TEN

“What do you mean, you lost them?” Selene demanded.

The unaccustomed Mareker trousers she was wearing felt scratchy against her legs. It didn’t help that the fabric was much more coarse than anything she normally wore. But it wouldn’t have done for the Lord Lieutenant to be seen out here in this, this shack on the outskirts of Marek that called itself an inn; so she had tied her hair under a scarf like some servant, and put on cheap Marek clothes, and gone out the back door of the guesthouse when no one was looking. She didn’t have that long, either; it was already nearly sunset, and she had to meet with the sorcerers in an hour or so, and then attend another formal event – she couldn’t even remember which, there had been so many of the wretched things – later. She’d received yet another message with a House seal as she was getting changed, and she hadn’t even had the time to look at it. She scratched irritably at the back of her neck and glared at her companion.

Hira, the sorcerer who’d been tracking the escapee, fiddled with his beer glass, looking unhappy. Selene had a beer too, but she had no intention of drinking it.

“It’s not that I lost them, exactly,” he said.

“But you just said…”

“Uh. I mean. We were following them, you understand? I mean, it was following them. The…” he trailed off, not wanting to say ‘demon’ here where he might be overheard, even though the background noise in the inn was more than enough to cover their conversation. Marekers were unenthusiastic about demons. To be fair, Tereni were too. But Hira was a sorcerer, so he was accustomed to them, and since Selene was apparently responsible for Hira now he’d arrived at Marek, she had to have this conversation, however much she might wish otherwise.

At least the demon wasn’t close. Hira had it stashed away somewhere. Selene hadn’t asked about the details.

“It was following Tait, yes,” Selene said, endeavouring to sound encouraging rather than furious.

“But we couldn’t, like, pin them to a place. Because of them not calling up anything. We were just in the mountains.”

Runaway sorcerers weren’t unheard of, but the Academy usually managed the problem efficiently and in such a way as to discourage repeats. It seemed deeply unfair that the Academy had chosen this moment to fail, and that this wretched sorcerer had made for Marek and turned this into her problem. She had no desire whatsoever to be associated with this, practically or politically.

“You were in the mountains,” she prompted. “So, what, you knew they were in the mountains but not exactly where?”

Hira nodded. “Yeah. Because the connection doesn’t, uh, locate itself properly unless,” he looked around himself and leaned in. “They’d have had to make their own connection to the spirit plane, see. Then,” he brought his hands together, “bang! Link, location, all fine. But they didn’t do that.”

They probably knew how it worked, and weren’t stupid, Selene thought.

“But the, uh… it… it didn’t have a proper connection, but it had, like, a direction. I knew we were in the right area. So… I got… it… to rile up a dragon-bear. I thought, iffen they had to fight one of those, they’d have to summon help, right?” By help he clearly meant, a demon.

“But they didn’t?”

Hira shook his head. “Guess not. I dunno if it didn’t find them or what. Maybe someone else dealt with it. Maybe we were in the wrong place. The, uh… it, it said we were close but it’s foldy, in the mountains, you know? Even dragon-bears can’t actually fly, not properly, not across some ravine or other. And the d– the, uh, it wouldn’t be able to tell either.”

She could do without all this witless burbling.

“So you followed the trail,” Selene prompted.

“Right through the mountains. And over into Exuria.”

Selene went cold. “Tell me you didn’t take a demon into Exuria.”

Hira frowned. “I was following. I was told to follow.”

“Tell me no one saw you with a demon in Exuria.”

“No.” Hira sounded confident. “No chance.”

Well, that was a relief. She very sincerely hoped that Hira was right, but there was no point in worrying about that now, and nothing she could do about it in either case. If Hira had sparked a diplomatic incident with Exuria, he would be dealt with back in Ameten, in due course. And it would take a while for word to get to Ameten from Exuria, via official channels. Not her problem.

“Right. Well,” she said briskly, moving on. “The trail came back out of Exuria, I’m guessing.”

