by Jay was waiting for me down in the Waymastery Station. I don’t suppose anybody else calls it that but me, but it’s what it is. Unprepossessing, for all its exalted purpose: just a tiny room in the cellar, unpainted and virtually unfurnished. There’s an ancient henge under the floor, and that’s what Jay uses to whizz us about.
He had a small shoulder bag with him, which he opened when I came in. I took a peek inside, and saw a cloth-wrapped bundle snugly nestled within.
‘Bill?’ I ventured.
‘Bill,’ Jay confirmed.
I patted the bag I carried over my own shoulders. ‘I’ve got your stuff.’ Change of clothes, life-saving magickal artefacts, the usual. Indira had dutifully packed up his personal things and left them out for me, while Jay was off securing the book. I could well imagine his task was not an easy one; nobody wanted to see Bill go, and he had to try to squirrel him away without anybody noticing besides. Anyone but Val, that is.
‘Ready?’ I said, watching Jay’s face. He looked worried. A heavy frown creased his brow, and he couldn’t stand still.
‘Absolutely,’ he said, fidgeting with the strap of his bag.
‘Except?’
The frown deepened. ‘I’m worried about Indira.’
‘She’ll be fine. It’s not like there’s an army of orcs marching upon the House, or anything.’
‘I’m worried about what happens to her if anything happens to me.’
Oh. ‘Er, that’s a bit doomy,’ I tried. ‘We’re not in mortal danger.’
‘Then why the Sunstone?’
‘Bill is in mortal danger.’ I said this in a whisper, hoping that the book was too well wrapped-up to hear me. ‘We aren’t.’
‘She’s shy. It’s hard for her to manage without me.’
‘Even for a week or two? She needs to stand on her own feet sometime, Jay, or she’ll never be independent.’
He scowled at that; I’d irritated him. ‘Let’s go, anyway.’
‘If I may be permitted my opinion,’ said Bill, his voice doubly muffled by the cloth wrappings and the bag. ‘The little Spellwright is in no danger, either of harm or mortification.’
‘How do you know?’ said Jay snappishly.
‘She and I have had conversation together. I found her to be bright-minded, and more resilient than elder brothers are inclined to imagine.’
The fact that Bill and Indira had been chatting together was news to me, though perhaps not to Jay, for he just gave me a sideways look and then went on with his preparations to leave. ‘I hope you’re right,’ he said to Bill. I have no idea what he does when he’s making ready to use the Ways, so I just stand back and try to keep out of his way.
A breeze picked up in the room, and began to build. ‘Off we go,’ said Jay, and held out a hand to me.
I took it. Since I met Jay, I have had a little practice at travelling the Ways. Enough to know that it is a disorienting experience, and can leave a person feeling unpleasantly shaken up in the middle. It appears to have an even greater impact upon Jay, but he went about his work with an enviable composure, and betrayed no further signs of unease.
I do wish he had warned me before departure, however. Last time, we had waited until the Winds of the Ways had gathered themselves to quite a height before we set off. This time, the breeze had barely doubled in strength. There I was, tranquil enough yet in the expectation of its being a few more minutes before we would be going anywhere—
—and then I was away, tossing about in the wind like a miserable little leaf and clinging fiercely to Jay while the currents rattled my teeth and did awful things to my hair.
When the winds died down, they left us marooned on top of a low hill looking out over an expanse of drab fields. Stone monuments rose around us, which at first glance I took to be your typical ancient megalithic arrangement — except that, at a second look, the stones looked oddly new.
‘I forgot to ask where you were taking us,’ I said, a little breathless.
‘Milton Keynes.’ Jay sat cross-legged upon the ground in a pose of studied nonchalance, and looked around with more apparent satisfaction than I was feeling.
‘Milton Keynes.’ I got to my feet and took a couple of breaths, waiting until my knees steadied.
‘Yes.’
‘But why.’
‘Because of all the places you and I might heroically flee with a magickal book, who’d ever think of Milton Keynes?’
Who indeed. ‘And what in the name of Milady’s garters is this?’ I flicked a finger at the nearest lovely, smooth stone.
‘A new henge.’
‘A new henge?’
‘It isn’t their age that makes them effective, you know.’ Jay picked himself up with some care, and squared his shoulders. ‘Built last decade. Part of the city plan.’
One of the hazards of my trade: a tendency to start making overly simplified and accordingly fallible suppositions, for example: the older, the better. ‘I suppose it’s about as reasonable as putting in a train station.’
Jay’s lips quirked in a smile. ‘If only there were a few more Waymasters to make use of them. Somebody had dewy-eyed ideas about training up a lot more of us.’
‘Can’t manufacture that kind of talent.’
‘Apparently not. You okay?’
‘Of course!’ If Jay was determined to be Totally Fine then so was I. I looked around at the uninspiring landscape, and hoisted my bag higher upon my shoulder. ‘What now?’
‘I don’t know. Fancy a cup of tea?’
‘Last one to the cafe’s a rotten egg.’ I began to totter down the hill.
‘Which cafe?’
‘Any!’
But my phone buzzed before I was more than halfway down the hill, and I hastily grabbed it.
‘Ves?’ said Val. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Perfectly. Why wouldn’t I be?’
‘And Jay?’
