Storm's Apprentice

The soldiers came back to the barracks five days later. They marched in wearing their black brigandines with the silver star of Antorx sewn onto their chests. They carrried their swords unsheathed in one hand, as if to remind us that we were still prisoners, we still weren’t trusted. The bare blades seemed to say, ‘Try anything, and we’ll run you through.’

The lead soldier was an officer who only looked older than me by a handful of years, but already wore a world-weary expression, with enough scars that he looked like he’d already survived a war. He carried his sword in his right hand, but in his left was a tightly rolled scroll of cream-colored paper.

He marched into the room, stopped by a table, and then started to unroll the scroll. He struggled to do it without letting go of his sword, eventually having to put the scoll down and roll it out before lifting it up to read.

His eyes scanned along the text written on it before he started speaking.

“Silas Amberge,” he said. He looked around the room with the appearance of a teacher calling attendance. His eyes fell on a nervous-looking boy a year younger than me. “You have failed your assignment. Fail again, and you will meet the Failure’s Fate.”

The boy called Silas’s throat bobbed as he swallowed. He nodded tightly. He didn’t seem brave enough to ask what the Failure’s Fate was. Nobody had told us so far. Maybe we all just assumed it meant we’d be killed. I was hoping it was expulsion.

“Domine Beatrix,” he said next. This time, his target was a woman a year older than me. She stared back at him with her arms folded and a belligerent expression on her face. “You have failed your assignment. Fail again, and you will meet the Failure’s Fate.”

The woman lifted her fist and gestured at him with a raised little finger. It was a gesture I’d seen traders make at locals on their visits to Kirkswill, and it had never gone down well with the target.

The officer didn’t react to it. I thought I saw a flash of pity on his face before he moved on to the next name.

“Olan Draxs, you have passed your assignment.”

Draxs was one of the native Antorxian students among us, a six-foot tall man with a muscular frame and an outlaw’s tattoo peeking out from the collar of his shirt. From the start, he’d seemed more at home here than the rest of us conscripts. It didn’t surprise me that he was the first in the list to have passed.

He didn’t seem happy or relieved to have succeeded. He looked like this was only what he’d expected.

The officer continued going through his list, reading one name after another. Not everylne he addressed was in the room. Some had already left the barracks for the day. It was possible that some were dead, if their task had been anywhere near as dangerous as mine.

Through the officer’s list, I got a second-hand introduction to the conscripts I’d never spoken to.

Sal Merchamp was a woman half a foot taller than me, with broad shoulders and a laborer’s frame. She’d had long hair when we’d arrived, a dark brown braid that fell down to her waist, but she’d cut it back into a severe soldier’s cut at some point in the last week, as short as brush bristles.

Sal had failed her first assignment, but her only reaction was to stare at the officer with a look of disgust on her face.

Marienne Sedge was a short, thin-shouldered girl who wouldn’t have looked out of place herding sheep in a mountain village or running a loom at a weavers cottage. She seemed utterly miserable to have it confirmed that she’d failed her assignment.

Jon Carrot was one of the few I’d spoken to, a farmer’s son from Cortiss, the plains nation north of Antorx. He’d surprised me by passing.

There were a few more passes and many more failures before I heard my name.

“Dorian Tisk,” the officer said next.

I felt a shock run through me, and turned to look at him.

His gaze found mine. “You have passed your assignment.”

I nodded, and the officer looked away.

I hadn’t been worried. Not at all. I’d handed my required bag of leaves in to Master Korphus the same day I’d received my assignment. It’d turned out to be a dangerous task, having to deal with a murderous tree-spirit. I’d almost been hypnotized into hanging myself, but it hadn’t been particularly time-consuming.

I recognized the next name the soldier read.

“Adrian Wheatfield, you have failed your assignment,” the officer said. He spent a few seconds looking around the room for Adrian, but didn’t find him. I could have told him he wasn’t present.

Belatedly, half to himself, the officer added, “Fail again, and you will meet the Failure’s Fate.”

I’d already known that Adrian wasn’t going to pass his assignment. His task had been to pray to some strange, dark god. I didn’t know what his religious beliefs were coming in, but praying to an Antorxian god seemed like it would be beyond the pale for him. Losiris wasn’t a devout nation as nations went. Observances in Kirkswill were mostly limited to private prayers and offerings, but the Abbey still had a presence in Losiris even decades after the Antorxian conquest, and the old gods of light and hearth they swore to cast a long shadow.

