Bauma Otouné patted Maki’s bony knee and squeezed the meat of his thigh. It was the next day, and he had still not slept. Rather, he had been released from the black and green embrace of the police and instead of shuffling home he had found himself knocking on the door of Bauma’s shop. She ran an apothecary - not The ‘Appy Apothecary or Bauma’s Potions, just an apothecary, because when her ancestors had first opened, it was the kind of time when shops didn’t have names or logos or brands. It was one of Maki’s favourite places, not only because Bauma stocked a good collection of the weird reagents that spellwork required, but also because it was a nexus for the interesting type of people who still bought their magic from local suppliers. It was where he had first met the Professor.

When she had finished flicking the sash of her floral sabisas against his cheek for having the temerity to disturb her Nekkerday lie in, he explained what he had seen. Then she had dragged him into a rib-cracking hug, yanked him off the street and into her shop.

“What did the police talk to you about?” she asked, her normally loud voice subdued.

Maki sighed and scratched at his neck. “Well, they were really keen to know what I was doing in her office with two moons shining.”

Bauma looked at her palms. “What were you doing there?”

“I told you. I forgot something of mine in her office las- the night before last. It was urgent that I get it back.”

“What did you forget?”

Maki surged forward, fingers gripping the arms of his chair in tight claws. “What are these questions? Come out and say what you want to say, Bauma!”

Just then, Tayunti, Bauma’s partner, stepped carefully down the stairs that led to the living quarters. In her hands was a tray with three steaming mugs. Something about her arrival sponged up the anger leaking from Maki, and his face creased as he leaned back.

“Here. I always find these things are easier to bear after some tea.”

It could not be said that Maki accepted the beverage with good grace, but it was certainly with more manners than he usually displayed. Without fail, whenever he was offered a drink at Bauma’s, he would crack some joke about potion makers mixing their powders with their sugars.

No one said anything for a while, the threesome sitting there in separate compartments of silence.

Maki hid his face behind a hand.

"It was a beacon."

"A gemstone? Alright, so what’s the problem?"

It was hard admitting such things to Bauma. Maki's voice was strangled in much the same way it would be if he were confessing to a predilection for rubbing oiled up puppies against his crotch.

"It was for one of those jobs..." He muttered, unable to meet her gaze.

Bauma scowled. She rearranged her sabisas across her chest silently. Then she bunched a trailing edge of the long colourful wrap and used it to assault Maki.

"Idiot boy! I told you. I said to your stupid goat face 'Dr. Engazi don't you be mixing up with that kind of person. No good comes of it.' I know you heard me as well, because you made this ugly gnome face you make when you think you know better than someone clearly smarter than you."

Maki sheltered behind his arms, nodding with his flagellation. He could have summoned up all sorts of excuses; that he needed the money; that the shady stuff also led to more legitimate business; that he got bored teleporting drunk suits to a beach. That he had drunk way too much Angel Sweat that day and had been wired to the eyeballs and feeling invincible. But he couldn’t blame all his problems on his addiction to energy drinks. He deserved the slapping.

“Love, that’s just his face.” Tayunti laid a hand on Bauma's arm and she relented.

"What did the police say?" She finally asked, clothes primly rearranged.

Maki shrugged. "I didn't tell them. I panicked and tossed my wallet onto a chair and picked it up when they arrived."

This time both of the woman were shocked and Maki got an excellent view of their tonsils.

"You lied to the people investigating the murder of our friend?"

He winced. When it was put like that it did make him sound like something that crawled out from under a rock, or worked in the corporate ethics department of an investment bank.

"Come on now. I brought it over that night. It's nothing to do with what happened to the Professor."

Then he caught up to what the other two had already figured and his face fell.

"No. You don't think that this is about... Me?"

Maki bolted to his feet, tea cup almost spilling over. He darted to the window and peered out, eyes blazing wide. “But she had nothing to do with it! It makes no sense…”

Suddenly the street outside the window was populated by a cast of ruinous villains, blood-drinking warlocks and necromancers. Never mind that Maki had friends who were warlocks drinking donated blood and forensic necromancers; these were the evil ones.

Then a cloud parted and the demons were driven away by a shaft of brightness. “No. It’s got to be a coincidence.” He shook his head. “You’ve both seen the emails the Professor used to get. Those nutjobs saying she’s going to get Balé burned to the ground.”

