The sun set as I climbed the mountain. When I set out its top edge still peeked above the horizon, but by the time I made it to up a handful of terraces, it was nothing but a purple bruise over the swamp.
The light on the mountainside changed from a strange golden orange to deep shadow within a few minutes. The grass and bushes turned into tangled silhouettes, and the tower looming above the academy became a black monolith against the sky.
The academy was quieter than usual. There were a few other students around going from building to building, but it was mid-week, most of them would working on their assignments. My own assignment this week was to create a tower of stones, kept upright with balance alone. It was typically nonsensical, assigned by a Master Melodius.
I had a theory that it had something to do with the acquisition of an unknown aspect, but the assignment hadn’t actually said that. I was planning on meditating on the experience after I’d built it.
Over the weeks I’d started to gain a faint appreciation for the assignments. For all that they were dangerous and often made no sense, they just as often hid a lesson or concealed an advantage. My first assignment, collecting ginsberry tree leaves, had taught me to recognize spirit-possessed plants, how dangerous they could be, and how to tap them for useful resources. I’d almost died, but that had been a lesson too. Some tasks were obviously chores for the benefit of the academy, but many had a secret reward that extra effort could uncover.
That as much as anything convinced me Jason’s poem was a set of directions. It would have been easy for him to scribble off a literal translation and hand it in, but there seemed to be more beneath the surface.
On the tower’s terrace I passed by a group of visiting officials, men and women with shaved heads and formal robes of layered heavy fabric with tripeak badges pinned to the collars. They formed a procession, moving from a row of wooden carriages towards the tower, escorted by road-weary soldiers and a young Reeve armored in steel and leather. This Reeve carried a feather blade on his back, sheathed in black wood and held in place with a leather strap. I didn’t often see real, working Reeves on the mountain. Their presence was usually limited to the academy Masters. This one’s maja was almost overwhelming, up close, a feeling of cold pressure that made me have to remind myself I was still outside under the open sky.
I kept my distance as I walked past, trying to avoid their attention. Some of the soldiers glanced over, but the officials only cared about the tower, and the Reeve didn’t look like he cared about anything.
On the highest terrace…
The academy’s highest terrace was above the tower, above all the buildings, empty except the upper extent of the wall. Adrian had lived in the small woods out here for a while, and we’d occasionally come up here to find plant samples that grew wild between the trees.
I couldn’t immediately see anything that matched the poem.
Where stone walls meet…
The outer wall up here was made of several parts, so I thought the poem might mean where two of the straight sections met. I could see one of those points from the ramp up from the lower terrace, but the rest were hidden behind trees. I’d have to walk the wall.
I headed for the join I could see clearly to start with. I looked around at the dark trees as I passed the woods. Not many people came up here. The wall seemed to have enclosed it just to capture the land for future development, but it had never been built on. There were the trees and some useful plants, but the only real reason to come up here was to get some peace from the other students.
I stopped at the first point. The two sections of wall came together cleanly, the stones interlocking. There was nothing unusual. There was a bird nest further up the wall, a ball of mud and sticks clinging to the stone that was giving off a regular screaming sound as the baby bird inside cried for food, but there was no spring of any kind and no sense or smell of maja.
I continued walking along the wall.
Further along, part of the mountain rose up just on the other side, creating an overhang of jagged rocks so steep it looked like it was going to fall over. At the second point where two straight walls met, the overhang on the cliff was so extreme it looked like it would stop rain. No spring. It was the same story at the third intersection point. A massive thorn bush had grown around the corner in the wall, but after ten minutes of searching through it I concluded there was nothing special there either. The smell of bare earth drew me to a hole where someone had tried burrowing out under the wall. It went down three feet before the digger had given up, only finding more wall all the way down.
About forty feet past the third corner, I realized I’d got the translation completely wrong.
Here, part of the mountain had collapsed. A rock slide had come down, breaking the wall and flooding into the academy. It had toppled a tree, tearing up massive clods of earth, and revealing a narrow fissure in the rock.
The crack was jagged, narrow, about five feet long and three inches wide, with a completely lightless interior.
Where a rock thing meets rock thing.
I should have known that sounded wrong. It should have been Where rock meets stone. It was a kind of Old Irisian pun.
I was suddenly glad I’d checked after all. The Master who assigned it might have failed a purely literal translation, if they were particularly pedantic. I could imagine the person who came up with this assignment being pedantic.
