The newly minted Wizard Council was struggling to overcome the centuries-old blood feud between the Wizard Houses of the Red and the White Rose so it could deal with the recent rebellion of the servant guilds. Even worse, it was possible D'Orsay's own organization had been compromised. Someone he could carry to the dungeon in Raven's Ghyll and torture into spilling the Dragon's secrets.īut nothing. For months, D'Orsay had been searching for the flaw in it, the loose end that when pulled would unravel the web.Ī loose end. The Dragon's spy network was legendary, his operatives astonishingly loyal. Somehow he'd sensed they were backtracking through the Net to find him, crawling past all the online blind alleys and mail drops he'd set up to mislead them. Perhaps the use of magic had given them away.
D'Orsay scanned the grid of streets surrounding the building. They stormed up the steps to find the roof occupied only by cats.
The apartment would have been chosen for that reason, and not for the decorating. The keyboard and monitor were still there, a harness linked into a tangle of cables, but only a faint outline in the dust of the desk surface revealed where the laptop had been.Īn inside staircase at the back of the flat led to the roof. He passed through a front room, a kitchen, into the bedroom in the back. Layers of grime ground into the carpet made it impossible to guess at its original color. The furnishings looked to be castoffs accumulated over several decades. It took them less than a minute to discover there was no one in the apartment to kill.ĭ'Orsay followed them in. Six wizards came through the front door like wraiths, shields fixed in place, knowing the Dragon would attack when cornered. Perhaps he'd thought it safe to emerge in the small hours of the morning. It might have been an ice sculpture, or a fairy castle that hid the menace within.įor once the Dragon had stayed online long enough for them to pinpoint his location. Magical barriers overlaid the soot-blackened brick, beautiful as spun glass. The surrounding streets had been emptied of people and traffic, and the filthy pavement perspired in the thick air. Their target was a run-down three-story building in an area of the City of London that had not yet been gentrified.
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