Adrian’s was the last name read. After that, the same messenger from the previous week stepped forward holding a dark wooden box. He set it down, opened it to reveal a stack of new assignment scrolls, and started handing them off to the soldiers to deliver.

I accepted mine from the armed soldier without comment and took it to a table to read.

The paper unrolled smoothly as I lay it flat on the table.

Report to Master Antonyx in the tower Command Center for the details of your off-site mission.

Just that. It was an assignment to go and collect an assignment.

I looked up from the paper and scanned the other students. One of them was already leaving. Others were staring grimly at their scrolls. One of them, Sal Merchamp, was staring right at me.

She stood a few feet away, her scroll in her hands, looking at me with an expression like I’d just stolen her lunch. After a few seconds, she started marching toward me.

I resisted the urge to get up and run away, comforting myself with the knowledge that I could throw a wave of force at a moment’s notice.

She reached the table and sat down, sliding onto the bench and putting her scroll down in front of me. She leaned forward, and spoke in a low, serious voice.

“You can use magic, can’t you.”

I considered being evasive about it, but I realized I was just happy that someone in my group had thrown off the Antorxian’s welcome and was willing to talk to me.

“Yes,” I said. “How’d you know?”

“A guy called Adrian. He told me you were dangerous.”

“I’m not!”

“I don’t care. I need to know how to do it.”

She leaned forward, staring at me intently, waiting for an answer.

Her expression was stern, her soldier’s haircut giving her an intensity that would have intimidated me if we’d met 88 the street. She was taller than me, looked more athletic than me, with muscles that only years of physical labor or training could build. She’d probably never had the same opportunity I’d had to learn even the basics of accumulating maja.

I toyed with the idea of turning her away, or asking for a favor in return, but the words of Master Korphus came back to me, ‘It is not to receive, but to take’. They were words I didn’t believe. I didn’t want to believe them, and I didn’t want to embody them.

“How much do you know about maja?” I asked.

“What’s that?”

“It’s the energy used to cast magic.”

“Why don’t you just call it ‘magic’?” she asked.

“Because maja comes from the Old Irisian word majasa, meaning fluid. It’s a—”

“Maja is magic fluid?” Sal asked. “Like magic juice?”

“No. Fluid as an adjective. As in changeable, or dynamic, with connotations of fitting itself to a vessel.”

“What’s an adjective?”

I let out a short breath. Sal didn’t even have the basics of maja. I didn’t know what country she was from, but the Antorxians must have stamped down the free practice of magic there even more thoroughly than in Losiris.

“Have you ever tried accumulating maja?” I asked.

She shook her head.

If she’d never even heard of maja, she probably wouldn’t have any reserves. It took weeks of daily effort to accumulate enough to form a nascent core, and she probably didn’t even have that.

I closed my eyes and tried to feel for her presence. Feeling out the academy Masters was easy. They were blazing magical presences, giving off sharp or acidic maja like a bonfire gives off heat. The other students in my group were very muted by comparison.

When I looked for her, I was surprised to find quite a strong magical presence. It was hard to gauge relative strength at such low levels, but she didn’t feel substantially weaker than me.

I opened my eyes, feeling suddenly suspicious.

“Are you sure you’ve never accumulated?”

“Never even heard of it.”

“It’s a process where you meditate, drawing in energy and consolidating it inside your body.”

She looked thoughtful for a second, then said, “Huh. Sounds like Resting Stance.”

It was my turn to feel confused. I’d never heard of it. I couldn’t even guess at its meaning by picking apart its roots. It didn’t sound Irisian.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“The watchmaster back in Dorries made the town guard train in it.”

“It’s some kind of martial art?”

“I guess so. It’s got a other name that mean ‘calm before the storm’ or something. Deep breathing, keeping your head quiet, spreading your breath into your body.”

That sounded similar to something I’d read in The Opening Arts of Arrenshu.

“It sounds like a body reinforcement technique,” I said.

“I don’t know. He never acted like it was magic. I always thought it was junk. Just tradition, you know.”

It would have been funny if some village guard captain was openly training his troops in magic under the noses of the Antorxian authorities. I thought it was more likely that the captain didn’t know anything about magic, and was just repeating something he didn’t really understand.

“You have a quite well developed maja core,” I told her.

“Oh. Goodie. What do I do with that, then?”