I took a few steps closer to the fissure. I could already feel air blowing out from it, hot and acidic. I wasn’t sure how the airflow was possible. Maybe there was a channel in the rock that caught the wind from somewhere else and brought it underground. It wasn’t just wind, either. With the air came maja.
It tingled in my eyes, nose, and throat, a smell like bile or spirit vinegar. It made me think of doing the accounts at the dyer’s hut in Kirkswill. I’d always left with a sore throat and burning nostrils.
The maja here was stronger than in the air around Wild Century had been. It was even stronger than the maja my spirit siphon had torn from the small spider.
I stepped closer and knelt in front of the fissure.
Up close, I could feel patterns in the air moving through the opening. It blew out for several seconds, then paused, then reversed, with wind flowing back in. Then the cycle would repeat.
I held up my hand as close to it as I dared. The hairs on the back of my arm blew back as maja-rich air flowed out of the gap, then twitched forward as outside air rushed back in. There must have been some kind of subterranean cave network, with different chambers creating an alternating pattern of pressure.
I reached down, putting my hand into it. I felt around, trying to get a feeling for how deep it was. Just below the opening on the surface, the fissure widened out, and it felt like that continued as it went deeper. The landslide that had uncovered it had plugged the gap in the wall with rocks and scree, but this felt it might connect to a cave system. I wondered if Sal would consider it a viable way out, if she could break it open.
If the poem was to believed, the fissure was called a maja spring, and that a lucky one may drink. I guessed that meant I was the lucky one in this situation.
I pulled my arm out and sat back on my knees. Closing my eyes, I felt for my spiritual senses.
With the mundane world sliding into the background, the maja from the fissure felt much more significant. I felt like I was at the center of a cloud of buzzing insects, every one of them landing on my skin and stinging, before flying away. It was like the shock from the Storm’s Gate, spread across my entire body. It was sharp, painful, and hard to accumulate under.
I took a breath, bringing the strange acidic maja into myself. My core swelled, halfway to full. With my next exhalation, most of that maja left. But not all of it. I took another deep breath. Again my core swelled, weeks’ worth of accumulation coming in, and then in the next breath going out, but not all of it. With every breath I managed to hold on to a small amount, and given the volume of maja even a small fraction was a lot for me. It was probably the most productive accumulation I’d ever done.
With my focus on the maja coming from the fissure, I didn’t notice the other students approaching until they were on top of me.
I took my attention off my energy just for a second, and suddenly realized there were three human maja signatures close by, surrounding me on three sides.
I opened my eyes and jumped to my feet.
Three other students were standing around me. They wore darker robes than mine. One boy was armed with a club, with another boy and a girl with bare hands. They all had black hair and tanned skin, giving them the look of native Antorxians. None of them looked older than fifteen.
The girl stood in front of me, her straight hair stretched back in a bun with a peacock’s tail of needles fanning around it. The two boys were to my side and behind me, too far away to touch but close enough that they could get to me in half a second if they wanted.
“Have you seen this glutton, Duran?” the girl asked.
My stomach turned to lead at her voice. This was what I’d been worried about since I came here. Being cornered by more advanced students. I thought I’d been safe up here. The upper terrace was so remote, practically deserted. But like all safety that had been an illusion.
The boy she’d called Duran took a step closer to her and looked me in the face.
“Eating like a rat who found the pork barrel.”
The girl smiled and cocked her head. The motion reminded me more of a magpie looking at a worm than any movement a human might make.
“They say a child starved is a glutton raised. Do they starve their children in the provinces?”
“They do, of magic,” I said. As I spoke I was shocked at how level my voice sounded. “You realize Antorx doesn’t allow mages to practice magic in the nations?”
“No,” the girl agreed. “They bring you here, to dance for our amusement.”
Her maja surged, a hot, sharp stinging sensation, like the afterglow of a birch cane on skin. At the same time there was movement behind me. Hands appeared at the edge of my vision. A rope passed over my face, then snapped tight around my throat. A noose.
I grabbed at the noose to try and take it off, but I couldn’t get my fingers under it.
It twisted, closing around my throat like a pair of hands, the rope fibers as sharp as knives against my skin. The weight on my feet slackened as I was lifted into the air. The lack of air hit me quickly. My head pounded and needles started to prick at my fingers and toes.
