PLATINUM 1.10: THE MAGINOX

“As to the matter of these martyrs, as you so eloquently put it… The slave who becomes a master is loved by the slaves, hated by the other masters. But this is all on one side of the scales; on the other teeters society itself. Whilst the masters will never love him, the slaves can be made to hate him. In the interest of finding a balance, I propose significantly increasing the funds made available to prospective champions. In this way over the coming years the power of the Unsacrosanct shall be diluted, and all it will cost is a few pounds of gold each year.”

– the Lord Justice Brolosir, in session before the Justice Council, Kailost 827 NE

Flying, I decided, was fun. Being almost horizontal in the air, a good forty feet higher than the highest buildings, moving as fast as I could’ve run – it wasn’t uncanny or disorienting – certainly not scary or mortifying – and oh gods how was my stomach squirting lava into my throat? – no, no. I couldn’t be sick, I didn’t want to have to have to wash my scarf, I didn’t want to be sick in front of Emrelet. No. Fun.

Fun.

Zel was giggling and – no, fun. Fun. Fun.

“Ze dizziness vill pass,” Em shouted back to me.

“Euuueuuuuurrrrr,” I replied through teeth gritted into a fixed skull’s-grin.

I could hear her laughter on the wind.

Which was just lovely. Both the new women in my life, taking amusement from my inability to do something that was natural for both of them. This was a sentiment I couldn’t voice to Emrelet right now, so I vented at Zel for a minute. By the time I was done with that, my stomach had stopped threatening to turn me into an erupting volcano, and I could turn my attention to what I was actually doing.

I was glad Ciraya and Dustbringer had decided to go on ahead. Initially Dustbringer offered me one of his spectre-mist-leg-things (chariots, he’d called them), but Em had insisted I travel under her power. At first I’d thought it a no-brainer, sticking with the actually-friendly arch-wizard, over the impossible sorceress and her grunting half-undead champion friend. But when I saw the ease with which the ‘chariot’ carried Ciraya aloft I began to regret my decision; after watching me flop about for two minutes the sorceress had commented something to her companion and they’d told us to catch up before soaring away, the lower half of each of their bodies shrouded in a cloud that passed invisibly into the fog.

Yet, now we were soaring above the city in the twilight, and I had to admit that it was beautiful. Yes, the smog occluded most of the fine detail, but I had my empowered vision to help with that, affording me a view few could’ve had. I could see the lights of candles flickering in windows, the bonfires here and there in the squares, the ocean of rooftops stretching on and on –

I could see Mund for the first time, and realised what it must’ve been like for Emrelet to arrive here, newly-capable of flight – to soar above the metropolis and witness her new home like this. I glanced over my shoulder, towards the lower lands: the big Greywater in the south, partitioning-off Rivertown on the far side – with the Blackrush near me, dividing Sticktown and North Lowtown on this side from Oldtown on the other – and far to the east, the Whiteflood, splitting Oldtown on its far edge from the distant Treetown and South Lowtown. All surrounded by the great seamless walls, which, though I could better-appreciate from this vantage, I still couldn’t see in their entirety. I’d need a clear day for that, and I’d have to go a couple of hundred feet higher at least…

The thought of that made me shudder.

I turned back to face forwards, looking where we were going. We were climbing in height gradually as we flew, as the landscape slowly rose up before us. I copied Em, gaining altitude by angling myself, pointing my feet as though I could just trust the force propelling me, like a swimmer angling towards the surface trusts the water to make him rise.

And it worked.

It was only then that I understood she wasn’t directing me, and the temptation came to me to test it.

I did a single barrel-roll, still arrowing forwards, then tried to go faster, just tensing my muscles along my arms, my buttocks –

Yes, this actually was fun.

The nausea departed in an instant, once I realised just how in-control I was. I hadn’t thought this kind of magic possible.

“Archmagery,” Zel sniffed.

I came to a stop, ‘standing’ vertically in the air. It was simple once you trusted it. When I leaned forwards once again, I shot off to meet Em, who had come to a stop herself, hovering over the sloped roof of a large building, some guildhall or tavern – the structure had to be five storeys in height, and that put us at close to a hundred feet.

It thrilled me instead of debilitating me. Feeling less tense, I suddenly realised that I could discern the slower air passing over my face. Was that what was letting me breathe even when going flat-out, keeping crud from catching in my hood, even preventing my hood from being ripped from my head? They really had this figured out, didn’t they?

“I get it now,” I said, slowing to drift over to her. “This… is something else.”

It sounded stupid, even to my ears, but I didn’t really have the power right now to put this sensation into words.

And her grey eyes shone suddenly all the same.

“Follow,” she replied – and I heard the challenge in it.

She went at twice our former speed, so I closed my eyes and focussed my thoughts, flexed my body, and trebled my own speed – so she redoubled, always outpacing me. When my breath was being taken away by our sheer speed – then she made it interesting.

She went lower, entering the labyrinth of streets and alleyways.

We passed over the tangles of Ebondock Knot, the solitary hill of Arnost’s Green, and it was as much as I could do to fly above her and try to keep pace. I was sure I could see better, maybe even react faster, than she could – but I had a feeling that she had more wind-magic at her fingertips than just the means of propulsion that was granting us flight. Was her archmagery giving her a sense for where the buildings were, the turns, the obstructions? I couldn’t actually put myself in her place and imagine how she could experience things on that level, but there was clearly something like that at play.

We raced from Sticktown to Hilltown, Em close to the ground and probably visible to those below in her light robe, with me in my dark robe far higher and virtually invisible. We were flying over the craft-halls with their open-air forges burning all night long, the orange glows lighting the fog with an eerie hue as, hidden below, the centrifuges were humming, sending smoke up in great swirls. When I picked out Dustbringer and Ciraya ahead, their dark upper bodies were barely visible in the gloom – it was the whirling blue lines around the champion that gave them away. Though their misty conveyances let them cut their own path over the buildings, they didn’t move much faster than a galloping horse; the wizard’s power let us outstrip them by a considerable margin.

I tried not to smile smugly as we went over them, but I did give them a little wave of acknowledgement.

I guessed it did speak highly of their motives, that they’d let Em bring me after –

“It only means they trust her to bring you in.”

True. But if they wanted to kill me, she could just drop me right now, couldn’t she? If they don’t want to kill me, and you can stop them controlling my mind, then what can they do to me?

“They could try to control your mind and then when that fails kill you,” she replied at once.

You’re really quite good at this, you know?

“What, keeping you alive?”

No – well, yes, obviously that – but, you know, thinking like an evil mastermind. Who taught you to think like that?

“Har-har.”

