“Did you have any magical epiphanies in the night?” Gail asked me the next morning.
I was washing in a shallow pool, crouched on my heels and splashing my face and hair with clean-looking water. I turned wiping stray drops out of my eyes.
Gail looked like she’d slept in a real bed and spent an hour in the washhouse, despite just having rolled out of a tree. She was carrying her robe over her shoulder again, part of the fabric wound up to shade her face.
“The opposite,” I said. “I’ve been pushed to the ground with Weight aspect before, but it still isn’t working for me.”
She turned away from me, stretching. “Not everyone has an affinity for every aspect. Or sometimes it takes time. You may need to meditate on the experience to understand what was happening.”
She dropped her arms and walked past me, stopping twenty feet away where the stretch of land gave way to the next band of water. She took a deep breath, closing her eyes.
“Do you think we’ve passed them already?” I asked.
She kept her eyes closed for a few more seconds.
“No. They’re further ahead than we thought. They must have found a way to cross the water.”
“How can you tell?”
“I can feel them.”
I stared at her for a second, then closed my eyes and felt for my spiritual senses. Gail was there, a bundle of porcupine quills and steel needles, and I could feel the cold underground lake of my own maja, but those were the only human sources I could pick up.
“Are they that close?” I asked.
“No. But they’re making ripples in the Fold. If you feel for it, you can sense more turbulence ahead of us than behind.”
I changed my focus, turning away from my spiritual senses and reaching for the Fold. There was a time when it took long minutes of meditation to reach this state. Now it was almost second nature.
I found the Fold to be the same as always, perpetually swelling and crashing, a plane of terrifying, enormous motion. I tried to pick out the subtlety she’d mentioned, but I couldn’t. Every direction felt about the same.
“I can’t feel it,” I said.
I heard Gail’s footsteps as she resumed walking. Opening my eyes, I followed.
As we walked, I realized I’d been wrong about the runaways’ chances. Their head start wasn’t as big as I’d thought. Tracking them wouldn’t be as impossible as I’d thought. Having seen what event student sorcerers were capable of, it was entirely possible that we’d catch up with them.
“Do you know a faster way across the water?” I asked.
“Weightless aspect would let us walk across it,” she said, “but I don’t think either of us are that advanced. Unless you have a boat in your pocket, we will be wading.”
I took a deep breath and let it out too softly to be a sigh. My body felt like lead at the prospect of more wading. But at least it would be slow. It wasn’t likely to catch us up.
I stopped at my tree and made sure my possessions were all wrapped in their waxed cloth. My notes were still dry, though water wasn’t as dangerous to the notes I’d taken in pencil as it would be for ink. The hairy seed from the screamer spirit sat in the bundle like a poisonous fruit.
I was lucky I’d eaten before Gail had woken up because she didn’t seem interested in stopping for breakfast. There was a constant background sensation of her maja, now, the prickling-straw feeling filling her as she drew on it for strength.
She was already knee-deep in the next track of water by the time I was done with my things.
I slogged after her, wincing as the water sloshed over my pants legs. My feet were probably going to be rotting by the end of this.
How many sorcerer graduates had suffered this same discomfort? Did every sorcerer, Reeve, and Master have the same memories of wading through the swamp on futile assignments, all developing the same aversion to stagnant water? Why was the academy even built here? There had to be better locations.
Dark shapes moved in the murky water a little way away from me. I caught glimpses of misshapen heads like balls of melted wax, and muddy sticks that were meant to be arms. The screamers were still with us, and still allowing us to pass.
I still wasn’t seeing any other spirits. It was as if the entity behind the screamers was as hostile to other spirit life as it seemed to be to mortals. Having agreed to carry the seed to a new area, we were having an easier time passing through than if they hadn’t been there at all. As long as it didn’t get impatient or start to doubt our word, we’d probably be safe to the end of its territory.
The heat started building before the sun was even fully above the treeline. By noon I was dreading the water crossings as much because leaving the cover of the trees exposed us to the sun as I was the wading.
I could see why Gail first thought the runaways would be following the land path. It was insane not to. And yet somehow they’d found a way to cross the water, bypassing the screamers.