I scratched at the rope, trying to breathe. It continued to lift me, three feet off the ground, then five, then ten until I was looking across at the top of the wall. I kicked the air. Useless. Below me, the girl bent over laughing.
I grabbed my sword and reached up to try and find the knot so I could cut it. I ran my hand up and down the rope, searching.
Nothing. The rope was somehow, impossibly, all one piece. I raised my sword to cut at it, but the edge of the blade couldn’t get a bite. The lack of air was turning my arms to lead, and after a few seconds my sword dropped out of my hand.
I forced myself to think. I hadn’t tried maja. Could I shake the rope loose from whatever was supporting it? What was it even hanging from? None of the trees were this tall. I closed my eyes and tried feeling for the maja signatures of the three students below me. I couldn’t sense them. I could see them, but I couldn’t sense any maja at all.
After a few seconds I lowered my arms, relaxed, and took a deep breath. This time the air came, fresh, cool in my lungs, and so welcome the acid fumes from the vent tasted like perfume.
I down at the ground, at the girl, then threw up my arm and launched a blast of Force at the blank wall in front of me.
The dream shattered. I was back on the ground. My neck was free with none of the illusory pressure.
The black-haired girl was slumped against the rock slide in front of me. There were scratches on her cheek and forehead where Force-tossed stones had scraped her. She took a staggering step forward and left a red stain behind her on the rock.
“I know a tree who does that better,” I told them. “It remembered nooses are meant to have knots, at least.”
One of the boys’ maja moved behind me. There was a sound like a hammer striking wood and pain stabbed out from a spot on my head. I covered my head with my hand on instinct and spun around.
This one hadn’t been a magical attack at all, just a club across the skull.
I dropped my hand to the boy’s chest and pushed with another blast of Force, sending him flying backwards. He crashed into the undergrowth ten feet away and didn’t get up.
To my left Duran’s maja surged. His power felt like the dryness of paper magnified to a painful, skin-splitting degree.
I pointed at him and pushed out another flood of Force.
As my spell surged through my fingers, something caught me and spun me, turning me so that my attack flew off into the woods. My Force maja wasted itself on branches and bark while I continued to spin, toppling onto the ground. I kept rolling after I fell, hitting rocks and roots. Somewhere in the chaos I realized this was the Wheel aspect.
I thought back to the spinning of the Phinion in Master Cordaze’s lesson. My maja took the memory easily and I managed to catch myself. It took a steady stream of maja to contest the boy’s attempts at spinning me, but I was stable.
I put my hands to the ground and pushed myself to my feet. Duran was standing with his hand outstretched.
When he realized Wheel wasn’t working he changed tactics. His maja stilled, he pointed his arm straight at me, and his maja pulsed again.
I could practically feel the wave of Force leaving him. I dropped to the ground and grabbed the roots of a tree as Force tore over my head, snatching at my hair and robe.
I lifted my hand into the onslaught and retaliated with more maja than I could afford. The ground under him popped in an explosion of dust and stones. He was pelted with a cloud of loose rocks and thorns and knocked onto his back.
To my right I could see the boy with the club picking himself out of a bush. To my left the black-haired girl was touching the back of her head. Her hand came away bloody. I had seconds left. I looked around and grabbed my sword from the ground.
My surprise attack from within the Dream had bought be a few seconds to fight them one on one, but that was at its end. I’d done as well as I could so far, but I couldn’t fight all three of them at once.
I got to my feet and started running.
I sprinted through the trees, dodging left and right to put tree trunks between myself and my three attackers.
I wasn’t sure they’d even try to follow me. If they were only there to use the spring, then they might not want to leave it. On the other hand they were more advanced students, and Antorxians. If I’d pricked their pride by getting away, then they’d be out for blood.
My suspicion was confirmed a second later when a tree I was running towards exploded in a shower of white splinters. A steel dagger was stuck in the trunk, lodged up to its hilt.
I ducked behind the splintered tree and looked back. The boy with the club was there. Apparently he’d thrown the dagger. The other two weren’t around.
He’d slowed down when I ducked behind the tree, wary of an attack.
He was too far to hit with Force, or even a Force-propelled stone. Wheel aspect wouldn’t do much, and I hadn’t really practiced it. My Storm’s Gate canto wouldn’t be useful with the maja I had, unless I wanted to tickle him with sparks.
