With their old base destroyed, the Council needed a new one, and an argument broke out as to where to go. The Isolationists wanted a place out in the countryside where they’d have as little interaction with normal humans as possible. The more moderate members wanted to pick a smaller city like Gloucester or Oxford. But the Directors wanted their power centre here, in the heart of the City, and as London was being rebuilt they took the opportunity to lay the foundations for what would become the new centre of magical government in Britain for the next three hundred and fifty years.

One of the reasons the Directors won the argument was that they’d noticed which way the wind was blowing. Traditionally mages had lived in towers, way up above the ground, to the point where it had become a status symbol. Unfortunately for the status-conscious mages of that time period, spells and technology had been evolving at a good clip, and the seventeenth century’s brisk trade in Light-Dark warfare provided the more innovative mages on both sides with plenty of opportunity to give the new weapons a test-drive. Experimental data proved that that towers and artillery didn’t mix. After several well-publicised incidents of traditionally defended towers being brought down by cannon fire, even the slower-witted members of the Light Council figured out that while towers might work for personal residences, they probably weren’t the best choice for a military centre of government.

Building a centre of government below ground, on the other hand, was a different story. Compared to a traditional tower or castle, an underground complex would be harder to attack, easier to defend, and much more likely to go unnoticed by any normal people living on the surface. So in the aftermath of the Great Fire, the first tunnels were burrowed into the area beneath what’s now modern Westminster. With earth and matter mages to do the bulk of the work, the tunnels expanded fast, and within a generation they’d become a sprawling warren. The Summer War did a good job of proving the security of the tunnel network, and the Council’s stayed there ever since. Somewhere during one of the various Dark-Light skirmishes the tunnels started getting called the War Rooms, and the name stuck.

Or so the story goes . . . but I might have got it wrong. Light mages learn stories like this as they grow up, picking up the culture and the traditions, but I spent my childhood in the normal world and my apprenticeship surrounded by Dark mages, and a good part of my life since then has revolved around my shop. I’ve never really been inside the Light mage circles. For that matter, this was the first time I’d ever actually been to the War Rooms.

I suppose I should look on the bright side. I might be going to an indictment, but at least it wasn’t mine. Yet.

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Getting through security took longer than I expected. The security personnel hired by the Council are famous for their complete lack of any kind of a sense of humour, and I was kept answering questions until Haken finally showed up. “There you are,” Haken said, then addressed the man who’d been interviewing me. “He’s with me.”