I noted that this wasn’t exactly an answer – or a denial.

“You owe me a discretion point, remember,” she said sweetly.

Fine, but it’s not like I’m going to be able to just forget that, is it?

“Forget what?”

I growled a little, deep in my throat, but left it for now. I had plenty to occupy myself with.

For one thing, traffic.

Em had slowed and risen higher to meet me, and I matched her pace as we flew into the tower-district of Hightown – it clearly wouldn’t be safe to go at breakneck speeds with others around. I was sure a collision would prove fatal more often than not. As we went at a more leisurely pace, I looked with curiosity at the other mages zipping here and there, most of whom were merely travelling between windows.

Some were mist-shrouded like Dustbringer and Ciraya and some were simply soaring along like me and Emrelet – but there were others. I saw a tall mage with white wings like those of a griffon sprouting from his or her back setting-down onto a balcony below us, the wings folding away into nothingness as the mage reached out for the glass door and entered the building on the seventh or eighth floor. In the air to one side of us there was a mage so obese he could’ve eaten Peltos for breakfast, being carried on some kind of palanquin, its diaphanous curtains rippling open in the breeze – the thing was being heaved by dozens of extremely put-out-looking, violently-flapping imps, sulphuric sweat literally pouring off the red-skinned, eighteen-inch-tall demonoids as they crossed our path.

“Did I just hear a demon say ‘Twelve Heavens’?” I asked blankly after they’d gone past.

“Vell, I do not think ‘Tvelve Hells’ vill be a svear-vord, in Infernum, vill it?”

“… Single Materium, you’re probably right!”

We curled around the cracked courtyards and mossy silence of the Tower of Mourning, its three sides now lighting the darkness with the ribbons of blue radiance worked into its surfaces, the illumination fascinating yet somehow dreadful in the way that it seemed to pulse, as if with a cold heartbeat. The pattern was branching, webbed and forked, like a mess of sapphire vines, a series of lightning-bolts frozen in time and left thrumming in the blackness.

My view of it was fleeting. Soon other towers got in the way, and the domes of the shrines too – Hightown had no more temples than the other districts but they were all flamboyant, sprawling structures in vast grassy grounds. Then I followed Em down one of the tree-lined avenues, the roads beneath me hidden by the vast landscape of yellow leaves still clinging to the branches, that were this time like a carpet below me rather than a roof above my head.

When I looked up, I saw that the omnipresent clouds were gone, replaced with a tapestry of stars shining fiercely in a purple sky streaked with turquoise and indigo and violet – if some wizards had been paid to clear the clouds, it was worth it for this.

Was that something Em could do? I’d have to ask her sometime. This was a sight more deserved to see.

We passed the Thirteen Candles, and for the first time I noticed the weird distortion in the air around it. No lights shone in the dark slits it had for windows. It’d always been hard to tell from the ground, but from up here it was obvious that the flames burning on the roofs of the ungainly citadels were massive: even the smaller, lower towers on the edges of the ‘candelabrum’ had thirty-foot flames; the two in the middle must’ve had fifty-foot ones. Ever-burning. The cone-shaped roofs beneath eternally-unharmed. But… why?

Who even lived there, in the darkness of those inscrutable windows, those scabbed wounds in the blood-painted surfaces? What was the place, exactly? No one ever really spoke about it – it was just one of those things. There was nothing to say about it; no one I’d ever met on the streets knew anything about it. Either way, wherever archmagery took me, I didn’t think I ever wanted to end up hanging out in a place that looked like that.

Then I realised just how close to the glass spike stabbing up into the sky we’d come, letting my attention drift over it at last.

The Maginox.

Framed by the mountains beyond Mund to the north-east, each of the Maginox’s five sides was a narrow, blade-like triangle tinted with a different colour: red, purple, blue, green, yellow, much of it illuminated even at night by the gleaming magelight within… So tall it seemed to defy the clouds, its width was tiny in comparison to its height and yet its base occupied a huge amount of land. I could see the close-cropped grass around it, the pebble-paths wending here and there to features of interest.

The huge-pillared building that I knew to be the library would have been an impressive structure all of its own if it hadn’t been dwarfed by the presence of the Maginox itself so close by. There were benches under groves of trees by reed-ringed ponds, rolling slopes with magnificent views, open-plan shrines to Locus, God of Learning, and to Enye, Goddess of Youth… the kinds of places where even at this late hour many students were congregated, standing or sitting in small groups. Maybe some were even discussing their schoolwork, given that it was, after all, magic.

The Noxway, the master-crafted street leading towards it, was so wide that the trees couldn’t reach across to each other, couldn’t hide the marvellous surface from my sight with their autumn leaves. Over a hundred feet across, it was paved in a marble so smooth and pure that the road looked more like a razor-thin sheet of glass suspended on a river of milk than anything so imperfect, so crackable and chippable as stone, practically glowing of its own light in the twilight.

All in all, the highborn mages knew how impress – but I didn’t fancy being the kind of archmage that ended up hanging out in a place like this either. It was just too ostentatious.

I could now discern a kind of moat around the tower itself, no more than a hundred yards from the glass walls themselves, and a number of simple, small bridges that crossed the moat. Two mages in black-and-white robes, robes that looked thick and heavy, were standing guard at each bridge, and each of them wore some kind of shoulder-armour, pauldrons shaped with curls and snarls and sharp edges – white on the left shoulder, black on the right. Chest-high rods of black metal were in their hands.

And, interestingly, I saw no one flying inside the border afforded by the moat. No one was coming-and-going on the exterior of the – hundreds? – of floors comprising this building.

I was finding it hard to breathe.

I was closer to this place, far closer, than I’d ever been before, and intimidated wouldn’t even begin to cover it. But what was I going to do? Drop off out of here right now, and make the chaos ten times worse? Abandon Em, break my word? There were no alternatives, no ‘possible futures’ that I could accept that didn’t lead across one of those bridges, and into that building…

As if to confirm my suspicions, Em began to lose altitude quite rapidly, and let me catch up as we crossed over the point where the Noxway met the grassland and branched into smaller roads and paths. We followed the course of one of the paths into the Maginox’s grounds, flying slower, slower… I could see ahead of us the posts of the iron-wrought bridge, well-lit by glowing globes, and the decoratively-armoured mages leaning against the rails, heads inclined in conversation.

Flying lower, lower…

We were about to touch down on the path just twenty feet from the two guards, and to my surprise I felt more than heard Dustbringer and Ciraya’s approach behind me; I’d not had any reason to look over my shoulder in ages, given the place we’d been heading towards. But of course, Em would have been able to sense them behind us, and time our arrival to match theirs by reducing our speed.