I thought back to Lectuous’s riddle, instead. I pushed my thoughts onto maja and glared them out at the boy.
Thought aspect had been developed for private communication, but an undisciplined mind could sometimes interpret a thought projected from outside as one of their own. Lectuous probably hadn’t been thinking of trainee sorcerers being those undisciplined minds, but I hadn’t been impressed by this club wielder so far.
The boy took a step forward, then hesitated. He looked back in the direction of the spring, then ahead at my hiding place.
He wasn’t buying it.
I wished I could use whatever aspect the girl had used on me. Dream? Hallucination? When Wild Century had used the technique I’d thought it was a spirit trick, but if a human sorcerer could do the same thing then I wanted to learn it.
After a few seconds the boy hadn’t turned back, but he hadn’t reacted to my use of Thought aspect either. There was indecision in his expression. I tried again.
I felt like this would be more convincing if I knew anyone’s names. I threw out another thought.
The boy gave one last long look at my tree then turned and started running back towards the spring.
I stood catching my breath for a minute, not quite believing that had worked.
I knew Thought aspect was relatively obscure, but a person didn’t need to know an intrusive thought came from somewhere else to know not to follow it. The idea that I was doubling back to the spring didn’t even make any sense. I’d only come up with it because it was all I could think of in the moment.
When it was clear the boy was heading back to the spring in violation of all logic, I turned away from my tree and set off running again. I needed to get away before he realized he was being an idiot.
I made it to the edge of the wooded area. I looked around before I left the cover of the trees. There was as much cover for anyone watching for me as there was for me to hide in, so I didn’t feel particularly safe as I ran for the ramp down.
I slowed as I reached the ramp. The girl from the spring was standing at the bottom, flanked by two more male students, not the ones she’d been with before.
“Look at the expression on the his face,” she said. “He’s thinking, how did they get past me.”
The boy to her right laughed.
I stared down at them, looking from face to face. I was actually wondering why the girl didn’t have any scrapes on her cheek or forehead any more, and when she’d found the time to put her hair back into a perfectly neat bob. Had she caught me in a Dream again?
I took a breath. I tried to clear my mind, to look at the world with no expectations. When I opened my eyes again, the people at the bottom of the ramp were gone.
“Do you think he’s praying?” the girl’s voice asked, this time from behind me. “There’s no way out down here. Perhaps you should throw yourself off the ledge. You’d survive the fall, probably.”
She still thought I was trapped in her illusion.
I reached out, feeling for maja sources. There were two of them coming up behind me, the girl, with her energy like stinging heat, and Duran’s painful dryness.
I tightened my grip on my sword hilt.
“I don’t really understand why you attacked me,” I called out.
“That’s because you’re an ignorant cur,” the girl said. “You wandered into our feast and helped yourself to the table.”
“It can’t be something as petty as you trying to keep a resource to yourself, can it?” I asked.
“Petty! This is the Sovereign’s Path. Nobody is above that.”
My path wasn’t really blocked. But I still couldn’t run. The two bundles of maja weren’t far behind me and if they’d chased me through the woods, they’d chase me over the open grass of the next terrace down. I was too far away from help, or even witnesses, to turn my small head start into a chance of escape.
“I must not have learned that part of the Path yet,” I said. “It’s not to receive, but to take. Why should you receive sole access to the spring, and why shouldn’t I take it?”
Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.
I took long blinks through the exchange, tuning out my physical senses to keep track of the signatures behind me. They were on a constant, slow approach, confident that I’d bought in to the dream.
The girl laughed. “Take it then, if you can. Of course, you’re only an Initiate, and you face two Potentiates.”
“What’s the difference?” I asked.
The girl was sounding increasingly bored. “Just a know-nothing cur after all.”
The maja signatures behind me were close, now, just a few feet away. I reflected that putting someone into an illusion cut both ways. If it failed, then it was the caster who labored under an illusion.
I spun, swinging my sword in a wide arc.
As I turned, I got a glimpse of my attackers. Duran was holding out his hands toward me, readying a spell. The point of my sword slashed across his palms, leaving cuts that didn’t start bleeding until I’d finished spinning. The girl dodged back from the blade, avoiding being hit. She stared at me with complete contempt.
