Anthony mildly. “On gryphons and, more recently, on dragonkind, thanks to the auspices of our new dark fey allies. But Mage Talbert is correct; the net my counterpart has thrown over his lands is virtually impenetrable. I won’t risk more lives on a fool’s errand.”
“We’ll risk the whole army if we don’t know what’s waiting for us,” Anthony replied.
“Well, I’d like to know how you expect us to find out!” Talbert snapped.
Like me, he apparently hadn’t gotten the memo on how to address his betters, although nobody seemed to be taking offense at him. Maybe because he came with Caedmon, who everybody seemed to treat with kid gloves. Or maybe because he creeped them out, too.
“I’ve been all over those mountains,” Talbert added. “Spent half a lifetime crawling through cracks and crannies, losing toes to frostbite and almost getting myself killed, trying to see what that old bastard’s doing! And I’m telling you—”
“And we appreciate your input,” Mircea broke in smoothly. “We will discuss this in detail at a later time.”
“A later time? A later time? We’re out of time, man! We can’t move the army until we know what’s waiting on the other side of that pass, and we can’t do that until—”
“Tristram,” Caedmon said briefly.
Tristram shut up.
“As mentioned before,” Mircea continued, after a pause, “the invasion faces several hurdles, with the second no less challenging than the first.” The mountain range flickered out to be replaced by the head of a man. One with pale gray eyes, white blond hair, and a manic expression.
I suddenly sat up a little straighter in my chair.
The face wasn’t all that remarkable, except that it looked like it should be snapping at the air. There was something feral about it, inhuman, but not in the way that weres were. There were a few of them here now, clustered together at the far end of the table, around a tall, dark-haired man with a handsome face and inhumanly bright blue eyes. When he moved, there was almost a lag effect sometimes, like a double exposure, as if two people changed position at once with a tiny pause in between.
I’d seen that occasionally with his kind before, which was how I’d spotted him, but the effect had never been so pronounced. I wondered if that meant that he was stronger or weaker than the others. Either way, he was a bit uncanny, although there was nothing of the beast about him. And even in his altered state, I doubted he’d look anything like that.
I stared at the slowly rotating head and remembered the last time I’d seen it: on a dark mage trying to recruit me in a casino parking lot to what I now knew was the Black Circle.
Unless you were talking to the covens, the Silver Circle was usually viewed as the good guys. They kept order in the supernatural community, served as its police, fought its wars, and held people, including themselves, to some kind of standard. As usual with police forces, it was a thankless task, and people frequently complained about this law or that restriction. But there was little doubt that there would have been chaos without them.
The Black Circle, on the other hand, was that chaos.
A group of powerful dark mages, they were the elite of the magical underworld. There were always small-time operators, planning heists or running scams, but the big jobs were almost always Black Circle ops. They probably would have been a far greater threat even than they were, but most suffered from a major addiction—to magic, which they stole to increase their abilities and to get really, really high.
And, fortunately, really, really high people don’t plan too well.
Unfortunately, the leadership seemed to be in better shape. Although how much better, nobody knew, because nobody knew much about them. On the outer edges of the Circle were groups of mages who acted almost independently, running their own criminal enterprises. They paid a percentage to their contacts on the next layer inward, who in turn provided them with tips on jobs. But they rarely knew anybody but their contact, who rarely knew anybody but his contact, and so on.
Each layer in seemed to have a better quality of mage who ran progressively bigger and better cons, as well as reaping rewards from mentoring their contacts on the outer edges. Only those who overperformed in a major way were able to move up—or inward, in this case—and get closer to the center of the organization. My father