That was fine by me. I’d have rather had more time in the air than on the ground.

Do I have to go in? I whined plaintively.

“I’ll back you up, no matter what,” Zel asserted, with a bit of steel in her telepathic voice. “Can’t necessarily say the same for others…”

I let out a sigh as my shoes hit the pebbles. It was all over. I wobbled for a second before finding my balance.

“Can we do that again?” I asked.

“Next time ve can race,” Em replied with a smile, smoothing down her robe.

“That wasn’t racing?”

She arched an eyebrow at me like I was joking, then we both gave in and laughed at the same time. I could still feel the thrill of the flight in my nerves, this abundance, overabundance of energy. I wanted to do star-jumps.

“You got used to it, then,” Ciraya commented snarkily from behind me.

I heard Dustbringer give a grunt of concurrence.

“Hey, I’ve never flown before,” I responded, turning to watch as they landed a few feet from us, dragging a great swathe of the spectral mist with them. “Unless you count being swooped off with by an owl… Were you so hot the first time?”

“Nope. But there’s a difference between not being so hot, and being so cold people get brain-freeze just watching you.”

“Hey, just because I beat you –“

“I honestly thought I was going to keel over right there in mid-air,” the sorceress drawled over me in her crisp, croaky voice, “if I had to watch you hit the top of your head against the floor one more time. It’s, like, the top of your head. And the floor. Those two things should never meet. There’s just no reason for it…”

Em had started to advance, and, doing my best to keep the worry from my mind, I fell in next to her, ceding the argument to Ciraya. I could sense the moment when the mist stopped flowing from behind me, when Dustbringer wordlessly let go his undead.

Pebbles crunched under our feet. The two guards ahead, in their heavy-looking black-and-white robes my mind was having trouble not categorising as armour, turned to face us, their dark, shiny rods in their hands. It was only then that I realised they were magisters, of some special corps – they had ten-pointed stars on each shoulder: a black star on the white armour, a white one on the black.

Both were women, both a little taller than average, not quite my height. One had red hair and freckles, no older than twenty, while the other had to be twice that or older, a brunette without any other mark of rank or seniority needed than the look in her green eyes, sparkling with challenge. She tapped the flat butt of her rod firmly into the pebbles a single time then raised it again.

“Emrelet. Dustbringer. Ciraya.” The older magister named them, her tone proper and businesslike, looking at them and pointing the ‘v’-ended tip of her rod at them in turn; then her green eyes fell on me as if they’d only been waiting to do so. She stared at me, looking the robe up and down, gazing into my hood. Her own expression was as unreadable as mine, and she didn’t have the benefit of a scarf covering half her face. She pointed the tip of the rod at me, and said, “Feychilde.”

“We’re just bringing the newbie in for a chat,” Ciraya said with an overly-bright sound to her voice. “It’s all in accordance with Mistress Henthae’s wishes…” There was an unusually-pleading, expectant look on her face I couldn’t quite wrap my head around.

“You know the protocol, Ciraya,” the older magister said, stepping back and tapping the butt of her rod against the pebbles twice.

“Oh, come on, I’ve got things to be –“

“Give it up, Ciraya,” the younger, redhead magister supplied in a tired-sounding voice, while the older magister began a chant. “You know it’s night in the Twelve Heavens when Najraine lets you through with two out of three.”

The reference was lost on me. ‘When it’s night in the Twelve Heavens’ was another way of saying ‘it’ll never happen’ but…

“Two out of three?” I thought I might as well ask; it was innocent-enough. I kept my voice low, my gaze on the older magister who was now spinning her rod in her hands, moving her eyes between the four of us as she voiced a sonorous, wordless song in ever-changing pitches of sound.

“Identity, authorisation, and, most importantly, behaviour.” The redhead turned her attention to me. “We’ve got to check your future-lines. We wouldn’t want to let anyone through the wards who was planning to cause trouble, would we?”

Does this mean that if we go in, and they try something, they have to be successful? I mean – if they aren’t even going to let me in unless they win, I don’t cause them trouble –

“I’m a diviner too, remember.”

But they’ll have arch-diviners in there. Other archmages… My mouth was dry.

“Arch-diviners interacting with you will just muddy the waters, if you bother to recall. Plus, you’ve got your shields.”

I did indeed have my circle-and-star formation in place, redrawn the moment I’d donned the robe and scarf around the corner from Mud Lane before even we started our flight to Hightown.

“Your failure earlier was from your own impatience. If you’d drawn spikes on the outside of your shields like Dustbringer’s and used those to strike his shields, I bet he wouldn’t have been able to get through yours. Just keep a level head and you’ll be fine. I can’t sense any danger.”

“A sensible precaution,” I hedged, “but shouldn’t you have enchanters out here too? I mean, what if someone came up, a powerful illusionist, and just made you guys think they weren’t going to cause any trouble?”

“Ze guards have cast ze best glamour-varding spells upon zem, Feychilde,” Em said, “as viz every one of us, before our shifts begin. It vill last zem hours, and even ze strongest arch-enchanters cannot break it.”

“Wrong.”

Really?

“Well, probably. Protections do work, but –“

I went to move my hand, to tap my finger against the side of my head, intending on telling Em that she was getting disagreed-with by my passenger –

“– don’t go implying I’m in here with Dustbringer around! Trust me!”

Er? Okay, Zel.

“The less we give away the better, I think…”

Either way, the older magister, Najraine, had now stopped singing and lowered her staff.

“Three out of three,” she declared, sweeping her staff to one side and tapping it three times on the pebbles. “You each have permission to enter the Maginox, and to leave again afterwards.” She stepped aside to stand next to the red-haired guard, leaving the path clear for us to cross the bridge over the moat.

“See you,” the redhead said plaintively to Ciraya, getting a nod in return.

Me and Em in front, with Ciraya and Dustbringer bringing up the rear as before, we stepped onto the iron mesh of the bridge. The moat itself was a simple ring of motionless water, thirty feet or so in width, but it didn’t look stagnant. The narrow sliver of moon above us was beginning to shine brightly, and in its pale radiance the waters of the moat seemed, if anything, to be almost crystal-clear. As we crossed, the bridge unmoving beneath the tread of our feet, I fancied I could see the shapes of fish moving near the reeds at the bottom of the moat.

Then we got half-way across, and I could see it for the first time.

The gigantic, shimmering bubble around the Maginox.

“Wow,” I murmured, moving to the rail of the bridge and stopping.

It reached to the mid-point of the moat in all directions so that we were now just inside its gentle curve – a vast cone of rotating blue shielding. I was pretty sure that anyone who flew into that wall of pure force would come off worse for wear, and if they went into it with enough power they might-well end up a smear of red gunk hanging up there in the air against the translucent surface.