“Sacrasmodi, grant me a weapon,” the girl muttered.
She held out her hand and a white light played across it. The dying sunlight seemed to shift, and she was suddenly holding a spear of white wood tipped with silvery metal. The weapon was slightly translucent, like the sword of the figure I’d fought in the spirit-haunted inn.
She didn’t wait for my surprise to wear off, stepping forward and striking at me with a one-handed thrust. Pain flared in my heart, followed by ice.
I took several steps back, putting my hand to my chest. My palm came away flecked with blood. The spear was immaterial, but not completely. If it were a spirit, it would be on the cusp of achieving a solid form.
The spear came at me twice more in quick succession. I tried to parry it on instinct, but the spear went straight through my sword with only the slightest jerk when they met. At least parrying it blocked the physical part of the spirit weapon’s attack, leaving only the cold spiritual damage to hit me.
I backed away, looking between the girl and the boy I’d cut.
“Finish him, Mira,” Duran said, pressing his bleeding hands together. “This had gone beyond blood. It’s to the death, now.” His maja flared, and blood stopped dripping from his hands.
“I’m pretty sure you tried to kill me with your opening attack,” I said, still backing away.
“Only the weak die from a wound dealt under the Dream aspect, but I suppose that does include you.”
Mira took her spirit spear in both hands and thrust it at me again.
I twisted out of the way, dragging my blood-flecked hand along my sword at the same time. When she lunged again, I knocked the spear away with the flat of my blade. She didn’t show any surprise that my weapon could block hers.
I raised a hand to throw Force at her, but she jabbed with the spear before I could even pull at my maja. I got a graze of small incisions in my palm as it hit, like gravel rash.
Duran was circling around me, coming in off the sidelines now that his bleeding had stopped
I looked past him down the mountain. I found myself wishing that Adrian were here. Adrian and Sal would be the most help. The three of us probably topped our cohort in the skills the Reeves wanted us to learn. It probably wouldn’t have made a difference. These two could have beaten us one on one and collectively.
I felt Duran’s maja spike, and a blast of force hit my arm, jarring my shoulder and sending my sword flying away across the grass. A second blast hit my back and sent me to my knees. Duran’s maja spiked again, and I suddenly felt like lead weights were attached to my arms and legs. The weight of my own body dragged me down to the floor, flattening me against the grass, until it took all my strength just to draw breath.
A spot of cold appeared on the back of my neck, and a bead of wetness trickled down to the front of my throat; the tip of Mira’s spear, positioned for what might be a killing blow.
“Mira, look there,” Duran said.
“Look cur. The vultures are already circling,” Mira said.
She put her sandal in my side, tipping me over until I was facing up. Against the purple-black of the dusk sky, a ragged bird was circling. It had a fanned tail and wings tipped with splayed feathers. Its head seemed abnormally shortened. I couldn’t tell if it was a real vulture, or if it had a human skull.
I was suddenly sure this was the moment the vulture spirit had been waiting for. It’d picked me as its carrion the night I’d almost died in the swamp and it had been waiting for its meal ever since, following me, even into the academy, so that it wouldn’t miss the moment it could reduce me to meat.
I was suddenly back in the barracks during that endless night. I had the irrational fear that if I died here I’d be trapped in that moment forever.
I felt for my core, pulling out all the maja I’d accumulated since that night weeks ago. It was a pitiful amount, in comparison. I’d fed it more in the few breaths I’d taken of the spring than in all the nights of normal accumulation since then.
Before the two of them could react to my surging maja I pushed it out into my body, transmuted it into Force and released it as a directionless wave.
Whatever aspects the two of them knew, Stillness wasn’t one of them. Both of them were thrown backwards, out of my line of sight.
I sat up, rolled into all fours and staggered to my feet.
The two students had been thrown about six feet. It was all I could manage with this little maja, and it hadn’t been enough to do any damage. They were already picking themselves up.
I looked down to the next terrace. Still not an option. I turned to look back towards the spring. The trees would at least give me some cover.
Mira was already getting to her feet, her maja rippling.
There’s no point running. I’m dead either way.
The desolate thought came to me out of the blue. It was probably right, but that didn’t mean I was going to stand around waiting for a spear through the throat. I set off running away from the ramp, towards the spring.