A little after we stopped to rest, we got a clue as to how.
Gail was sitting on a fallen log, not seeming to need the rest but taking it anyway. I hadn’t seen her eat since we set off, and she’d only drunk sparingly from a small metal bottle she kept hidden in her clothes.
I was already halfway through my stashed oat cakes. I’d misjudged how much I’d need to eat while traveling again, and I’d already finished the water in my gourd.
I’d was gathering sticks to boil some more water when I found the dock.
It was almost completely ruined. Two jagged pillars rose out of the earth like broken teeth, tar-black and covered in mushrooms. Six more jutted out of the water, covered in freshwater shellfish and overgrown with green slime. The crossbars and planks were all gone, but it was still clearly recognizable. I wouldn’t have thought it’d seen use in decades, but tied to one of the far posts I could see the remains of a rope. The loose end trailed into the water, cleanly cut with a knife. Compared to the dock, the rope looked new.
Could there have been a boat tied here? It would have needed to be a lot newer than the dock, but it would explain how the runaways were still ahead of us. This had to be where they’d started crossing the water. This was where they’d started making up the time they lost following the land trail, either yesterday, or the day before. But why had there been a boat here?
I turned away from the dock to look back at where Gail was sitting.
Knowing they were using a boat changed things. They’d be slower than us crossing the land bars, assuming they were carrying the boat with them, but they’d more than make that time up on the water.
The wouldn’t even need to follow the most direct route out of the swamp. They could just follow the seemingly endless delta as it gathered into larger pools, then cross those to where someone on foot would have a hard time getting. Their trail would be gone, and once they reached a solid stretch of land they could abandon the boat to run. At that point, nobody would be able to catch up with them.
It felt like this was the moment that we’d lost them.
I went back to where Gail was sitting, keen to tell her of our failure.
“They’ve escaped on a boat,” I said.
She turned to look at me.
“They found a boat here, tied to a ruined dock. That’s how they’re crossing the water. I don’t think we have any chance of catching them, now.”
She cursed under her breath and jumped up. She ran past me to the water, double checking my story, then stood still as she closed her eyes, breathing deeply, reading the Fold.
I did the same, but all I could sense was the sharp prickling of Gail’s maja, and the background smells of the swamp.
When she opened her eyes, her eyebrows were furrowed.
“They’ve changed direction. They’re heading for the central south lakes.” She looked off in the distance, more to the left than ahead, as if she could look through the packed trees to see them paddling across the lakes even now. After a minute of thought, she asked, “How far can you run without stopping?”
I found myself suppressing a sigh. She wasn’t giving up. She should. We had every excuse to, now. We’d fail our assignment, but we could go home. We could be back at the academy by dusk tomorrow if we rushed, clean, refreshed, with beds to sleep in, and the runaways would be free — at least until they were killed by something in the swamp, or starved, or were recaptured by the military.
“How far?” she repeated at my hesitation.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Not very long. A few minutes.”
I was being generous to myself. Back home in Kirkswill, I’d have been out of breath after a thirty second sprint.
“Let’s go. Tell me when you’re tiring.”
She set off running without warning, disappearing through the trees heading parallel to the water.
I glanced down at my pile of sticks. I hadn’t been able to make my tea. I knew that if I went on now, I’d be drinking the unfiltered water I’d collected from a pool before ten minutes were up.
I made sure my pack was secure enough not to bounce and set off running after her.
By following the water instead of heading straight out of the swamp, the runaways had given us a land route to follow them along what became the joined-up banks of small lakes, then larger lakes. Eventually we’d reach a point where we couldn’t follow them by wading or running, but until then we’d be catching up on them.
We ran for twenty-five minutes before my lungs started burning. I started gradually falling behind. Maja made a little difference. It eased pains and pushed aches aside, and it gave me the strength to push through my first bout of breathlessness. But it was only maja, and my muscles needed air.
Eventually I staggered to a stop, leaning against a tree.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
Ahead of me, Gail’s footfalls slowed and she retraced her steps. She appeared around the edge of my tree, staring at me.
“How are you using maja?” she asked. “What’s your technique?”
