Benedict Jacka - Taken

“You and me both.” I pulled myself to my feet, wincing, and gave Anne a hand up. “You okay?”

Anne looked at my hand in surprise for a second, then smiled and took it. “I’m okay.” She brushed herself off, looking around. “I guess we’re back again?”

“Is it over?” Luna asked.

“No one’s going to follow us,” I said. I’d been looking into the futures of our staying in the house and they were all blessedly quiet. “It’s over.”

“What about Vitus?” Variam asked. He’d propped himself up against the wall, his shattered arm still hanging limp.

“ You are not worrying about Vitus,” I said. “You’re going to bed to let Anne work on you. And you’re staying there until you’ve had a chance to rest.”

Variam tried to look indignant. “I’m-”

“You’re going to bed,” Anne said firmly. “Right now.”

Variam seemed about to argue, then looked at Anne and changed his mind. He allowed himself to be led off grumbling. Luna watched Anne and Variam go, then shook her head. “What’s the order, oh master?”

“You can get a fire started,” I said. “This place is bloody freezing. And while you do that I’m going to try and figure out who I should tell this whole crazy story to first.”

Luna opened up the stove and sniffed at it, sneezed, then looked dubiously at the basket of firewood. I’d just taken out my phone and was deciding which number to dial when I paused. “Ah, damn.”

“What’s wrong?” Luna asked.

I looked towards where Anne and Variam had vanished. “I just remembered I never restocked the kitchen.”

Explaining the whole thing to the Council kept me busy for the next few days.

I was interviewed by the Keepers, then by Council reps, then by the masters in charge of the apprentice program, then by the Keepers again, then by some other guys whose names I can’t remember, then by the Keepers one more time. After that I had to tell the whole story to each of them again, except slower and in more detail. After that I had to tell the whole story to each of them again , by which point I was about ready to chew my own arm off, or possibly someone else’s. Luna got lucky and was let out sometime around the second day.

Anne and Variam got interviewed too, and their interviews were a lot less friendly than mine. Anne had it especially bad-it took a long time to convince the Keepers that she hadn’t fled from custody and even then they didn’t stop treating her as a suspect. I later found out that the only way Anne finally got them to accept her story was by submitting to a memory probe.

The rest of the tournament-unsurprisingly-was cancelled. A Council task force evacuated everyone from Fountain Reach and established a cordon around the mansion. Fortunately all the remaining apprentices got away safe. Unfortunately Crystal did too. She’d seen which way the wind was blowing and had given Lyle the slip within minutes of getting back to Fountain Reach, and by the time the order went out to bring her in for questioning she was long gone. Talisid had been giving me regular updates and on the third day he sent me a message with an invitation.

* * *

The train that took Luna and me into the Cotswolds was the same one I’d taken for my first trip there, and as we alighted I looked around to see that the country station was deserted. The train pulled away from the platform, and as the rumble and clatter of the carriages faded into the distance everything became quiet. The town the station was built in was a small one and there wasn’t much traffic.

I walked out of the station and onto the main road. “Aren’t we taking a car?” Luna asked. She’d been quiet on the trip and was looking around at the green hills. It was less than an hour to sunset and the light was fading quickly.

“We’re early,” I said. “Might as well walk.”

Luna looked resigned but didn’t complain, and we turned towards Fountain Reach and settled into a steady pace. It had been a clear winter’s day and the temperature dropped like a rock as the sun disappeared behind the western hills. The stars came out, bright and twinkling in the clear air, the Square of Pegasus hanging almost directly overhead while the stars of the Summer Triangle sank into the west.

We came up around Fountain Reach from over the back hillside. We bypassed the campsite where we’d gathered around a fire with Anne and Variam and Sonder a few nights ago, and descended towards the clearing where I’d seen Onyx and Lisa before that. The woods were going from shadowy to pitch-black, but neither Luna nor I slipped or fell.

As we approached the clearing I began to make out lights between the trees, and we emerged onto the grass to see that shielded lamps had been stuck into the grass around the clearing’s edge. Two men were talking at the centre of the clearing: one I didn’t know and one I did. As I watched they finished their conversation and one turned and walked away down the hill, disappearing into the darkness. The other turned to us with a nod. “Verus. Luna.”

“Hey, Talisid,” I said. In the dim light I could see he was still wearing his maths-teacher suit, looking faintly ridiculous in the winter forest. There was the crackle of static and Talisid raised a hand apologetically. “Just a moment.” He took out a radio and spoke into it. “Receiving.”

“Charges are set,” a voice said from the radio speaker. “Everyone’s accounted for.”

“Did anyone enter the building?”

“No.”

“Good,” Talisid said. “You have full tactical command from this point. Proceed at your discretion.”

“Roger that,” the voice said. “Moving into final positions now.”

Talisid clicked the radio off and returned it to his pocket. “So you decided not to go in,” I said.

“The Council decided that the chances of a successful recovery from Vitus’s shadow realm were too low to justify the risks of mounting an expedition.” Talisid gave me a glance. “Based on your report it didn’t sound as though there was any realistic likelihood of finding survivors.”

I thought of the slaughterhouse in Vitus’s sanctum, piles of bones stacked neatly in their alcoves. “No,” I said.

We stood in the darkness on the hillside, looking down upon Fountain Reach. The mansion was dark, no lights showing from the windows. I couldn’t see any activity but I knew people were moving in the grounds. “Any news on Crystal?” I said.

“Of a sort,” Talisid said. “We haven’t been able to pick up her trail, but we managed to find one of her hideouts and it turned out to be quite a source of information.”

“About her and Vitus?”

“It seems Vitus had been practising his particular brand of life extension for some time,” Talisid said with an expression of distaste. “Apparently his ritual absorbed his victims’ life force through the medium of their blood-I’ll spare you the details. Unfortunately for him, the ritual was providing diminishing returns. Each killing was extending his own life by a shorter time. So he recruited Crystal to ensure a steady supply.”

“What did she get out of it?”

“Knowledge,” Talisid said. “Vitus shared his research with her. It seems Crystal came to believe that the flaw in the ritual had been Vitus’s choice of subjects. Crystal started preying on adepts, and when that didn’t work she began kidnapping apprentice mages. According to Crystal’s notes, she believed that if they found the right mage the ritual would grant perfect immortality, without the. . flaws Vitus had developed.”

“And when they saw Anne use her magic, they decided she was the right mage.”

Talisid nodded. “Hopefully we’ll never find out if they were correct.”