I made it to the trees in time to avoid a blast of Force from Duran. His use of Force aspect was like mine, a strong, immediate throwing force, but like mine it spread out quickly over distances. I felt a leaden weight settle over my legs, but I ducked behind a tree, and the effect fell away as I broke Duran’s line of sight.
So far I’d seen him use Force, Wheel, and whatever that weight aspect was. Mira had only used Dream and her spirit weapon. Keeping my distance and staying behind cover seemed to protect me from all of them. I couldn’t keep that up forever though, and I doubted they’d run out of breath before I did. They had maja to refresh their endurance, and I was empty.
I ran through the woods, at one point stumbling through the remains of Adrian’s old camp. There was no advantage for me there. I knew there was a murky pool nearby, but I didn’t think it was even deep enough to hide in. I carried on through.
Navigating by the top of the wall visible over the trees, I made my way back to the spring.
The boy I’d tricked into doubling back was there, kneeling in front of the spring with his club on the ground at his side. His eyes were closed, accumulating. It looked like he’d decided to stay and take advantage of the spring while his friends were chasing me.
He didn’t hear me approaching. He would be ignoring his physical senses to better focus on accumulation. He’d be able to sense the maja around him, but I didn’t have much maja to sense right then.
I ran up to him and grabbed his club from the ground. I raised it up above my head, but even then he didn’t stir. My stomach twisted. I couldn’t force my arm to come down. I let the club drop to my side and turned away from him, stepping closer to the spring.
The maja was as thick as it’d been before. I took a deep breath, pulling in the acrid air. It filled my core completely. I tried to hold on to it, but when I let the air out of my lungs, most of the maja went with it. Only a residue remained.
The undergrowth rustled as my pursuers caught up. I felt their maja first, opening my eyes to see them stepping out of the trees. Mira and Duran came out just in front of the spring. Mira still had her spear, but she didn’t seem to be in a hurry to close with it. Either they were wary of another wave of Force, or more likely, they knew they had me trapped, with no maja, and no more surprises.
The boy who’d hit me with the club was waking up from his meditation about the same time. He looked at Mira and Duran, confused, then slowly turned to look at me a few feet behind him.
“A last drink from the spring won’t save you,” Mira said, stopping at the tree line.
I took in another lung-full of the air from the spring.
I looked down at my hand, as if I was examining my nails. The Storm’s Gate canto was still painted on my fingertip. At this point, it was the only thing I had that might make a difference.
“Seil,” Mira said, speaking to the boy who’d been quietly accumulating. “Show us that you’re not just dead weight. Put the cur down.”
The boy grabbed his club and flew to his feet.
All I had left was the Storm’s Gate. I’d only ever seen it spark, but that could have just been because I hadn’t been able to spare the maja. Now, I was sitting on top of a maja spring.
I took a deep breath, filling my core with a momentary swell of acrid energy. Before it could escape in the exhale I raised my hand, pointed it at Mira, and channeled it through the Storm’s Gate.
The tip of my finger buzzed, the hairs on my arm all stood on end, and a incandescent line of white fired from my hand.
Mira flinched and Duran dove for cover. The bolt flickered through the air for about twenty feet before changing directions to strike a nearby tree. Bark exploded, showering Mira with splinters.
The energy blinked out of existence, as fast as it’d appeared. The bark of the tree was blackened and smoking, but it had taken the attack meant for Mira.
In the aftermath, Seil ran, skidding around to the other side of the rock slide and peering at me from behind a mound of earth. Duran’s head appeared looking out from behind a tree. Mira stood completely still, pretending to be calm, but her face was tense.
The cantogram had worked. I checked my finger. The diagram itself had burned to ash, but my skin was only a little pink. It had just been a matter of power. Too little, and the bolt would just bend back and bite its source, but with enough maja behind it it’d travel far enough that it wouldn’t try to come back at me.
Not that it had really helped. It had followed its own path, the same way that lightning would strike the tallest tree. It wasn’t the right weapon when the opponent was hiding behind cover.
Duran cautiously stuck his head out from behind a tree. Mira was shaking off her surprise. Confidence reasserted itself on her face. She stepped forward, her maja rippling.
I’d only had the one Storm’s Gate prepared. I took another breath. I could use the same trick to throw Force around to keep them off me. Maybe eventually someone would pass close enough to sense I was in trouble and come to help.
The breath went out of me a second later. I don’t have a chance.