She wasn’t breathless at all.
“I’m filling my body with it,” I said.
“No. Stop,” she said. “You’re increasing your vitality, but you’re increasing your needs along with it. Pull the maja back to here and here. Your lungs and your heart.”
I processed the instruction quickly and tried to reign my maja in. Pulling it back from my limbs made them feel suddenly weak, but I forced myself to concentrate the maja in my chest.
“Put a hand to your chest to locate your heart. Breathe deeply to feel the extent of your lungs.”
I was already practically gasping, so I had a good conceptualization of my lungs, but I followed her instructions and put my hand to my heart. Using the thudding as a signpost, I wove maja into place. After a minute of practice I thought I was getting the hang of it. The deep coolness of my maja settled into my upper chest like I’d just taken a long cold drink of water.
My breathing steadied out quickly after that, though my heart still felt like it was racing.
“Do you have it?” she asked.
“I think so,” I said.
“If you’d used that full-body technique too much, you probably would have ended up starving yourself,” she said as she turned around.
“Right. Thanks,” I said curtly.
She set off running again, and this time I found myself able to keep up.
Every breath was refreshing, and my heart pounded fiercely but without effort. After a while I started feeling lightheaded. I felt like I was floating over the ground as much as running.
Gail called a halt an hour later. I staggered to a stop behind her, breathing deeply but not desperately.
“Don’t retract your maja straight away. You’ll probably have a heart attack,” was the first thing she said.
I nodded.
She turned to face the direction we’d been running and repeated the process of sensing for our prey.
“They’re farther south, now.”
She turned to look to our right. The trees in that direction were denser, but I could just see a place where the undergrowth turned into tall reeds, marking the water’s edge.
“It looks like they got away,” I said, but I knew better than to think she’d accept that.
“You’re a sorcerer,” she said, turning slowly towards me. “How would you catch them?”
“I’d let them go,” I answered.
“That’s not the answer of someone walking the Sovereign’s Path.”
“Who said I am walking it?”
“Then it’s not the answer of someone who’ll survive their first year. You’re a sorcerer now, whether you’ve graduated or not. How would you catch them?”
I didn’t want to answer, but at the same time I couldn’t stop my mind from picking at the puzzle. I came at it from the other direction. If I were running, what would I be worried about my pursuers doing? I’d have a boat, and a seemingly insurmountable lead, across terrain that my pursuers had no easy way to cross.
I’d seen large flying spirits coming and going on errands for the academy Masters. I’d be worried about my pursuers summoning one of those to chase us down. Now that I knew a sorcerer with the right technique could run without fatigue, or at least with vastly reduced fatigue, I’d be worried about them swimming through the water faster than I could row. Maybe they would have access to spirits who could carry them through the water, or maybe they could fly, or maybe they could just step through the Fold like I’d seen Master Cordaze do.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I can’t fly, or summon powerful spirits, or walk on water. I can’t even feel them from here.”
“You have lots to work on,” she said concluded, turning away.
She looked around, before her gaze settled on a large straight tree to our right, leaning over the water.
“Help me fell this tree.”
“What?”
She set off through the dense forest towards the water’s edge. I sighed, grit my teeth, and followed her.
The trees were packed so close together we had to partially climb up some of them to get over the jutting trunks of its neighbors, squeezing through tight gaps in some places and wading through thorny bushes in others, all of it under the punishing mid-afternoon heat.
It took a few minutes to reach the leaning tree, where Gail pushed me to one side of it, heading to the other.
“Force aspect. You push, I’ll pull.”
She went to the other side and I immediately felt her maja swell. She reached out and grabbed the air, yanking at it like she was trying to win a tug of war with the forest itself. Energy surged then washed out of her, vanishing from my senses as it she aligned it with the aspect. The tree groaned.
“Push!” she said. “Push, or I’ll throw you into the lake and use your bloated corpse as a boat.”
If I’d had a few seconds I might have thought better, but in the moment, her face and her voice convinced me she was serious. I called on my own maja and threw up my hands, throwing out a stream of Force at the same moment that Gail pulled.
Our coordination had more to do with her timing than mine, but our combined effort made the tree bend. The trunk gave off a deep, dangerous groaning sound.