I looked round to check, if it would make Val happy, and saw Jay wandering down the hill some way behind me, hands in the pockets of his ever-present leather jacket. ‘He’s fine. Val, what’s the matter?’
Val exhaled in a way that filled me with an unreasonable foreboding. How could I be so unsettled by a sigh? ‘Milady had me pull up everything we know about Ancestria Magicka, which proved to be embarrassingly little. So then she had me go comb the world for every new scrap of information I could find — in fact she put the entire library staff on it, and—’
‘Val, the suspense is killing me.’
‘Sorry. Ves, they have a Waymaster.’
I almost dropped the phone. ‘What? How’s that possible?’
‘Imported her from Hungary. She’s been on the job only slightly longer than Jay, but she knows her stuff. Graduate from a top magickal university, comes highly recommended, entire bidding war to employ her. Etc. I’m sending pics. Her name’s Katalin Pataki.’
‘And you think they’ll send her after us.’
‘Well, wouldn’t you? Why did they go to such lengths to get a Waymaster on the staff, if not for occasions like this?’
‘They can’t possibly know where we are, though, can they? Jay picked a destination at random, like Milady said. What are they going to do, travel to every single henge in the entire British Isles looking for us?’
‘Ves, I don’t have time to convey everything I’ve lately learned about this lot, but I’d advise against underestimating them. They may be new, but they’ve already got Milady worried.’
Curses. ‘Thanks, Val.’
‘Be careful.’
I checked the pictures and then put my phone away, a variety of thoughts flitting across my mind. Who were these people? They had gone pretty far afield in search of a Waymaster, and poured buckets of money into securing one. Why?
And if they had those kinds of resources to throw around after less than a year… who the hell was funding them?
‘Jay,’ I said when he reached me. ‘We may have a problem.’
‘Another one?’
I relayed Val’s news, but Jay did not react as I’d expected. He thought for a moment, frowning deeply, and then said: ‘A bidding war?’
‘That’s what she said.’
‘A bidding war?’ He looked thunderstruck. ‘You know, my parents told me not to take the first offer I received. They told me.’
‘So why did you?’
‘The Society’s legend. How could I refuse?’
‘Then it’s no good regretting that your salary isn’t higher. Can we talk about this later?’
‘Right.’ Jay shook himself and began to march off, heading for who-knew-where, but after a few paces he slowed again. ‘Was Bill under guard all night?’
‘No idea. Ask Bill.’
Jay began to root furiously through his bag, and at last extracted the book, stripped of its cloth wrapping. ‘Bill, have you been left alone at any time in the past twelve hours or so?’
‘No, sir!’ said Bill brightly. ‘I have been very much admired, and without pause, ever since the news of my existence was gratifyingly taken up.’
‘By whom?’ I said, warily.
‘Oh, by everyone! My acquaintance has expanded enormously.’
‘Did anyone tamper with you?’ said Jay.
‘Decidedly not!’ said Bill, outraged at the very idea.
But Jay was not satisfied, and neither was I. ‘The problem with Orlando,’ he said, turning Bill around in his hands, ‘is that he’s sometimes too clever by half. Those pearl-things you’ve got, for example; even a non-magicker could use them. A potent spell perfectly encapsulated inside something inoffensive; no particular skill required to use it, and therefore no discernible trace left for a paranoid Waymaster to discern, or even a touchy, overly talkative grimoire of a book…’ As he spoke he was inspecting Bill’s covers and turning over page after page, ignoring the book’s protests that he was a grimoire of enormous ability and no one could conceal a spell between his own pages and hope to escape detection.
‘Ah,’ said Jay then, and took up something that sparkled when he held it up to the afternoon sunlight. It was round, and about an inch across; pale and translucent, so much so that I wondered Jay had spotted it at all. The kind of thing, in short, that no one would much take note of. If you didn’t know better, you might have said it was some kind of sticker, or a patch, or perhaps a bookmark.
‘That’s a tracker spell,’ I gasped. I had seen them before. Orlando’s technicians craft a lot of them, and they’re wildly popular across the Society. These aren’t the type of thing even a non-magicker could use, but they’re among the simplest of charms to manipulate, requiring only a trickle of magick.
Jay tossed it to me. It lay in my palm, warm and faintly buzzing.
I dropped it at once.
‘We’d better go.’ Jay spoke tersely, already packing Bill away into his bag again.
‘My most abject apologies!’ Bill was babbling as Jay closed the bag upon him. ‘I had no notion—’
‘Not your fault, Bill,’ I said. ‘You’ve been out of the game for four centuries.’ I was looking around as I spoke, as though I expected some kind of obvious course of action to occur to me if I moved my neck and blinked enough.
Blank mind. Palpitating heart. Not good.
‘It doesn’t matter where we go as long as we go quickly,’ said Jay, and departed at a jog.
But he was too late, for a flicker of movement atop the hill caught my eye. I stopped, squinting against the light. What was it, a bird? Or worse?
‘Ves!’ yelled Jay behind me.
It was not a bird. A woman stood up there, her figure indistinct in the distance, but I could discern enough to be sure. She matched the photos Val had sent: tall, a shade too thin, long dark hair.
She had a man with her, too. He was holding what looked unpromisingly like a Wand.
I turned tail, and ran like a rabbit after Jay.
