‘You guessed you’d up whatever reward you’re going to get from Montgomery if she stayed missing a few more days. Probably you even took something from Rhaine herself to keep silent. If you were smarter then you are, you’d have made sure that list of names you gave the general didn’t include anyone halfway competent. Though in due deference, you probably figured I’d go along with it, between the two of us we could string the man out for half his worth.’
The gradual pinkening of his fat face suggested I wasn’t far off the mark. ‘I simply can’t understand where you’re getting these absurd notions.’
‘It doesn’t matter why I think what I think, Gilchrist. You wouldn’t be able to follow along anyway. What matters is that she did visit you, and I know it, and the more time you waste pretending otherwise the faster I start to lose patience – which if we’re being honest, is not one of my stronger qualities anyway. So let’s dispense with the pretense that you’re an honest man, or that anything you’ve said to me up to this point is true. I won’t hold it against you. In fact, if you come through for me now, I’ll even try to score some coin for you, once I send her home.’
Between the promise of money and the flaccid nature of his character, Iomhair folded. ‘She asked me about her brother. She said she wanted to know about what he was doing before he died.’
‘And what did you tell her?’
‘Not much. I didn’t know much. I told her to go down and see the boys at the Association – they were the ones to talk to.’
The anger that I had been feigning flared to life. I tamped down on it. Getting hot never helps anything. ‘You sent her to see the vets?’
I must not have done an absolutely successful job of keeping myself calm because his tongue seemed stuck in its depression, and it was a while before he stuttered out confirmation. ‘Yeah.’
‘By the Lost One, Gilchrist, sometimes I forget how fucking stupid you really are.’
I guess there wasn’t much could be said to that. At least, nothing he could think of, or had the courage to speak.
‘When did this interview take place?’ I asked.
‘Yesterday evening. I didn’t think it would do any harm. Roland was the head of the Veterans’ Association before he died, and Joachim Pretories was always his truest friend.’
I had no interest in setting Iomhair straight about the nature of the Association’s activities, nor the character of their current commander. ‘Where is she sleeping?’
‘I don’t know – I swear, she wouldn’t tell me. You know I’d never lie to you.’ As if he hadn’t spent most of the conversation doing just that.
‘Then I guess you’ll need to find out.’
‘How?’
‘That’s the nice part about not being a pawn, Gilchrist – you get to tell people what to do without working out how they’ll do it.’
The truth was I didn’t have much to hold over the man if he refused me – but he wouldn’t, conditioned as he was to do the bidding of anyone who raised their voice. ‘There isn’t any need to let the general know I saw Rhaine, is there? I was going to tell him, really, I just didn’t get the chance yet.’
‘If you aren’t going to smoke that,’ I finished, nodding at his unlit cigar, ‘you’d best put it back in its box.’
He looked down at the fat five inches trembling in his hand, and I bobbed on out.
5
The air in the Earl was so stale you could cube it and stack the pieces. I headed to the courtyard to draw myself a pint of water from our pump.
Wren sat cross-legged against the back wall, eyes closed as if in slumber. He had grown since I’d taken him off the street three years prior. As a child he had been lean and quick, light-skinned, dark-haired, and subtle as the night. As a youth he had turned gawky, and, cruel as it was to point out, acne-ridden. Though he ate three square meals and incessantly between them, he was as thin as he had been the day I’d found him loitering in an alleyway, and it sat worse on him than it once had. His limbs seemed overlong, like they were intended for a full-grown man but had been mislaid. I figured he’d grow into them, if someone didn’t kill him first.
And someone might, for a lot of reasons. Because he had a sharp mouth and opened it around people who repaid insult with iron. Because despite my best efforts he still had only a dubious respect for the concept of personal property. But primarily because of the small blue light that swirled around his outstretched palm – speaking more accurately, because of his ability to produce it.
Most folk live and die without ever having any direct experience with the Art. They come to think of it like it is in fairy tales, rings that turn you invisible, incantations that make a man fly or transform shit to gold. Maybe during the harvest festival they give a hoarded argent to a traveling conjuror in exchange for a charm or a palm reading. Almost certainly, they gave their money to a con man, and are lucky to have found themselves cheated.
Because there is far more terror in the Art than wonder, and even as a child, when I’d counted amongst my closest friends perhaps the most powerful and certainly the most decent practitioner the realm had ever produced, I still didn’t like it. Magic is a perversion of reality. Dabbling with it is, in my experience, a recipe for madness, or damnation.
Though in truth, the damage Wren might cause himself was not my primary concern. The Art was power in its most concentrated form, and the government regulated it zealously. At the first sign of the spark a practitioner was required to register themselves with the Crown, and anyone under twenty-five forcibly enrolled in the Academy for the Furtherance of the Magical Arts. Originally it had been a wartime measure, to fade away once the crisis with the Dren had passed. But of course, that’s not the way things work – once authority is ceded to the Crown, nothing short of revolution is sufficient to claw it back. Indeed, in the years since the armistice the Crown’s hold on the Empire’s practitioners had only grown firmer. When it first started the Academy had been a finishing school for practitioners, its students in their late teens or early twenties, already long apprenticed to a master. These days the Academy was closer to a prison than a boarding school, raising the next generation of sorcerers to walk in lockstep with the Throne.
I swallowed my greeting once I saw the phantasm. Mind fixed on his creation, Wren didn’t notice my appearance. Even a basic use of the Art is taxing, and he was still an amateur – it took every ounce of concentration to maintain his working.
A long-handled ax was slung by the door, awaiting the next time Adolphus needed to chop wood. I slipped my palm around the butt and stalked the short distance between us, flipping it over so the blade was towards me. Then I rang the back end of it against the wall a few inches above Wren’s head, the metal sparking off stone.
The light died stillborn and the boy leapt to his feet, but I was ready for him, discarding the ax and pinning his shoulders against the wall. ‘Are you out of your mind?’ I asked quietly, and despite the coolness with which I’d taken my quarry my heart beat a rapid staccato. ‘Are you out of your fucking mind?’
He wouldn’t look at me, his head swinging back and forth as if to some unheard rhythm.
‘Do you have any idea how dangerous that is? What can happen if you miscalculate?’
‘I know what I’m doing.’
I tightened my fingers around his collarbone. ‘There are cells below the Bureau of Magic Affairs for people who knew what they were doing, knew what they were doing till they didn’t. Maybe tomorrow I’ll take you to see them, rows of lunatics shitting themselves and spouting gibberish.’
He stopped swaying long enough to sneer. ‘You wouldn’t get in.’
‘No, I wouldn’t – but they’d still be there, and you’ll still be joining them if you keep acting the fool.’
‘I’m careful. I don’t try anything I can’t handle.’
‘You don’t know enough to know that. And what if someone else had come by and seen you, as you were so bright you decided to try this outdoors? The Crown pays yellow for straight tips on children with the gift.’
‘I’m not a child.’
‘You act like one. How do you think it’d be telling Adeline that the gray are carting you off, remaking you into their tool, that she’s never gonna see you again?’ I shoved him back against the bricks. ‘The Art isn’t a fucking toy –
