Cursed

I nodded, resigned. Arachne hasn’t lived however many hundreds of years by being careless, and I’ve seen her do this before. When danger comes, she vanishes. I’ve never known where she goes but I suspect the answer’s somewhere down in those tunnels. “Well, I’ll tell you if anything happens.”

“I will be contactable for another two or three days,” Arachne said. “After that …” She gave an odd rippling motion that I’ve come to recognise as a shrug.

Walking up out of Arachne’s lair, I wondered just how many times she had done this over her long life, and how it worked. I’ve never heard of any other creatures like Arachne—giant intelligent magical spiders aren’t a known type in the way that, say, elementals are. I’ve wondered sometimes if Arachne is unique … but then where did she come from? Are there others of her kind, out there somewhere? Or was she once something else?

I watched the earthen bank rumble back into place, the roots writhing and retwining themselves to lock the door closed, and knew I wouldn’t be going back there for a while. It made me a little sad. There aren’t many places where I feel comfortable, and Arachne’s lair is near the top of a very short list.

Luna was standing nearby. I started walking out of the ravine and she fell in by my side. With my mage’s sight I could see that the silver mist around her was muted. “What were you about to say back there?”

The sun shone down out of a blue sky, white clouds drifting with a brisk east wind. It was September and there was a chill in the air, but even so there was a scattering of people around the park, most wearing greatcoats or ski jackets. “When?” Luna said.

“You were about to say that trying to control your magic doesn’t matter.” I looked at Luna. “What’s up with you? I thought you wanted this.”

Luna walked silently for a few seconds. She was wearing her green coat, and the wind whipped at its sleeves and ruffled her hair. We reached a path that would lead us southeast and turned onto it. “What if there’s another way?” she said without looking up.

“What do you mean?”

Luna sighed quietly. “Look, I’ve been doing this for months, okay? And I suck at it. It’s been half a year and I still can’t get through a session without burning the lights out!”

“We always knew it was going to take time,” I said. “Luna, mages spend years learning to control their powers. It’s not just you.”

“Yeah, well, they don’t kill everyone around them when they make a mistake.” Luna stared down at the path. “I know what it means when one of those lights burns out. I can’t make it so that it never happens. What’s the point if I only sometimes kill people? It’s just as bad.”

The path crested the ridge and sloped into a wide, open hillside. We were in the part of the Heath just north of the tumulus, where the rolling meadows descend gradually in a long stretch of grassland before flattening out into the woods and ponds at the park’s edge. It’s open to the sky and we could see for miles. People, alone and in twos and threes and with dogs, were scattered across the great meadow, strolling. On the other side of the ponds, the ground rose again into the huge shape of Highgate Hill, the roofs of houses and a single church poking up between the trees. The valley between gave the illusion that the hill was much closer than it was, almost as if you could reach out and touch it. In the distance East London stretched away, clear in the autumn sun.

Luna and I turned off the path and started down the meadow. Beyond the ponds at the bottom was the main road. “So what are you going to do?” I asked. “Give up?”

Luna walked quietly for a minute. “What if there was another way?” she said again. “Make it safe without all the work. Wouldn’t that be better?”

I looked sharply at her. “Are you—?”

Something flickered on my precognition and I stopped talking. Precognition is a kind of mental discipline and pretty much any diviner who spends much time in dangerous situations learns it by necessity. All diviners have the ability to see the future but we can only look in one place at a time. So what we learn to do is to recognise the outlines of the most important events that’ll affect us personally, things like sudden changes or danger, and then we train our awareness so as to always keep a vague eye on the immediate future, at the back of our mind. It’s like peripheral vision: you can’t see details, but you can sense if something’s about to happen, enough to turn your head and took a closer look.

I took a closer look.

Somebody was about to shoot me through the head in exactly eight seconds.

“Luna,” I said. I kept my voice calm, even as my heart sped up, dumping adrenaline into my system. “We’re about to get shot at. On my mark, go right and take cover.”

Luna stared at me. “Wait, what did—?”

From somewhere on Highgate Hill a rifle fired, and a supersonic bullet flew towards me.

chapter 4