I like taking a little while to look over an area before an operation. I don’t mean planning or recon, though I do those too; I mean finding a place with a good vantage point, sitting there, and waiting. No matter how many maps I’ve studied, or how many projections I’ve seen, I never feel happy about going into a place until I’ve watched it for a while.
The farmhouse had peeling white paint, with widely spaced windows and slates missing from the roof, and it looked pretty much identical to any of a thousand other old farmhouses scattered around the British countryside. There was a disused yard and a couple of old barns, but according to our information, what we were interested in was underground. The buildings and landscape were clearer than they should have been: Anne had worked an effect to enhance my low-light vision.
I heard a whisper of movement behind me; it was Vari. “Everyone ready?” I asked.
“We’ve been ready for half an hour,” Variam said. “Are we going in or what? We’re not going to learn anything sitting around staring.”
“Learning about things by sitting around and staring is pretty much what I do.”
“I think you do a bit more than that these days.” Variam walked up beside me. “So it’s a go?”
“Entrance is in the cellar behind a false wall. Lock’s a little tricky but I should be able to handle it.”
“Enemies?”
“Can’t tell,” I said. My path-walking lets me follow the futures, in which I take a certain sequence of actions, discovering who or what I’ll meet on the way. But the lock was tricky enough that following the chain of futures all the way through the ones that’d open it and to what was inside would have been slow. I could have done it with more time, but the benefit was marginal, and there was a small but definite chance that we were on a clock. We’d been working this lead for a while and I didn’t want to waste it.
“Eh,” Variam said. “Anne’ll probably spot anyone.”
“How’s Landis’s op going?”
“He says boring. Bodyguarding Council members is a waste of bloody time. I dunno why they keep putting us on it.”
“Just because Richard hasn’t tried assassinations yet doesn’t mean he won’t, but you’re right, it’s a waste of resources. Landis is too important to be doing that kind of work.”
Landis is Variam’s master, or to be more accurate his ex-master—Variam became a journeyman a little while ago and a full member of the Keepers along with it. Up until a year or so ago, a mage as young as Variam would never have been sent on a combat assignment like this without his ex-master to supervise, but with the war, manpower was tight.
“Well, I doubt we’ll need him,” Variam said. “Aren’t going to be any mages, are there?”
“Just traps and whatever’s left of their experiments,” I said. “Of course, if one of those traps is an alarm and they gate in some reinforcements, things are going to get interesting.”
“That’s why we have you around, right?” Variam said. “I mean, they decide to gate in, you’ll be able to give us what? A whole minute’s warning? Now come on, the boys are getting bored.”
I gave the farmhouse a last look and got to my feet.
* * *
We moved up through the farmyard. I was at the front, my attention split between the house looming up in the present and the branching futures ahead. Vari took the right, his movements quick and sure, his turban making him easy to pick out even in the darkness. To the left was Ilmarin, an air mage I’d worked with a lot over the past year. Anne brought up the rear, a slim presence in the darkness, quiet and watchful.
Behind us were the Council security, a detachment of ten led by Sergeant Little. I’d pulled Little out of a hot spot a few years back and it had turned into a good working relationship. Like his men, he wore body armour and carried a submachine gun; to someone who didn’t know better, he and his squad would have seemed like the dangerous ones. They wouldn’t have been wrong, exactly, but it was the four of us on whom the mission would depend.
The standard Keeper doctrine for combat ops is to send a minimum of six to eight mages, with at least three times as many security personnel. But I’d led a lot of these missions over the past year and a half, and I’d come to prefer the speed and responsiveness of a smaller team. Two elemental mages, one living mage, and one universalist gave us the tools to handle most problems, and if things did go wrong then it’s a lot easier to evacuate fourteen than forty.
“Building is dead,” Anne said quietly into my ear through the communication focus. No telepathy this time; everyone else needed to hear what she had to say. Little’s men were on the same circuit, which was another area in which I ran things differently. Normally Keepers have separate communication bands for Council security and for themselves. “Nothing alive on the ground floor.”
“Basement?” Variam asked.
“Not on the first level. Can’t see farther than that.”
“Move up,” I said.
Little’s men advanced, three moving to the door, two more sweeping around each side. The front door lock was dealt with and the security men entered.
“Ground floor clear,” one of the men said.
“First floor clear,” came a minute or two later.
If there were anything alive in the house, Anne would have seen it, but there was no point taking chances. “Secure the basement.”
The farmhouse felt abandoned, with that particular sense a place has when it hasn’t been lived in for a long while. Traces of dust rested on the furniture. I took the stairs down to the basement while Little gave orders for one of the men, Lisowski, to stay in the entrance hall and watch our backs. If trouble came from outside, we’d be counting on him to sound the alarm.
The facility entrance was behind a wooden wall. Pulling out a hidden dowel allowed the wall to swing back, exposing a circular steel door. I stepped up and got to work. The basement was cramped with fourteen of us, but no one spoke—they’d all done this before and they knew I needed quiet. Diviners are good at breaking through security: when you can see the consequences of your actions, it’s easy to avoid most kinds of alarms or traps. In this case the builders had opted to go with a technological approach rather than a magical one, using a simple access code. There are types of locks that divination doesn’t help with—a fingerprint or retinal scan, for instance—but this wasn’t one. (If it had been, Vari would have just melted the door to slag. Like I said, a team like this can handle most problems.)
The door clicked and I pulled on the lever. It swung open with a creak, revealing stairs down into darkness. No breeze came out, but I thought that I could smell a faint scent in the air, something unpleasant and stale.