“You were lucky,” Caldera said once I’d finished.
“Lucky would be not getting attacked by an assassin-mage in the first place,” I said. “Seriously, can you stop acting like this was my fault?”
“You still shouldn’t have gone back. If you suspected something—”
“Suspected what? There was no evidence that it was going to—”
“All right, all right,” Caldera said with a wave of her hand. “I’ll admit, you didn’t totally screw up.”
“Is that supposed to be a compliment?”
“Anyway, we’re officially assigned to the case. So you can consider yourself on the clock as of yesterday.”
“Do we get anyone else?”
“Rest of the Order are stretched thin right now,” Caldera said. “The ones who aren’t tied up with security ops are off looking for some missing Council guy. You get me.”
“One case, one Keeper?”
“It’s usually enough.” Caldera closed her notepad. “Okay, here’s how things stand. Liaisons are pulling the CCTV from Pudding Mill Lane and Stratford stations for the past seventy-two hours, so we should have that by the end of today. Next priority is this air mage. I’ve checked the watch list and there’s no one recently active who meets your description.”
“He was speaking in French,” I said. “At least, before he was trying to kill me.”
Caldera nodded. “We can try the French Council, but that’ll take time. Anyway, we’ll need a better description before we go to them. Once the CCTV footage gets in, we should have a photo.”
“Timesight?”
“The waiting list for time mages is a mile long,” Caldera said. “I’ve put in a request flagged as urgent, but don’t hold your breath.”
“Maybe we can get this air mage to try to kill you, too. That ought to bump it up the priority list.”
“Next up, this focus. You got it here?”
“It’s with Variam’s master,” I said. “Landis. You know the guy, right?”
“Yeah,” Caldera said, and sighed. “Fine, let’s see if he’s got anything.”
Gate magic makes travel so much easier. If I’d been on my own, getting up to Edinburgh would have meant either an overpriced rail ticket and hours on the train, or a path-finding exercise involving gate stones. With Caldera, we were there inside five minutes.
Edinburgh’s a weird city; castles and ancient buildings and modern shops all piled together down the length of sloped streets, with that giant grass-and-stone hill looking down over the rooftops. In the summer it’s crammed with tourists, but this was February, generally accepted to be the most miserable month in the British year, and not too many visitors were braving the cold winds and drizzle.
In magical society, Edinburgh’s famous for a different reason: it’s the location of the second and smaller of the Council’s two apprentice programs. Sometime back in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, there was a treaty signed giving the Edinburgh mages the right to run their own teaching establishment separate from the ones in the south. Over the centuries most of the mage schools were assimilated into the association that would eventually become the London apprentice program, but the Edinburgh faction resisted it for long enough that having a second apprentice program became a tradition. There’s still the odd attempt to merge the two, but the proposals have always fallen through, partly due to Scottish nationalism but mostly because a number of British mages find it useful to have a secondary power centre in the British Isles that’s not quite so closely connected to the Council.
We wound our way through the streets, away from the tourist centres and to a stone house down a side alley. We rang the bell and the door opened to reveal Variam. “Hey, Vari,” I said.
“Hey,” Variam said. He looked more subdued than usual.
“Landis in?” Caldera asked.
“He’s up there,” Variam said, pointing his thumb at the rickety staircase behind him. “Good luck, you’ll need it.”
Up until a year and a half ago, Anne and Variam were living with me. Anne moved out in the summer to a flat in Honor Oak, but Variam came here to Edinburgh, taking up the role of apprentice to a mage named Landis, a Council Keeper from the Order of the Shield.
The Keepers of the Flame have three orders. The largest and most well known is Caldera’s order, the Order of the Star. The Order of the Star police magical society; if a crime is committed that breaks the peace of the Concord or the national laws of the Council, they’re the ones who are supposed to deal with it. Next is the Order of the Cloak, the ones responsible for preserving the secrecy of the magical world. They work with (and on) the mundane authorities, dealing with normals and sensitives, and they’re much less high-profile. They rarely deal with other mages, to the point that a lot of mages forget that the Order of the Cloak even exists.
And then there’s the Order of the Shield. Once the biggest of the orders, their name’s a hint at their original function: they were battle-mages, meant to protect the population from magical predators. But as magical creatures declined, so did they, and nowadays they’re the Council’s military reserve, called in when a situation is violent or expected to get that way. Ninety-nine percent of their time is spent sitting around doing nothing or guarding against threats that never show up. The last one percent involves getting sent into the most horrendously dangerous situations imaginable. Let’s put it this way—the Order of the Shield are the ones who get sent in when the Council thinks that mages like Caldera aren’t enough.
It shouldn’t be a surprise that Keepers of the Order of the Shield have a reputation for being weird. The Council gives them more leeway than the other orders, probably because people who were entirely sane wouldn’t be volunteering for the job in the first place. Mostly, they just point them at a problem, then get out of the way. I’d met Landis two or three times, but this was the first time I’d visited his house.
The top floor of the building was a wide room with a beautiful view out over the Edinburgh skyline. The room was a workshop, with desks and benches covered in half-built or disassembled clutter, and papers and books were stacked in piles or scattered in the corners, and bent over the desk at the centre was Landis. He’s tall and rangy, with sandy-brown hair and an angular face, and he always seems to be moving. As we walked in he thrust a finger towards us without looking. “Caldera! Lady of the hour! Excellent timing, I’m quite sure you did it on purpose, and don’t think it’s not appreciated. Or was it you, Vari?”
“It’s not that.” Variam had followed us into the room and was looking at Landis in a long-suffering sort of way. “They just wanted to know—”
“Wanting to know, the source and saviour of our problems, but there’s no escaping it, is there? Oh, hello, Verus, of course I don’t need to tell you that. Right then, let’s be about it!” Landis bounded up and covered the distance to Caldera in three long strides, holding something out to her. “There! No goodly state in the realms of gold, but a thing of beauty in its way.”
I peered at the thing warily. It looked like a wide-bodied dart, about the size of my hand, with a body of beaten copper that gleamed in the daylight through the window. I could also feel fire magic radiating from the thing, and a lot of it, which made me more than a little nervous. Fire magic’s good at what it does, but “what it does” mostly involves burning things.
“It’s very nice,” Caldera said. “But what we came for—”
“But time and tide wait for no man, eh? Or woman, or child, or elemental spirit, so no sense admiring the weather.” He tossed the dart to Caldera, who caught it; I felt Variam flinch. “Now just take a twiddle at the top and we’ll be on our way.”
Caldera sighed. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Disassembly, my dear girl—give that gadget you’re holding in your delightful hands a closer inspection by way of its inner parts, field-strip and cleaning, don’t you know?”