Risen

5

I returned to the Hollow to find Karyos awake, sitting cross-legged in her clearing. ‘You slept late,’ I said as I walked over.

‘Recovering the memories was difficult.’

Karyos was reborn less than a month ago, and she still doesn’t remember most of her past lives. If she needs to recall something, she uses a meditation ritual. I guess when you live as many lifetimes as a hamadryad, keeping track of all those memories is difficult.

I sat down in front of Karyos. ‘To understand the ritual,’ Karyos began without preamble, ‘you must understand how jinn die.’

I nodded.

‘Jinn are immortal,’ Karyos said. ‘They can take a body, but only as a vessel. As clothing. When their bodies were killed – back when they had them – the jinn’s essence, their soul and animating spirit, would drift, discorporated. In time, other jinn would give them form again by performing a ritual of rebirth. The elements of the world around them were sculpted into a body. The jinn would wake, and begin its new life.’

When I’d asked Sonder about jinn, he’d told me about history and war. When Richard had brought it up, he’d talked about armies and power. Now I was getting a third perspective.

‘Jinn were connected to the elements of our world. They did not fear death – the word has no meaning for them. What they feared was something else. The void. If they were to lose their connection to our world, they would be cast into the space between. Somehow, mages learned of this. They came to believe that they had found the jinn’s weakness.’ Karyos was silent for a moment. ‘Suleiman’s ritual was designed to sever a jinn’s connection with our world. With that link gone, discorporation was no longer a drifting sleep. It was an eternal nightmare.’

‘And that was what happened to all of them,’ I said.

‘The lesser jinn were reduced,’ Karyos said. ‘Their thoughts and consciousness degraded until they were little but husks. Those creatures that attacked us two days ago . . . they were living beings once. Perhaps they might even have been among the ones I spoke to, when I was young. If they were, they did not recognise me. Nor I them.’ Karyos stared into the distance for a moment, lost in her memories. ‘The greater jinn retained their consciousness. After a fashion. The void contains . . . entities. They do not live or exist in time as we understand it. But they can affect those they touch.’

‘Well, that’s incredibly creepy,’ I said. ‘You think that marid was affected?’

Karyos shrugged. ‘It wanted for the humans of this world to be made extinct even before being banished to the void. From your point of view, I’m not sure it makes much difference.’

‘Fair point.’

‘In the waning days of the war, the jinn attempted to revive those of their kin that had been banished,’ Karyos said. ‘Working together, they were able to modify the rebirth ritual. Instead of creating a new body, they learned how to summon a banished jinn into a human host. Unlike a normal contract, the host’s consent was not required.’

‘And that wasn’t enough to win them the war?’

‘The ritual was too slow, and by the time they had fully developed it, too many jinn had been bound. The problem lay in the amount of energy required to bring a conscious mind through the veil. Mindless and near-mindless creatures, such as jann, could be summoned easily, but greater jinn were far more difficult. The sultan and its generals came to believe that if the veil was weakened in a specific area, this problem could be solved.’

‘That’s the ritual that Richard’s talking about,’ I said. ‘So what, the sultan tried it back then and it didn’t work?’

‘The Council forces discovered the plan, and attacked and crushed the remaining jinn before the ritual’s completion.’

‘And now the same thing’s happening again,’ I said. I thought for a minute. ‘You said the ritual weakened the veil in an area. What sort of area? Like a shadow realm?’

‘Perhaps,’ Karyos said. ‘It may be that the ritual would not work in our world. Perhaps a smaller, separated reality is necessary.’

‘Would explain why she went after Sagash’s shadow realm. Well, that and for personal reasons.’ I frowned. ‘Wait. The ritual affects an area?’

Karyos nodded.

‘Richard said the ritual was supposed to affect Anne,’ I said. ‘It’d give her the ability to summon greater jinn fast.’

‘Effectively.’

‘It doesn’t modify Anne to act as some sort of conduit, or something like that?’

Karyos shook her head. ‘I do not fully understand how the ritual works, but I’m quite sure that would be impossible. No living body would be able to withstand it. And even if it could, the effect would fall apart as soon as she moved. It would have to be anchored to an area.’

I kept frowning.

‘Alex?’ Karyos asked.

‘Yeah,’ I said absently. When Richard had described the ritual at the meeting, he’d implied that the way it worked was by affecting Anne.

It wasn’t a big difference in practical terms. Instead of making new jinn-bearers on the spot, Anne would have to knock them out and drag them back to her shadow realm first. It would make things harder, but not that much harder. But if it was such a minor detail, why had Richard lied about it? Had he been trying to make the ritual sound more dangerous than it really was to pressure the Council to take action?

Or maybe Richard didn’t know everything. Maybe he’d just made a mistake.