It had been one of Chioté’s quirks. Printing off the most vitriolic and hateful of her “fanmail” and bringing it the shop to read out loud. Her favourites had been the ones that had claimed she was working for one of the magical secret societies that still haunted Balé, influencing events from behind the scenes. They were closely followed by the ones claiming to be from those self-same societies, threatening her for revealing their innermost secrets. Promising the wrath of Dragon.

“Make up your bloody minds!” she had cackled, grinning like a goblin.

At first Maki had been horrified. Some of the threats were beyond the usual anonymous rage and floundered deep into the territory of the actually dangerous. But then she had taken him aside and shown him the number of emails she had received and the threat had been blunted by sheer volume. The everyday exhausted paranoia.

“We just want you to be careful, Maki. Once people like that get their talons into you, it can be very hard to get unhooked.”

“What would you know of it?” It came out crueller than he had intended, a voice that he hardly recognised as his own.

Bauma scoffed. “I’ve been running an independent business for longer than you, sonny. You think they’ve never come to me asking for this potion or that salve? You think I’ve never been tempted by the money?”

There were magicians who could snatch words out of the air, and it wasn’t the first time that Maki wished he was one of them. He knew that Bauma, and shops like hers, were suffering in the wake of the Silicon Revolution. Websites like [email protected] promised next day delivery of grimoires and reagents to the doorstep and had a range of products that made most local businesses look provincial. Of course she had been tempted by the less salubrious side of commerce.

Tayunti continued for her. “It’s not worth it. What happened to Chioté wasn’t anything to do with this, but even so. It’s not worth it.”

Maki returned to his armchair, taking the time to sip his tea and wash away the taste of his last comment. He looked at his friends and found the open concern on their faces a little hard to handle. “I need to get out from under this, don’t I?”

They nodded in perfect time with each other.

Maki drank some more tea.

“I need to get that beacon back. Today.”

The two women shook their heads.

“No, you’re right. Chioté is dead. She’s dead. And I don’t want to end up the same way - not for a couple more ringots in the bank. I’ve got to wipe my hands clean. Do the job and walk away.” He was nodding, convinced by his own rhetoric.

He drummed his hands against his thigh, staring at the unfolding of future events, looking through Tayunti and Bauma.

“There’s a way to do this… I think I got it. Yeah”

“Maki!” Bauma said, snapping a beaded sash against his knee. “Do not do anything illegal! Whatever it is you are thinking, don’t do that. We’ll figure something out together.”

But Maki was grinning, wide as a cheesemonger at a cracker sale. “I better get moving. There’s a lot to prepare. Thanks - helped me see things a lot more clearly.”

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

Bauma rocked up to her feet from the deep couch but Maki was quicker, darting across the room to the door. The hollow bones above the lintel clattered as he pulled it open and then he was gone.

Bauma turned on Tayunti, hands jammed onto her wide hips. “You put something in the tea, didn’t you?”

The Haeponese woman had the fortitude not to blush, but her courage failed in matching her partner’s glare. “Just mixed in some river wort and royal jelly…”

Bauma’s eyes widened, the whites stark and bright from her dark skin.

“I thought it would perk him up, keep him from getting too despondent about what happened to the Professor.”

“Oh yes well! A master alchemist at work you were. Rolled him right through the mourning period.” She pressed her hand to her shaven scalp. “Thousand Bells.”

“Should we tell someone? The police?”

“That our idiot friend wants to break into their crime scene? Again?” Bauma shook her and held out her hand. “Love, I think we should get back to our lie in. Everyone knows the shop doesn’t open til noon on Nekkerday.”

***

There was probably a part of every adult, the part that was still a big wobbly kid, that fantasised that if they really wanted to - if they suffered the appropriately tragic back story and then trained every day - that they could don the night black garb of an urban commando and disappear into the shadows. So while Maki once more padded around the empty halls of the Tower of Conjuration at night, this time clad in some serious shoes and the only black clothes he could scrounge up, he felt a swelling euphoria filling his chest, pushing his lips into a grin. He passed a window and did some crude marchat moves.

"Badass," he whispered at his reflection.

