left, a stone lion snarled down upon an information desk covered with pamphlets. I crossed the floor, half my mind on keeping my footsteps silent and the other half searching the possible futures for more guards, noting as I did that a patrol was due in about three minutes. I picked a map off the desk and glanced at it. The bulk of the ground floor was taken up by the west wing, mostly filled with permanent exhibits from Ancient Greece and Rome. Somehow I couldn’t see Lyle’s relic being one of those; if the Rosetta Stone or the Elgin Marbles were magical, I was pretty sure someone would have noticed by now. At the back, around the third floor, were some rooms marked in brown as ‘exhibitions and changing displays’. That sounded hopeful. I slipped the map into my pocket and started for the stairs.
As I climbed the curving staircase around the Reading Room and mapped out my path through the museum, the back of my mind was puzzling about why any kind of magical item would be here. Mages, as a whole, are not the most public-spirited of people. If they find something they want, they take it. They don’t leave it on display.
Unless in this case they couldn’t take it. If the Council couldn’t move it to a safe location, that might explain why Lyle was desperate enough to try contacting me.
I’d just reached Ethiopia and Coptic Egypt when something pinged on my precognition. Two guards were ahead. I paused until I knew neither was looking in my direction, then peeked my head around the corner. The men were about thirty feet away, standing in front of a staircase leading up, and they were carrying …
Bingo. The security guards at the door had worn the black uniforms and pullovers of British Museum security, with a silver ‘BM’ on their epaulettes. These two wore plain clothes. They carried no obvious tools or weapons, but I could sense the auras of magical items, and from the way one had moved I’d spotted a gun in a shoulder holster and that made them Council security. Mages don’t do sentry duty, not unless it’s literally a matter of life or death; they’re too important for that. Instead they have private soldiers, equipped with modern weapons and magical aids.
These two weren’t mages, or even adepts, but they were alert and competent. As well as that, I could tell from here that the top of the stairwell behind them was warded with a barrier. The barrier would contain a well-hidden alarm; anyone entering the fourth floor without the magical key, whether by foot or by spell, would set off a silent warning signal. Knowing the Council, the guards wouldn’t be trusted with the password key. An elemental mage could blast through the guards and the barrier, but would set off the alarm. A more subtle mage would be able to avoid raising the alarm, but they wouldn’t be able to get through the barrier.
It was a typical Council defence: cost-effective and ruthless. The job of those two guards was to be, basically, cannon fodder. If a mage attacked them, their chances of survival were nil. Their only purpose was to raise the alarm and give advance warning to Council reinforcements gating in. But no matter what I thought of the methods, I had to admit it was a fairly good setup. For a normal mage, getting past both the guards and the barrier without raising the alarm would take hours of preparation, if not days.
It took me slightly over five minutes. When you know exactly what will set off an alarm, then you know exactly what won’t. Think about it.
The fourth floor was sealed off from the rest of the museum with boards and screens. Worn red carpet covered the floor and a scattered handful of lights cast the room in a dim glow. Standing in the centre of the room was a statue.
I should probably mention at this point that what I was doing was, under mage law, illegal as hell. The Council might turn a blind eye to torture and murder, but trespassing, well, that’s serious. With my reputation, I’d be in serious trouble if I was caught. However, I was pretty sure by this point that I’d be in more serious trouble if I stayed home. I had no particular desire to sit around waiting for the next guy in line to take a shot at me.
I scanned the room. A few other exhibits had been pushed into the corners: a vase, a standing lamp, something that looked like a totem pole. None radiated magic. A lift was at the far end, but it was dark and unpowered. There were no windows. Apart from the stairs I’d climbed to enter this room, there was no way in and no way out, which meant I was standing in a dead end if anything went wrong. I would have to work fast.
The statue was of a man, life-size, wearing robes that looked like ancient ancestors of the ceremonial gear Light mages wear to formal occasions. He looked in his fifties or sixties, with a flowing beard. His right hand grasped a wand, while his left hand was held out in front of him, palm up and slightly cupped as though asking for something. The face was superbly detailed, right down to the age lines and the set of the eyes; the sculptor had obviously used magic to preserve his work. The expression and pose of the man was commanding, proud. I circled the statue once more then, after a moment’s hesitation, reached out and touched it.
Nothing happened, as I’d known it would. The statue looked and felt like stone, though slightly cooler to the touch than stone should be. This was Lyle’s relic, all right. Even without my mage’s sight, I could feel power radiating from the thing. I looked around the room, putting together what must have happened. The museum had gotten hold of the statue and brought it here. The Council had found it, sent agents. Their orders would have been to study the item, determine its power. First they would have tried to activate the statue, then if that didn’t work they would have tried to move it.