Alex Verus 5: Hidden (19 page)

“Because I tried that the first time I ran away. It doesn’t work; there isn’t enough forest before you hit the boundary. I went into the castle instead, then those Dark mages came through behind me.”

“They’re Sagash’s apprentices.”

Anne nodded. “I thought they were. The first place they checked was the forest. It gave me enough time to get into the castle and I lost them in the courtyards.”

“You did a pretty good job,” I said. “I don’t think many mages would have lasted this long here.”

Anne didn’t smile. “It’s not my first time.”

“Well,” I said, “you’re the expert. What’s the best way out?”

“The main gate. But I don’t have a key.”

I held up the fluted rod I’d taken from Darren. “You mean one of these?”

“That’s it.”

“One slight problem,” I said. “Darren and Sam stuck a squad of eight of those shadows on top of the platform.” I’d taken a few minutes to confirm it after breaking away from the three apprentices, and Ji-yeong had been telling the truth. “Don’t suppose you know a way to deal with those things?”

Anne shook her head; she looked weary. “They’re not alive, my magic can’t touch them. It was why I could never get away. There are too many and they don’t get tired or give up.”

Anne’s head was down. “Well, it might not be that bad,” I said, trying to sound cheerful. “From what I overheard, I think Sagash only lets his apprentices play with four of them each. If they’ve got their shadows there, they haven’t got them out here looking for us.”

Anne didn’t answer. “Any other ways out?” I asked.

“Maybe.” Anne shook her head. “Yeah. I don’t know exactly . . . Somewhere.” Her eyes drifted closed for half a second, then she pulled herself awake again. “What was that?”

I frowned. “Are you okay?”

“. . . Little tired.”

“Have you slept since you got here?”

“They’ve been looking for me,” Anne said. “They searched here the first night. If I’m asleep . . .” She trailed off.

“You’ve been awake for
three days
?”

“I can go longer than this if I have to.” Anne sounded defensive.

“That doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.” I looked at Anne, and this time I noticed the little signs I’d missed; her eyes were slightly dulled, her movements not as quick or as sure. She must have been running on adrenaline since she’d heard me, and now it had worn off. I made a quick decision. “Get some sleep and I’ll keep watch. I can use the time to scout ahead.”

Anne put up a token protest but it didn’t last long. She curled up in the nest of sacks like a dormouse, and when I next looked she was fast asleep.

I leant back against the wall with a sigh.
Well, that’s step one. Now we just need to get out.
I looked through the futures in which I sat still, watching to see if anyone would come. Apart from the futures in which Anne woke, nothing disturbed us. For now at least, we were alone.

I looked over at Anne and saw that she was shivering slightly. I walked quietly across the floor and tucked my coat more closely around her. She settled into it with a sighing sound and her shivering slowed. I looked down at her and had to smile. Asleep, Anne looked very young and delicate. It was good to know she was safe.

Though her surviving shouldn’t really have been a surprise. I once saw Anne shot with a full clip of bullets, and by the next day she was walking around as though nothing had happened. I’ve also seen her rip the life out of another mage in the blink of an eye. She might look delicate, but she isn’t.

How much of that came from what had happened to her here?

I shook my head and straightened, then walked to the stairs and climbed up to the next floor. The staircase led into an upper level with windows open in all four directions, giving a view down onto the grass and the pool and out to sea. The sun had set, and the sky was a tapestry of red cloud fading into dusky purple to the east. I sat on the stone floor, resting my back against the wall with a sigh. My armour isn’t really designed for lying around in, but it’s a lot better than anything made out of metal or Kevlar and I was comfortable enough. I closed my eyes and started searching for a way out.

Just as the conditions at the Tiger’s Palace had been terrible for path-walking, the conditions in the castle were nearly perfect. Path-walking requires a long chain of highly predictable links, and as soon as one link becomes unstable, everything beyond it collapses. If you’re within a busy environment like a city, then normally the only way to do any kind of long-distance path-walking is to limit it to your own home or some other controlled environment where you don’t have to worry about passersby destroying your intricate probabilistic house of cards. But here, path-walking was easy. The castle wasn’t deserted but it was pretty close, and the only uncertainty came from the ocean winds and the foraging birds. There was still just enough light for my future self to see by, and I sent him running south, working his way back towards the entryway as the sky darkened above him. I couldn’t see any trace of Sagash’s apprentices, but the castle was so big that wasn’t really a surprise. There were a lot of places they could be, and I didn’t try to find them; instead I explored my way south, running up against dead ends and memorising them as I did, building up a mental map of the castle so that with each wrong turning I could find the path a little faster next time.

