Risen, p.8
Risen, page 8
part #12 of Alex Verus Series
You can do that?
Apparently. It’s a rather experimental branch of magic.
If it’s such a good defence, why doesn’t everyone use it?
Well, for one thing, the similarity between a shadow realm and its corresponding location on Earth is what anchors the shadow realm to our reality. Weakening this metaphysical link could compromise the shadow realm’s stability.
Okay.
Second, November said, the Council have so far been unable to determine precisely which universal constants the isolation ward would affect.
When you say universal constants, you mean . . . ?
The gravitational constant, the Planck constant, the parameters of the Higgs field potential . . . that sort of thing.
Um, I said. In practical terms, what would happen if it changed the wrong ones?
Well, scientifically, it would be very interesting, November said. But you probably wouldn’t want to be in the area while occupying any kind of physical body.
Okay, thanks for giving me some new things to worry about.
In any case, the Council are aware of the defence system and have been studying it in detail, November said. The isolation ward is designed to trigger only in the case of a large-scale assault. The Council’s ward specialists believe that they can bypass this trigger. The isolation ward appears to be fully automatic, so once the strike teams have entered the shadow realm, it should no longer be relevant.
Unless Anne decides to go exploring, finds a big red button somewhere, and pushes it. No, that wouldn’t happen. Survival was Dark Anne’s number one priority. Anything else the Council are doing that I should know about?
Just preparations. If it helps, I haven’t seen any indications that they’re planning to try to assassinate you again.
Not for the next two days, at least. Thanks, November. Let me know if anything changes.
Of course.
I broke the connection and sat back. Around me, the Hollow was peaceful and quiet. I thought back over what I’d learned this morning. My mind jumped from detail to detail, searching for connections.
I kept coming back to two things. Richard’s lie about the ritual, and the isolation ward. I held the two ideas up in my thoughts. I had the feeling they fit together somehow.
I still had a few hours left, and I’d spoken to most of the people I needed. The obvious missing piece was Richard, but my instincts told me that right now, going to talk to him would be a mistake. I didn’t know the right questions to ask, and I was starting to learn that letting Richard set the agenda was a very bad idea. He’d give away less than I would.
But it was Richard who was the key. It wouldn’t be enough this time to just react. I needed to understand him.
I sat there in the Hollow for a few minutes, listening to the birds sing in the trees. Gradually an idea began to take form. It wasn’t a particularly pleasant one, and at first I pushed it away, but each time I did, it would circle around and come back. At last, reluctantly, I rose to my feet and began making a gate.
*
The apartment block was red, with sand-coloured edgings and pale blue drainpipes running from the roof to the ground. Wrought iron balconies jutted from the flats; the balconies on each level had a different design, from half-moons to rectangles to boxes topped with spikes, as though the building had grown layer by layer over the decades with a different architect each time. The street felt too wide and the air too cold, and I watched the cars pass by for a couple of minutes before entering.
The inside of the apartment building was gloomy, with the odour of cleaning fluid trying to drown out an underlying scent of mould and beer. The lift had a notice posted on it in Cyrillic, and didn’t work. I took the stairs.
The third-floor corridor ran the length of the building, with light streaming in from the window at the far end. Muffled sounds of traffic drifted in from the outside. Sitting in a chair beside the window was a woman with a lined craggy face who looked older than the building. At the sight of me, she glared and fired off a challenge in rapid-fire Russian.
I gave her a nod and walked down the corridor. When I reached the right door, I knocked.
The woman hauled herself to her feet and said something angry-sounding. She had white hair peeking from under a red shawl, and carried a thick walking stick. She stomped down the hallway, brandishing the stick.
‘Relax,’ I told her. ‘I’m just visiting.’
Suspicious eyes glared up at me from under deep-set brows. She shook the stick under my nose.
There was a soft footstep from behind the door, and I turned away from the woman to face the spyhole. There was a moment’s silence, then the sound of a key turning in a lock and a chain rattling. The door opened to reveal another woman, taller and straighter-backed than the old lady. She stared at me.
