“So it’s what—mutually assured destruction?”
“Yes. The number of Council mages who use White Rose’s . . . services . . . is relatively small. But still large enough to cause a great deal of trouble. And the Council, as you may have noticed, dislikes trouble.”
“So they just let them get away with it.”
“Yes. In the same way that you, as an ex–Dark mage, support the torture, murder, and abuse that Dark mages perpetuate.”
“. . . What?”
“Don’t make the mistake of thinking that the Council is monolithic.” There was a slight edge to Talisid’s voice. “The Guardians and the Keepers would love nothing more than to see White Rose eradicated. But Marannis, the Dark mage who runs White Rose, has no political ambitions. If he were using White Rose to expand his power base, he would be a strategic threat. But instead it seems he is quite content to preserve the status quo, which brings him into de facto alliance with the Centrists and Isolationists. As a result, White Rose has existed long enough for it to become . . . part of the landscape. A benign cancer. We have limited political capital, and making a concerted push to destroy White Rose would cause significant internal conflict in the Council. So for the past years our policy has been one of containment. Well, Vihaela’s arrival on the scene could have changed that given time, but . . .”
I nodded, filing away the references to “our” and “we” to my mental dossier on Talisid and his position, and making a note to find out who Vihaela was. “Okay.”
“So I hope you understand exactly how large a can of worms you opened when you and Caldera reported White Rose’s name to the Keepers last night. You see, for all the crimes Marannis has committed in his time leading White Rose, the one thing he has been very careful to do is never break the Concord. Now all of a sudden, the Keepers have evidence linking White Rose not only with Rayfield’s disappearance—or murder, as the case may be—but an attack on you and Caldera.”
I still wasn’t sure that it was actually White Rose that had been behind that attack, but I got the point. “How does the Rayfield case fit in?”
“Rayfield is—or was—apprentice to Nirvathis, who is attempting to secure a seat on the Junior Council. I assume you know this?”
“Yeah.”
“What you may not know is that Nirvathis is an empty suit,” Talisid said. “He was chosen by certain Light faction members to be a puppet. And the main controller of that puppet is your old acquaintance, Levistus.”
“Shit.”
“Yes. Levistus hopes to use this to secure himself a place on the Senior Council this coming year.”
“Goddamn it,” I said. “So that brings the whole thing with Morden in, too.”
“Actually, at a conservative estimate, I would guess that by now around fifty percent of the active political population of the Light Council is involved in this affair of yours at one remove or another.”
“And I’m in the middle of it.”
“Yes.” Talisid paused. “Verus . . . I haven’t said anything about your choice to work more closely with the Keepers. I understand that in some ways it was a logical decision. However, given the direction things are taking, it might be advisable to reconsider.”
“Right. Wouldn’t want your prospective mole with Richard to associate himself too visibly with the other side, would we?”
“I understand that—”
“I’m not going back to Richard.” My voice was flat. “Not as a double agent, not as a triple agent, not for you, and not for anyone else either. It’s not going to happen. Ever. Understand that.”
“Becoming involved in a conflict between Council factions will not help that goal in any way.”
“I’ll take that under advisement.” I looked at the clock: it was past eleven. I needed to get moving. “I have to go.”
Talisid paused again, and futures of him trying to persuade me further flickered briefly before vanishing. “All right. Good luck.”
I cut the connection and prepared quickly for my trip, checking my phone as I did. There was a message from Luna: she’d arranged an appointment with Chalice for this afternoon. It was an e-mail rather than a voice mail, which I suspected she’d done so that it would be harder for me to tell her not to do it. I was still uneasy about sending her off to meet Chalice, but she had Anne, and I had too many other things on my plate already. I sent her a short message and put it out of my mind. Time to visit the War Rooms.
Chapter 9
Beneath the Treasury in Westminster is an underground complex called the Churchill War Rooms. It’s a museum, though not a well-known one; the tourists that crowd London in the holiday seasons usually want to see places like the British Museum and the National Gallery, and the Churchill War Rooms get less than a tenth of the visitors of either of those. It was built on the eve of the Second World War, a concrete labyrinth designed to withstand bombing raids, and during those long dark years it was the place from where Churchill and his cabinet directed the wartime efforts of Britain.
But the Churchill War Rooms isn’t the only tunnel network beneath this city. People have been living in London for a very long time, and while there have been people, there have been mages. It was inevitable that the Council would set up their headquarters there. The original centre for the Council was a sprawling complex of spires and towers situated near the old St. Paul’s Cathedral in the City. It was burnt to ash in the 1666 Great Fire of London, along with the old cathedral, the Royal Exchange, and pretty much everything else within the City limits. (Depending on who you believe, the destruction of Council headquarters might have been the reason for the Great Fire, and the “started in a bakery” explanation a cover-up, but that’s another story.)
With their old base destroyed, the Council needed a new one, and an argument broke out as to where to go. The Isolationists wanted a place out in the countryside where they’d have as little interaction with normal humans as possible. The more moderate members wanted to pick a smaller city like Gloucester or Oxford. But the Directors wanted their power centre here, in the heart of the City, and as London was being rebuilt they took the opportunity to lay the foundations for what would become the new centre of magical government in Britain for the next three hundred and fifty years.
One of the reasons the Directors won the argument was that they’d noticed which way the wind was blowing. Traditionally mages had lived in towers, way up above the ground, to the point where it had become a status symbol. Unfortunately for the status-conscious mages of that time period, spells and technology had been evolving at a good clip, and the seventeenth century’s brisk trade in Light-Dark warfare provided the more innovative mages on both sides with plenty of opportunity to give the new weapons a test-drive. Experimental data proved that that towers and artillery didn’t mix. After several well-publicised incidents of traditionally defended towers being brought down by cannon fire, even the slower-witted members of the Light Council figured out that while towers might work for personal residences, they probably weren’t the best choice for a military centre of government.
Building a centre of government below ground, on the other hand, was a different story. Compared to a traditional tower or castle, an underground complex would be harder to attack, easier to defend, and much more likely to go unnoticed by any normal people living on the surface. So in the aftermath of the Great Fire, the first tunnels were burrowed into the area beneath what’s now modern Westminster. With earth and matter mages to do the bulk of the work, the tunnels expanded fast, and within a generation they’d become a sprawling warren. The Summer War did a good job of proving the security of the tunnel network, and the Council’s stayed there ever since. Somewhere during one of the various Dark-Light skirmishes the tunnels started getting called the War Rooms, and the name stuck.