“You need to learn an aspect.”

She stared at me blankly. It was like she hadn’t even visited the library yet.

“What have you been doing all week?” I asked.

“I’ve been trying to escape,” she said blankly. “The gate isn’t guarded, but there’s some kind of magic on it. It attacks anyone who tries to leave.”

She rolled up her sleeve, revealing an arm covered in scabbed-over cuts and deep black bruises. It looked like she’d shoved her arm into a barrel of broken glass. It had to have been excruciating.

I remembered the feeling I’d had when walking through the gate, like my skin was being touched by wire brushes. It had been oppressive, but in the end the gate had let me pass.

Did the magic protecting it have some way of knowing I was authorized to leave? Could it see the assignment scroll in my bag? For all I knew, the gate was possessed by a spirit that could read the intentions of anyone walking through. From what I’d heard about Antorxian sorcery, anything was possible.

“I think it only lets us outside if we need to leave to complete our assignment,” I said.

“That would have been good to know three days ago,” she said.

“There are books in the library that talk about aspects,” I went on. “Fire aspect, Weight aspect…”

I could probably help her learn Force aspect, in the same way that it’d been taught to me.

“Fire. Fire is good. How do I learn that?”

I stared at her for a few seconds, then looked down at her battered hand. I couldn’t bring myself to tell her. She might just do it.

“Maybe you should go read about it,” I said.

“You’re clamming up on me now?” she asked. She pulled down her sleeve and leaned back in her chair.

“It’s just, it’s not going to be fun.”

“Oh no. And I was having so much fun this month.”

“You have to put your hand into a fire,” I said.

She blinked at me. Her eyebrows crept up her face.

“You’re not joking.”

“No. There’s more to it. There’s a ritual. I don’t remember the details. You’ll have to go read about it.”

“Great. So I have to read, on top of everything else.”

“You don’t like to read?”

She didn’t reply, only giving me a baleful stare.

“There might be another way,” I started, hesitantly. “Last week, Master Korphus threw me out of his office with Force maja. After that, I was able to use it. If you wanted, I could try teaching you.”

“You can throw me?” she asked.

I hesitated. I actually wasn’t sure. In my outburst back in my room, I’d only thrown Adrian a few inches, the equivalent of a strong shove. I’d played around with it in the days afterward, but I hadn’t let it loose with it yet.

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

She leaned forward, her expression suddenly serious. “Do you think you could throw me over the wall?”

“The wall is twenty feet high,” I said.

The expression left her face and she leaned back, blinking. “Right. I guess that’s a no.”

“Do you want to try to learn it?” I asked.

“Yeah. Worth a shot. Want to try it now?”

“I have to report to the tower,” I said. “Let’s make it after evening meal tonight?”

Suspicion crept into her eyes. “The tower? The big tower up there?”

“Yes. It’s part of my assignment this week.”

“What are they getting you to do?” she asked.

“I’ll tell you if I can read yours,” I offered.

She nodded and slid her scroll at me. I passed mine to her. Together, we un rolled them, and I read her assignment.

Demonstrate your magical aptitude to Master Sectus at the academy infirmary.

This was why she needed to learn magic. She’d already failed one assignment. If she didn’t have anything to demonstrate at the end of the week, she’d find out first hand what happened to someone who failed two in a row.

She was still reading my scroll when I passed hers back to her. Her face was scrunched up, eyes staring at a fixed point on the paper.

When she noticed me looking, she tossed the scroll back to me.

“Right. After dinner, then,” she said.

She slid off the bench and stood up, leaving the barracks by the front doors. I couldn’t guess whether she was heading for the library, or if she was going to try escaping again.

I packed up my own scroll and left after her. I had my assignment, and the tower was waiting.

~

The tower didn’t look like the wall. It wasn’t built of clean-cut gray stone blocks laid together so precisely they almost merged. It also didn’t match the smaller buildings of the academy, with their irregular stones that stayed standing with nothing but a bit of mortar and the insight of the architect. The tower barely looked like a human construction at all. It was a monolith, a single enormous rectangular slab of white stone, perfectly clean, perfectly smooth on every side, with a flat roof, no windows, and only one door. It loomed above the academy like a tombstone.

Three hundred feet high and about a hundred wide, it was more like a monument than a place where people worked. I got the simultaneous contradictory impressions that it was both newer than the outer wall and older than the mountain it grew out of.