I looked back at her.
‘Well,’ she said after a pause. ‘You might as well come in.’ She said something in Russian to the old lady, then disappeared into the flat. The old lady gave me a look of deep suspicion before stomping off down the corridor.
I walked into the flat, the door closing behind me with a soft snick. The rooms inside were quiet with a sense of age, beams of light filtering through the windows to catch motes of dust floating in the air. It smelt of old wood and cigarettes. I walked through the entry hall into the living room.
My mother was sitting in a chair near the window, her legs crossed. The chair was positioned so that the rays from the window caught her legs but left her body in shadow, and she was holding a cigarette between two fingers from which a trail of smoke drifted lazily toward the ceiling. It was a while since we’d seen each other, and I looked at her face, studying her. Not much change. Deep hooded eyes, aquiline nose, wide mouth, strong jaw. A few more lines at the eyes and cheeks. The hair was still jet-black, though it was starting to look out of place. How old would she be now? Twenty-three plus thirty-four . . . fifty-seven.
I nodded back toward the corridor. ‘I see you’ve got a dragon guarding your door.’
‘Olya,’ my mother said with a faint smile. Her accent was more pronounced than I remembered. ‘She was floor manager in our building when I was a girl. Now she keeps away the Uzbekistanis. They steal things.’ She nodded at a chair. ‘Sit down.’
The chair was by the table, directly in the path of the window. I moved it into the shade and sat. The light from the window streamed into the room between us.
‘You look starved,’ my mother said. ‘Isn’t anyone feeding you?’
‘I’ve had a busy few weeks.’
‘And you haven’t had time to eat?’ She raised her eyebrows. ‘Why are you here?’
‘Family visit.’
‘You don’t visit. You didn’t even come to the wedding.’
‘You mean your second wedding?’ I asked. ‘Or have you had a third one I don’t know about?’
My mother frowned at me. ‘Don’t be uncultured.’
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘But you can’t expect your son to be especially excited about you divorcing his father and marrying someone else.’
My mother had been tapping her cigarette into a glass ashtray; now she shot a look at me. ‘What happened to you?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You said sorry,’ my mother said. ‘And you didn’t start a fight.’
I gave her an annoyed look. ‘So?’
‘Oh.’ My mother’s eyes opened wide. ‘Who’s the girl?’
‘What do you mean, who’s the girl?’
‘You’ve fallen in love,’ my mother said. ‘Who’s the girl?’
‘This hasn’t got anything to do with a girl.’
My mother laughed. ‘I know men, and I know you.’
I tried to shake off the annoyance. It didn’t work. How do parents always manage to get under your skin? ‘Given how your relationship with Dad turned out, I’m not sure you know men all that well.’
‘Your father’s an idiot.’
‘He’s a university professor.’
‘He made professor? Hm.’ My mother shrugged. ‘Very smart idiot is still an idiot. He could have been part of the English camarilla. He knew the right people. I told him, all you have to do is not rock the boat. I would have helped. I could have been at his side, done what he couldn’t. But he wouldn’t listen.’ My mother shook her head. ‘When he came home that day and told me he was resigning from the party . . . good God, I was angry! You probably don’t remember, you were too small. I was furious. A few more years and they would have been in power; all he had to do was keep his mouth shut. He said it was a point of principle. Tchah!’ It was a disgusted noise. ‘So he shuffled off to teach in a dusty classroom.’
‘I don’t much agree with my dad’s principles either,’ I said. ‘But he is sincere about them. And looking back on it, he did try to make the marriage work.’
‘Principles,’ my mother said, loading the word with contempt. ‘Things for rich men in rich countries. A man should put his family first.’
I didn’t have an answer to that. I looked away, out the window. Unbidden, a cold, uncomfortable thought came to my mind. The things I cared about, the person I was . . . how much of that was just the imprint of my parents? How many of my problems had been me trying to reconcile two incompatible ways of looking at the world?