Just as I expected, reaching the bridge and crossing the cliff to the platform caused the painstakingly held thread of my future to break apart into the chaos of combat. There were a bunch of shadow constructs on the door, and this time they weren’t going to let me past. Constructs aren’t sapient, which means it’s theoretically possible to predict how a fight with one will go, but it didn’t really matter in this case: the shadows were individually weak but there were too many of them. The focus in my pocket would take out one, but not the other seven.

I tried to work around the fight, but the combination of distance, darkness, and cumulative uncertainty was making it hard to see. It didn’t help that I was pretty tired myself. It had been a long day.

I opened my eyes and looked up out of the window. I’d lost track of time while I’d been path-walking, and the last traces of sunlight had faded from the sky. In their place a moon had risen, shining through the eastern window and turning the dark tower of the windmill into a strange place of black shadow and knife-edged moonlight. The sails still swung past outside, the rhythmic creaking blending with the rush of the waves on the rocks far below. The moonlight on the clouds gave it a misty halo, rings of light spreading out through the sky, and I sat there for a while, gazing up at it. I’ve always loved looking at the moon, and I wondered idly what I was really seeing. Was it our moon, its light transported, or another one? Did the shadow realm have its own sun and moon and stars, or did it borrow them from our world?

Who knows.
Whatever that moon was, I was glad it was there.

Movement in the futures caught my attention, and as I glanced at them I saw that Anne was awake. I was within the radius of her lifesight so I didn’t need to tell her where I’d gone. After a minute I heard quiet footsteps on stone and a shadow appeared at the staircase. “Alex?” Anne said softly.

“Trouble sleeping?” I asked.

Anne nodded. She had my coat wrapped around her. “Come over here,” I said. “You look cold.”

“I’m not,” Anne said. She sat down against the stone wall opposite, shivering slightly.

I looked at Anne for a second, then got up. I’m not much good at knowing what to do when someone’s upset or unhappy, but every now and then my divination gives me a hint. I sat down next to Anne and put my arm around her. “What’s wrong? Did you get hurt?”

Anne shook her head. I could still feel her shivering against me. “You’re sure you’re not cold?” I asked. Anne wasn’t exactly heavily dressed, but the stones of the castle were still warm.

“It’s not that.”

“Did something wake you up?”

“No,” Anne said. “I mean, I was asleep . . . I was afraid they were coming. I wanted to sleep, I had to make myself wake up. Then when I did it was like they were there—I couldn’t see them, but they could have been . . .” Anne’s shoulders hunched and she fell silent.

Oh. Right.
Anne had just spent three days without rest or sleep, alone and on the run with Dark mages trying to abduct her or worse. On top of that, she’d been dragged back to the same shadow realm that had been the site of probably the most horrible experiences of her life. Anne always seems so self-possessed but she’s actually younger than Luna, and what she’d just gone through would have sent most people into a nervous breakdown. “It’s okay,” I said, trying to sound reassuring. “You’re safe.”

“We’re not safe.” Anne’s voice was slightly muffled, and she didn’t look up at me. “They’re still after us. And now you’re going to get hurt too.”

“Okay, I’m not saying it’s
impossible
that things’ll turn out that way, but let’s look on the bright side. You’re here, I’m here, we’re both alive and safe, and you get to have a good night’s sleep for once. Why not enjoy it?”

Anne was silent. “Come on,” I said. “Remember back when you moved in with me? That talk we had up on the roof? You trusted me to take care of you back then. Trust me now.”