“And down to the river,” Hira agreed. “And then along the river, and I figured, I’d do my best to catch up. But we missed the boat by a whisker, and we had to wait for the next one, and I tried to persuade the crew to help her along a bit, with the oars, but they weren’t having any of it.”

“But you can’t have lost the trail on the river,” Selene said, grinding her teeth. “The river only goes to one place.” Unless the sorcerer had taken off into the swamp proper; but in that case the swamp would deal with them, no further intervention needed. And a sorcerer bright enough to avoid being caught for this long wouldn’t be foolish enough to go off into the swamps alone.

“Yes,” Hira agreed. “The river comes here, and then people go into Marek.”

“So?”

“So now I can’t track ’em any more, because they’ve gone into Marek. Maybe half a day before we got here. Less, even. They’ve disappeared.”

“What do you mean, they’ve disappeared?”

Hira shrugged. “Marek’s under the protection of the cityangel. Don’t everyone know that? The… it… it can’t feel anything coming out of there.” He made a gesture, hands forming a dome. “Like a big cover, over the whole city.”

“Then go in,” Selene said, impatiently.

Hira looked horrified. “Go in? To Marek? With a… ? You can’t. Cityangel won’t allow it. Don’t you… ?” He met Selene’s eyes, and managed to bite back on ‘don’t you know that’.

“So,” Selene said, words clipped. “You followed this rogue sorcerer through Teren, into and out of Exuria – thereby breaking our treaty with Exuria, I might add, though we will hope that they didn’t notice – you set a dragon-bear on them, and you’ve lost them at the Marek gates.” She sat back, arms folded. “Wonderful.”

Hira hunched his shoulders a little. “I did my best. Tait trained with us. They knew what we’d be looking for. They were prepared!”

Selene inhaled, tongue pressed against her teeth. “And you are supposed to be better trained, and to have been able to solve this problem.”

Hira looked a bit like a dog with its tail between its legs, waiting to be beaten.

“Very well,” Selene said. “You can stay out here, while I decide what to do next.”

Hira brightened up a bit. “There’s rooms at this inn, I checked, but I haven’t enough left to pay for it…”

“You’ve been camping out for the last month,” Selene said. “I suggest you keep doing that. I saw tents on the far side of the square. You won’t stand out. And keep a leash on your… acquaintance. I’ll get word to you when I have worked out how we can resolve this situation.” She put a vicious spin on the last few words and, with satisfaction, saw Hira wince.

She would be meeting the Mareker sorcerers in an hour. She’d been hoping to hear that she didn’t need to talk to them about this; that she could just sound them out about other forms of cooperation. But she had her story planned. The rogue sorcerer, the unbound demon. The same story the Academy would have spread through Teren. That should make these Marek sorcerers amenable to assisting; they wouldn’t want a demon running around loose any more than anyone else did.

And she didn’t have time to stay any longer here; not that there was anything else to be done. She nodded coldly to Hira – if the idiot had just done his job, she wouldn’t have to be dealing with this – stood up, and began to make her way out of the ugly little inn.

Something crackled in her pocket as she moved, and she remembered the message she’d received earlier and not had time to read. She pulled it out and slid her thumbnail under the seal – House Fereno, she thought. As she scanned the brief message, her eyes widened, and she slowed to a stop.

According to Marcia, this sorcerer was indeed in Marek; and she’d even helpfully given a location.

Perhaps the demon couldn’t do anything inside the city, but sorcerers were no more immune than anyone else to a nice prosaic stabbing. She didn’t have the resources here that she might in Ameten, but Teren did have… connections, here, that she could draw upon. And potentially she still had these Mareker sorcerers she was supposed to be meeting as a back-up option.

She might yet be able to resolve this quickly and quietly.

k k

Cato scowled down at the tabletop.

“I’ve changed my mind. Why didn’t we just invite the woman to my rooms.”

He looked up at Reb just as she rolled her eyes. “You don’t even slightly mean that. Stop being annoying.”

“Or yours.”

