Alex Verus 5: Hidden (20 page)

I rested my head back against the stone and gazed up at the beams of moonlight slanting through the windows. The creak of the sails, the whisper of wind, and the distant waves blended together into a soothing, gentle sound. Anne slept next to me, still and warm. I found my eyes drifting closed, and chided myself, looking ahead to check the futures in which I sat here and stayed awake. It didn’t look as though anything was going to disturb us—in all the futures I could make out, we’d be left alone until sunrise. Still, even if I’d checked, there was always the chance of something changing, no matter how small. I let my eyes close, feeling the presence of my armour around me, watchful.

I shouldn’t go to sleep, but it felt good to rest my eyes. Just for a little while . . .

I
drifted through dreams, old memories rising to the surface and sinking into the depths. A door opened and I stepped through.

As I did everything changed, becoming focused and clear. I was standing in a hallway made out of some kind of black stone. Soft lights glowed from holders, reflecting off the walls. The walls, floor, and ceiling were all made of the same substance—it was somewhere between stone and glass, with a mirrored finish which cast back the light with perfect clarity. I brushed my fingers across it and found it cool and smooth to the touch. Turning, I saw an open doorway behind me.

I didn’t recognise this place but there didn’t seem to be any immediate danger, and I was curious. I walked down the corridor.

The corridor opened up into a large curved room. A long dining table of dark wood sat in the centre; bowls made out of a vivid green glass were spaced along its length. A little farther away was a sofa and a set of chairs, all the same distinctive shade of green, contrasting oddly with the black-glass walls. Lights hung from the ceiling, but the room was dominated by the row of massive arch windows along the left wall. They had no glass or panes, and the view I glimpsed was so bizarre that I walked up and leant on one of the windowsills so that I could gaze out.

The windows led out onto a railed balcony made of the same strange black glass, and beyond was an impossible landscape stretching away to infinity. Giant trees rose beside mirrored lakes, stretching up into a clear blue sky. The trees were the size of tower blocks, and only the perspective gave a clue to how vast they were. The biggest looked as though it could have cast St. Paul’s Cathedral in its shadow, and tiny wooden buildings and round platforms peeked from its twisting branches. Farther away I could see rolling hills, distant grasslands, and sunlit mountains on the horizon. All of the landscape teemed with life; birds flew, grass and trees and flowers crowded the hills. It was a lush, verdant land . . . until you looked down. A few hundred feet away, at ground level, the grass and trees were cut off abruptly, as though with a knife. A black wall formed a perfectly curved arc around my current location, stretching to the left and the right until it was hidden by the edges of the window. The difference was razor-edged and startling—outside the walls flowers bloomed in grassy meadows, while inside everything was sculpted from the same black glass, without so much as a blade of grass to break up the unnatural smoothness. The outside was natural, wild, and alive; the inside artificial, ordered, and dead.

I was in Elsewhere, of that I was sure, but not any part of it I’d ever seen. Looking down at the ground and judging the angle, I had to be in some kind of tower. The arc of the walls made me think that they might go all the way around, forming a circle with the tower at the centre. There was something odd about the light: the lakes and the giant trees in the distance were all bathed in sunlight, as was the landscape to either side, but the place I was in now was dimly lit, the black glass reflecting only the light of an overcast day. Something about the layout made me think of the castle in the shadow realm, with the keep at its centre.

I stared down at the black-glass walls. They had to be thirty feet high, and I couldn’t see any gates or ways to climb to the top. They didn’t look designed to keep people out. It was more as though . . .

A voice spoke from behind me. “They’re to keep things in.”

I jumped, twisting in midair, coming down in a fighting stance. A blade of blue-white energy ignited at my hand and I held it pointing down at the floor.

The girl who’d spoken was Anne . . . or something that looked like her. She had Anne’s face and eyes and slender height, but the rest of her was different. Instead of falling to shoulder length her hair stretched down her back, and in place of Anne’s soft-coloured clothing she wore a floor-length dress of vivid scarlet that shone in the darkened room. She held something in her hands, though at this distance I couldn’t see what. “You were wondering about the walls.” She had Anne’s voice, but it was stronger, more confident. “They’re to make sure what’s in here stays in.”

I stared at Anne, or whoever it was. “What are you doing here?”

“That’s a little rude.” She walked towards the table, coming into the light from the windows. As she did, I saw that she was holding a long knife, tapping the blade against the palm of her hand. She placed it on the table with a
clack
, then nodded towards my right hand. “You don’t need that.”

