‘Yeah, not many do,’ I said. ‘All right. Thanks for the help. One last thing. Are you hoping the marid’s going to pull this off? I mean, mages haven’t given you many reasons to like them.’
‘Some have,’ Karyos said. ‘Besides, I do not believe the sultan’s plan will end happily. The jinn I knew and walked in the woods with, when I was younger . . . I saw nothing left of them in those summoned forms. All that I loved in them is gone.’
I got in touch with Luna. What’s the news? Luna asked immediately.
Richard’s lying about how the ritual works, the Council want me to assassinate him and I’ve learned a few things about divination and jinn. Oh, and I need you to report to the War Rooms to get issued a set of combat armour.
I was hoping to hear something about Vari, but I guess I’ll take what I can get. You want to hear what I’ve found out?
Yes, please.
Okay, Luna said. So I’ve been listening in on the whisper network. Last few times Richard’s launched a big offensive, we’ve heard rumours a day or two in advance. Right?
Ever since the start of the war, Richard’s biggest source of manpower had been his adepts. He had a network in place for passing out messages: orders would go down the pyramid from him, to his inner circle, to Arcadia-trained adepts, to other adepts. Eventually the messages would filter through to adepts who weren’t so loyal, or to ones who’d been having second thoughts about signing up for Richard’s ‘association’, and some of those people would be willing to talk, especially to a friendly shopkeeper who might have helped them in the past. Right, I said.
So that’s not happening now, Luna said. The long-serving adepts, the ones who were trained in Arcadia and who’ve been with him from the beginning, they’re being mobilised for something, they don’t say what. Everyone else is being told to stand down. Word is there’ll be new orders issued after the weekend.
The ritual deadline, I said, and frowned. If you were Richard and you were doing an operation like this, wouldn’t you want all the manpower you could get?
Luna gave a telepathic shrug. He wants a smaller team? Something more agile?
Maybe. I thought for a moment, then shook my head. I’m going to call November.
November responded to my telepathic call instantly. Oh, Alex, I was hoping you’d call. There’s been no movement from Mage Walker or her jinn. My projections now place her within the shadow realm up until the time of the attack with over ninety per cent confidence.
Can you give me the order of battle for the Council strike forces?
November replied instantly, information flowing through the dreamstone far quicker than speech. The Council forces for tonight’s operation are composed of two strike teams and a reserve. The first strike team consists of five hundred and thirty-two mages, auxiliaries and Council security personnel. It is commanded by Director Nimbus, with Captain Rain as his second. The second strike team consists of one hundred and seventy-nine mages and Council security personnel, all cleared for front-line combat. It is commanded by Captain Landis, with Lieutenant Tobias as his second. The first and second strike teams are composed of Keepers from the Order of the Star and the Order of the Shield, respectively. The reserve is still being assigned but is currently somewhere between five and six hundred strong, and contains further members of the Order of the Star, some members of the Order of the Cloak, and other mages classified as secondary combatants. Director Nimbus has field command, with Captain Landis and Captain Rain as second- and third-in-command respectively, but both are subject to Senior Council members Druss, Bahamus and Alma, who will be directly overseeing the operation.
Bloody hell, that’s a lot, I said. I’d never seen the Council deploy even half that many. On a related note, I’m not sure what it says about Council operational security that you could find all that out.
November sounded smug. I am rather good at this.
You know, back when I was planning these kinds of ops, I used to think they were secret. I shook my head. Tell me what you know about the ward defences on the shadow realm.
The Council gained reasonably thorough information on the shadow realm’s wards during the abortive siege four years ago, and in the aftermath a team was tasked with drawing up an attack plan should it be necessary to assault the shadow realm more forcefully. This has been combined with information provided today by the Dark apprentice Yun Ji-yeong, and also with intelligence gathering over the past twenty-four hours in order to produce a reasonably complete picture. The gate wards across the shadow realm are of a standard design and—
Forget the standard wards, I said. Ji-yeong said something about an isolation effect. What’s that?
It seems that after his previous experiences, Sagash became increasingly security conscious, and he was particularly concerned about the threat of a large-scale invasion. Rather like the one that’s going to be launched today, in fact. Though probably not in the way he was expecting. Well, in any case, Sagash devoted considerable time and resources to installing an isolation ward, a large-scale defensive ward placed over the shadow realm as a whole. When activated, the isolation effect alters certain universal constants within the affected shadow realm, causing a dissimilarity between it and our world that makes it difficult if not impossible to link the two with gate magic.
You can do that?
Apparently. It’s a rather experimental branch of magic.
If it’s such a good defence, why doesn’t everyone use it?
Well, for one thing, the similarity between a shadow realm and its corresponding location on Earth is what anchors the shadow realm to our reality. Weakening this metaphysical link could compromise the shadow realm’s stability.
Okay.
Second, November said, the Council have so far been unable to determine precisely which universal constants the isolation ward would affect.
When you say universal constants, you mean . . . ?
The gravitational constant, the Planck constant, the parameters of the Higgs field potential . . . that sort of thing.
Um, I said. In practical terms, what would happen if it changed the wrong ones?
Well, scientifically, it would be very interesting, November said. But you probably wouldn’t want to be in the area while occupying any kind of physical body.
Okay, thanks for giving me some new things to worry about.
In any case, the Council are aware of the defence system and have been studying it in detail, November said. The isolation ward is designed to trigger only in the case of a large-scale assault. The Council’s ward specialists believe that they can bypass this trigger. The isolation ward appears to be fully automatic, so once the strike teams have entered the shadow realm, it should no longer be relevant.
Unless Anne decides to go exploring, finds a big red button somewhere, and pushes it. No, that wouldn’t happen. Survival was Dark Anne’s number one priority. Anything else the Council are doing that I should know about?