They must’ve felt so safe, so well-protected in here, warded against all intrusion, all outside-attack –

“They can’t all see it, you know.”

What?

“Vhat is it, Feychilde?” Em asked, stopping at my side. The others halted too, just a few feet away.

“You’ve got the eyes of an arch-sorcerer. It’s like the way you could hear the Autumn Door. Do you think your little wizard friend could see the fight you and Dustbringer got into? Even Ciraya would need to cast the right spells –“

Ah yes, that ‘third eye’ stuff. I get it.

A smear of red gunk hanging up there in the air against the invisible surface…

“I…” I felt stupid. I looked across at Dustbringer, trying to meet the dark eyes looking out through the slits in the corpse-face mask. “Is this thing supposed to be a secret?” I asked him, waving an arm generally in the air – I couldn’t really gesture at the shield itself; it encompassed every direction now we stood inside it.

“No,” he replied at once. “But isn’t it a shame they can’t see it?”

“Ah-h-h,” Em breathed. “You can actually see ze vards?”

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“Sorry, it’s just… professional curiosity,” I said, turning to indicate that I was happy to continue on walking.

Em cast me a strange sidelong glance as we continued on our way, crunching more pebbles, leaving the bridge and moat behind.

There was an arched, doorless opening in the centre of the red face of the Maginox looming there across from us, brightly-lit and even welcoming at the top of a short flight of stairs. It seemed the interior of the School of Magery used a milky black stone for its floors and ceilings, with pillars placed more, it appeared, out of a sense of style than any kind of structural necessity. There were no guards here, but other mages were coming and going; a few lingered for a moment with their eyes or hoods turned in our direction, but they always turned aside to continue on their way after a few seconds; we weren’t challenged any further.

I took deep breaths as we entered. If there was ever a time to be Feychilde, to let Kastyr step aside, assume the guise of the champion right down to the core – it was now.

I let Em lead the way inside, and marvelled at what I saw.

At first there was a black-stone ceiling above me, thirty feet or so over my head. After a minute, we arrived in the centre of the space; the ceiling disappeared, and I found that I could look upwards and see the entirety of the Maginox stretching on into the sky around me. Rings of balconies, the doors of rooms, windows, innumerable robed students. In the very middle there was a single spiral stair, wide enough for twenty abreast with long, shallow steps of the same black stone, winding around a central post that seemed to go all the way to the top. Every fifteen feet or so of elevation there was a lone black bridge, broad enough for at least ten abreast, connecting the staircase to the rooms on that storey around the edges of the building.

Hundreds of them, floor upon floor upon floor, piercing the heavens.

An abstract clock hung in mid-air near the first storey. It was just two long crystal rods imbued with a white radiance, one longer and one shorter, but it was enough to make it clear what it was; the two hands displayed what looked like seven-thirty-five.

I might’ve detested the overall look of the building, its grandiose nature, the way it sought to dominate the skyline and belittle the other, far more ancient towers, but in some ways the bridges spanning the open space almost reminded me of Mud Lane. While the acrid odours of failed alchemical experiments might linger somewhat in the air here, the pervading scent was the mustiness of stone. There were no sounds of dogs yapping or babies crying; here there was only the studious silence, not even a single stray noise from people traversing the rings of balconies reaching down to us. Mages who passed us weren’t speaking quietly, necessarily, but no one actually raised their voice, and everyone kept a respectful distance from those they didn’t know.

As Em led our strange quartet towards the great spiral stair, I remarked on it. “Is this normal for you Magisterium types?”

“Is vhat normal?”

“You know – the whole, staying-away-from-each-other?”

“Yes… Zis is because no one knows vhat spells anyone has active. Vould you choose to brush shoulders viz a diviner, and have him see vhat you did ze night before, or an enchanter, and have her see vhat’s really on your mind?”

“Yeah, that could get awkward real fast,” I said, giving her one of those probably-too-deliberate looks.

She put a hand on my arm, and spoke in a jaunty tone: “Unfortunately I am not ze enchantress Ilitar accused me of being. I can only blast your arm off.”

I laughed rather loudly, then cringed internally, almost hearing the rolling of eyes from the masked champion and cynical sorceress behind. I was trying and very much failing to hide the flush of pleasure that coursed through me as Em had so casually placed her fingers on my upper arm, tensing them slightly, as if to grip at my muscle for a brief moment.

We went on up the stair, passing mages of what looked to be every nationality and then some, mages whose natural skin-tones weren’t just white or pink, bronze or olive, brown or black – mages with pale-green skin and vibrant, all-green eyes that bore no whites; mages with dark-blue complexions, high cheekbones and foreheads… There were many elves, of course, with never a hair out of place or a blemish on their skin, hiding brilliant white teeth behind their thin-lipped smiles as they swept past us on the stair, robes swishing dramatically as only elves could truly achieve. A fair few gnomes were there too, barely tall-enough to reach my waist and squeaky-voiced (such that I’d have taken them for children if not for the extremely complex words coming out of their mouths), wearing their richly-cut robes with as much pride as any elf. I even saw a single dwarf on his own – probably an outcast from his race, everyone knew there were no dwarf mages – sporting the red robes of a probable-wizard, stomping his way down the stairs past us with a sour look on what could be seen of his face, his ginger beard streaming behind him.

About one in four of those who passed us seemed to have Magisterium-symbols on their chests, which was a higher proportion than I’d have expected.

After a couple of minutes we must’ve gone up ten-or-so floors, and we crossed to navigate the bridge that would lead us out from the centre towards the actual rooms, contained in the great five-sided ring around the edges of the building. We walked on the left, next to the rail carved from black stone, the rail that protected us from the already-over-a-hundred-foot drop, and I ran my hand along the barrier’s surface. It was like untextured glass despite the milky ribbons that rippled through the material, as smooth as a silken sheet.

As I studied it, I looked past the barrier, down. And felt a terrible sudden urge to fall over the edge – or I felt like someone was going to grab me, grab me and hurl me over –

We weren’t a hundred feet up. We weren’t ten floors up. We were…

Despite having just flew to get to the Maginox, it took my breath away. I hadn’t actually flown this high, and I certainly had never felt my feet on the floor whilst looking down at a drop beneath me of such magnitude –

“Whuuuuh,” I thought I managed to say.

Dustbringer grunted a hunh, and Ciraya chuckled, but Em put a hand on my arm again.

“Ve could get nothing done if ve had to spend all day valking up and down zose stairs,” she said, by way of trying to normalise what had to be some kind of time-hole. “And zey von’t allow us to fly vizzin ze building.”