“One more,” she said.
I called on my maja again. There was a creaking like the timbers of a house in a storm, stretching out, then suddenly the trunk snapped. A noise louder than a whip crack echoed out through the forest and the tree began to tip towards the water.
It seemed to fall slowly. Gail stepped casually out of its way as it crashed through the branches of its neighbors. The broken base swung upwards as the top end levered its way to the ground, and I barely staggered back in time to avoid a splintering spike of wood to the chin.
It hit the ground so hard I felt the vibration through my feet. Birds nearby I hadn’t even noticed took to the sky in a screaming cloud, and water from the lake splashed up, dusting the leaves of the other lakefront trees with stagnant rain.
“Do you know the Blade aspect?” Gail asked.
“No,” I said, staring at the downed tree.
Had we just done that? I hadn’t even used an appreciable fraction of my reserves.
She turned away with a tutting sound, and fire leaped to her hands. In lieu of cutting, Gail burned. It took twenty minutes for her to sear through the upper and lower parts of the trunk, blackening the wet living wood of the felled tree until it gave way in thin, precise lines of ash. In twenty one minutes we’d done the work of a team of lumberers, felling a tree and cutting it into a tidy log twenty feet long.
“Now Wheel,” she shouted, agitated either from the work or my attitude. “Spin it, end over end, into the water.”
She took up a position next to me, holding out her hands. Her maja surged, familiar now, and I recognized the hand gestures she was using as the ones Master Cordaze had used to demonstrate Wheel aspect on the massive spinning globe of the phinion wheel.
I mimicked her, following her gestures, calling on my maja and casting it into the mold of that memory. A spinning sphere, disastrously heavy, unstoppable, ready to roll over everything.
I focused on the far end of the trunk. The trunk was suddenly the axle of the a wheel that rolling towards the lake.
I wouldn’t have been able to do it alone, but neither would Gail. Between us, we managed it. The blackened end of the log closest to us rose slowly off the ground, then started swinging through the air. It stood upright, briefly, before crashing down into the water.
Gail didn’t even stop to celebrate. She sprinted at it, leaped off the bank, and landed on the log. She wobbled once, arms held out to keep her balance, then relaxed.
“Come on,” she called.
I followed her reluctantly. At the bank, I didn’t try repeating her feat of jumping onto the log. I waded out and hauled myself up.
The log spun as I tried to climb onto it, forcing Gail to take several quick steps to stay on top of it. She bent her knees slightly, swaying with its motion, taking occasional steps to keep ahead of its rotation. Her leather sandals didn’t seem to have any problems gripping the wood, and I didn’t know how she was managing it.
I’d never played these kinds of games in Kirkswill. Staying on a log was a popular summer game among certain types, but I’d never tried it. My lack of practice was showing now.
“I can’t get on it,” I said, holding on to the blackened stub of a branch.
Gail sighed, then held out her arm. Maja surged and seemed to grip me. She lifted me out of the water and me dropped painfully astride the trunk. I grabbed on like my life depended on it.
She’d lifted me with Force aspect. The same aspect she’d used to pull at the tree. She obviously had more control over it than I did.
She turned around to look out over the lake.
“How are you going to row it?” I asked.
I’d barely finished speaking when a wind rose up behind us. The log wasn’t a ship, and Gail’s body wasn’t a sail, but she held out her arms, let her robe flare out, and among the increasingly violent waves we began to float across the surface of the misty lake.
“Dorian,” she called back to me.
“What.”
“This is nothing,” she called out. “We’re sorcerers. The strongest of us can rival the gods. You need to step outside yourself. Learn to walk the Path. Learn to think as a free person, you won’t survive what’s coming.”
I sat without speaking for a few seconds, confused.
“What’s coming?” I asked her.
“A trial. If you’ve been here half a year, it must be close.”
“What kind of trial?”
She looked back at me over her shoulder.
“The kind that the weak can’t pass.”
She turned back to face ahead. With her standing on the log like it was a broad-bottomed boat, and me clinging on to its upper surface like the swamp barnacles at the jetty, we moved out into deep water.