Fated

The room inside was dimly lit. It looked oddly familiar and it took me a second to realise what it reminded me of: the room in Canary Wharf where I’d met Levistus. Just like there, a handful of chairs faced a full-length window made of one-way glass. But my attention was fixed on the woman standing in the centre of the room. It was Deleo, except this time, as she turned to look at us, she wasn’t wearing her mask. And this time, I knew who she was.

I stopped dead in the doorway. ‘I believe the two of you know each other?’ Morden said.

Both of us stared at each other in silence. ‘Well,’ Morden said eventually. ‘I have a disciplinary matter to attend to. Let me make it clear that I will not accept any internal fighting. Both of you work for me now. If you prove unable to cooperate, one or both of you will be replaced. Understood?’

Neither of us answered. ‘I said is that understood?’ Morden asked, steel creeping into his voice.

‘Yes,’ I said. The woman facing me nodded.

‘Good. Oh, and please stay here until I return. You’ll understand why shortly.’ The door clicked shut behind Morden and the room was silent.

‘So it was you,’ I said at last.

Deleo – not that that was her real name – spoke for the first time. ‘You didn’t even recognise me, did you?’

‘If you’d called yourself Rachel, I would have.’

She looked away. ‘That’s not my name any more.’

Silence fell again as I went back to staring at Rachel. It’s a strange feeling, seeing someone after so long. When I’d first known Rachel, she’d been a teenager, pretty and thoughtful, always changing. In her face I could still recognise the person she’d once been, but her face was immobile now, mask-like. She was striking, even beautiful in a cold way, but ‘pretty’ didn’t describe her any more.

There had been four of us, back then. Me, Shireen, Tobruk and Rachel. Tobruk was dead. Shireen was probably dead. Rachel’s fate I’d never known. After that last battle, I’d never heard from her and she’d never come looking for me. I’d forgotten her, buried her in my memory along with everything else that had happened back then. Until now.

‘Why the mask?’ I said at last.

‘You wouldn’t understand.’

‘Is this how you’ve been keeping yourself busy? Treasure-hunting?’

‘And you’ve been running a shop,’ Rachel said contemptuously.

I shrugged. I can’t say I like mages looking down on me for my day job, but I’m used to it. ‘Running a shop or treasure-hunting … it seems to have led us to the same place.’

Rachel didn’t answer. ‘Just out of curiosity,’ I said, ‘what were you planning to do with me and Luna after you got into that relic?’

‘Whatever I wanted.’

‘Modelling yourself on our old teacher?’

‘Fuck you,’ Rachel snapped. ‘We had you. You could never beat me.’

‘I wasn’t trying to beat you,’ I said. Rachel made a disgusted noise and stalked to the end of the room, her back turned.

Despite the violence in Rachel’s words I couldn’t sense any danger. With her mask off she seemed a different person. I could also tell she wasn’t going to answer any more questions, so I walked to the one-way glass and studied what was beyond.

The room on the other side of the glass was a torture chamber. Three small barbed cages were lined against the far wall, not quite tall enough to stand in and not quite wide enough to sit in. A rack was in one corner, and there was also a vagrant’s chair and an iron maiden with its spikes just visible inside its half open doors. In pride of place, at the centre of the room, was a ten-foot-tall agoniser. Its straps and metal plates had been polished, ready for use.

Although well equipped, I couldn’t help but notice that Morden’s torture chamber was a little on the primitive side compared to Richard’s. Richard had gone to special effort to select devices that inflicted pain without causing physical damage, so that they could be used over long periods of time without need of a healer. Maybe Morden was the old-fashioned type.

By the way, if you’re getting creeped out by me discussing the pros and cons of torture chambers, I’m not surprised. Just trust me when I say you’d understand if you’d ever been there. Treating it like it’s something normal helps to make it less scary. Of course, when you’re treating torture chambers as something normal, that’s also a sign that you should seriously re-examine your life.

‘Just like old times,’ I said. When Rachel didn’t reply, I looked at her. ‘Did Morden put you in there? Or was it just Cinder and Khazad?’

Rachel looked at me without expression. I leant back against the wall, watching her. ‘You wouldn’t take orders from anyone, back then,’ I said after a pause. ‘You were the one in charge; that was how you sold it. Now one day and you’re following Morden? What changed?’

Rachel turned her back on me again. For a moment I thought she wasn’t going to answer, then she spoke. ‘A lot of things changed.’

‘One thing hasn’t.’ I smiled slightly. ‘We’re supposed to be working together again.’