‘I think,’ I said after a pause, ‘that if you and Dad had focused a bit less on why your ways of doing things were right, and focused a bit more on compromising with each other, then my life would have turned out a hell of a lot better.’
My mother sighed and seemed to deflate. Suddenly she looked much older and much more tired. ‘I was young and full of fire. And stupid. I thought I could handle everything.’ She studied the smouldering tip of her cigarette. ‘You think I haven’t had that same thought, many times? There is much time for regret, at my age.’ She looked up, met my eyes. ‘Do you still hate me for it?’
I took a moment to answer. ‘No,’ I said at last. ‘I carried a lot of resentment for a long time, but . . . no. My life’s my own, and so are my choices. Anyway, I’ve seen what happens when people hold onto grudges. It doesn’t end well.’
My mother didn’t answer, but I thought I felt her relax just a little.
‘Richard came to visit you after I left home,’ I said. ‘It would have been seventeen years ago.’
My mother looked curiously at me. ‘So?’
‘What did you think of him?’
‘What did I think?’ My mother laughed. ‘Now you listen to your mother? I’m going to die of shock.’
‘Better late than never. So do you remember?’
‘Of course I remember,’ my mother said. ‘He was a tolkach.’
I gave her a puzzled look. Tolkach doesn’t have a good translation in English – ‘pusher’, maybe, or ‘fixer’. They’d been the manipulators of the old Soviet system, wheedling and lying and bartering to make the numbers add up to what the government said they should. My mother had told me stories about them, when I was young and she’d been in a good mood. ‘I don’t think he lived in Russia.’
My mother waved a hand impatiently. ‘Every country has tolkachi. Some admit it; some pretend. He was one of the ones who would pretend. Oh, he was charming and cultured and when we spoke he was very attentive. He wanted to be seen as noble, like an old Romanov. But I grew up around tolkachi and I know them when I see them. The look in their eyes, always thinking what they can sell.’
I almost smiled at the image. The idea of Richard as a two-bit criminal was funny. It would be nice if he was only that.
Maybe he is?
I frowned.
‘I told myself it would be good for you,’ my mother said. She was looking past me, lost in her memories. ‘You were so rigid. I hoped it would teach you something.’ She was silent for a moment. ‘Some part of me knew I was being foolish, that he was a dangerous man. But what could I do? You would not listen.’
‘I suppose not,’ I said absently, then glanced out the window. The sun was dipping low over the St Petersburg skyline, and I rose to my feet. ‘I’d better go.’
My mother tapped out her cigarette and rose with me. ‘I hope you don’t leave so long between visits next time.’
‘No promises.’
My mother had closed the distance between us. Now her hand shot out to grab my arm, her grip surprisingly strong. I gave her a quizzical look.
‘I’m not a fool, Alex.’ Her voice was quiet. ‘You didn’t come here just to talk about your old teacher.’
‘No,’ I admitted. ‘But you did help. Thank you.’
‘I won’t ask what you’re going to do.’ My mother’s eyes were dark and intense. ‘But whatever it is, you come back. Understand?’
I looked back at her for a moment before nodding. ‘I’ll do my best.’
‘Good.’ My mother released my arm. ‘And stop calling yourself by that ridiculous name. My mother and father kept our family name alive through the famines and the purges and the siege, and you just throw it away?’
I sighed.
By the time I stepped out into the streets of St Petersburg, the sun was hanging low over the buildings. Long shadows stretched out across the road, and a cold wind was blowing out of the east.
I turned down the pavement and began walking, absently tracking the cars and pedestrians, lost in my thoughts. I’d come to see Richard as a mastermind, someone who was always two steps ahead. And I wasn’t the only one – the Council had developed an almost superstitious fear of him. Mages like Alma liked to pretend the Council was invincible, but he’d outmanoeuvred them too many times for them to believe it.
