Raindrops pattered on Colette’s automobile and wetted Deen’s hair as he stepped out into the supposed neutral territory of former Altair, twigs and the fallen autumn needles of larches cracking underneath his boots. The imposing circular wall of the great city of Ulciscor from this distance resembled something more akin to a donut somebody left on the ground.

“This is close enough,” Deen said after he heard the sound of a second automobile door opening and closing. “We’ll walk from here.”

He rested his hands on his hips and surveyed the surroundings, scanning for any sign of movement. One minute. Two minutes. Nothing. Like he thought, they’d skirted Mirastelle too closely to run into the army itself. Scouts from both sides probably saw them, but based on their automobile’s southeastern direction, they would have been dismissed as an uninvolved party, mere Ursan civilians traveling somewhere like Sirius or Munitio.

Cyrus stood beside him, silent. His hair was already slick and beaten down from the rain and his clothes were grimy and ripped. His arms and face were patched black with dirt stains and he stank terribly. The worst of it was that empty, haunted expression he wore. Deen probably wasn’t faring much better. On all counts.

“Okay,” he finally said, satisfied. They’d practically parked at the edge of the Sheer Sea, just a half-mile or so off. He took one last glance around to try and memorize a few landmarks, then made for the north. He’d decided it was better to head for the South Wall over any other because the soldiers knew his face and wouldn’t mistake them for some kind of Daevan spies. And perhaps weren’t as likely to immediately stick a spear through him for dereliction of duty when they did recognize him.

An hour later, the year’s twenty-first sunrise lit their backs as they continued to cross the forest. The Wall loomed before them now, taller than two men and wide enough to protect two hundred thousand.

He glanced up at the watchtowers but didn’t catch sight of any movement. A good sign; the upper patrols had been acting far too careless as of late. Perhaps Major Vasran finally got through to them now that a literal war was imminent. The distant laughter of men brought down his mood. He was immediately reminded of that exact brand of carelessness. Being a deserter, he wasn’t in a position to just walk up and snap at them, but he sure wanted to.

Whose voices are those, anyway? That had better not be Velox.

He motioned Cyrus to stop and crouched. They crept through the underbrush to get closer. The voices were still too far away to be distinct, but he thought they were unfamiliar. He poked his head out as far as he dared and peered ahead. The group of guards had brought out a table and were clustered around it on several chairs or lazily sprawled out against the Wall. They were playing clipping cards and something smaller, perhaps dice or chips. They wore the silver and black, yet none of them were armored. He didn’t recognize anyone, not even from Velox’s unit.

The logical answer was that a new captain replaced him, and these slackers belonged to them. But something was… off. There was a sense of wrongness in the pit of his stomach. He couldn’t shake that feeling.

He pulled himself back and shook his head at Cyrus, making a shush gesture and moving further east. He took note of the side entrances and counted to the third one, just far along the Wall’s curve to be out of sight from those guardsmen.

The stone door blended into the surface. You had to know what you were looking for to spot these. They only unlocked from the inside, but Arston always left this particular entrance unlocked for one of his sergeants to sneak off mid-shift. Deen investigated in his free time once, and found out the sergeant was a single father checking on the well-being of his eleven-year-old daughter. He kept the matter to himself after that.

He tried the handle, and it opened. That did not help settle his stomach at all. Arston always locked it at the end of his shifts. He waved Cyrus through and locked the door after closing it.

He led the boy through stone hallways, up stairways into the South Wall’s interior lodgings inlaid into the structure itself, something like a cross between barracks and an outpost. There were proper barracks closer to the city center, but several facilities like closet-sized bedrooms and shared shower rooms were built for the Guard’s convenience.

It was an empty journey, mostly. Twice or thrice a guard passed by on the lowest hallway, busy with other business. Along the way, Deen slipped inside a tiny weapons repository and snatched a spear off a rack.

Much better.

Next to the showers was a room with spare uniforms laid out in rectangular compartments, each labeled by name. He took his own, unsurprisingly still there. Menial upkeep often came slowly to the Fourth Regiment. The South Wall was for underachievers and outcasts, the other regiments would whisper. To be sent there was a punishment.

“I’m up first,” he said and patted Cyrus on the shoulder. “I’ll grab you something to wear after. Want in or out?”

Cyrus shuffled inside and sank to the floor cross-legged, facing the wall without saying a word. He’d been quiet for most of the trip after Handa’s Heaven, as if he’d used up all his energy that day and it wasn’t recovering. His face was far more grim than any teenager’s ought to be.

He showered and dressed quick as he could, running hands through his hair to try and get it straightened. He approached a wall mirror and a gloomy man with dark rings under his eyelids and an unkempt beard stared back at him. Good enough.

