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Chapter 758
Garrick Vail let out a breath that was almost a laugh.“Somewhere warm,” he said. “You’re threatening a fire magician with warmth.”His own front room. Nine feet between them. The lamp turned low on the wall, the ashes cold in the grate.“For people like me, kid, warm is nothing—warm is bathwater.” He clenched his fists, unleashing twin coils of fire around his hands.“You’re right.” Alex nodded. “I should have been clearer. The invitation is to hell.”Vail stopped smiling.“They tell me it’s very hot down there,” Alex went on. “And you being what you are, I thought — well. At least he’ll have something to play with.”“What do you want?”“You spent tonight in a room above a restaurant arranging my death.” Alex stood up. “You commanded three hundred men to burn us. So of course I came here to kill you. What else did you think this was?”Vail’s hand was already coming up.Nineteen years as the strongest fire magician in the Arcanum State, and he did not hesitate, and he did not waste a
Chapter 757
The inside of a minister’s carriage smells like lamp oil and old leather.“Why,” Alex said, “do you want to make an enemy of the White Tower?”The blade did not move. It lay along the side of Penn’s neck, above the collar, exactly where a man can feel his own pulse.“Do you think we’re easy to bully?”…“You—” Penn’s voice came out in pieces. “You dare. You dare point a sword at a Minister of Magic.”“That’s not an answer.”“Do you know what happens to a man who lays a hand on me?”“So it’s like this.” Alex sat back a little, which somehow made it worse. “When you sit in a room upstairs and arrange for four towers to come and end me, that’s government. But when I answer it, that’s a crime.”“That is not—”“You can build the knife,” Alex said. “I’m just not allowed to look at it. Who exactly do you think you are?”“You’ve already lost,” he said. “Do you understand that? It’s done. Four towers. Ferrowgate’s money behind every one of them. I signed it tonight, upstairs, over a good bottle
Chapter 756
The recording glass hummed once, the way it does when a voice comes in loud, and the sound carried all the way down the table.“Do you want to die?”Minister Penn’s face went white, then red, and he put both hands flat on the wood to stop them shaking.“How dare you,” he said. “How dare you threaten me. In this hall. I am the Minister of Magic.”“Then let me ask you a better one.” Alex hadn’t sat down.“Three hundred Red Tower magicians came to a private dinner two nights ago to kill me, my chairwoman, nine White Tower elders in their eighties and two hundreds our guests,” Alex said.He leaned in slightly.“So I want to hear you say it clearly, Minister, because the glass is running. Are you standing with them?”“I stand with justice—”"We are on the side of justice. We never strike first. You have to pick a side, because if you stand with them, you stand against us—and you need to understand what being our enemy truly means."Penn straightened his coat. He had prepared this part."I
Chapter 755
Weeks earlier, in the middle of a war with the Black Tower, Beatrix put a stack of purchase orders on Alex’s desk and did not sit down.Rain was coming down the fourth-floor windows in sheets. Below them New Avalon was all wet lamplight and moving umbrellas, and every one of those orders had a Red Tower address within two miles of it.“Explain these to me.”“They’re land purchases.”“I can read.” She pushed the top sheet across. “Warehouse leases. Ninety of them. Every single one sits inside walking distance of a Red Tower branch, and we are currently at war with a completely different tower.”Alex didn’t look up.“Then it’s a good week to buy warehouses. Nobody’s paying attention.”“Alex.”“Sit down, Beatrix.”She sat.…“There are three organisations in this country that want to destroy us,” he said. “Black. Red. Ferrowgate. All three of them are talking to each other and all three of them are waiting to see how the first one goes.”“So you’re preparing for Red before Black is finis
Chapter 754
Red Tower had three hundred red tower and thirty thousand magicians in the Arcanum State.That night, there were almost none of them in a Red Tower.…It was not carelessness. It was the business.Red sells fire by the month. Every forge, every bakery oven, every kitchen stove in the state runs on a flame-charm, and a flame-charm has to be renewed by hand, at the customer’s door, by a man who walks there.Red’s people lived in their own houses. They slept above shops in the market districts, in rented rooms near the harbour, in cottages on the roads out east, so they could be at the first door by seven in the morning on the first of the month."White Tower had summoned every fighter drone, every ex-black-magic recruit, it commanded to attack all of the Red towers."Red Tower never summoned anybody, because it was ambushed.…At the Halloway branch there were twenty-six people inside at midnight.Four cooks. Nine record-keepers. Two men on the gate. A duty elder named Corliss who had d
Chapter 753
Six hours earlier, on the roof of the Regent Group building, a machine the size of a carriage was running in the dark.No lights on it. No sound except a low hum you felt in your teeth.Gaia the Mother AI had gone up the week after thirty men climbed the east stairwell, and it had not been switched off since. Every drone over the White Tower answered it.Every drone over the Regent building. Every drone in the Arcanum State, all the way out to the coast.Alex stood in front of it with his hands in his pockets.“Say it again,” he said.“Two hundred and ninety-six,” Gaia said. “Moving out of the Red Tower’s north gate in nine groups. They are not travelling together and they are not travelling as magicians.”“Where are they going?”“Every route converges on the banquet grounds. Estimated arrival, twenty-one forty.”“Two hundred and ninety-six.” Alex almost smiled. “He rounded up.”…Beatrix found him there twenty minutes later with her coat still on.“Cancel it,” she said.“No.”“Alex,
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