“I caught bits,” he said in an undertone. “Did he really see it, do you think?”
I shrugged and played with a pen, adding to the doodles on my blotter. “I think he’s found one of his talents, yes. Makes me wonder – the first time, when his magic started. I wonder what it was he saw that’s left him so jittery.”
“I could take a look? No, all right, maybe not. So if he saw it, if it’s real… He thinks it is, at the least. Here, look, I caught this much.”
I could see the office, the cobwebs in the corner, the array of candles in weird shapes, the top of Dendal’s head as he bent to start another letter, Pasha’s monkey face and the way he was twisting his finger out of its socket with a hiss of pained breath. Overlaid on all that, I could see… machines, mountains, men. Just like Allit had said. I tried to shut my eyes against it, but Pasha’s little insertion into my brain was still there.
I’d seen the machines at the gates from far away, through a telescope at Top of the World. Monstrous guns on wheels, and they’d been bad enough. These machines were different. Imagine a spider got drunk and mated with a – hell, I don’t know, a lion and a giraffe or something. And then had some twiddly bits grafted on. They had too many legs, too many nasty, brutal-looking protuberances and weird twisting parts that looked like teeth at the same time as they looked like guns. Smoke oiled its way around them, making them vague and all the more disturbing. I was pretty sure I knew what I was going to be having nightmares about when I slept next, though they’d have a fight on their hands with all the other crap my brain liked to throw at me when I was weak.
Maybe Dench had been right all along: maybe we should have allied with the Storad, should have bent the knee, swallowed our pride. Maybe I shouldn’t wait for the cardinals’ men to find me but hand myself over now, as long as the Storad promised not to use these things in anger. From this news of more machines, if not from the things already here, it was obvious that this had been long in the planning. They’d just been waiting for the best time, the time when we were weak.
But now maybe we had an edge. If the boy could really farsee, then that might be all the edge we needed.
Perak was there in minutes when I called him – he’d been in the lab, looking very secretive as he discussed something with Erlat. She gifted me a wink before she left, leaving me with the feeling that something funny was going on there. No time to think about it right then though.
Pasha showed them what he’d showed me of Allit’s vision. Perak looked pale and shaky, kind of how I felt.
“Are you sure?” he kept asking. “It couldn’t be a mistake, could it?”
“Allit certainly seems sure,” I said, with a shrug that probably made me look a lot more unconcerned than I was. “But then, it’s only the first time this has happened to him that we know of.”
“So perhaps —”
“Perhaps we don’t want to take that chance, Perak.”
He sat on the other edge of my desk and ran a hand through his hair. “No. No, you’re right. But by the Goddess, just when I though we might be able to do something, get this over with. I thought we had a chance, but with that on the way…”
When I looked up, Allit was standing in the doorway to the kitchen, Lastri’s hand on his shoulder. He looked very young all of a sudden.
“Allit,” Pasha asked in a soft voice, “do you think you could do it again? Just to see if – well, if it’s still the same.”
Allit’s voice was full of teenage belligerence and a hint of bewilderment. “I didn’t lie.” He looked at me, as though I had all the answers. “I didn’t.”
“No one says you did,” I said. “But – first proper spell and all, well, first intentional one, it’s difficult. Maybe you aren’t farseeing. Maybe you are and it’s the other side of the world, not Storad in our mountains. Maybe a hundred things, but we have to be sure.”
He looked between me and Perak, seeming to weigh it all in his mind. “All right. I’ll try it again.”
Perak nodded firmly. “Good. In the meantime, at least I’ve got something to go on. Jake and Malaki, I’ve got some work for them to do, and I’ve got a few things to deal with myself – all these people who want you dead, for starters. Let me know what you find.”
Pasha and I settled down with Allit, and got on with the business of him trying again. It didn’t go well.
Finally, after blood had got everywhere, we’d got nowhere and Allit seemed on the verge of tears, I said, “Allit, when you… well, when you first found out you were a mage. What was it you saw?”