“Because she thinks you got something to do with this too.”
Eliot’s free hand slipped his handsome silver watch from his pocket and flicked the case open and closed. Ilsa kept her face impassive, but she was certain this time that she had discovered Eliot’s tell. Whatever he said next would be a lie.
“She never approved of me in the first place,” he said into his tea. “This matter was just an excuse.”
So not about the missing wolves at all, then. She had believed him when he said the others thought he was involved in Gedeon’s disappearance. She had believed it before then. But there was something else between Hester and Eliot. Her cousin had other reasons not to trust him, and Eliot knew what they were.
“And now you’re idle,” Ilsa baited.
He was silent a moment. Ilsa was reminded again of cards; of waiting for her opponent to lay his bet.
“Not exactly. I think I know a little of what Gedeon has been up to. Here.” He rose gracefully and indicated for Ilsa to follow him to a desk, where several newspapers were splayed. “Shortly after Gedeon vanished, there was a raid on a chemist in the Heart. Then another. A week later, another.” He lifted each story in turn and tossed them down in front of Ilsa. “Six in total. No money was taken. Most of the stock was untouched. Only vemanta was stolen. When the chemists replenished their stock, the raiders hit them all again.”
“I never heard of vemanta,” said Ilsa. “What’s this got to do with Gedeon?”
“I’m coming to that. No, you wouldn’t have heard of vemanta. Strange as it may seem, the flower we derive it from does not grow in the Otherworld, but I believe one can compare it to a poppy.”
“Like opium, then.”
“It’s almost exactly like opium,” said Eliot. “Available in any chemist, useful as a pain reliever or to help one sleep in small doses, but addictive. Do you know why someone would steal it all?”
Ilsa picked up the topmost story and scanned it. Smash and grab. Locks forced. Windows broken. It seemed Sorcerer shop keepers had sophisticated, magic ways of raising the alarm when they were robbed, but it had done them no good. The thieves were fast, knew what they were looking for, and vanished before anyone arrived.
“Someone with a habit?” said Ilsa. “I hear you’re really sleepy these days.”
Eliot grimaced. “That’s some habit. And you don’t have a very high opinion of me, do you?”
“I’m still deciding,” she replied, staring at him straight on.
One corner of Eliot’s mouth pulled up into a smirk. “You know what it means to be an Oracle, don’t you?”
“Fyfe said something ’bout having books thrown at you.” Eliot didn’t have an answer for that. Ilsa shrugged. “I din’t get it neither.”
“An Oracle’s magic is tremendously powerful yet impossibly difficult to wield. From the moment an Oracle is born, they See the whole past, the whole present, and the future as it will be at any given moment, of everything and everyone on earth, all at once.”
Eliot paused, as if to give her a moment to consider it, and Ilsa was silent a while as she pretended to. “I still don’t get it.”
“Because you and I can never truly conceive of what it’s like. We experience time as linear, and our perception is fixed in place – it’s limited to what information we can gather with our senses. Neither is true for an Oracle. An Oracle in Kensington, say, can See a kitchen of a lumberjack’s cottage in Northern Tuman—”
“Where, now?”
“—not just in this moment, but in every single moment of time for as long as that cottage has stood. They can See the spot where it was built before any non-Oracle knew the place existed, when it was the feeding ground of creatures long extinct.”
“If that’s true, and they See everything, why ain’t they running the show?”
Eliot smiled grimly. “Because they See it all at once, all the time, and they cannot shut it off. Imagine you’re standing in a crowded room. You close your eyes and you try to pick out a single voice, no louder or closer than any of the others, and you try to focus on it. Imagine simply trying to hear your own inner voice amidst all the noise. Oracles call it the Glare. A blinding, indiscriminate deluge of space and time. For most, it doesn’t mean power at all, it means madness.”
“So what’s all this got to do with vemanta?”
“Disorientation, sleeplessness, a loss of touch with reality. The hallucinations are the real kick in the teeth, if you ask me. As if it’s not enough to be crushed under the weight of your Sight, flounder down there long enough and you won’t even know which visions are real any more. It’s no wonder so many of them choose to surrender their minds. Most surrender theirs to vemanta. Nothing dulls the mind, and thus an Oracle’s magic, quite like it.”
Ilsa had never been more glad to know so little. It staggered her that the Oracles could believe in the sanctity of a magic that was so… broken.
“So, Oracles robbed them chemists?” she said, puzzled.
Eliot smiled knowingly. “No Oracle with a pressing need for a fix is capable of a methodical, sustained operation like this, but Gedeon is.”
Ilsa frowned at the papers spread in front of her again. The more she learned of her brother, the less honourable he seemed. “Why would he be stealing vemanta?”
“Control the vemanta, control the Oracles who need it. The Heart have had a monopoly on the city’s vemanta supply for decades and it’s made them very rich. They channel it mainly through their own chemists of course, to keep the money in the quarter, and sell just enough elsewhere to appease all the right people. These six