After about ten seconds she was able to prise my hand off the rail, and once I was free I was happy to be guided away. It took me a few moments to get over the fact we were now thousands of feet high, possibly on something like the two-hundredth storey – I had no way to guess, really. The floors below had just looked like a horrific blur when I’d glimpsed them…

Then we were in a globe-lit corridor, walking on the black stone past rooms with solid doors of rich mahogany, some locked with a padlock featuring no keyhole. Many rooms had windows that looked out onto the corridor, but those which weren’t curtained-off were dark and empty within: most looked like classrooms, desks and chairs, magical paraphernalia all over the show. A few rooms had no windows and looked bigger, with double-doors half again as high as the others.

“So, what should I expect here, exactly?” I ventured.

“How do you mean?” Em said.

“Mistress… Henthae?”

Em smiled. “She is one of ze few. I think you vill like her. It voz her note zat opened ze vault, from vhich your thirty platinum vere taken.”

“Well that’s – nice,” I managed to choke out the word, not daring to mention the obvious question: why her?

We’d only gone a few hundred feet and followed two bends, when Em came to a stop beside a door without a padlock, a heavy black curtain drawn fully across the window, hiding its occupants.

“Just one person.”

Henthae?

“An old woman. Seems to fit.”

Em opened the door, swinging it inwards without knocking, but didn’t move into the opening. She just gestured at the room.

“Ze Miztress Keliko Henthae, department-head of Operations and Special Investigations.”

It was small, utilitarian without loss of luxury. A single large, clutter-free desk with just a few sheets of paper neatly stacked in its upper corner, a jug of water and some stacked glasses. There were four chairs in front of it and one behind it, all of them leather-cushioned, the grips of the chair-arms and headrests of the chair-backs carven into the likenesses of some fierce beaked creature: a griffon, perhaps, or a phoenix… An orb fixed to the ceiling shed a yellowish radiance. The sole decoration on the milk-ribboned black stone walls was a small painting hanging behind the desk, depicting a huge, forest-covered rock crashing into a desolate, featureless land.

In the chair behind the desk, a small, narrow woman was rising to her feet – old, yes, perhaps nearing seventy, but remarkably unwrinkled. There were no creases across her brow, but she had heavy laugh-lines and a couple of rolls of excess skin under her chin; her eyes twinkled as she looked out into the corridor and saw me standing there. Her iron-grey hair was tied back in a pony-tail, and her robe was a soft rose hue, the ten-spoked wheel on her breast stitched in a dark, silvery thread. As she gestured, gems glimmered in myriad shades from the rings on her fingers under the soft yellow light.

“Feychilde – do come in, take a seat! You too, Emrelet – gods know it’s been too long since I last saw you. Three weeks? How’re you getting on? A glass of water? Come in, all of you – shut the door, we’ll have half the people who saw you listening in otherwise –“

While she spoke I shuffled inside, my shields preceding me, and the others followed, trading pleasantries with her. Within moments we were sipping the chilled water in our seats: Dustbringer, Ciraya, myself and Emrelet, from left to right.

“So Kastyr, we meet at last.” Henthae spoke in a refined voice, but there was warmth in her tone, taking her own seat and settling herself back down into her visible leathery groove, with no wincing on her features as she moved, no creaking of old bones. The blue eyes gazed at me with curiosity. “I hear you’ve had a busy week?”

I grated slightly – especially here, I would have had her call me Feychilde and nothing else, door closed or not. But I supposed I wasn’t in a position to argue. Wiser to keep that up my sleeve. She clearly wasn’t trying to be insulting.

“An even busier twenty-four hours,” I replied, amiably-enough.

“That too,” she conceded, cracking a wry smile. Her twinkling blue eyes darted over to Ciraya on my left. “I take it the business was resolved without any loss of life or significant destruction of property or loss of life?”

Mistress Henthae’s smile edged into the dangerous-range as she turned her eyes to the sorceress sitting next to me, and I began to carefully reassess my first impressions of her.

“That’s hardly fair – that was one time – and there were four of them and they had weapons,” Ciraya responded with an unusual gloominess.

As Henthae began to reply with some curt admonishment, I was sure I heard the sorceress mutter something under her breath about Fe being hungry.

“If I may interrupt,” Dustbringer cut in with his deep, dry voice, “there was no loss of life, no destruction of property. If anything our presence appeared to exacerbate the likelihood of what your oracles would call, I believe, the prominent future-lines actualising.”

He spoke quickly, but I got the gist of what he was saying, and again kept very quiet about just how tempted I’d been to set a demon on Peltos’s boys.

No point getting myself arrested.

“Agreed.”

“Indeed, Endren, that too was something I was warned of –“

Henthae’s chosen form of address for Dustbringer was odd, a message in itself. How did she know that he’d revealed his name to me? Someone had filled her in, somehow.

Twelve Hells, anything would be possible if she had access to some half-skilled diviners she could set on the task, as Dustbringer had implied.

Perhaps the Magisterium didn’t really care one jot about keeping champions’ identities secret.

“– fine young chap like Feychilde we aren’t going to want to take risks, considering the current situation with, ahem, Soulbiter and Screamsong – dear me, wherever do they come up with these names? Lord Termiax and Lady Rissala were known as highly-cultured individuals, they never missed a chance to talk-up some fine art they’d recently purchased… quite beyond me…“

Or maybe it was just a personal issue with cool-sounding names. Which just made Henthae profoundly boring, not particularly evil, right? What was wrong with ‘Feychilde’ and ‘Dustbringer’?

“You mean, you don’t imagine a fey kid and someone holding a feather duster?”

Thanks, Zel.

“My pleasure.”

Still, there was the whole business of a darkmage knowing who I –

“And finally this issue of Belexor Ishemen we take very seriously,” Henthae was saying, as if reading my mind.

Is she doing that? Reading me?

“If she is, she’s got the lightest touch I’ve ever seen. And she’s within your shields, no repulsion.”

That’s not a denial.

“I realise that.”

Henthae was looking across at Emrelet as she mentioned Belexor, as if waiting for the arch-wizard’s report on the druid she’d been supervising for the last month.

After a few moments to consider her words, Em said, “I had no idea zat he vould go to zese lengths. You have had vord from Nighteye?”

Henthae nodded sombrely. “Enforced metamorphosis,” her eyes twinkled at me for an instant, then shot back to Emrelet, “is a very serious crime, as I’m sure you are aware.”