“Soap’s there,” he told Cyrus, pointing. “I’ll be back in a minute. I’ll grab you a recruit’s uniform. There’s a whole stack of them a few doors down. Nobody will miss one.”

Cyrus nodded and turned the shower handle.

Deen stepped out and strolled confidently— uniform pristine, spear at his back— to the door with the uniforms, then opened a closet filled to the brim with cleaning supplies. He frowned.

Right, he remembered. They moved them down a level.

He backtracked and crossed a walkway and took a staircase down, then snatched his best guess for Cyrus’s size out of the stacks and began to make his way back. He heard a stern man’s voice echoing off the walls and picked up the pace.

He saw light from the shower room spilling into the dark hallways and could distinctly hear the man as he drew close.

“—your sergeant, boy. Don’t make me repeat myself a third time. And unless you want your wings clipped you’re gonna tell me exactly why you were fooling around at the side entrances. Right now. That’s right, we heard you. Don’t shake your head at me, boy. Don’t play stupid, you little—”

Deen thumped the man on the back of the head with the butt of his spear. Hard. The guardsman crumpled instantly, not once hearing the ex-captain approach over the sound of his own mouth running.

“Never seen such a rude bastard,” he muttered. He picked up the recruit’s uniform and tossed it into the room. “Come out when you’re ready.”

He shut the door and leaned against the wall, waiting with folded arms. He eyed the fallen man. No one he recognized. Neither were any of the guards they passed on the way here. Where were Velox and his lieutenants? This was supposed to be their shift.

Cyrus stepped outside, dressed sharply in the silver and black of the Ulciscor Guard. He looked at his arms and chest, frowning.

“I don’t look like someone from the Guard.”

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

“You look like a recruit,” Deen said. “You’d fit right in. And sorry.”

“Thank you,” Cyrus said, head bowed. “I keep getting you into trouble. If anyone should be sorry, it’s me.”

“Don’t be. I’d have done this last month if I caught somebody acting like that to one of our recruits. Or to anybody, really.”

He went back into the showers and sprayed some water around, then pressed a bar of soap onto the unconscious guard’s boot and tossed it aside. He wiped his hands on his trousers and led Cyrus out. A few more stairways and a narrow door was all it took to reach the city proper.

The drizzle before sunrise had stopped, but far-reaching low clouds darkened the sky, not giving much way to morning light. Beneath the gray dreariness, the streets of Ulciscor bustled with activity. Be it rain or shine or imminent war, the men and women of Ulciscor had work to do.

And so did they.

“Where to?” Cyrus asked.

“First things first,” he said. “We’re going to see Lyla.”

———

Luke adjusted the collar of his dark green cloak with a finger, striding out of the cabin into the crisp autumn morning. A man, or perhaps a woman, stood waiting for him further down the trail, dressed in a long black spiralsilk cloak of their own and covered from head to toe in countless strips of thin white medical bandages. The bandages clung strangely to their skin, hanging loose in places and pulled tight in others. That was Argent, the mysterious magician who Weaved the winds like the great conductor of nature’s orchestra.

“Haven’t lost your nerve?” Argent asked, voice altered by wind. What kind of person was behind all those layers of protection? He was still no closer to figuring it out than when he first woke up in the cabin.

“Nope.”

The Weaver folded his arms, measuring Luke’s worth with those bright golden eyes. For once, it was easy to tell what he was thinking.

“I had nightmares,” Luke said. “Nothing new for me. I feel pretty plucked, but I can bear this much.” He squeezed fists beneath his cloak, but smiled to reassure the man. “We can’t stop a war, but we can make the emperor stub his toe, right?”

“Well said,” Argent said and laughed heartily. That was unusual, not only the sound but the act itself.“Well said indeed.”

It was welcome, though. It helped.

“Okay.” Argent nodded and spun on his heel, cloak billowing. Back to Luke, he said, “Climb aboard. This won’t be very comfortable, but there’s not much I can do about that.”

“Climb… what? You?”

Argent stuck out his arms as if saying ‘you see anything else?’ and cleared his throat impatiently.

Luke hesitantly approached. The man bent down and he grabbed onto surprisingly slender shoulders, the bandages giving way to his touch as if they’d been puffed up by pockets of air. This close, he thought he might pick out a smell, but Argent was odorless. Soft winds rasped all around them, and a few loose strips wrapped themselves around Luke’s wrists and ankles.

“Just fastening you,” Argent said absentmindedly. He stood and took a deep breath. “Don’t need you falling off.”

Falling off? Luke could tell that the man was deep in concentration, but to what end? What was he about to do?