I was still holding the energy blade. Elsewhere is fluid; creating a sword of magical energy is as easy as thinking. You can make any tool or weapon you can think of, lighter than a feather and stronger than steel, with all kinds of amazing properties which could never exist in the real world . . . and they’re all completely useless. I opened my hand and let the blade vanish. “There you go,” the girl said. “Relax. I’m not going to hurt you.”

I looked at her for a moment. “You’re not Anne,” I said at last.

“No shit, Sherlock. Did you think my hair grew twelve inches overnight?”

“The sarcasm is kind of a giveaway too.” I studied the girl. “Whose Elsewhere is this? Anne’s or yours?”

“That’s a hard one to answer. Do you know how Anne can go without sleep?”

“I know it has to do with adjusting her biochemistry, but no.”

“Human bodies have safety cutoffs designed to force them to operate at lower capacity if they’re short of resources like food or sleep. Anne can override those cutoffs and keep going when normal people can’t—enough to kill herself if she’s not careful. She’s been doing that for three days straight, and that’s why she’s in a deep sleep right now. Too deep to touch Elsewhere.”

“And this is relevant because . . . ?”

“The cat’s away, so the mice can play.”

I studied not-Anne. She
did
look like Anne, at least physically. But the way she moved and spoke . . . it was like a different person in the same body. “Does that make you the cat or the mouse?”

“Let’s just say I’m a side of Anne that doesn’t get out much. Figures the one chance we’d get to talk would be now, but better late than never.”

“How long has Anne been using Elsewhere?”

“She started during her time with Sagash.” Not-Anne walked towards the windows, approaching me at an angle, shoes clicking on the black glass. “An escape, really. He controlled everything in the real world so she built herself a refuge.” She came to a stop by one of the windows, looking out over the endless view. “It’s not just a backdrop. It’s all detailed, every bit. It’s quite beautiful, you know.”

Something in not-Anne’s voice made me glance up with a frown. She was staring out at the distant forests, and there was a strange expression in her eyes—not hostile, but not happy, either. “Have you been there?”

“I used to.” She stared out for a second longer, then shook her head and turned towards me. “Has Vari told you about what Anne’s home life was like back when they were both in school?”

“No. Wait, so Anne knew about Elsewhere last year? When I was using it with Deleo? She didn’t—”

“In case you haven’t noticed, Anne doesn’t talk about herself much.”

I looked around the tower room of black glass and at the girl in front of me, eyebrows raised. “No kidding. She didn’t tell Vari?”

“No. Now shut up a second and listen. Anne spent a lot of her time as a kid having to take care of everyone else. Cooking, cleaning, nursing them when they were sick, that kind of stuff. She’s always been good at noticing things—she’d see when people needed help, and when her magic developed it was the same thing but stronger. She could look at everyone and see how healthy they were, whether they were hurt, what their bodies needed. And she could fix it, or try to. But here’s the thing—Anne doesn’t actually
want
to do that all the time. Oh, don’t get me wrong; she likes helping people and she wants to get married and have kids someday, not that there’s much chance of
that
ever happening, but she doesn’t want to be nurturing and mothering to every single person she meets for the rest of her life. Things like that clinic? She doesn’t do it because she wants to, she does it because she feels like she has to. Because she can heal people, so if she just leaves them alone, it’s her fault, right? But it’s a bottomless pit. Doesn’t matter how many you treat, there’s always another one. And you know what really gets annoying? Half the time they’re not even all that grateful. The better you do your job, the more you fix people’s problems, the more they take it for granted. They think it’s just the way things are supposed to be.” Not-Anne stared at me. “Do you know what it feels like to always take care of everyone and get treated like crap for it? It gets to you. Especially when you’ve got those gossip circles whispering behind your back.”

I looked back at not-Anne. “So what do you want to do about it?”

“Hmph.” Not-Anne looked back out the window. “It’s not like I get the choice. She’s too dutiful.” She paused. “Or she used to be.”

“Before
what
? Before Sagash? Anne keeps dancing around it but she won’t tell me. It’s obviously really damn important but she can’t make herself talk about it. You’re here because you want me to understand, right?”

“Anne doesn’t talk about it,” not-Anne said, “because she really,
really
doesn’t want anyone to know what happened in those nine months.”

