There was a stone bench by the pool and I took a seat. The only sound was the gentle splashing of the fountain. The air smelt sweet and flowery; there were rhododendrons and hydrangeas all around, blooming in red and violet. I breathed in and out slowly, forcing myself to relax. The things I said and did in the next few minutes were going to have very long-term consequences, and I needed to be calm.

Footsteps sounded from the direction of the hallway. I closed my eyes and kept them closed. The footsteps drew nearer, and I tracked their owner by sound and divination as he walked into the observatory, wound his way around the bushes, stepped up onto the rock garden, and came to a stop on the other side of the pool from me.

There was a silence. I didn’t move.

The figure on the other side of the pool spoke. “Mage Verus.”

I opened my eyes. Standing opposite me was a man in his fifties, with thin white hair. He was dressed in Council ceremonial robes, understated but expensive, and he had his hands clasped behind his back. His most distinctive feature was his eyes: they were pale, almost colourless, and they were watching me steadily.

“Councillor Levistus,” I said. “I understand you wanted to see me.”

It’s strange how one encounter can change your life. Before today I had met Levistus exactly once. It had been in Canary Wharf, for a private conversation that lasted hardly any time at all. I’d been in and out of his office in under twenty minutes, and since then, we’d never communicated in any way—no phone, no e-mail, no messages. It was as though we’d never met.

And yet, as a result of that one brief meeting, Levistus had become my worst and most dangerous enemy out of all the Light mages in Britain. That fifteen-minute conversation had led to an escalating series of attempts on my life, ranging from subtle betrayals and reassignments that left me exposed, all the way up to outright assassination attempts employing everything from other mages to bound elementals to (on one particularly memorable occasion) a rocket launcher. Directly and indirectly, Levistus has tried to get me killed more times than any person alive, and given that he’s a junior member of the Light Council, there’s absolutely nothing I can do to him in return.

On the other hand, while I can’t do anything to Levistus, the same doesn’t apply to his agents. An awful lot of the people who’d gone after me on Levistus’s orders were now dead, including a Keeper named Griff, a Light mage named Belthas, and an enslaved air elemental named Thirteen, as well as various lower-level employees whose names I’d never learnt. At some point Levistus must have gotten the message, because he’d stopped sending assassins. That didn’t mean his feelings had changed. In fact, I was pretty sure it had made him like me less.

“I believe I asked you to come to the interview room,” Levistus said. He had a measured, detached sort of voice. There was little variation in tone: his words were as expressionless as his face.