“Your directions were fine,” I said. “You do seem to have a knack for finding pleasant places to live. Did you design Arcadia yourself?”
“I had some hand in it,” Morden said. Standing alone in the wreckage, he made an odd contrast, a figure in black on a field of green and white.
I gave Morden a curious look. “Does it bother you, what happened here?”
Morden gave a slight smile that didn’t touch his eyes. “Shall we get down to business?”
“Let’s.”
Morden’s four apprentices walked past me to stand near him, spreading out into a formation that left the five of them on one side and me on the other. “You asked me for a stepping-stone,” Morden said, “but it would be more accurate to say that what you need is leverage. Against the Council in general, and Levistus in particular. Would you agree?”
“That seems fair, yes.”
Morden nodded. “Do you know why Levistus was so strongly opposed to any action against White Rose?”
I frowned. I hadn’t been expecting the question, and it took me a moment to answer. “Because he wanted to keep you off the Council. Without all the blackmail material you got from there, you wouldn’t have been able to get your seat.”
“Correct,” Morden said, “but there is another side to it that you were never made aware of. White Rose, while it existed, held the largest reserve of blackmail material within the Light political landscape. The second largest reserve was held by Levistus.”
“Really?”
“You first encountered Levistus during his attempt to acquire the fateweaver,” Morden said. “He failed spectacularly, yet shortly afterwards advanced from the Junior to the Senior Council. His failure with White Rose was just as complete, yet that didn’t stop him from forging an alliance with Alma and Sal Sarque. And don’t forget his personal vendetta against you—pursuing a grudge against a lesser mage is one thing, but failing at it quite another. Levistus lacks Bahamus’s birth and connections, he does not have the proven war records of Sal Sarque and Druss, and he does not possess Alma’s administrative skill. So why is he perhaps the most powerful man on the Council?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted.
“Levistus’s power lay in secrets,” Morden said. “Many of which were also known to White Rose. The two of them had an arrangement where neither would disrupt the other. My actions threatened that.”
“Huh,” I said. I’d always wondered why Levistus seemed to have such a particular issue with Morden. Come to think of it, maybe that was one of the reasons he’d never liked me, either. Secrets only have power if they stay secret, and having a diviner around would cut into his territory. “So where did he get all those secrets? Mind magic?”
“I’m sure he would have gleaned the odd titbit, but every Council mage takes precautions against mind-reading. No, what Levistus has is much more interesting, and it was only relatively late in my time on the Council that I was able to discover it. Levistus has access to a bound synthetic intelligence.”
I frowned. “An imbued item?”
“Not exactly. It is a thinking, conscious mind, grown over time. Unlike most mage creations, this one was designed to interface with machines, and in particular computer and communication systems.”
“Communication systems? Like radio signals?”
“It intercepts, decrypts, and searches them,” Morden said. “Effectively, Levistus has a small, private version of the British government’s GCHQ, or the American NSA, able to collect and sort vast amounts of electronic intelligence. The overwhelming majority is useless or irrelevant, but not all.”
“I wouldn’t have thought he’d get much from the Council, given how low-tech they are.”
“You’d be surprised,” Morden said. “It only takes one bureaucrat or Council aide to make a phone call. The phone call is intercepted, flagged by an algorithm, and passed on in a daily report. Any clues in that message can in turn be investigated in more detail, whether by his agents or by Levistus himself. Levistus has been in possession of this synthetic intelligence for over twenty years. Twenty years of compound interest on information adds up to a very large amount.”
“And your idea is to get hold of that information and use it against Levistus and the Council.”
“I am not aware of the exact contents of Levistus’s files,” Morden said. “But they are extensive. I imagine they will more than satisfy your needs.”
“I can see a problem here,” I said. “Levistus is going to have the tightest security on those files that he possibly can. He’ll either have them in some data focus that’s locked to his magical signature, or just keep them all in his head. He’s a mind mage; he can probably memorise them all without breaking a sweat.”
“Indeed,” Morden said. “But I am not suggesting you go after Levistus’s private vaults. I am suggesting you go to the source. The synthetic intelligence itself.”
“How do you know there’s anything there?” I asked. “Levistus could just take out anything he needs on a weekly basis and delete the rest.”
“He could,” Morden agreed. “And that would be the logical approach were he entirely focused on security. However, without existing data to cross-reference, it becomes harder to separate useful signals from noise. I suspect in the early days Levistus might have been willing to make such a sacrifice, but he has been operating this system for a very long time, more than long enough to become complacent. By the time I chanced upon his secret, he was, in my judgement, no longer spending enough personal time and attention on administering the synthetic intelligence for such an approach to be a realistic possibility. I believe that he has allowed data to accumulate for the sake of convenience.”
“But you’re not sure,” I pointed out.
Morden spread his hands. “Things may have changed. But as I say, this is my own judgement.”
“Mm,” I said in a neutral tone. It was still possible that Morden was leading me into a trap. “All right. Say I go after this synthetic intelligence. Where is it? In some super-fortified shadow realm?”
Morden smiled. “That’s the good news. Levistus couldn’t install it in a shadow realm. No radio. So he looked for a central location with the best reception he could find.”
A fuzzy patch of grey appeared in the air between me and Morden, around five or six feet tall. Lines of yellow-white light appeared within, tracing a three-dimensional shape. It was a tower, roughly rectangular but with protruding panels, about five times as tall as it was wide. At the top, the structure broke up into an irregular stack of blocks, with a thin mast protruding from the highest one.