Taken

“The obvious person to blame was Crystal, because she was the one who kidnapped all the others. But if it was Crystal then she should have been trying to kidnap Anne, not kill her. And there was something else—the more I thought about it the more it seemed to me that neither of the attacks would have done Crystal or Vitus any favours. They wouldn’t have led us away from Fountain Reach—if anything they would have done the exact opposite. If I’d been killed in the middle of investigating that place it would just have convinced the next few investigators that I was on the right track. So whoever was behind it, they weren’t on Crystal and Vitus’s side. But they weren’t on Anne’s side either, because they were trying to kill her. And they weren’t on my side or Variam’s side, because they could have killed us too, and they weren’t on Morden or Onyx’s side, because those guys wanted me alive, at least until they found Vitus. In fact, it didn’t seem like they were on anyone’s side, which didn’t make any sense.

“So I decided I’d been going about this the wrong way. I threw out all my ideas and started from square one. And when I looked at it with a fresh eye the first thing that jumped out at me was that every time Anne had been in danger, your name seemed to crop up. That first time in Archway she’d gone there in your car with your driver. Same with the motorway services. Vitus trying to kill her wasn’t your doing . . . but it was your doing that she was in Fountain Reach in the first place. And that’s a bit odd, isn’t it? Anne doesn’t duel, so why send her to a duelling tournament when there’s someone out there kidnapping apprentices? Especially when you knew that Fountain Reach was the place those kidnappings were coming from? And finally there was the Council arresting her. It didn’t seem like that could be your fault . . . until I remembered that habit of yours of asking Anne about her classmates. The Keepers are probably going to decide that Crystal got that information out of Anne’s mind, but they’re not a hundred percent happy with that explanation and neither am I. Of course, if the information was getting passed on to Crystal by someone she told it to . . . well, then that would make Anne a perfect spy, wouldn’t it? She’d be Crystal’s accomplice without ever meeting her. But as long as she was alive, she’d be a link that could be traced back to you.”

I stopped and waited. The only sound was the crackle of the fire. “Are you accusing me of attempting to kill my own ward?” Jagadev asked.

“It doesn’t seem to make sense, does it?” I said. “After all, you pointed me towards Fountain Reach. It’s almost as if you wanted to get rid of everyone. Anne and Variam and me and Vitus and Crystal and Onyx . . . and a whole lot of random apprentices in England.”

Jagadev extended his hand to pick up his glass of wine and drank from it, his eyes not leaving mine. “Then there were those gunmen who went after Anne,” I said “I always had the feeling they were killed to stop them from talking about their employer, but it was interesting how they were killed, wasn’t it? Those weren’t gunshot wounds, more like claws. Almost like a big cat.”

Jagadev set the glass down. “Please come to the point.”

“Sorry. Anyway, the problem was that I still couldn’t figure out any reasonable motive. So I did some historical research. I eventually found what I was looking for but I had to go back a long way. All the way to 1865.”

I felt Jagadev go still. “For Americans, that was the Thirteenth Amendment,” I said. “For Indians, it was the British Raj. And for mages, it was the rakshasa wars. That was the year a group of British and Indian mages supported by an auxiliary force attacked the palace of a rakshasa named Lady Arati. Arati was killed, but the other rakshasa in the palace—her husband—escaped.” I paused. “Just out of interest I tried to trace the family trees of the mages who carried out that attack. It was very difficult. Over the decades nearly all of them seem to have suffered mysterious deaths or just disappeared. In fact as far as I can tell, there are only two direct descendants of those mages alive today. Their names are Anne Walker and Variam Singh. And the name of the rakshasa that escaped that attack was Lord Jagadev.”