“You wouldn’t be any happier in my rooms than you are here. And I’m not having that woman know where I live.” Her jaw set, suddenly and firmly, and Cato looked speculatively at her, almost distracted from his complaints.

“Anyway,” Reb said. “You didn’t have to come, if you didn’t like the meeting or the venue.”

They were in a tediously respectable pub on the Marekhill side of Old Bridge, just off Marek Square. Reb had bespoken a private room, with some nonsense about how the Teren Lieutenant deserved a little privacy. Fine, Cato wouldn’t have wanted to have this conversation in public either, but he didn’t really hold with hierarchy. The one thing both of them had agreed was that they weren’t going to go to Selene, as if Marek’s sorcerers were there to be summoned by this dignitary or that. She would have to come to them. Almost annoyingly, she hadn’t seemed at all perturbed when Reb had messaged to that effect.

Reb had wondered whether they should be bespeaking dinner rather than merely infusions – or in Cato’s case, a beer – but Cato had put his foot down. If he’d wanted to have polite conversation over indigestible food, he’d have stayed in bloody Marekhill.

“Oh, but I am a crucial part of this bloody Group of yours, aren’t I?” Cato said. “So I did have to come.”

Reb, he could tell, was absolutely desperate to tell him to shove off out of the Group if he wanted to, except that he also knew she didn’t want him to do anything of the sort, both because she could hardly claim to have oversight of Marek’s magic all by herself; and because Beckett seemed convinced that it needed both of them. Seeing just how far he could push her towards regretting the whole business was entertaining by itself.

Although if he got as far as annoying Beckett, it might be slightly less entertaining.

What, though, had Reb so strangely-tempered about the Teren Lieutenant.

“Oh! I remember! You’re Teren, aren’t you?” She’d said something about it, years ago, during one of their run-ins back in the day, when he’d done something that had aggravated the Group. “That’s why you’re irritable about the woman before we’ve even met her.”

Reb eyed him with great and evident dislike. She didn’t agree, but she didn’t disagree either, which was basically as good as proof.

“When did you come to Marek?” Cato asked. “Why did you come to Marek? I mean, obviously, it’s a delightful city and so on, clearly far superior to anywhere in Teren…”

“How would you know? You’ve never so much as set foot outside the city boundaries,” Reb said, with unfortunate accuracy.

“Marek doesn’t have boundaries. We have swamp,” Cato said. “And the Oval Sea. That’s the whole point of Marek, no? In any case. I’m guessing it was magic.” Another thought occurred to him, with what felt like blinding insight. “You’ve practised Teren magic, haven’t you. How interesting.”

Reb slammed a hand down on the table.

“None of that is any of your damned business, and I am not going to speak to you of it, do you hear me?”

Cato looked at her, carefully, and decided to back off. He raised his hands, considering whether he might go so far as something that sounded a bit like an apology, when there was a knock on the door.

“Your visitor’s here, honoured ones,” the innkeeper said. She was obviously uncomfortable to be housing two sorcerers at once. She showed the visitor through with almost excessive haste, and departed again even faster.

The Teren Lord Lieutenant was a short, dark-skinned woman. Her long hair was done up in a complicated plait and wound around her head in a way that spoke of someone used to having a maid assist her. Her dress was richly embroidered. If Cato were inclined to think that way, he might have felt slightly uncomfortable about his own somewhat grubby clothing.

As it was, he smiled widely at her and slouched back in his chair.

“Lord Lieutenant.”

Reb had stood up to greet her with a nod of the head. Sorcerers did not shake hands, something which he ought to remember to explain to Jonas.

“Selene will do.” She sat down in the other chair, and Reb sat down with her.

“I’m Reb. This is my colleague Cato.”

Cato raised a casual hand, and the Lord Lieutenant – Selene – nodded over at him.

“You are the representatives of Marek’s sorcerers?”

They were Marek’s sorcerers – well, if you didn’t count Jonas – but he wasn’t surprised when Reb just nodded.

“I gather you have a problem that you wished to talk to us about?” Reb said.

