Taken

The mansion was isolated, but not terribly so. The hillside cut off the view of the nearby town and rail line but the sounds of activity drifted up through the trees. The slopes were forested and I left the access road to angle upwards through the woods and look down on Fountain Reach from above. The gardens were extensive and looked carefully tended, beautiful flowerbeds mixing with copses of exotic trees. Birds pecked on the lawn, their calls echoing through the leaves, and the winter sun was dipping in the western sky, casting a yellowish light over the scene and giving a perfect view across the countryside below.

It looked about as unsinister a place as could be imagined, enough to make me feel a bit foolish. I half-expected a coach to show up and a bunch of European tourists to go wandering across the lawn with their cameras or something.

But I was here and I might as well do the job I’d come for. I found a good vantage point beneath an ash tree and crouched down, concentrating on the futures of me exploring the mansion below.

The technique is called path-walking, and it was the same one I’d used the night before. Basically, instead of looking forward into your various futures, you isolate just one future and follow it through the choices ahead. I’d tried it during the train journey in an attempt to speed up any search of Fountain Reach but hadn’t had much luck. Hopefully it’d be easier now that I was closer.

To my surprise it wasn’t. I could trace out the futures down to the mansion but as soon as I entered the images became narrowed, fuzzy. I kept trying for ten minutes before giving up with a frown.

I’d seen this effect before. You got it when attempting to use divination magic within an area that had been warded against scrying—heavily warded against scrying. As I focused on the mansion with my mage’s sight I realised that the walls were layered with overlapping shields of magical protection, so thick that from my position I couldn’t see through them at all. They were messy, uneven, but extremely powerful.

Now why would a private residence in the middle of nowhere have such heavy defences?

The obvious answer: because they had something to hide.

I waited for sunset. English winter days are short and it wasn’t even four o’clock before the sun began dipping behind the hills. As soon as the sun vanished the temperature dropped like a rock, but my cloak kept me from more than the odd shiver. I know from experience that it’s actually harder to spot someone in twilight than nighttime—the eye has trouble adjusting from the light sky to the dark ground—so once the sky had faded to blue-grey I set off downhill.

The dark woods were filled with roots and traps for unwary feet but my divination magic guided me safely through. My breath was visible in the cold air and the stars shone down from above, Orion and Sirius glowing brightly in a clear sky. I vaulted the garden wall and stole across the lawn, just one more shadow in the evening gloom.

Fountain Reach was occupied—that had been obvious from the cars and vans—but having watched the place for an hour I was fairly sure that there wasn’t much security and I didn’t pick up any danger as I approached. I reached the back of the mansion and studied the wards.

The more I looked at them, the more puzzled I got. Like the house, the wards had an organic look, as if they’d been grown rather than constructed. The design was massively inefficient but the sheer volume of energy made them formidable all the same. There was a gate ward, of course, and shields against spatial and temporal scrying, but search as I might I couldn’t discover any barrier to physical entry. Which was very strange—why would anyone expend so much energy on making a place impossible to view or gate into but do nothing to stop anyone from just walking in?

The divination ward worried me, though. It’s almost impossible to shut down a diviner’s magic completely but the wards were powerful enough to damp it, and as I looked into the futures of my entering I found that I could see much less further than normal. Futures thirty seconds away were fuzzy, and beyond that they degraded quickly into uselessness. My ability to see into the future is the only major edge I have. Having it even partially suppressed makes me very nervous.

But if I was careful thirty seconds ought to be enough. There were windows all along the ground floor and it took me no time at all to find one that had been left unlatched. I pushed it up and climbed inside, and into Fountain Reach.

chapter 5

The inside of Fountain Reach was quiet, distant voices muffled by the intervening walls. I’d come into some kind of sitting room and I moved to the door and listened. I could hear movement, but not close by.