It wasn’t in the geographic center of the academy, instead being perched on one of the upper terraces, but it was clearly the center of the academy’s operations. It was like seeing an Abbey-built cathedral rising out of a village of dirt huts.

The door faced the downward slope of the mountain, a half circle of textured brass with no latch, no knocker, no peephole, no visible way of opening it, and no obvious way for it to even open.

The area around the terrace was deserted. There were no guards to keep unwanted visitors out and nobody to ask how to get in.

I gripped my scroll tighter in my hand and marched toward the door.

With no obvious way of opening it, I did what came naturally.

I reached up and pushed against the door.

The world around me disappeared.

I was suddenly in a sapphire blue void, with nothing but myself and the door in front of me suspended in an endless sky.

The metal was still cold under my hand, but that was the only thing that was normal.

I felt movement behind me, something huge shifting through the expanse. I started to turn my head. My body was sluggish in this altered space, but I was able to crane my neck enough to catch sight of enormous shape, something irregular and many-eyed that couldn’t possibly exist.

And then the world returned.

There was a wooden floor under my feet, and stone walls around me. I could smell lamp oil and old leather.

I turned, shaking. I was inside the tower.

“What was that?” I said aloud.

The only other person in the small reception room, a young man in a formal clothing, answered, “Your first trip through the Fold?”

I could feel magic radiating off him, less strongly than the academy Masters, but more than I’d felt from any student. His maja felt rigid and regular, like the grid of an iron gate. He was dressed differently from the other students. He wore a long white collarless shirt that ended in a diagonal slash across his thighs and loose charcoal-colored trousers that vanished behind the wall of a standing counter.

Several books were spread across the desk. One of them was open and facing him, the top page covered in a list of handwritten notes.

“What was that thing?” I asked. My voice was breaking as if I’d just spent a full minute screaming.

“You must have seen the Watcher,” the man said. “Its just a little guardian spirit. It keeps out spies and other annoyances.”

“That thing wasn’t little,” I protested.

The man closed his eyes for a second, not much more than a long blink, and I picked up the maja scents of mud and dead moss, like the air from a dry well. After a moment, the smell receded, and he opened his eyes.

“Yes, well, you’re only small yourself. How may I direct you?”

I stared at him for a few seconds, then turned around to look at the door. I couldn’t help but imagine that thing was still there, looming just a few feet behind me.

“I was in the Fold?” I asked.

“For less than a tenth of a tenth of a second,” he answered patiently.

“Does everyone who comes here go through that?”

“Yes. Though only those with the mage talent can see the watcher, or notice the Fold at all. Our political visitors pass through quite oblivious.”

The man, who I was starting to realize was the entrance clerk, picked up an ink pen an started writing something in the book in front of him.

“How may I direct you?” he asked again.

“My assignment said to report to Master Antonyx,” I said.

“Right.” He pointed to one of six doors leading out of the square room. “Third door to your right. Head down the spiral staircase to the bottom floor, then follow the circuit left until you see a door labeled Archives.”

I looked from the clerk to the door, then started to edge towards it. I kept glancing back at him, waiting for the trap.

I expected him to try to take something from me, or shoot lightning at me, but he just went back to making notes. He must not have been adhering to the academy’s Sovereign’s Path particularly closely.

The longer I watched him quietly write down an account of my arrival and purpose in being there, the more I got the feeling that he wasn’t even part of the academy. I could feel magic rolling off him, but he seemed more like a bureaucrat than a Reeve.

I stopped in front of the door. It was made of heavy black wood, and after my experience at the entrance, I was afraid to touch it.

“It’s just a normal door,” the clerk said, seeming to understand what I was thinking without looking up. “The entrance is the only Fold gate here. In the public areas, anyway.”

I nodded. “Thanks.”

The door opened easily, swinging out on the landing of a spiral staircase that wound down into the bare stone of the mountain.

Unlike with the stairs down to the library, these were lit. A glass-shrouded oil lamp sat just beyond the door, and more yellow light shone up from below, fading up and down in intensity as its source burned inconsistently through its fuel.

I stopped, leaning back into the entrance room to ask one more question.

“Is Master Antonyx violent?”

The clerk looked up from his ledger. “What do you mean?”

“Will he throw me around with Force maja?” I asked.

“If you’re asking if he’s a traditionalist, no.”

“Okay. Thank you.”