Em smiled. “I have been keeping up on my reading. If ze change of shape is prolonged, it carries a sentence of fifteen years, commuted to two years viz a fine of one thousand gold, ten percent of vhich is to be avarded as compensation –”

“Yes, dear,” Henthae said with the warmth returned to the set of her features, mouth slanted in a tight smile, “you don’t have to show off.”

There was a mutter of laughter, and some of the tension in the air evaporated.

A little part of me reacted to the notion of ten more platinum, replacing much of what I’d lost to Peltos once Ciraya’s work was done, but I swallowed down my acquisitiveness. There’d be time for money-making later.

“It sometimes works differently for magisters found guilty, however,” the old magister continued, “if circumstances demand. What do you think, Mr. Mortenn? Would you entertain conversation upon the topic?“

I took another gulp and set down my glass.

“Honestly?”

I glanced across at Em before replying. She looked down at her hands, face flushed, but the smile was still on her face.

I looked back at Mistress Henthae, the expectant twinkling eyes.

“Honestly, I didn’t expect you to take my side so quickly. But I have one major concern.”

“We are always keen to ensure our new champions find us accommodating,” she replied smoothly, sitting back but keeping her eyes on my face. “I’m sure you can imagine why. What is it that troubles you?”

“Belexor,” I said, “knows who I am. And clearly hates me. Is there anything…?”

I left it hanging there in the air suggestively.

“You are requesting that we remove his memory of your identity from his mind.”

The way she phrased it, she wasn’t asking me a question, but she was still inviting a reply.

I thought about it carefully.

“What would it cost me?” I asked, deciding to simply get it out there for sake of speeding this up. It’d been a very long day… and if me and Em left at the same time, I could fly through the moonlit air with her back to Sticktown before the start of her shift…

“Cost you?” she asked, leaning forwards again. She affected a little sardonic laugh. “Mr. Mortenn, what kind of business do you think we are in?”

I raised an eyebrow, uncertain whether she could see it under this light with my hood in the way.

“Well, I don’t mean monetarily, obviously…“

”What primarily concerns us,” Henthae filled my pause, “is that prophecy and telepathy completely failed to predict Belexor’s subversion.” Her voice took on a brittle tone. “Don’t mistake me, Mr. Mortenn, you aren’t at the top of our list of priorities. This meeting isn’t the first I’ve had tonight, and won’t be the last.”

Of course, she’d had that whole Facechanger business to look into – I had merely further-complicated an already-complicated day for her…

“Nonetheless, you are one of our priorities.” She softened somewhat when she said that, looking down at the table for a moment, almost guiltily. Thinking of lost champions? “You speak of costs, and no psychic inspection is required for me to recognise the contempt in which you hold the Magisterium –”

I opened my mouth to protest but one of her beringed, bejewelled hands was already flashing out in a little cutting motion –

“– which would seek both to protect and be protected by you in any case. Like all champions, you merely possess those delusions of independence which no doubt contribute, in time, to the doom awaiting even the most competent.” She pursed her lips momentarily, and flicked her gaze to Dustbringer, who gave no outward sign of annoyance at her words – he’d probably heard this spiel a hundred times. “If I said that we were already planning to instil those barriers in Belexor’s mind required to hide your identity from exposure, you might not believe me. But the truth is that we need people like you, Kastyr.” The old woman’s eyes went to Emrelet, then back to me once more. “Lowborn archmages inspire the people in ways we never can –“

“Don’t give him that pile of manure,” Dustbringer grunted, suddenly sitting forward. “Until today there were five recognised arch-sorcerers – fighters – left in the city. All of them champions. Now there’re six again.”

Six ‘again’? Oh… Hellbane.

Dustbringer went on: “Let him stay a champion. It’s common-enough knowledge that archmage sorcerers are rare compared with the other archmages – albeit wizards come close –” I thought I saw the eyes move within the mask’s slits, glancing briefly down the row towards Em “– even if you take into account those in other professions, or those hiding or otherwise unregistered by the Magi-”

“Yes, quite,” Henthae said; “in any case, your task is complete here, Endren. Our young friend has been brought into our presence and you successfully avoided burning down Mud Lane. Our gratitude will be waiting for you in the usual location.”

“The usual fee?” His gruff exterior betrayed him for a moment, and I heard need – or greed – in his voice. Perhaps we were not so dissimilar, Endren and I…

“The full amount, of course. It’s already arranged.”

Dustbringer got to his feet, and on impulse I did too, swivelling – not to leave, but to offer him my hand.

He removed the scorched metal gauntlet from his right hand, and we shook for a second time.

“Nighteye?” he said to me, with a curious tilt of his head.

It took me a moment.

Ah. He wants to know if the druid told me about the Gathering of Champions…

“Yes, he did,” I said cautiously – and it seemed my guess was right by the way he just nodded curtly, his question answered.

“Hm?” Henthae made her interest plain. She’d steepled her fingers in front of her face, elbows on the arm-rests of the chair, and her eyes were brighter than her rings.

I resumed my seat as Dustbringer nodded to Em and Ciraya and, sliding his glove back onto his hand, made his way out of the room.

Once the door had closed again, I replied, “He was checking Nighteye gave me the new-champion-pep-talk, that’s all. I think you were saying something about needing me, and already planning to wipe Belexor’s memories of me…”

“Not just wipe his memories of you,” she replied, un-steepling her fingers. “Do you think we allow decommissioned magisters – dark magisters, if you will – to just walk off with their knowledge of our practises?”

“But you have no way of knowing who they’ve told in the meantime, which secrets –“

“That is where you are wrong,” she cut in smoothly, leaving me blinking. “Let what you see today serve as a warning to those of you here who might otherwise one day harbour thoughts unworthy of your esteemed stations,” she raised an eyebrow in warning, looking coolly between me and Em and Ciraya, “which is the reason I’m going to ask you to come with me.”

Henthae stood suddenly, springing to her feet all too fluidly for a person of her advancing age. She moved briskly around the desk, not waiting for our acquiescence – simply assuming it and moving on. Hurriedly, we found our feet and followed her from the room.

We walked two abreast along the corridor, and though I tried to drop back to walk beside Em, it appeared Ciraya was having none of it; she smoothly manoeuvred such that I couldn’t avoid walking next to Henthae without literally stopping and bodily moving the sorceress into my own position. Before long I could see the great central spiral stair once more, through the glass of a window.

“So what do you think of the place, Feychilde?” Henthae gave a general gesture at the surrounds as we approached the stair.

“Erm -” I couldn’t very well tell her that it reminded me in a strange way of my home – that would just play into her attempts to get me to sign-up, and I didn’t need to give her any more ammunition on that front. I suspected she had plenty up her sleeve already – and I didn’t want to sound like some gushing idiot either. “The Maginox? What do you really want me to say? Obviously it’s astounding.” As I said the word I realised I meant it, swallowed down my doubts. “But it’s, er, too much for a poor boy’s poor eyes, Mistress.”