The Tower was mostly deserted - what had happened had driven people out of the building like a wailing fire alarm. But there were still police officers patrolling the grounds and guarding the entrances. Common mythology was that killers had this urge to return to the scene of their crime - some said to bask in the life energy of the one they had killed, others that they got off on seeing the aftermath of their carnage. Police procedure dismissed most of that as superstition and worried about the much more garden-variety Common Idiot looking for a morbid souvenir or unique selfie.

Maki had avoided them not with any flashy tech or puissant magic, but with the cunning taught to all students of a good university. There were always ingresses into old buildings that were less well-known; backdoors, tradesman entrances or even just creaky old windows that didn’t latch properly. Maki had dropped through one of these, his brain mashing up the theme music to a half-dozen action movies as he hustled.

To his very great relief - he had been planning a completely blind hop spell and wasn’t sure he wanted to put the theory into practice - the corridor of Chioté’s office was completely unguarded. And even better, her door was unlocked, simply Xed across with POLICE DO NOT CROSS tape, purple and unwelcoming.

But Maki hesitated at the door. Reality poked a needle hole in the water balloon of his confidence. The last time he had gone through this door he had seen the murdered body of his friend. Everything rational in him told him that there was nothing to fear but everything else in him was demanding that he turn around, that the room was churning with a kind of darkness he did not want to unleash.

All the energy, the drive that had pushed him through the day, powered the magic that he had prepared for this moment. It fizzled in the face of Chioté’s cut glass doorknob. It was worse than the come down of his energy drinks and Maki bunched his fists up by his side, angry at his own impotence.

“Don’t be an asshole,” he muttered.

If he didn’t go through with his plan then for all he knew he was next on Mr. Q Unknown’s list of Top Five People to Shoot. He had to take care of himself. And besides, he had seen the Professor once already; it couldn’t be as bad as that.

His hand acted on the Executive Order, before some rogue faction of his brain could intervene. He twisted and pushed and the door swung open.

As a boy growing up in Sombilad, a country plagued by the necromancer queens in the fall of Hierarchy centuries ago, Maki had been weaned on the stories of the restless dead. So he was more relieved than he would admit to see that the police - well, he hoped it was the police - had removed the Professor's body. Even so, he checked behind the door just in case she had transformed into a ravening, eye-sprouting, kumo. She had not, she was just dead and gone.

A twinge tugged at his heart and he rubbed his chest. The last time he had spoken to Chioté she had been so excited, rabbiting on and on about her research, inexhaustible. She had been more enthused about magic than Maki had been as an undergraduate.

And all that time her killer had been coming. If Maki had stayed the night, slept on the couch as he had in the past, would the Professor still be alive? Or would they both be just as dead?

Ask nine diviners, get ten answers, as the old saying went.

The duty officers would check the room eventually, so Maki got to work.

***

He searched high and he searched low. He wriggled under the desk and couch. He even stuck his hand into the charred bowels of the Professor's computer. With each place that he looked, his stomach knotted further, a slick tightening.

He had presumed, with all the certainty of a man standing safe in a circle of daylight and common sense, that it would be a simple matter of picking up the beacon from where it had rolled and triggering the spellword of the recall magic he had spent most of the day preparing. In then out then off goes the package and Maki would be free and clear with no mythical spear points hanging above his neck.

But in the shadows of a murder scene, picking his way around so as not to make it too obvious that someone had pillaged it, things were less clear. Every nook was mouth, whispering foolish possibilities: Did you drunkenly hide the beacon in me? asked a wicker box. Obviously you placed it up here for safe-keeping… The bookshelf muttered. A chattering of empty promises. All of them were possible, despite being so damn improbable.

He debated the likelihood that the police had taken it away with the body. They had certainly left little plastic markers around the place, numbering the items of interest, but they hadn’t removed any of the items themselves. His weight shifted from one foot to the other and his breaths were shallow. A frightening thought was bludgeoning its way to the forefront of his mind.

Just then, a flutter of movement caught his eye. Without pausing to think, he ducked behind the desk. He had left the office door open, justifying that he would be able to better hear someone approaching. He peeked over the lip of the desk, expecting to see the waggling illumination of a flash- or magelight.

It wasn’t the police though.