“Yes. Well. I will keep it brief. A demon was raised, close to Ameten, a few weeks ago.”

“That’s a regular part of Teren sorcery, isn’t it?” Cato asked.

“Indeed.” Selene’s voice sounded tight. “However, as a rule, the sorcerer raising the spirit, of whatever type, takes steps to return it to its own plane after their work is completed.”

“And this one didn’t,” Cato guessed. “Oh dear.” He couldn’t see what the problem was; couldn’t someone else just return them?

“There are ways of dealing with that, too,” Reb said. She sounded more uncompromising than usual, and when Cato looked over to her, her arms were tightly folded.

“Indeed,” Selene said again.

“Which are?” Cato asked.

“Sacrifice the sorcerer,” Reb said.

Cato’s eyebrows went up. Possibly he should know a little more about Teren sorcery, but it had never seemed particularly relevant. “Kill them?” It seemed… excessive.

“Yes,” Selene said, impatiently. “We could not do that in this case.”

Cato was definitely regretting not knowing more about Teren sorcery. Both Reb and Selene were several steps ahead of him, and he hated that feeling; but he would hate it even more if he had to ask. He could ask Reb, later, maybe, if he absolutely had to, although doubtless she would gloat over it. Not out loud – quietly, where he couldn’t see – but he would know. In any case, he certainly wasn’t going to ask here and now. He settled for slouching back a bit further and nodding slightly, to suggest that he knew what they were on about.

“Why not?” Reb asked.

“The sorcerer ran,” Selene said. “We have not tracked them down since, despite our best efforts.” A muscle in her jaw twitched. She wasn’t happy, having to ask for assistance.

“And what of the demon?”

“A group of the Academy’s sorcerers trapped it, but they weren’t able to return it, and it escaped again. At present, it is roaming – we assume, looking for the original sorcerer.”

“Roaming where?” Reb demanded.

“We do not know. There is no word of it.”

Reb’s eyebrows flickered upwards for a moment. “No word of it? Then it isn’t causing any real problems?”

“Perhaps not yet,” Selene said, “but I hardly feel…”

“Yes, yes, certainly,” Reb said. “However. I understand your concerns, but what do you intend us to do about it?”

“Two things. Firstly – well. Marek has its own spirit.” She looked uncomfortable.

“You wondered if the cityangel could help,” Reb concluded.

“Why should they?” Cato demanded. He didn’t have to know exactly what was being asked to bristle at the idea of Beckett being hassled by Teren. “And, come to that, why should they be able to?”

“The Marek cityangel does not tolerate other beings within the city,” Selene said. “That is well known.”

That was mostly accurate. There were ways around it – that stupid business Marcia had got herself tangled up in back when they were teenagers – but Beckett had reacted pretty strongly to that, not to mention successfully, via Reb and her then-mentor Zareth. At the cost, of course, of Zareth’s life.

It had never occurred to Cato before now to wonder what would have happened if Reb and Zareth hadn’t succeeded. But that wasn’t something to bring up right now. Instead he nodded, and repeated, “But that’s in Marek, not out in Teren. Bluntly, this is your problem, not ours.”

“Marek is a part of Teren,” Selene said “And it would perhaps be useful to both Marek and Ameten if our sorcerers could work together, rather than apart. I would be very happy to see the bonds between us strengthened.”

Beckett couldn’t go outside the city’s boundaries, which would make collaboration difficult; and Cato didn’t particularly want closer bonds with Teren. If anything the opposite. However, he wasn’t going to give away the former piece of information, and although getting into the latter argument might be entertaining, it wouldn’t get them anywhere useful. He settled for a distant nod.

“Additionally,” Selene said, “our information indicates that the sorcerer who raised the thing is moving towards Marek. Seeking, we believe, to hide here. They may, indeed, already be here. Even if you are unwilling or unable to assist with the demon, we would ask for your help in locating the sorcerer.”

Reb nodded. “I see.”

Cato saw, too. And he didn’t like the idea of turning another sorcerer over to be executed, regardless of what they’d done.