The clerk didn’t speak again, and I stepped onto the landing. The door quietly fell closed behind me.

I followed the spiral stairs down three floors. I let my curiosity take control of me as I went down, stopping at each landing to open the door and spend a minute looking around.

All three underground levels followed the same plan, a single long, wide stone corridor lined with doors on either side.

The first level looked to be mostly made up of private suites. Two of the doors to the rooms were standing open, and I caught glimpses of curtained beds, oak writing desks, wash stands and bath tubs, fireplaces, dressers, wardrobes, heavy cloth drapes, rugs, and tapestries. To my eyes they looked like the rooms of nobles, but they might have just been the apartments for the academy staff. I froze when I saw a porter dressed in white, pushing a cart of cleaning supplies out of a room further down, but they seemed completely oblivious to me. He had the same blank expression as Ba, the woman I’d seen in the library. He also had the same scar — a vertical line down the center of his forehead, flanked by two dimples.

The second level down had the feel of a utility space. The corridor was wider and taller, and the doors that lined it were the size of barn doors. The floor was scuffed with wheel tracks, as if carts were regularly pulled up and down it, and I could hear a distant rumbling noise that reminded me of the inside of a windmill; wooden gears grinding against gears, the motion of heavy machinery.

The third floor down was a mixture of storage spaces and smaller rooms. I followed the clerk’s directions, turning left and following the corridor, checking doors as I went.

I’d passed twenty doors before I found Master Antonyx’s office, slapped in the middle of a long stretch of unbroken wall. His name was burned into the wood of the door in a harsh, blocky script. Below it was the word Archives.

I reached up and knocked.

There was no sound from the other side for thirty seconds, then the door was flung open.

Standing in the doorway was a man in his fifties, with short steel-gray hair and graying stubble that dusted his face and chin. His eyes were a natural gray, and his brown skin didn’t show any of the silver patches I’d noticed on some of the masters. He wore a dusty black robe over a white shirt and brown pants, as well as a silver star pinned to his collar and a small silver earring in his left ear.

He stared at me like I’d just woken him up.

“What?”

“I was told to report to you?” I said. I unrolled my scroll and held it up for him to read.

He only glanced at it, before looking back at me. His nostrils flared, and I felt a wash of maja radiate out from him. His maja presence felt like ice water to me. Deep, flat, freezing, crushing. At the same time I picked up a maja scent, tingling in my nose and lungs. It smelled like smoke.

“You just got here?” he asked.

I assumed he meant the academy, and not the tower.

“Just over a week ago,” I said.

He seemed disgusted by my answer. He turned and marched back into the room.

I was left in the corridor. I stood there for a few seconds before I followed him in.

Past the door, the space opened up into a large storeroom. A small area near the entrance was set aside for a desk, a table, a cot, all lit by a standing oil lamp, but beyond that the room was filled with shelves and boxes. Books and scrolls dominated the space, stacked on shelves and on top of cabinets. Any free space on the walls was filled by charts, indexes, maps, and arcane diagrams. It put the academy’s official library to shame. I felt at home there straight away.

“How old are you?” Master Antonyx asked.

He was facing away from me, heading towards his desk.

“Nineteen.”

“What’d you do before enrolling here?”

“I didn’t enroll,” I said. “I was kidnapped.”

“Well, yes. I was trying to be polite.”

He reached his desk and stooped down, rifling through papers.

I let my gaze stray to the walls.

The space above Antonyx’s desk was covered by a huge map of the continent. It didn’t look like the maps I was familiar with. The ones I’d studied back in Kirkswill had shown the continent as a knife-shaped landmass with ice at the southern tip and desert in the north. In that layout, Losiris was a stretch of land bordered by the sea to the west, Lake Gorgion to the north, Antorx to the southeast, and the Hills Territories to the south.

From my studies I knew Antorx itself was a relatively small nation, half the size of Losiris, though with an outsized presence thanks to its military.

On Antonyx’s map, Antorx was drawn as big as its reputation implied. Here, it sat at the center of a star-shaped continent, with every other nation stretched and narrowed the further it got from the center. It was clearly an abstraction or visualization, rather than a map someone could navigate by. The colors of the map indicated political groups, with large parts of it painted in reds signifying they were under the control of the Antorxian empire, even including countries like Cortiss to the north, which I didn’t think was actually part of it.