“Perhaps,” she replied; “perhaps not yet. One shan’t remain a poor boy for long.”

I avoided looking over the edge this time as we started moving upstairs again. “Might I enquire as to our… destination?” She’d spoken of what we would ‘see today’ and that sounded somewhat portentous.

“It was you who first spoke of cost,” she replied. “Might I ask that in return for our assistance, you grant me a favour?”

“That’s… bold,” I replied. “An undefined favour?” I knew my answer already, even if it was a question of everyone’s safety from darkmage-attack. “I couldn’t agree to that.”

“Oh, no, no. Something simple. That will cost you little in time and nothing in effort.”

I rolled it over in my mind as we ascended, watching as other mages passing us on their way downstairs inclined their heads at my host – it was as if everyone knew Mistress Henthae, whether they were magisters or not.

“I don’t think it’s a good idea, personally. I mean, some vague favour will turn out to be something evil, and then –“

She said nothing in effort.

“Perhaps it will assist you in your decision-making process if I tell you upfront what the favour demands.”

“Now you’re just being silly, Mistress Henthae, obviously it will assist me –“

“Think about joining us.” Going off her tone she took the minor insult in her stride. “Just think about it. That’s all the favour I want. The life of a champion is a life of risks.”

“And rewards.”

“Rewards commensurate with the risks. Which entails risks commensurate with the rewards. You have had one bounty, and are already rich by your own standards. Is money worth your life? Our arch-magisters live far safer lives than champions, you know. I can have you apprenticed to the Seven-Star Swords, or the Night’s Guardians… Perhaps the Circle Watchers would best suit you… The pay of a collegiate magister may be less than that of a champion – but perhaps you would be interested in watching over the Winter Door for us, whose pay –“

“It’s not about pay,” I almost growled. “It’s about service. No offence, m’lady, but I do not much like the thought of being at your beck and call.” I regarded her. “And in return for this favour, this consideration, I’ll – what? Accept your promise that Belexor is no threat to my – to me?”

I saw her smile, just a single twitch. She caught my stumble there. Damn.

I knew I was giving her more ammunition; she’d realised I was going to say something like my family, that I was the type of person who cared about other people – and this could be used to control my responses. She was highborn; she might not know many people who actually cared about others, but she wasn’t stupid, and she would apply the correct levers to her target to get them to play their part in her schemes.

“I intend to bring you to young Mr. Ishemen,” she said, the smile returning to her face as she caught my shocked glance in her peripheral vision. “Not much farther.”

Em and Ciraya, walking behind, had been conversing in low voices, but now Em raised hers: “He has already been brought in? Vhen voz zis? I voz not glyphed…”

Henthae replied over her shoulder, matching the arch-wizard’s volume so everyone could hear clearly, “Not long after the Red Hart was set aflame. Your handiwork, I presume?” The old magister’s eyes turned back to me, her lips twitching in amusement as I stifled my own urge to answer.

Never incriminate yourself, never confess. The thought was deeply ingrained, known since a time when my age was numbered in single digits, when I’d realised the informants got offed with as much regularity as those they informed on. Hamry Bewent had been a burglar, and when he snitched on his burglar-turned-murderer colleagues he’d been hanged right next to them. Maybe the Magisterium were better about it – cleverer about it – than the city watch, but the instinct remained.

We exited the stairwell – and I didn’t have to look down but up to see how high we were; I could clearly make out the five-sloped ‘ceiling’, with Zel’s help. We couldn’t be more than a few dozen floors from the top. The stairs themselves hid the ultimate apex from my vision but I could see the coloured walls, red and blue and purple and green and yellow, all tapering up the form the very point of the Maginox. And through them, the sky beyond tinted in those shades, the stars directly overhead burning white in a multi-hued field of darkness.

“This is Magicrux Altra, the most heavily-guarded institute from which suspects and criminals can easily be removed,” Henthae said as we crossed the bridge towards, not an open corridor this time, but a single sealed black-stone door, two magisters with those dark-iron rods and strange shoulder-armour standing guard outside it.

I understood the need for the bridge-guards outside, now. The shield protecting the Maginox wasn’t a catch-all for ill-intent like my own instinctive shields. How could it be if you were going to house dangerous prisoners inside it?

And I could believe her words. Trying to escape from here, in the centre of the magistry’s power? Having to walk down those stairs for ten minutes, past hundreds, possibly thousands of hostile magic-users – a fair proportion of whom were actually trained to oppose darkmages?

But I’d cottoned-on to the obvious meaning of what she’d said. “You have other heavily-guarded institutes from which they can’t be easily removed?”

She shrugged. “We can’t afford to keep the most dangerous here. Obviously a single archmage could wreak havoc, given the right circumstances. Security must be commensurate with threat. But Belexor is of no particular concern – he has none of his materials and his spells allowing him to change his own shape have long since expired. What’s more, his parents are out of the city, holidaying at their villa.”

She looked pleased with herself, smiling away as we stopped before the guards while she went forward to give her credentials… but I recognised the slightly more subtle threat she was implying.

Mistress Henthae had probably locked up dozens of archmages in her time; arch-sorcerers. She was letting me know that my capabilities didn’t faze her and that she had a hellish hole to drop me into, all ready to go if I set a foot out of line.

Interesting.

“I don’t like the slant of your thoughts. This is how you were back in the apartment. You can’t test their security, just the same as you couldn’t thrown a demon at Peltos.”

I know. But it is interesting. I wonder what measures they take to prevent archmages from escaping?

“Measures you don’t ever want to learn more about than that they exist. Clearly. Do you go around contracting every disease you hear of, to find out more about it?”

The guards were showing Henthae something on a glyphstone they’d produced from a glossy demiskin pouch – she was holding the fist-sized, irregularly-shaped chunk of clear crystal up close to her eyes, gazing deep into it. I hadn’t actually seen one in-use before, but I’d always just assumed glyphstones would operate on the same principles as your everyday crystal ball, so this made sense.

“Do you know much about this place?” I asked Em. Like everywhere else, the wall around the door was just smooth, clean black stone with its little creamy rivulets running through it. The usual glowing globes a few feet on either side of the door. Nothing unusual-looking at all. You would hardly think you were standing outside a jail.

“Ve all get ze tour,” she said, trying to smile – but it looked fake, not reaching her grey eyes; I could tell her heart wasn’t in it. She wouldn’t meet my eyes.

“Not all the champions, though,” Ciraya added blandly.