“We’ll have to consider it,” Reb said. “And I can tell you that, so far, I haven’t heard of any such person. But we may be able to look for them.”

“When do you think you will be able to give me an answer?”

“I will send word as soon as I can,” Reb said. “Tomorrow, if possible.”

“My thanks.” Selene rose. “I won’t take any more of your time.” She nodded towards both of them. “Sorcerers.”

The door shut behind her, and Reb let out an explosive noise.

“A demon in Teren, uncontrolled. Storms and angels.”

“Well, it’s not up to anything at the moment, apparently,” Cato said. “So maybe it’s not that much of a problem.”

“That it hasn’t done anything so far doesn’t mean it won’t.” Reb paused. “How long could you control something like that?”

“A while,” Cato said, which was a bit of a lie. “If I worked that way. Which if you recall, I don’t. I do deals, between planes. I don’t bring spirits over here, still less bind them, because that’s a stupid idea, not to mention far more work. Honestly. Bloody Teren. Does this really have to be our problem?”

“Well, no, it doesn’t.” Reb shrugged. “If it does come here, Beckett won’t let it in. It might take a fair bit to keep it out, though.”

“It could come here?” Cato sat up in a hurry.

“Of course it bloody could,” Reb said. “I thought you were supposed to be the expert in spirits?”

“Well, I know it could, but why would it? If it’s wandering around Teren, why wouldn’t it just stay there?”

Reb shrugged. “Following this sorcerer, for starters. But in any case, we’re part of the same land-mass. The swamp’s not going to stop a demon.”

Cato shuddered. “Well then. Fine, I see why we might want to do something about it, if it does get closer. Where by ‘we’ I mostly mean ‘Beckett’.”

“If Beckett will,” Reb said. “But there’s no point in thinking about it unless and until it happens. Beckett can’t act outside the city.”

“If it does come here,” Cato said, “you can talk to Beckett. They like you better.” It was true. Slightly annoying, but true. Beckett made Cato nervous, now that they were actually moving around in Marek as opposed to just… being there, in some kind of abstract hypothetical sense, making magic work. On the whole, Cato had preferred the latter state of affairs; but there was no point in wasting time sighing over that, especially since, arguably, he had been partly responsible for the change.

“Anyway,” Reb said. “What Selene asked directly was, are we prepared to track down a Teren sorcerer and hand them over?”

“To be sacrificed,” Cato said.

Reb grimaced. “Yes. I didn’t think you liked the idea of that, the face on you when she mentioned it.”

“I don’t,” Cato said, fervently. “But it would get rid of the demon, apparently, and I like even less the idea of a demon coming here. I could well do without seeing a fight between spirits ever again. Whoever did this was an idiot. I’d rather they paid for it than me.” He swung his feet off the table and onto the floor.

“Are you saying that we do track them down, then?” Reb demanded.

“Ugh. I don’t know. Can we leave it for a day or two, see if Teren manages to track them down without us?”

“You’re putting off the decision in the hope that you don’t have to be responsible for it,” Reb said, flatly.

“Yes. Exactly.”

“For the love of the angel, Cato. Have you no sense of duty?”

“Uh. No. I haven’t. Have you met me?”

Reb pressed her lips together, obviously keeping in any one of a number of things she was considering saying. After a moment, she said, tightly, “Very well. When are you willing to revisit that?”

Cato gave an enormous sigh. “Two days from now, I suppose.” And once two days came, he could probably put it off for at least a couple more.

“What if something happens? The demon comes here, or we hear of it acting in Teren?”

“Fine, if something happens, I’ll think about it again. Happy?”

“Not really,” Reb said. “But very well. Two days.”

“Are we done now?”

“Yes,” Reb said, rolling her eyes again. “Off you go, back to your den of iniquity.”

“I quite like that,” Cato said, standing up. “Den of iniquity. Sounds good. See you in two days, then, unless Teren manage to sort out their own damn problem before then. Let’s hope, eh?”