The capitals of each nation were marked by a small black square. Kirkswill didn’t even merit a pinprick of ink, but I could see what must have been the marker for Windshriek academy; a black rectangle at the base of a mountain that sat alone in the middle of a swamp.

I did my best to quickly memorize the land around the academy, thinking I could tell Sal about it if nothing else.

Antonyx straightened up and turned towards me. He caught me looking at the map, and turned to follow my gaze.

“Planning an escape?” he asked. He turned back towards me. “I don’t recommend it. It never goes how we think.”

“You tried to escape?” I asked.

“Thirty years ago, we didn’t even have the walls,” he answered. “We lost more kids back then to the wild spirits than we did to the teachers. And you know we can’t have that. If a student’s going to be killed or horribly maimed, it better be by one of us.”

I wasn’t completely surprised that one of the masters had been brought here as a conscript. It seemed to be how the Antorxians did things. I was surprised he was willing to tell me so easily.

“I was attacked by a wild spirit,” I offered.

“Wild Century?” he asked, tipping his head at the bruises still faintly visible on my neck.

“Yes.”

“That’s not a wild spirit. It’s a pest. Practically tame, from all the soft meat we’ve fed it. You’ve never met a real wild spirit.” He raised his hand and put his knuckles to his lip, like he was used to biting on them. “Which makes me think someone up there’s laughing at me, sending a complete initiate to me for this job. You’re not some kind of prodigy are you?”

“No.”

“What did you do before this?”

“I was a scribe’s apprentice.”

“I thought it must be something like that. You’ve got airs about you. Have you learned your languages?”

He asked the question in Old Irisian, a language more famous for being written than spoken, and it took me a few seconds to work out what he was saying.

“Yes,” I answered in the same language. “I read and write Old Irisian, Varian, and Hoghan script.”

“Jung nooug Oydajaric?”

“What is that?”

“Ajaric. The language of the ancient Reeves.”

“I don’t know it,” I said.

“There’s no way you could,” Antonyx said, though he didn’t sound sure of himself.

“I thought the Reeves were Antorxian,” I said.

“Yeah, but we’re also a sect. The Reeves only got incorporated into the Antorxian military two hundred years ago. Before that we had our own laws and langauge.”

I nodded sharply, filing the scrap of information away.

It would be easy to lower my guard around Antonyx. He spoke casually, in an accent that was noticeably more coarse than the other academy masters. He let information slip conversationally, apparently without any respect for Master Cordaze’s Sovereign’s Path. He’d even made a reference to trying to escape. He might have been in a similar position to me once. But that was why I couldn’t trust it. I couldn’t shake the fear that it was an act. If he was an adherent of the sorcerers’ philosophy, then it could all be an elaborate trap or manipulation.

While I was thinking, he’d picked a cloth scroll up from his desk and handed it to me.

I took it and unrolled it.

It was a map, a real one this time, showing the academy, the mountain, and part of the swamp, with terrain and paths scratched out in lines of brown ink. The swamp held more secrets than I’d guessed. The trees and bogs hid ruins, caves, caches, and outposts that’d be completely hidden if I didn’t know where to look.

A bony finger crept down over the map and tapped on a tiny sketch of a castle on the other side of the mountain. It was labeled Fort Msiesetr.

“Did you learn how to handle yourself in the wild as a scribe’s apprentice?” he asked.

“Not specifically,” I said.

“You’ll have to figure it out. I need to get someone here to fort Msiesetr, and you’re what they gave me.”

“So the assignments are chores,” I said. “It’s a way of getting free labor out of the conscripts.”

“In this case? Yes.”

I looked at the map again. The fort he’d pointed at was on the far side of the mountain. It was joined to the academy by a long, broad road that ran down the mountain, wound through the swamp like a coiled snake, and climbed up again on the other side.

It would definitely be a multi-day journey. The map didn’t have a scale, but extrapolating my trip to the ginsberry tree lake, it looked like it could be a four day round trip, even without delays or difficult terrain.

For me it would be a multi-day journey. For a Reeve or one of the academy masters, it might only take hours. Or less. I couldn’t forget the sight of Master Cordaze taking one step and appearing on a distant terrace. For all I knew, a sufficiently advanced sorcerer could just fly there.

“If it’s important, why don’t you do it?” I asked, only worrying afterwards that it might have been too bold.

I needn’t have worried.

