Last year, I’d been forced to face something that had been nagging at me for a long time: as a diviner, I’m simply not a match for the heavyweights of the magical world. In the past I’d mostly stayed off the radar of the really scary people, and when that hadn’t worked, my solution had been to run and hide. These days, that was becoming less of an option. ‘Run and hide’ doesn’t work so well when you have people you care about, and over time I’d managed to accumulate a worryingly large number of enemies. It was Arachne who’d made me see the writing on the wall. If I didn’t do something to push myself into a higher weight class, then sooner or later – and probably not very much later – I was going to end up dead.
The dreamstone had been floated as a way to solve that. Bonding with imbued items and manipulating Elsewhere have a fair bit of overlap, and the dreamstone gave me the ability to use Elsewhere more effectively; with practice, I ought to be able to use those same techniques to make use of the kinds of imbued item that other people couldn’t. By going on these retrieval missions, I ought to be able to find an item that I could make use of myself. Or that had been the plan.
‘It’s not about easy or hard,’ I said. ‘I don’t feel as though I’m getting anywhere at all.’
‘Don’t undersell yourself,’ Arachne said. ‘You can travel between Elsewhere, dreams and dreamshards at will now, and you can shape your environment in all three. Your defences against possession have grown to the point where I think even a mind mage would struggle to influence you. If you’d picked up that crown, you’d have been in no real danger.’
‘None of which gets me closer to what I need,’ I said. ‘Okay, so imbued items can’t possess me. But I can’t possess them either. I’ve tried twice now – first the sword, then the brooch in April. I can talk to them, more or less, but I can’t change what they want. And if what they want is to go on a murdering spree, or set up a slave empire, then we just end up with a stalemate. I can’t dominate them; they can’t dominate me.’ I looked gloomily down at the table. ‘Maybe I should have taken the other dreamstone.’
‘You shouldn’t.’
‘You said it was better for exercising control,’ I said, taking a drink from the glass. ‘Seems like right now that’s what I need.’
‘No, it isn’t,’ Arachne said firmly. The second dreamstone had been a twin to the one lying by my sleeping body right now. Anne and I had brought it together out of the deep shadow realm, but we’d had to give it up to Richard. I didn’t know what use he’d put it to. ‘I doubt you’d have even been able to make it accept you. It’s a matter of personality, not what you feel you need, and you simply don’t have enough of a desire to dominate and control.’
‘Then what do you think I should be doing?’
Arachne studied me, and when she spoke, her voice was sober. ‘For one thing, I wouldn’t be in so much of a rush.’
I started to speak, but Arachne raised a hand to forestall me. ‘Listen, Alex. Power always has a price. I warned you, at the beginning, that to choose this course of action was to pursue the most difficult path. For you to reach the point where you can personally challenge mages like Richard and Levistus will take more than hard work. You will have to make sacrifices. Significant ones. So do not be in too great a hurry to find an imbued item to bond with. It will happen, and when it does, you will find yourself wishing to go back to where you are now.’
‘That sounds … foreboding,’ I said slowly. ‘Are you telling me this is a bad idea?’
‘No,’ Arachne said. ‘But I also believe that from now, most of your choices are likely to be hard ones. I will help you while I can, but in the end the decisions will be your own.’
I sat thinking for a minute. ‘Are you worried that something’s going to happen?’
‘Why do you ask?’
‘That’s the second time you’ve said something like that,’ I said. ‘About helping me as long as you can. It sounds as though you think there’s a time coming up where that won’t be true any longer.’
‘I did say that, didn’t I?’ Arachne murmured. ‘No one can see all things. But the world is not as friendly to my kind as it once was. Be prepared.’
I looked at Arachne with a frown. ‘What can I do to help?’
‘For now, practise with the dreamstone,’ Arachne said. ‘I think a time will come very soon where your skill with Elsewhere may be all that keeps you alive. Until then, stay close to your friends.’
Anne was already gone by the time I woke the next morning. I shaved, dressed, ate breakfast under the multi-coloured sky of the Hollow, then gated to London.
Dr Shirland lives in a small terraced house tucked away down a one-way street in Brondesbury. I rang the bell and was let in. She looked much the same as she had when I’d first met her – curly hair, round glasses, kindly expression – and her tomcat was sleeping on the same chair. I stroked the cat, accepted a cup of tea and sat, watching the woman over my teacup.
Ruth Shirland is a mind mage and a consulting psychologist, though she spends more time as the latter than the former. She has connections into magical society, but for the most part she seems quite content to live in her little house, seeing patients. To Council mages, it would seem a bizarre way to live. They’d ask her why she was working a psychologist’s job for pocket change when she could make ten times as much in the magical world, and if she told them she didn’t use her magic when working as a psychologist, they probably either wouldn’t believe her or would decide that she was an idiot.
The truth is that independent mages like Dr Shirland are actually more common than Light mages and Dark mages put together. By becoming a Light or a Dark mage, you’re taking sides in a war. It’s true that the vast majority don’t fight on the front lines, and most of the time there aren’t any front lines to fight on in the first place, but the simple fact is, by signing up with either Light or Dark, you’re cutting your own life expectancy. Most Dark mages die violently, often at the hands of other Dark mages, and it’s not a lifestyle to choose if you’re hoping to live long enough to have grandchildren. Becoming a Light mage is safer, but it comes with its own consequences – the Council offers privilege and power, but in exchange you have to spend a lot of time saying the right things to the right people, often the kind of people that you don’t like very much.
Faced with those options, it’s not that surprising that most mages choose neither of the above. They don’t join the Council, but they don’t follow the Dark way either. They obey the Concord, at least enough to stay out of trouble, but for the most part they don’t bother the Council and the Council doesn’t bother them. Sometimes they use their abilities to make their way in the world – enchanters charming people out of their money, chance mages scamming casinos – but just as often they don’t, or at least not much. They just lead normal lives, staying off the radar of Light and Dark mages alike, going about their day-to-day business in peace. It was pretty much how I’d lived once, and sitting here and looking at Dr Shirland, I found myself – well, not missing it exactly, but feeling a little envious. Maybe sitting in cosy living rooms with cups of tea would get boring if I was doing nothing else. But being able to go back to it when you wanted, without having to absent-mindedly check the futures every five minutes to make sure that no one was going to take the opportunity to blow up the house with you inside it … that would be nice.
‘So,’ Dr Shirland said once we were both settled. ‘I understand you’re here about Anne?’