Curious, he blinked Yellow and saw brilliant Green dust swirling all around them, wind bending in tandem. The light of his own Magenta glowed from below, a blob around the injury he’d sustained from the thunderflute. Argent’s structure was no longer needed— the worst of the minor damage was healed, and all that remained was some tolerable soreness. Luke maintained a thick concentration of Magenta throughout the cylindrical entrance-and-exit injury. White bandages were wrapped all the way around his chest beneath the woolen shirt under his cloak to keep Luke clean and protected while the color did its work. All of which was to say, Argent had freed up a slot to use a second color.

“You paying attention?” Argent asked. “You’ll love this. I think.”

The man put one foot forward and bent down again, almost on one knee. Scarlet red particles coalesced from the air into thick threads running from his upper body down through the core muscles and into his legs. Then there was a flash, as if the threads ignited, and he pushed off one foot and jumped. A cyclone of wind of light roared around them and the ground vanished. The Pines themselves grew distant.

A mixture of terror and awe evaporated the anxiety he’d been feeling. How high were they? At least twice that of the canopy. Maybe more. Their horizontal momentum was somehow even more incredible than the verticality. They rode the winds fast, a faster speed than he’d ever experienced in any automobile or horse-drawn carriage.

It took a moment to register Argent trying to get his attention.

“Luke, are you doing okay? Did you pass out on me?”

“I’m okay!” he called over the roaring wind, eyes glued to the sky. It was a bit foggy and too cloudless for his tastes, but it was breathtaking all the same. “This is amazing!”

As they reached the jump’s apex and started to descend, Luke’s stomach backflipped and his terror immediately began strangling his other emotions. He looked down and saw the ground coming closer at an alarming pace. They were falling. They were falling!

“We’re gonna die!” he cried out. Argent laughed.

The Weaver’s Red left an afterimage behind as he released it. In the next breath, he yanked a hundred threads of glistening Blue light from that unseen place, as if drawing water from a midair sea. Over his shoulder Luke could see the Weave of a thick shield forming. It was external this time, judging by the distinct boot shapes. The cyclone shifted somehow; the wind pushed against them, gradually slowing their forward and downward momentum.

Argent landed in a crouch. The pressure and force escaped outward, blowing back tree branches and scattering loose gravel and other debris. He laid one palm flat against the earth for balance, then rose.

“Blue is incredible.”

“Ah, you were paying attention? That was a lot of Blue. I’m Weaving a few tricks with Green to meddle with our velocity, so I pull as much Blue as I can for the landing. It’s pretty forgiving, though. Believe it or not, the only times I’ve hurt myself learning this movement were a few sprains from performing the jump. Red can be tough on the body.”

“Couldn’t you use Red and Blue at the same time?”

“Sure. That would work. Smart idea, Luke.”

“Why don’t you?”

“A large part of the speed we get during this jump comes from wind manipulation. I need the Green for other things, as well. Like making sure you don’t fly off my back and break your neck.”

Controlling the bandages, altering his voice, masking his odor, pushing and pulling on their bodies with the wind— it was a wonder just how many things a Weaver could do with a single color.

“We’ll reach Ulciscor around noon. Think you can handle it?”

“Yeah.”

Argent bent to jump again. From there on, they proceeded to practically fly over the Pines in enormous arcs. Luke watched the process a few more times and picked up on quick Yellow glances from Argent, probably to make sure there was enough Blue and Green ahead. He couldn’t make heads or tails of what Argent was doing with the Green itself. All of it looked way too complicated to understand.

His thoughts drifted back to earlier. Only one color… Flocks. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t mentioned this to Argent yet. It had completely slipped his mind until now.

“Do you know about the Daevan military’s ampules?”

“Yeah.”

Oh.

“They’re still limited,” Argent said as he landed in a crouch, a powerful blast of wind dispersing around them. “They can’t access the abilities of any aspect except the physical, and the bloodstream rejects more than one color at once. They can only inject Red, Green, or Blue, and they’re having problems with Red in anything but tiny amounts.”

“You’re… pretty well informed.”

“It’s in my job description,” he said. Red infused his muscles as he prepared for another jump. “Professional pain in Amon’s ass.”

“How do they make them!” Luke asked over the howling winds.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” he said after landing again. “They can’t mass-produce it, if that’s what you’re wondering. They wouldn’t do that while they’re still developing it.”

Mass-produced Weaving for the entire empire. What a horrifying thought.

“What on Asundria do they need all these weapons for? Aren’t the thunderflutes enough?”

Argent said nothing. Several jumps later, he finally answered.

“Nobody tells Amon Munitio no. That’s the problem. Nobody can stop him. That’s why it’s up to me.”

“To us.”

“Hah. Maybe someday. You’ve got a lot of training ahead of you. But first, let’s focus on this imperial invasion. We have an Elite to sabotage.”

“Sounds good to me.”