It was also a reminder that this wasn’t just about me. Whatever Richard and Morden were planning, it was going to have trickle-down effects to everyone. More lives than our own were going to be affected by this.
The sun was setting when I finished with the last customer and locked up. I used to spend most of my days like this, but over the last couple of years the amount of time I’ve spent running my shop has been going steadily down. Officially the Arcana Emporium’s supposed to be open six days a week, and okay, I don’t think I’ve ever consistently kept to that, but I used to average about four and a half. Nowadays it’s more like three. Either there’s a job, or a problem, or I’m training Luna, or researching . . . and when push comes to shove, running my shop is one of my few responsibilities where if I skip out, then nothing immediately bad is going to happen. Over the last few months I’d actually got into the habit of having Luna run the place every Tuesday, just so there’d be one day the place would consistently be open.
If things kept going the way they had been, though, then before long the average number of days I was putting in at the shop per week was going to hit zero, and that bothered me a little. Weird as it sounds, my shop’s one of the only public faces for magic in this country; for people like Lucian who have some sort of magic-related problem but aren’t plugged into mage society, this is one of the few places they can go. Maybe I needed to start taking steps so that the shop could survive without me . . . I shook it off and checked my e-mail. There was a message from Carol, one of the Keeper admins; they’d received the report I’d sent about yesterday and had sent a form-letter acknowledgement back, which for some reason left me vaguely disappointed. I’d been half-expecting to get chewed out, but it didn’t sound as though they’d even particularly noticed.
Luna had sent me Chalice’s address. I sent her an e-mail agreeing to meet, then spent a couple of hours trying to dig up information. She was a Dark chance mage, but beyond that her affiliation was unknown. No apprentices or dependents that anyone knew about. Trained (and presumably born) outside the U.K., so there wasn’t as much information as there would have been if she’d grown up here. No obvious red flags, and no connection to Morden or Richard that I could find, but I was still uneasy. Dark mages always have an agenda. What was hers?
I was so lost in thought that I didn’t even see it coming when the phone rang. I picked up absently. “Lensman.”
“Hello, Verus.” Lensman is a mage with a voice that sounds like he should be on the BBC. He’s in the same business as me, more or less—while I sell items to adepts and apprentices, Lensman sells to mages. It’s higher profit but a lot more dangerous. I get some of my items from him, and over the years we’ve become friends of a sort, though we rarely meet in person. “Just to let you know, that focus you delivered looks excellent. I’ve already got a buyer lined up.”
“That’s good.” Honestly, I didn’t really care. The item in question had been a concentration-based shielding focus. Completely useless in a combat situation, but for some reason Light duellists love the things. My mind was still on Chalice.
“Well, in the meantime, I’ve sure you’ll be glad to hear that I’ve finally heard back about that archaeological project of yours.”
“Archaeological . . . ?”
“The rubbings?”
“Oh, right.” All of a sudden I was paying attention. I’d forgotten about those notes of Vari’s. “How did it go?”
“Well, it took some time.” Lensman sounded entertained. “You certainly picked a puzzler. Where did you dig them up, anyway?”
“Can’t really discuss it, sorry.” I knew that Lensman would assume that meant it was Council-related. “If you wanted somewhere more secure . . .”
“No, no, nothing sensitive about the information.” I heard the rustling of papers in the background. Lensman doesn’t like using computers—like a lot of mages, he’s the old-fashioned type. “So, the long and the short of it is that the inscriptions are almost certainly Heraclian.”
“As in the philosopher?”
“Not Heraclitus, Heraclian.”
“Okay, I have no idea what that means.”
“Yes, obscure, isn’t it? They were a mage tradition dating back to the Byzantines. Heavy associations with magical creatures. It looks as though those rubbings were taken from a storage device of some kind. Probably their version of a Minkowski box.”
“Any idea what was inside it?”
“No, it seems that whoever took those rubbings left the box sealed.”
“You said they ‘were’ a mage tradition,” I said. “Don’t suppose there’s any chance they’re still around?”
“Unfortunately not. Apparently they got a bit too close to magical creatures for their own good. Came under vampiric control and the Council had to wipe them out in the vampire wars.”
“Anything else in the notes? Where it came from, what it could be used for?”
“Sorry. We were lucky to get this much really.”
Damn it. “Well, thanks.”
I hung up and put the phone on the desk, staring down at it. I tried to puzzle out what all that meant and came up with nothing. Magical creatures in our world have been declining for centuries. Most of the types the Heraclians had been in contact with would probably be extinct by now. What would Richard want with relics of extinct magical creatures? It could mean anything, or nothing . . . and without more information, there was no way to know which. Another dead end.
I leant back, closing my eyes with a sigh. Ever since I saw Richard last year, I’d had a sense of doom. As though I were stumbling around in the dark, blind and clumsy, while Richard was looking down on me from some place of power. He hadn’t contacted me since last year, yet wherever I went and whatever I did, I could feel his presence like a silent shadow. Worst of all, no matter what we did to move against him, I couldn’t shake the creeping feeling that Richard knew exactly what we were doing and wasn’t responding in kind for the simple reason that nothing that I or Anne or Vari or Luna could do was the slightest threat.
I leant back and stared out of the window, wondering what to do. From above the rooftops, stars shone down from a clear sky, and I knew that it would be a bitterly cold night. It was hard not to feel hopeless. I was struggling and clawing to become a Keeper auxiliary, working for weeks and months at a time to gain a tiny bit more favour with the Council. Meanwhile, Richard and Morden between them had more power than I could gain in a hundred years. They could have us all eliminated at any time and place of their choosing, probably with no more than a phone call. Was I really accomplishing anything? Or were all my efforts with the Keepers and with finding a teacher for Luna just a way of passing time?
Then I shook my head. This isn’t getting me anywhere. Maybe working with the Keepers would help and maybe not, but I’d chosen my course of action and all there was to do was stick with it. In the meantime, if I couldn’t do anything about Richard or Luna, I might as well concentrate on something more productive.
All day long, in the back of my mind, I’d been puzzling over that focus I’d found last night and the question of how it had got there. Without it, I could have written off the 999 call as a waste of time. With it . . . well, focuses don’t get left lying around for no reason. Why had one been sitting by the train tracks of an all-but-empty DLR station?
The bottom line was that I’d been told to find out what had happened, and I hadn’t. Yes, I’d followed orders, but I didn’t really want to leave it at that. Part of it was a sense of professionalism, but part of it was just simple curiosity. When you’re a diviner, you have this constant urge to stick your head in for a closer look, and when you don’t, it bugs you. If I wanted to find out what had happened at that station, how would I do it?