But my mother didn’t know about the war, and had only a vague knowledge of the magical world. She’d judged him as a man. Maybe she’d seen something I hadn’t.
Tolkachi were manipulators and liars. Richard’s reputation had built him up to be some kind of dark lord. But what if he wasn’t? What if he was just an ordinary man who’d used tricks and leverage to parley up his magical talents to the point where he could punch far above his weight? Like me?
If that were true, then I shouldn’t be thinking about how to beat Richard, as though he was the final boss at the end of a dungeon. I should be looking for the trick. Yes, he’d tended not to lie – at least, not directly – but he’d always used misdirection, hadn’t he? In all his big operations, he’d made the Council look the wrong way before catching them off guard.
Put it all together. He’d said he needed the Council’s help to defeat the jinn – probably true. He’d implied the jinn’s ritual would act on Anne – definitely false. He hadn’t mentioned the isolation ward, but he’d certainly know about it. And he wasn’t bringing as many forces as he could.
A crazy idea surfaced in my mind. That couldn’t be his plan, could it? But no – as I thought it through, it wasn’t crazy. Audacious, yes, and you’d have to be very careful about calculating the risks. But wasn’t that exactly Richard’s style?
The more I thought about it, the more plausible it seemed.
But if I was right, then how to counter it? Richard was a diviner. If I set up anything in advance, he’d see it coming, and I couldn’t project false futures well enough to fool him. There was the jamming technique I’d learned from Helikaon, but that didn’t have enough range.
Well, that just left the more traditional ways of fooling divination. Cloud the futures with randomness and individual choice, and don’t give the diviner enough time to react.
I turned around on the pavement and started walking towards my gating spot. Three hours to go.
6
The War Rooms were full of noise and motion. Even out here in the entry hall, you could feel the change in the atmosphere: clerks and messengers hurried in and out through the security gates, too preoccupied to talk. They were so busy, they hadn’t even noticed me come down from the surface.
I walked up to the security gates, paused to let a Council bureaucrat run by and stopped in front of the officer on duty. He was busy writing on a clipboard. ‘Hi, Fred,’ I told him.
‘Just use the gates, we’re not signing anyone in today—’ Something in my voice made the security officer look up mid-sentence. His eyes went wide.
‘Been a while,’ I said. ‘How are the wife and kids?’
Fred hesitated, his eyes darting around at the rushing crowd. ‘Um—’
‘Relax,’ I told him. ‘I’m not here to pick a fight, and if I was, it wouldn’t be with you. Anyway, I guess they haven’t told you about the truce. I’m not kill-on-sight any more.’
‘Ah . . .’ Fred said. ‘Mage Verus, I’m really supposed to call this in . . .’
‘Go ahead,’ I said. ‘But your supervisor’s not going to answer and the front desk is busy. Ask them to put you through to Mage Talisid. He’ll vouch for me.’
Fred looked as if he’d rather be anywhere else, but he took a few steps away and started muttering into his communicator, shooting me occasional glances. After a few minutes he turned back to me. ‘He’s on his way.’
Talisid arrived fast enough that he must have run or jogged. He weaved his way through the crowd towards us. ‘Thank you, Officer –’ He glanced at the badge. ‘– Davies. I’ll take it from here.’
Fred Davies swiped me through the security gates and watched us go with a definite look of relief. ‘Here’s the bullet ward you asked for,’ Talisid said, passing it to me. The focus was made of dull grey metal, designed to clip onto a wrist. ‘I had to sign it out, so I’d prefer if you could return it, but given the circumstances I’ll understand if you don’t.’
The corridors of the War Rooms were filled with noise and bustle. Almost none of the people rushing past us would be going on the operation today, but you could feel the tension in the air: everyone knew that something big was happening. ‘Are you sure it’ll be enough?’ Talisid asked.
‘This’ll do fine,’ I said. Bullet wards aren’t very powerful, but by the same token they don’t need much energy. ‘Where do you have me placed in the command structure?’
