Anne hesitated. ‘This is going to sound weird, but I was dreaming about Morden.’
‘You mean in Elsewhere?’
‘No, just a regular dream. I was circling around his prison, looking for a way in.’
‘Huh.’ I inserted the key and tried again. It scraped, then turned, and the door promptly stuck. I banged it with my shoulder to force it open. ‘You haven’t been missing having him as your boss, have you?’
‘Not even slightly.’
The inside of the house seemed very dark after the bright sunlight of the valley. We walked down the hall and turned into the kitchen. The room was dusty and felt abandoned, exactly the same as it had been since I’d last left it, except for the wires running across the edge of the front door and down to the open gym bag below.
‘So who was it this time?’ Anne asked as I walked over to inspect the device.
‘I can see the future, not the past.’ The bomb was a stack of plastique packed into the gym bag, the wires ending in contacts stuck into the blocks. It was crude but powerful, enough to blow apart the house, the victim and anyone else unlucky enough to be within thirty feet or so of the front door. ‘I suppose I could get Sonder or someone to track down whoever it was, but honestly, I don’t think it’s worth it.’
‘It feels a little bit strange that you don’t even bother identifying the people trying to kill you any more.’
‘Who has that kind of time?’
The house we were in was mine, a small farm cottage I’d bought a long time ago as a safe house. Unfortunately, the more you use a safe house, the less safe it gets, and after the third or fourth set of unwelcome visitors I’d reluctantly accepted that it was time to move on. There was no point in making that fact public though, so I’d moved out all my valuable possessions, left just enough stuff behind to make it seem as though I still lived there and arranged for electricity and water usage to add some credibility. Once that was done it was just a matter of checking back every few days or so to see whether anyone had left any unpleasant surprises.
‘I know this probably makes me a bad person for suggesting it,’ Anne said, ‘but do you think we should stop disarming these traps?’
‘The idea being that the next person to break in gets to be the target of whatever was left behind by the last one?’
‘Pretty much.’
I’d checked the futures several times to confirm that cutting any of the wires would disable the thing, but I went ahead and looked at the longer-term futures just to make sure. It’s never a good idea to be too sure you’ve outsmarted your enemy. ‘Too much risk that someone innocent might get caught,’ I said. ‘Besides, leaving these things around just feels untidy.’
‘Untidy?’
The fact that these traps were still showing up was actually good news, all things considered. Apparently word had spread that trying to kill me face-to-face was a bad idea, which was the reason that my would-be assassins were now restricting themselves to long-distance efforts. Obviously, having to deal with lethal booby traps wasn’t ideal – so far this year there had been two bombs and one attempted poisoning, and that wasn’t counting the magical ones – but I much preferred it to having my enemies come after me in person. For one thing, divination is very well suited to avoiding traps. For another, a long-range assassin is far less of a threat. The really scary killers are the ones who are willing to get close enough to make sure they don’t miss.
I drew my knife and delicately sawed through first one wire, then the other. There was no visible effect, but the bomb was now an inert lump of chemicals. ‘Clear,’ I said, straightening up.
‘Want me to pick up the post while I’m here?’ Anne asked. She hadn’t backed away. It’s quite a vote of confidence when someone is willing to stand next to you while you defuse a bomb.
‘Sure. I’ll go put this one with the others.’
We gated to the War Rooms, and as we stepped out into the entrance hall, we stopped speaking out loud. The War Rooms have too many watchful ears, and while I’ve never found proof that the place is bugged, there are a lot of spells that can allow their caster to eavesdrop with little risk of detection. I ought to know since it’s something I’ve done myself. Fortunately, these days I don’t need to speak out loud to communicate.
So what happened in the dream? I asked Anne mentally.
It was strange, Anne replied. I was circling the prison from the outside, trying to find a way in. And it was definitely Morden’s prison, I knew that much. I think I was trying to get to him, and I couldn’t break through the barriers, and I was really frustrated.
We were talking via my dreamstone, the amethyst-coloured focus currently tucked away in my inner pocket. Arachne had told me that once I mastered its use, I wouldn’t need to have it on my person at all, but I still found that doing so made this easier. It wasn’t telepathy, not quite – mind magic telepathy works by broadcasting thoughts and picking them up in turn. This was more like opening a link. And it wasn’t just thoughts either: I could pick up some of the emotions in Anne’s mind, knew that she was watching the people around us as we spoke. I could even feel the echo of her memories of the dream, restless and circling, like a frustrated predator.
The dreamstone’s linking ability was limited. While it worked very well on the people I knew best and was closest to – which meant Anne, Luna, Variam and Arachne – establishing a link with someone else was harder, and the less we knew and trusted each other, the more ‘harder’ shaded into ‘impossible’. Then again, that wasn’t too much of a sacrifice to make. The link was two-way, and just as I could pick up other people’s thoughts and memories, they could pick up mine. I was fine with keeping people I didn’t trust out of my head.
What did the prison look like? I asked curiously.
A castle of black stone rising up out of the haze, Anne said. It reminded me of Sagash’s shadow realm, but uglier and without the growing things. Why?
Just curious, I said. I knew that the prison where Morden was being held was called San Vittore, but I’d never seen it. You don’t think he was trying to send you a message or something?
Through a dream? It’s possible, I suppose, but it seems like a funny sort of message. If he could do that, why not tell me directly?
Either way, if it happens again, let me know. I knew that Morden and Richard wanted something from Anne, and I didn’t like anything linking them to her, even something as vague and nebulous as this.
I will.
With the morning errands done, it was time for the bulk of the day’s work.
A lot of people get confused about how the Light Council works, so it’s probably worth taking a minute to explain. The Light Council is split into two parts, the Senior Council and the Junior Council, and the biggest difference between the two is that the Senior Council members are voting while the Junior Council members are non-voting. This means that when a resolution is put before the Council, it’s only the Senior Council members who get a say. The Junior Council have the right to speak on the topic, but not to vote on it.
If you’re wondering why they have a Junior Council at all, the answer is that like a lot of political systems, it’s a mix of circumstance and tradition. In the old days there was no Junior Council – there were seven Council members, and that was that. There was much less of a bureaucracy too – if you worked for the Council, chances were you knew at least one Council member directly. What changed all that was nothing to do with mages and everything to do with this country’s regular inhabitants. In the eighteenth century, Britain was the home of the Industrial Revolution, which along with advances in agriculture led to the population increasing by a factor of ten. With more normals came more mages, and all of a sudden the Council rulership was too small to handle the job. So the bureaucracy grew and kept on growing, and somewhere along the line it got big enough that seven Council members weren’t enough to oversee it all. But no one was willing to expand the number of voting members beyond seven (probably because none of them wanted their own votes diluted) and so the compromise reached was the creation of the Junior Council. To begin with there were only two or three of them, but that number had also gone up over the years until it reached the current status quo of six. Seven Senior Council and six Junior Council made up the full Light Council of thirteen.