I considered both explanations. Neither felt quite right.

Karyos was waiting patiently. ‘Can you think of any reason Richard would want us to think the ritual was designed to affect a person?’ I asked.

Karyos shook her head. ‘I don’t understand how your master thinks.’

‘Yeah, not many do,’ I said. ‘All right. Thanks for the help. One last thing. Are you hoping the marid’s going to pull this off? I mean, mages haven’t given you many reasons to like them.’

‘Some have,’ Karyos said. ‘Besides, I do not believe the sultan’s plan will end happily. The jinn I knew and walked in the woods with, when I was younger . . . I saw nothing left of them in those summoned forms. All that I loved in them is gone.’

I got in touch with Luna. What’s the news? Luna asked immediately.

Richard’s lying about how the ritual works, the Council want me to assassinate him and I’ve learned a few things about divination and jinn. Oh, and I need you to report to the War Rooms to get issued a set of combat armour.

I was hoping to hear something about Vari, but I guess I’ll take what I can get. You want to hear what I’ve found out?

Yes, please.

Okay, Luna said. So I’ve been listening in on the whisper network. Last few times Richard’s launched a big offensive, we’ve heard rumours a day or two in advance. Right?

Ever since the start of the war, Richard’s biggest source of manpower had been his adepts. He had a network in place for passing out messages: orders would go down the pyramid from him, to his inner circle, to Arcadia-trained adepts, to other adepts. Eventually the messages would filter through to adepts who weren’t so loyal, or to ones who’d been having second thoughts about signing up for Richard’s ‘association’, and some of those people would be willing to talk, especially to a friendly shopkeeper who might have helped them in the past. Right, I said.

So that’s not happening now, Luna said. The long-serving adepts, the ones who were trained in Arcadia and who’ve been with him from the beginning, they’re being mobilised for something, they don’t say what. Everyone else is being told to stand down. Word is there’ll be new orders issued after the weekend.

The ritual deadline, I said, and frowned. If you were Richard and you were doing an operation like this, wouldn’t you want all the manpower you could get?

Luna gave a telepathic shrug. He wants a smaller team? Something more agile?

Maybe. I thought for a moment, then shook my head. I’m going to call November.

November responded to my telepathic call instantly. Oh, Alex, I was hoping you’d call. There’s been no movement from Mage Walker or her jinn. My projections now place her within the shadow realm up until the time of the attack with over ninety per cent confidence.

Can you give me the order of battle for the Council strike forces?

November replied instantly, information flowing through the dreamstone far quicker than speech. The Council forces for tonight’s operation are composed of two strike teams and a reserve. The first strike team consists of five hundred and thirty-two mages, auxiliaries and Council security personnel. It is commanded by Director Nimbus, with Captain Rain as his second. The second strike team consists of one hundred and seventy-nine mages and Council security personnel, all cleared for front-line combat. It is commanded by Captain Landis, with Lieutenant Tobias as his second. The first and second strike teams are composed of Keepers from the Order of the Star and the Order of the Shield, respectively. The reserve is still being assigned but is currently somewhere between five and six hundred strong, and contains further members of the Order of the Star, some members of the Order of the Cloak, and other mages classified as secondary combatants. Director Nimbus has field command, with Captain Landis and Captain Rain as second- and third-in-command respectively, but both are subject to Senior Council members Druss, Bahamus and Alma, who will be directly overseeing the operation.

Bloody hell, that’s a lot, I said. I’d never seen the Council deploy even half that many. On a related note, I’m not sure what it says about Council operational security that you could find all that out.

November sounded smug. I am rather good at this.

You know, back when I was planning these kinds of ops, I used to think they were secret. I shook my head. Tell me what you know about the ward defences on the shadow realm.

The Council gained reasonably thorough information on the shadow realm’s wards during the abortive siege four years ago, and in the aftermath a team was tasked with drawing up an attack plan should it be necessary to assault the shadow realm more forcefully. This has been combined with information provided today by the Dark apprentice Yun Ji-yeong, and also with intelligence gathering over the past twenty-four hours in order to produce a reasonably complete picture. The gate wards across the shadow realm are of a standard design and—

Forget the standard wards, I said. Ji-yeong said something about an isolation effect. What’s that?

It seems that after his previous experiences, Sagash became increasingly security conscious, and he was particularly concerned about the threat of a large-scale invasion. Rather like the one that’s going to be launched today, in fact. Though probably not in the way he was expecting. Well, in any case, Sagash devoted considerable time and resources to installing an isolation ward, a large-scale defensive ward placed over the shadow realm as a whole. When activated, the isolation effect alters certain universal constants within the affected shadow realm, causing a dissimilarity between it and our world that makes it difficult if not impossible to link the two with gate magic.

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.