The guard accepted his glyphstone back and bowed to Henthae, then he opened the door, sliding it across into the wall.

We followed her into the rectangular opening, into a hall of a size I hadn’t expected to find at this elevation. There were no ordinary mages here; everyone had the ten rays of the Magisterium displayed prominently on the front of their robes. Smaller stairs led to corridors which branched off, and we passed more guard-magisters and more magisters of the regular kind, Henthae speaking to a few sergeants before finding the correct room.

She let us into a dimly-lit cuboid space, with a silent, white-garbed magister standing watch in the corner, his arms folded and hood up against the chamber’s chill. As I turned to look around I saw Belexor not twelve feet away, sitting on a stool at the end of the room with another door directly behind him. He was hunched forwards with his red curls hanging over his face. All in all he was looking even more dishevelled than he was following his transformations, with his robe torn in a couple of places – not to mention that his left wrist was shackled to his left ankle with a chain no longer than three inches, and likewise for his right wrist and ankle. Between his ankles a bar was fastened to the same shackles, eighteen inches long, so that he couldn’t bring his feet or hands together.

Restrictions sufficient to inhibit a mere mage.

“What’s in effect?” I heard Henthae ask the on-watch magister in a low voice.

“Standard noise-control illusions, m’lady,” the magister replied, giving the truth to his statement by using a normal volume which carried loudly in the quiet, chilly air, with no reaction from the prisoner, “and as far as he’s concerned there’s a wall about three feet in front of his face.”

Belexor’s head didn’t lift at our entrance, though his eyes were uncovered and his ears free to hear the door and our footsteps. Henthae advanced as me, Em and Ciraya stayed back, halfway to the doorway, exchanging glances to no avail. The women looked as mystified as I was, and they were magisters.

Strange.

But the weirdest bit was to just stand here, knowing you could probably get away with screaming a blood-curdling cry and having a sword-fight about five feet from the bound druid without him being any the wiser.

“How long until the illusion ends?”

“If I cease maintaining it, seven minutes,” the magister said, then frowned, “but you can –“

“Leave us.”

“Yes Mistress Henthae.” His protests stopped, just like that, and he bowed his head in respect before leaving the room, closing the door firmly behind himself.

They all did know her; it sounded like a mad supposition but something just told me it was true. How strange. The head of ‘Operations and Special Investigations’, who was famous enough amongst her own to be instantly recognisable, had personally written the bank-letter for me? She certainly had a lot on her plate, but it didn’t seem to have fazed her – someone like her could’ve retired ten years ago if she’d wanted, I was sure. No, she was the type who thrived on being at the centre of the web, touching the lives of others, manipulating them for her own ends. She’d do this till the day she died.

“Vhat are ve going to do to him?” Em asked, a slight tremor in her voice.

“Not we, dear,” Henthae replied, “just me. You should stay here and watch. Try to understand.”

I’d thought myself smart – I thought she was going to go out of the door near us, then re-enter the room through the door just behind him, where he would hear her – surely that was the whole point of the elongated room, the two-door setup… But Mistress Henthae began walking across the room towards him, as if to walk past him.

“But…” I started to protest – as far as Belexor was concerned, she was about to walk out of a wall in front of him… Wouldn’t that mess with the illusion? I had no idea – but I had no chance to say anything.

Em took my hand, and I fell silent, watching as Henthae raised a single hand in front of her face, then made a gentle slashing motion down at her feet using the edge of her palm.

She was invisible. It happened instantly, no rippling effect, nothing. She was gone, rose-coloured robes and all.

And here I was, thinking I was just being overly-paranoid…

“So she is an arch-enchanter,” Zel replied in a musing tone. “Her and Em, both arch-magisters.”

Enchanters were probably the worst kind of archmage to have as an enemy. A foe you could never see coming, a foe who could make you see whatever they wished…

“That might put a seriously-strange spin on things. I haven’t noticed her intruding – have you?”

I – no – nothing, I think? I mean, could she do that?

“I already expressed my doubts, didn’t I, before we came here? It pays to remember you’re fallible. You have to keep an open mind if you’re suspecting yourself of mind-control.”

Keep an ‘open mind’?

“Oh, you know what I mean! I’ll work on cracking her seals. There’s always a way in. I’m more worried about illusions. I can’t exactly just pop out to check with my own eyes right now.”

I could hear Belexor panting. The breath was heaving out of him in uncontrolled gasps, and I could hear the wet sounds his throat was making, the sniffling of his nose, and finally he began to sob –

“No, no,” he moaned softly, trying to reach up with a hand to ward off something only he could see – but it was chained to his ankle so that he simply flopped awkwardly to one side.

I knew I was supposed to feel some kind of rightness to this, some sense of justice and of vengeance fulfilled – yet there was none of that. He sounded like he was breaking. What was Henthae doing to his mind?

“Mother? Father!”

Belexor’s squeals were so abrupt and loud that I involuntarily jumped a little, and through our joined hands I felt Em jolt too.

“I, I haven’t told them anything, Father!” Belexor’s pleading was pained, the sheer, panicked desperation making his voice almost vibrate as he begged the empty air. “If I –“

His breath catching raggedly in his throat, he cringed back as if expecting a blow.

The dark druid was being interrupted and threatened by a non-existent father.

“No, Kas. Don’t.”

I could stop it.

“No, it’s much more serious than that. I wasn’t paranoid enough. I’m sorry.”

If this is about her being an archmage, just stop. You can’t blame yourself. We can blame her, though. This is wrong. This is unworthy of us.

“I – I know Jargrin – I didn’t – please, you’ve got to believe me, I had no idea they were there!” This came out as a scream, a literal full-lunged scream. “No – no! Of course I didn’t speak to them – what?” Belexor was shaking his head fervently, and I worried he could break his neck. “The st-stupid champion. No, I – I was going to fix it…”

“It’s not about her being an archmage. I don’t even know if I should tell you. You might give it away.”

Give what away? Zel, aren’t you listening? He didn’t tell Soulbiter and Screamsong about me!

“The hand you’re holding…”

… I had Em’s right hand in my left, fingers linked…

What?

“It’s not real.”

I tried not to freeze, but it took me seconds to process what she’d said.

“… I just wanted – I just, I wanted to sh-show off-f-f-fff…”

While the young magister wept on the stool in front of me, I tried again. To process. What she’d said.

I was –

Alone –

In Magicrux Altra –

I was standing in one of the most heavily-guarded places in Mund, in the world, at the mercy of an arch-enchanter who had seen fit to divest me of any potential allies, and provide me with perfect-to-the-touch copies.

To reassure me. To lure me deeper. To keep me unsuspecting until at the last possible moment.