Page 40 of The Unweaver

“How is your house smaller on the outside than inside?”

He quirked a brow. “Magic.”

“Fair enough.” She twisted her gloves in the thickening silence. “Did you make the house, too?”

“Won it in a card game off another Choromancer. Originally, it was enchanted to move between set vertices. I expanded the traversing anchors into an irregular polygon around London to increase the interior angles for more spatial flexibility.”

“Naturally.” She had no idea what he’d said.

Cora burrowed deeper into her bloodstained coat and rubbed her hands together in the cooling evening. Bane tossed his scarf at her. After a moment, she wrapped it around her neck, ignoring how his evergreen scent clung to the cashmere.

From memory, she navigated them to the Crossbones cemetery. It was the oldest, and therefore quietest, cemetery in London. Long-dead bones—her favorite kind—decayed silently in their tombs, worn into anonymity over centuries.

The sky’s hard slate had cleared into a cloudless day. Soot-darkened slush gave way to powdery white along the icy Thames. Skeletal tree branches creaked under glistening snow. Flurries, kicked up by the breeze, sparkled like diamonds in the rays of the setting sun. The snow-capped buildings they passed looked like a postcard from St Petersburg.

Remembering his earlier comment, she asked, “Did you fight in Russia during the Great War?”

“Not that one.”

She blinked. The last Russian war she knew of had been the Crimean War decades before. Unless there’d been a mage war she was unaware of.

Twenty years and you haven’t aged a day. She studied his profile. With the silver threading his temples and the furrow marking his near constant frown, Bane appeared to be in his mid-thirties.

“How... old are you?” The Binding Agreement emboldened her tongue, now she no longer feared him cutting it out. Her boldness only seemed to amuse him.

“Older than you. And too old to fight in another senseless war. They’re all the same. Wealthy men using boys like cannon fodder, dangling the carrot of honor while they die face down in the fuckin’ mud.” He turned the car onto the street winding up to the cemetery gate, the line of his mouth as grim as his tone. “I don’t believe in the petty gobshite reasons men use to justify slaughter for profit.”

Cora considered pointing out the irony of his moral objections to a war he’d profited from, but decided against it. “All right, I’ll bite. What does the Realmwalker believe in?”

His hand swept over the snowy graves raised like goosebumps on a giant’s sloped back. “I believe that millions of years ago, this was all at the bottom of an ocean. In another million years, it all will be again. Anything that happens between now and then is insignificant.”

And people callmecynical.“A nihilist,” she said at length. “Cheerful.”

“Does the Necromancer disagree?”

“Oh, not at all. Humanity is a transitory plague. Bound to drive ourselves to extinction sooner or later.”

He glanced at her with a half-smile. “Cheerful.”

Snow crunched under the tires on the unplowed lane to the cemetery. What remained of the day was a furnace lightof sunset sinking into the horizon. Not for the first time, she wondered why Bane was spending Christmas going to a graveyard with a stranger who, until yesterday, had been his enemy.

“If you really believe everything is insignificant, why are you here now? Why bother with, well, any of it?”

“That’s simple. Power.” He looked askance when a laugh escaped her lips. “What? It’s the truth. Either you have power, or you’re controlled by those who do.”

“Oh, I am aware.” Her smile waned. “So that’s it? Power?”

“Not just any kind of power. Money is the easiest currency of power and the least worth having. It’s a lie we’ve all agreed upon. Metal chips and dyed paper that only have worth because we give it worth. But magical power is intrinsically valuable. It’s the hardest power to get and therefore the most worth having.”

“But there are limits to the magic you can wield, Bane. We don’t understand magic enough to increase it beyond those limits.”

“Don’t we? Magic operates on the same fundamental laws of nature as everything else. It takes energy to weave chaos into order and releases energy to unweave it back. It’s the same equilibrium found throughout the universe, from atoms to threads of magic. Everything that exists is a rearrangement of the same basic building blocks.”

Her brows climbed to her hairline at this peek inside the Realmwalker’s head. “You’re really taking the magic out of magic.”

“What’s magic but a natural phenomenon we don’t yet have a scientific explanation for? To the ancient Greeks, lightning was the wrath of Zeus. To us, it’s an electrical discharge when warm and cold air mix. What we call our spirit, a distillation of magic, is just nerves in a meat casing. Give it another century and there’ll be no magic left.”

“After the Great War, a century might be generous.”

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