The thought rang through my mind, the inescapable conclusion thrusting itself up from my subconscious. Three against one were impossible odds.
Perhaps if I throw myself on my knees and beg for my life, they will have mercy.
I blinked at the thought. That wasn’t true. Mira seemed like a fanatic of the Sovereign’s Path. She didn’t have any mercy.
And had I ever considered begging for my life before? Not when the Reeve came to Kirkswill. Not when Wild Century was trying to kill me. Not even when I thought Master Sectus was going to leave me frozen forever.
I looked at Seil, standing a few feet away. He looked ready to attack me, but he was hesitating. I looked at Mira. The girl was smirking at me, a cruel look in her eye.
Had her maja moved just now? Thought aspect wasn’t a popular aspect, but I wasn’t the only one who knew it.
If I give them the secret of the Storm aspect, they might spare me.
I turned a glare on Mira. These weren’t my thoughts.
Seil had been so easy to influence, earlier. Easier than I expected. I wondered if it was the first time he’d been swayed by an external thought. And what about Duran? How easy would it be to manipulate someone using both Dream and Thought?
I took a breath, gathering wild maja. This time I cast it as Thought. I focused on Duran, first.
If I was wrong and Mira had brought them in to the existence of Thought aspect, then this wouldn’t be a surprise to him. But if she had, why had Seil been so easy to manipulate?
Duran twitched. His eyes widened. He shot a glance at Mira, then looked back to me.
He shifted position. He was listening, but his expression was flat. Even if he believed me, it wasn’t enough for him to turn on her.
He set his jaw. I saw his throat bob as he swallowed.
He was glaring at me.
“Mira…” he started.
I took a step to the side.
“Seil,” Mira snapped. “Finish him.”
“I’m not getting close to that,” Seil said.
“Look at his fingers. They’re burned. He can’t use it reliably. He’s as likely to destroy himself as anyone else.”
I felt Mira’s maja stir in the pattern I recognized as her using Thought, a fluttering like fingertips on raw skin, almost too low to notice. Thought didn’t need much maja, compared to Force, or anything else.
Seil took a step out from behind the pile of dirt. So far I hadn’t seem him use any aspects at all. Maybe he was closer to Adrian, skilled, but not with external maja.
I took a deep breath, filled my core, and held out my hand towards him. He ducked back behind the rocks.
“Mira,” Duran repeated. “Have you been manipulating us?”
She slowly turned to look at him.
Seil was still cowering. Duran had seen something in Mira’s expression and was starting to get annoyed. Mira was distracted. I took two steps to the right. When nobody moved to stop me, I took three more then started fast-walking away, heading for the tree line at an angle that would keep me out of Mira’s line of sight.
“Manipulating you? Don’t flatter yourself,” Mira was saying behind me. In a different tone of voice, she followed it with, “Sacrasmodi, my allies are failing me, pursue the initiate and maim him.”
A spirit formed out of nowhere next to her; a tattered knight, dressed in rags with a slitted helmet that seemed to reflect bright sunlight even in the dusk. He carried an impractical array of weapons in a bundle on his back: swords, spears, a halberd, a crossbow. Translucent and likely intangible, he must have been the source of the spear Mira was holding.
I set off running.
“Mira, I literally just thought ‘I’m being a fool’. Now I’m wondering if I’m actually being the opposite,” Duran was saying, in an increasingly loud voice.
The spirit knight, Sacrasmodi was chasing me, moving in a series of disjointed flickers. He was gaining on me, but I felt only relief. I could deal with spirits. If the three more advanced students were distracted I finally had a chance to get away.
I made it to the trees and kept running, jumping over roots and dodging dips in the ground.
Sacrasmodi flickered in front of me. He was holding an enormous greatsword, swinging it for my ankles.
I jumped over it, landing and almost falling on the far side. The spirit turned and flickered, appearing in front of me again. This time he was holding a flail.
The immaterial chain curled through the air and caught around my throat. I felt a snag on my momentum and a burst of cold that ran up and down my spine. My entire body went numb for a second. I stumbled and fell.
I let myself roll when I hit the ground, turning onto my hands and knees, then throwing myself back to my feet.
I felt like I really ought to stop and fight him, but I didn’t want to give Mira the time to reassert her control over the group. I didn’t have such a high opinion of my political skills that I thought I’d wedged an immovable barrier between them.