“That was—” Anne said, then stopped. I’d seen Anne’s words—she’d been about to say,
That was before last year.
After a pause she went on. “I can’t stop thinking about it.” Her shoulders were hunched and she was looking down at the floor. “All the ways they might catch me. I had nightmares about this place for so long. When I was here I dreamed every night about getting away. Then when I did I kept being afraid that someday I’d be caught again. You don’t understand—you don’t know what Sagash did to me. What it was like. Getting away was the only thing I wanted. And now, it’s . . . the one thing I did and it’s all for nothing.”

“You aren’t the same person you were,” I said quietly. “And you aren’t on your own anymore.”

“I’m so tired of being afraid.” Anne sounded dull and weary and utterly wretched. “I wish I didn’t . . .”

“There’s nothing wrong with being afraid of people who want to hurt you. I’d be more worried if you weren’t.”

“Easy for you to say. You and Vari and Luna are never scared of anything.”

I laughed out loud at that. Anne looked up in surprise. “What?”

“Anne, I’m scared of more things than I can
count
. If I ever sat down and tried to make a list, I’d be there all week.”

“But you don’t . . .”

“I’m eight years older than you; I’ve had time to get used to it. Look, you remember when we first met? You were twenty then, right? When I was that age, I was
much
more screwed up mentally than you were. I’d just gotten away from Richard and I was terrified out of my wits that he’d come after me. I couldn’t hold any kind of job or relationship, I treated everyone like they were out to get me, and I slept with a weapon under my pillow. But it gets better. It takes time and you have to work at it, but it does.”

Anne was silent. “Have you ever talked about it?” I asked.

Anne shook her head.

“Vari? Luna?”

“Vari knows bits. Little bits. Luna . . . she asked, but . . .”

“Why did Sagash bring you here?”

Anne was silent for a little while, long enough that I started to think she wasn’t going to answer. “He found out about us because of Miss Chandler,” she said at last. “She was his . . . student, I think. We didn’t know. We just thought she was on her own; we’d never heard anything about Dark mages back then. I was payment. That was the way Sagash explained it. He wanted an apprentice, and I was the price.”

“And you lived here for nine months?”

Anne nodded, not meeting my eyes.

“What was it like?”

“It was horrible,” Anne said softly. “The only other people were Sagash and his guests. Not all were Dark mages, but they were just as bad. I’d . . . I’d look at them when they came in and wonder what kind
this
one was, and whether Sagash would give me to them. I never had any say, not about anything. What I wore, what I did, where I went . . . He controlled everything. The only choices I had were the ones he gave me, he was changing me into something and I couldn’t stop it. I just watched and I kept losing myself, one bit at a time . . . I tried to run away but it never helped; there wasn’t any food and eventually I’d have to come back or starve. After the second time Sagash put a collar on me so he could hurt me and track me, and I couldn’t even run away anymore. I had to come back each time, for training . . .” Anne fell silent again.

“What kind of training?” I said quietly.

“I can’t tell you,” Anne whispered. “I can’t, I don’t . . .” Her shoulders shook and she started to cry. “I didn’t want to, he made me. It wasn’t me. It wasn’t me . . .”

I held Anne closer and she kept crying quietly, tears mixing with sniffs, one hand tight on the mesh of the armour at my chest. I didn’t ask her any more questions. Maybe she could have answered and maybe not, but pushing her to do it felt too heartless. Eventually she fell silent. She was huddled up against me, the coat still wrapped around her, and listening to her breathing I realised she’d fallen asleep. From a glance into the futures, I could tell this slumber was a deeper one; she wasn’t going to be waking up so easily this time.

Well, now what?

Anne was pressed up against me, which pretty much ruled out any more path-walking. We still needed to get out, but it wasn’t immediately obvious how. Trying to retrace our steps to the main gate would just lead us into a battle with a squad of constructs, which would draw in Sagash’s apprentices. I’d sucker-punched Darren once—I didn’t think it would be so easy to do it twice.

The best approach would be to find some other way out, but for that I’d need Anne’s help, and she was obviously exhausted. From the signs of it she’d been using a combination of terror and her own life magic to keep herself in a state of hypervigilance for three days straight, and she wouldn’t be able to think clearly until she’d had a chance to rest. For that matter, I was having trouble thinking clearly too. I hadn’t had much sleep since this whole thing had started, and it had been a long day.