“Because if I leave, Master Raphas will be down here desystematizing the archives before the door swings shut. Seen the library? Thank Raphas for that gift to the tradition. That’s if he doesn’t just decide to track me down on the road and kill me.”

I was too stunned by trying to imagine the wrongheadedness of someone deliberately trying to make an archive harder to use, to process the second part. It took me a few more seconds to realize he wasn’t joking about another master trying to kill him.

“The staff here kill each other?” I asked.

Antonyx shrugged. “I’d kill him if I could. And I’d take that sword of his. That’s how the traditionalists do it. Ah, don’t look at me like that. You’ll get used to it.”

I blinked at him slowly. The bleak feeling I’d felt after scaring Adrian away was back, and growing. It suddenly felt very cold in this underground chamber.

“It doesn’t matter. You’ll survive this no problem. How’s your memory?”

“It’s good,” I said. “Why wouldn’t I survive?”

“Fort Msiesetr’s got a records room,” Antonyx went on, ignoring the question. “When the military abandoned itthey left all the boring stuff behind, but now I need to find something in that boring stuff. Memorize this: Astronomical records, 1400 to 1760. The area between the constellations Kor, Vance, and Mephit is called the Vance Trigon. I want any record of changes to the stars in that region during those years.”

Kor, Vance, Mephit. It helped that the star clusters had the same names in Losiris. The dates didn’t mean much to me, except that it was currently 1810 by the Irisian calendar, so he didn’t want anything from the last fifty years.

“Don’t write that down. If anyone asks, you’re there looking for a genealogy of Count Serrato.”

“Why do I have to lie?” I asked.

He shrugged one shoulder. “I don’t want any of them upstairs to know what I’m looking at.”

“Should I also look for the genealogy?”

He pointed a bony finger at me. “Yes. Good. Good thinking.”

I looked at the map, at the route I’d have to walk. I thought about my thin-soled sandals and my sad makeshift bag. I looked up at Master Antonyx’s stern face. I thought about whether I could just ignore him. I’d fail this week’s task, but I’d still have next week to make it up.

But I couldn’t be sure the next task would be any easier or more palatable.

“I’d need some equipment,” I tried.

“Yeah? What?”

“A blanket. A tent. Some boots. A week’s worth of rations. A cooking set…”

Antonyx was already shaking his head.

“Not happening.” He turned and grabbed a torn scrap of paper and an inkpen, then started scribbling out a note. “No one gets that much help.”

Ater a second he stood and handed me the note.

“I can do this much for you. The basics.”

I glanced at him and then took the note, looking down to read it.

Give this novitiate a scout’s pack - M. Antonyx. Tot Og Ibvuer Diesn.

“That’s the best you’ll get,” he said. “That’s your task. Get to Fort Msiesetr. Search the records for astronomical changes in the Vance Trigon. Don’t write it down, and don’t tell anyone. If anyone asks-”

“I’m searching for Count Serrato’s genealogy,” I finished.

He pointed an approving finger at me.

“If you’re not back by your deadline I’m going to assume you’re dead and send someone else. If you die, try and fall in an informative pose. Point at the danger or something. Give some warning for the next one.”

“Right…”

“And listen to me — don’t run. There’s worse things in the world than being a sorcerer, and worse things in the swamp than a pissed-off Reeve. You’d be better off dead or gentled here than some monster’s long meal out there.”

He ushered me towards the door as he spoke, apparently tired of my presence.

He waved his hand as we reached it, and I felt a surge of his icy maja.

I tensed in anticipation of being thrown out, but he directed the wave of force maja at the door.

The handle snapped down in the same moment that the door flew open.

Anyonyx guided me to the door and out into the corridor.

“Go on, now. Get to work. It’s not to receive but to take and all that.”

He turned away before he’d finished speaking and shut the door behind him.

I stood there for a minute, trying to digest what had just happened. I’d found an academy master who would answer questions without inflicting grievous bodily harm, and someone who disagreed with the apparently deliberate hiding of knowledge in the academy library. Under other circumstances, I’d have been delighted. But that same master had given me a task that he thought was beyond me. He wasn’t even confident that I’d survive, and wouldn’t care if I didn’t.

I still had the option for refusal. I could ignore this task so long as I succeeded at the next, but I already knew I wouldn’t.

I recognized Antonyx for what he was, my chance at answers, my chance at resources, and my chance at a reward more meaningful than a candle. Whether I was following the Antorxian doctrine or not, I couldn’t expect anyone to just hand me another opportunity like this. It was up to me to take it.