Sacrasmodi appeared again, thrusting a short sword at my gut.
Once again, I found myself fighting with barely any maja and without my sword. Instead of dodging I threw myself at the spirit. We collided mid-air. The spirit was thrown backwards and away as if it were made of soap bubbles. I landed in the undergrowth, rolling until I was on my side, something in my pouch jabbing into my hip.
I flipped onto my back, suddenly, irrationally worried that I’d broken one of my few possessions. I felt at my pouch. The object digging into me was a small engraved metal disk; my spirit siphon. I tugged at the string of my pouch and pulled it out.
Sacrasmodi appeared above me, lifting a spear above its head as it prepared to bring the point down on my chest.
I reached out and placed the spirit siphon on the ground beneath it.
The spirit froze. A second later it started shaking, vibrating like a shadow cast by a campfire. It took a few moments to start wailing.
I took a breath, smelling oiled steel and mildew rolling off it. I tried to ignore the noise it was making. I was sure Mira wouldn’t be far behind when she heard it, if only to preserve the spirit as a resource.
I got to my feet and resumed running. I made it down the ramp then across the open ground of the next plateau. I kept looking back up at the ledge, expecting to see Mira appearing on it any second. Even as I ran down the next ramp, I was still worried Duran’s weight magic would catch me and pull me to the ground. I didn’t fully believe I’d gotten away until I reached the tower terraces.
I slowed, panting, as the academy tower came into view.
The officials’ carriages were still there. The visiting soldiers still stood around. They watched me warily as I passed.
I doubted they’d interfere in a fight between students, even if that fight was going to end in serious injury or death, but there were other students around as well, and if Mira and her followers attacked me here it wouldn’t be as clean and predictable as them ganging up on me on an isolated terrace.
I let myself slow to a walk. I got control of my racing heart. I reached the library, and the sight of it comforted me. I stopped there to really catch my breath.
I looked up at the next terrace. There was no sign of Mira or the others. In the sky above the mountain, a speck of darkness caught my attention. It might just have been a hawk, or one of the other native birds. I couldn’t tell.
As I started getting close to the barracks, I let myself drift away from my senses and felt Adrian and Sal’s maja inside. That alone was a relief. I might never leave the barracks without them again.
Jason was there as well, I noticed with distaste. This whole thing had been because I’d been double-checking his translation for him. I should have just given him the literal version. I wouldn’t have found out about the maja spring, but I wouldn’t have had a near-death experience either. It’d been stupid of me to think that such a valuable resource inside the academy would have gone unnoticed. It really would be a lucky one who managed to accumulate from that. The entire terrace would probably be a battleground as soon as more students found out about it.
When I got inside the common room was lit with one of Terese’s pine torches. Adrian was holding court with Tom, Terese, and Alexa. Jason was reading a book on the other side of the room. Where had he got a book?
I went back to my cell just long enough to write the translation below the poem on Jason’s scroll. I found him in the common room afterwards and tossed it into his lap.
“Your translation,” I said.
He picked it up, glanced at it, then set it back down. “Thank you.”
“It turned out to be a set of directions,” I said.
He looked up at me, his eyebrows raised. “Oh, did it? To what?”
“A maja spring on the upper terrace.”
“Oh. How interesting. I didn’t even know that maja could form springs.”
He hadn’t moved or even closed his book.
“Apparently they can,” I said. “I can’t recommend visiting it though, it’s been camped out by other students.”
Jason frowned, letting his gaze fall. “Oh. Well, I didn’t even know about it before this moment, so it doesn’t feel like a great loss.”
I took a deep breath. His lack of curiosity grated, and seemed forced, but I’d never really understood him.
I turned and headed to where Adrian was sitting. He was telling a story to the others about a wandering minstrel the abbot had once caught dallying in a monk’s room. It was almost certainly made up. I sat down against a wall at the edge of the group, listening from a distance.
As I looked around at them, I realized I’d made a mistake. Mira had kept the Thought aspect from her followers so she could manipulate them, and she’d made them easy to manipulate as a result, not to mention the risk of that fact being revealed at an inopportune moment.
I’d told the others about the Thought aspect in the Sixth Day group, but I hadn’t subjected any of them to it. I had the power to train them to resist that kind of manipulation. Once I regained some maja, I needed to use it.