“I was a Dark apprentice! Does she really think it’s going to be something I’ve never heard before?” I narrowed my eyes at not-Anne. “She’s not just afraid, is she? She’s ashamed of something.”

“Yeah.”

“Ashamed of what? What did Sagash do to her? Did he . . . ?”

Not-Anne looked at me curiously, tilting her head. “Did he what? Wait, are you asking if Sagash sexually abused her or something?”

I hesitated.

“Oh, for God’s sake.” Not-Anne rolled her eyes in disgust. “Use your brain. Anne is a
life mage
, she can paralyse anyone who touches her. Do you seriously think we need to worry about getting raped?”

“It’s not something I like to talk about, all right?”

“Yeah, well, Sagash doesn’t care,” not-Anne said. “He’s about as asexual as it gets and those bits of him withered years ago. I don’t think he’s got any physical desires
left
. He’s not human enough.”

“So what
does
he care about?”

“Power and longevity. He wants to live here forever and be king of his little world. Trouble is, you need subjects to be a king. Another twenty years and he’ll probably go all-the-way crazy and disappear into here with his shadows and never come out, but for now he’s still sane enough to get people to do what he says. And if they don’t do what he says, he makes them.”

“And that was what he did to Anne?”

“That was what he did to Anne. He wanted an apprentice-assassin. Someone who’d go out of the shadow realm, bring him whoever or whatever he wanted for his experiments, and kill anyone who pissed him off. He started training Anne, and when she said no he hurt her till she said yes. Death magic has lots of spells for affecting living bodies, and Sagash knows exactly how far he can go before they get lethal. No chance of the subject dying. Though they might want to. What he wanted Anne to do wasn’t so bad, to begin with. Spell practice, education—used her as a maid, too, when he had guests around. He didn’t need to, it was just to show her off:
look how powerful I am, I’ve got a life mage waiting the table.
She was still a slave, but it could have been worse.

“So then it got worse. After Anne had picked up the basics he started putting her through combat training. He’d match her up against other Dark apprentices, have them duel until one couldn’t fight anymore. Anne tried surrendering—didn’t work. The apprentice tore her apart and she got a torture session with Sagash for embarrassing him. After that, she fought. She wasn’t much good, but she was powerful. You know how life magic works—it only takes a touch.

“But there was a problem. See, Anne was dangerous in a duel, but Sagash didn’t want a duellist. He wanted an
assassin
, someone who’d kill for him, and Anne wouldn’t kill. He threatened her, but that was Anne’s line in the sand. She’d given up as much as she was going to and she said no. So obviously he tortured her, but she’d been learning from those fights and she’d figured out how to mute her pain receptors. Sagash could kill her but he couldn’t hurt her. She told Sagash that she’d rather die than become someone like that.”

Not-Anne stopped talking. She looked out at the distant forests, and an unpleasant memory came to my mind. That night when I’d met Anne outside her flat . . . She hadn’t said it in those words, but that had been the subtext, hadn’t it? Given the choice of taking my help or living in danger, she’d picked danger. Better to die than become someone like Sagash . . .
or me
?

I shook my head hard, trying to forget that last thought. “What happened?”

“Anne made a mistake,” not-Anne said simply. “She thought Sagash needed her alive. But the way he saw it, he didn’t need her at all. He was going to live forever. Sure, he’d invested time in her, but he could always get another. He only wanted her for his Chosen, and if she wasn’t willing to kill she wasn’t any use to him. So he called her bluff. He put her up against a Dark mercenary in the arena. A kid, really, one of those child soldiers. Sagash must have fed him some story or other, promised him a reward, because he didn’t talk, he just went for Anne and tried to kill her. Anne tried to disable him, but Sagash had given the kid a set of wards. Not against lethal attacks, just nonlethal ones. That was when Anne realised that Sagash meant it. She’d said she’d rather die—well, that was the choice he was giving her. Either she fought back and killed the guy, or she was going to die right there. No more life, no more growing up, no chance for a happily ever after somewhere down the line.”

“What did she do?” I asked quietly, even though I knew the answer.

“You know, most people never really think about how magic works.” Not-Anne leant back against the window’s edge, elbows propped against the sill, watching me casually. “Your magic’s a reflection of your personality, right? Well, that goes both ways. If your magic’s good at something, that says something about what kind of person you are. Life magic’s really good at healing. And it’s really good at killing.” She tilted her head. “Do you know just how
tired
you can get of taking care of everyone all the time?”