Well, why not?

| | | | | | | | |

One of the drawbacks of being a diviner is not having access to the gate spell. Gate magic is one of the more useful tricks that mages have up their sleeves; it creates a portal between two points in space, allowing you to step from place to place instantly. You have to know the two places you’re gating between, but it’s still a really useful ability to have—it would have allowed me to get to Pudding Mill Lane station in about sixty seconds, using my mental image of the place from the night before. Unfortunately, gate magic is restricted to elementalists. There are a handful of non-elemental magic types that can use the spell (death and space being the most well known), but divination isn’t one of them.

If you can’t use gate spells, the next best thing is gate stones. They’re small, cheap items that can be used to produce a gate effect at will, and like most focuses they can be used by any mage. Only problem is, they’ll take you to the same place every time, namely the spot the focus was keyed to. Great for going home, not so good for outbound trips.

Which is why when I’m travelling around London, I usually just take the train like everybody else.

| | | | | | | | |

I stepped out onto the platform at Pudding Mill Lane, shivering in the cold air. Behind me, the doors of the train hissed shut and the carriages began to pull away from the station.

Now that I knew what I was looking for, it didn’t take me long to find it. There were two CCTV cameras on the platform, pointing in both directions, and . . . there. Perfect. A third camera just a little way past the platform, pointing at the gate with the No Admittance sign and looking right down on the spot where I’d found the focus last night.

I wanted to go through the gate and poke around, but despite the late hour there were a couple of other people on the platform: a man fiddling with his mobile phone and a woman carrying a bunch of Sainsbury’s bags. I didn’t want to do anything to draw attention while they were so close. Although now that I’d found the right camera, it occurred to me that I didn’t really know what to do next. How did you pull recordings off cameras? The Keepers would definitely have contacts at Transport for London, but I didn’t know whether they’d do something like that on my request.

From the departure boards I could see that trains were coming every ten minutes. As I watched, a southbound train pulled up at the platform in a rumble of light and noise, newly arrived from the terminus at Stratford. The woman with the Sainsbury’s bags got on. The man with the mobile phone didn’t. The doors shut with a hiss and the train pulled away, heading south towards the towers of Canary Wharf, leaving the two of us alone on the platform.