~

Sal was waiting for me by the time I got back to the barracks, an imposing figure in a gray with a dense brush of black hair.

She was standing by a low, wind-shaped tree a little way off the path, stretching and swinging her arms like she was getting ready for a fight. She’d managed to find a weapon from somewhere, or she’d made it; a short staff of stripped white wood, long enough to come up to her ribs if she held it like a walking stick, and with a bump at one end. She was swinging it around in the air with some skill, rolling it across her hands and executing precise strikes against an imaginary enemy.

When I’d improvised a club on my way to the ginsberry tree lake it had looked and felt like a useless stick in my hands. The staff Sal held on the other hand looked like a real weapon.

She saw me standing on the path and stopped, resting the end of her staff on the ground.

“Where did you get that?” I asked, eyeing the staff.

“From a tree. What was it like up there?” she asked, indicating the tower looming behind me with a look.

“Getting through the door was traumatic,” I answered. “I didn’t see much apart from that. I think it’s some kind of administrative center.”

Sal made a face, then settled into a relaxed stance. “Are you ready to teach me some magic?”

I felt for my core, and found it, a dark cavern filled with placid energy.

I hadn’t spent much time accumulating since I’d arrived. I’d been too busy trying to get the Winter Hearth canto working. But after years of quiet accumulation with no magical outlet, I had a reserve that it would be hard to put a dent in with just one of two uses of maja.

“I can try,” I said. “Are you ready?”

She turned and lowered herself into a different stance, with her legs apart and her knees bent, the staff held across her body.

“Ready.”

I closed my eyes and turned my attention inward. My core was there, the inky darkness of an underground lake. I tore a scrap of maja free from the central store and let it slide down my arm.

When it reached my hand, I thrust myself back into that moment in the laboratory. Master Korphus reaching out. The crashing wave of power. My brief, violent flight.

I pushed the memory into the bundle in my hand and opened my eyes.

Raising my arm, I pointed my open palm at Sal and let the energy fly.

The grass rippled as the spell passed by, then it struck. Sal’s robe whipped back like it had been blown by a strong gust of wind. Her eyes went wide, and she was forced to take a step back.

She stood there for a second, tense, ready. Her robe settled, and she looked around.

“Was that it?”

“Yes.”

“That guy Adrian said you threw him into a wall.”

I lowered my hand. That casting did seem weaker than it should have been. I’d probably held back too much out of fear of hurting her.

“Did it work?” I asked her. “Do you think you learned it?”

She lowered her staff back to the ground and closed her eyes.

“Push the memory into your maja,” I said, repeating what the student in the laboratory had told me.

She stood there for about a minute, not moving and not speaking. Then her maja surged.

The glow of her magical presence felt sharp and hot against my skin, prickling like gravel rash and stinging nettles. Then the distinct sensations of her maja turned to pressure.

It was like a wind had sprung up, blowing away from her in every direction. The grass rippled. The fabric of my robe swayed in a breeze of force maja. It wasn’t strong, it would never have pushed me back even a step, but it was constant and unyielding.

It was a completely different interpretation of force than I’d learned from Master Korphus. Was that because I’d only hit her with a gentle blast? Or was it tied to her nature, or her personality?

The pressure died down and she opened her eyes.

“Did I do it?”

“Yes. You cast a spell,” I said.

She leaned on her staff and some of the tension went out of her shoulders.

“Then I passed. This week.”

“Congratulations.”

I waited to see if she’d say anything else. Seconds passed by in silence. I considered telling her about the map I’d seen in the tower, or that I was going to be leaving on my assignment tomorrow, but ultimately I didn’t want to encourage her quest to escape. I just didn’t think it was possible, yet. After a few seconds of silence I turned and started walking back towards the barracks. I had my own assignment this week, and it’d be a lot harder than getting someone to teach me an aspect.

“Thanks,” Sal called after me.

“You’re welcome,” I called over my shoulder.

I didn’t have to leave it at that. I could feel the pressure to demand a favor, or ask for payment, or just to take something from her like the student in the laboratory had from me. I ignored it. I might eventually come to follow the Sovereign’s Path, it would be naive to pretend the influence of the environment I’d been placed in wouldn’t push me in that direction, but I wasn’t going to run gleefully down it at the first test.