The corridor leading to Professor Chioté’s office was a checkerboard of light and dark, the ambient illumination from the outdoors meaning the windows along the wall left long puddles of light. A figure walked down the checkerboard, garbed in loose black clothes that put Maki in mind of the old ceremonial military robes. When the figure stepped into the shafts of light, though, they became even more indistinct, like shadows were snapping into place to protect their identity. With the regularity of the windows it became a rhythm, the gloom waxing and waning. It gave the illusion that the figure was pulsing with an inner luminescence. Throbbing with power. It was a kind of magic that Maki had never heard of before and the quiet analytical part of his brain happily worried at the problem.

Some kind of abjuring perhaps? The magnitude of the illumination strengthening a shadow shield?

But Maki, you forget the school of Illusion, of which this play of light is most surely an example.

I must interject, Maki! The subject has obviously conjured and bound a shadow elemental.

The less verbose and infinitely more effective part of him had a particularly convincing line of argumentation:

It's coming this way!

For all that the figure appeared to saunter, they moved with an alarming rapidity. Maki ducked his head down beneath the desk just as they pushed the door the rest of the way open.

Under the desk, Maki could see a black-clad pair of legs surveying the room. Black cloth with even blacker embroidery, patterns that Maki couldn't make out in the darkness. No one wore clothes like that anymore. They had gone out of style with last of the Balénese independence movements. The only place to see them were period dramas and the odd kooky society.

The slippered feet shuffled and Maki discovered just how loud the human lungs were. Bloody meaty bellows! He tried to inch himself further underneath the desk, with each breath expecting to be clubbed or stabbed or something even more horrific.

Instead the figure began to cast. Their voice was high-pitched but muffled by their mask, and even if it wasn't, Maki wasn't enough of a spellwright to reverse engineer what its results would be. Anything but necromancy, that’s all he hoped.

He hunched his head and came directly eye-level with a discreet but open cupboard. For a moment the muttering and gesticulating anachronism was forgotten and Maki stared into that narrow space.

He knew it well. It was the secret cupboard where Chioté hid her notes while she wasn’t working on them. The night he had come over he had personally seen the Professor slide her battered notebooks in. He remembered joking about coming back later to steal her research and she had laughed and waggled her finger, reminding him that everyone would be able to see the results soon enough.

It was empty.

"Who's there?"

The question was quiet but commanding and it dragged Maki reluctantly back to the present.

The feet began to step around the desk, grim as any executioner striding up to the block.

“You cannot hide from me.”

Maki grimaced and made a decision, his brain hurrying to catch up with some flimsy post-hoc rationalising. He popped to his feet, shooting up like a tree caught on a time-lapse camera. The figure leapt back, hands raising defensively. Maki had never had to learn how to be intimidating, his height had taken care of that from a young age. His gaze darted across the room one last time.

“You!” The figure hissed, hand shooting out to grab Maki’s wrist. He tried to wrench it away, but not before he got the uncomfortable sensation of scales sliding along his skin. Then the words were on his lips, slippery magically charged syllables sizzling the spit on his tongue.

“Kukuom ku-

***

The translocating of living subjects spread across a range of comfort levels - from a pleasant tingling up the spine to bullet-ants-under-the-skin agony. The recall spell, which rushed Maki back towards its anchor point, tugging him along the path he had taken like he was an incorporeal bungee jumper, was somewhere towards the gut-inverting end of the spectrum. Somehow, despite not having a physical stomach during the travel, Maki wanted to empty it through his pores. It was not enjoyable.

***

...rundi!”

Maki came together kneeling in the middle of an elaborate arrangement of chalk-drawn squares and symbols, rewound through space. He curled up over his thighs, kowtowing a candle that puffed out while ectoplasmic ropes fell away and faded from around his limbs. He brutally suppressed the urge to heave, his arms wrapping around his stomach. Everything in him was clenched tight and not just from the discombobulating translocation.

The beacon had not been in the office. He knew the proper logical forms; absence of evidence was not evidence of absence and all. But it should not have been hard to find in the first place. And the police would not have taken it - it seemed they were still cataloging the scene. With all the weird shit the Professor had in her office a very commonplace length of carnelian would not have registered as a Clue.

Which, as far as Maki was concerned, meant only one thing. The killer had taken the beacon after they murdered Chioté.

His body staged a quiet revolution, overthrowing the benevolent dictatorship of his brain. Then he threw up.

The killer had taken the beacon. This was about him.