Anad pulled gently on the brim of his top-hat, though it barely moved enough to shield his eyes from the scorching sun high in the sky, the usually convenient magic keeping it stubbornly in place. Another tug, it still didn’t move, and he gave up with a mild sigh and instead pulled on the lapels of his jacket.

“Nervous, rookie?” the older man next to Anad on the forest path asked. Barely wide enough for them to stand shoulder to shoulder, he couldn’t have missed Anad’s sigh.

Anad turned his head slightly to look at the man on his left. Sir Reghald, dressed in the formal tuxedo of the Royal Mediators of Order and Balance, like Anad, walked with his back straight and his hard-soled shoes tapping a steady rhythm on the dirt path. For his heels to make any noise, the man must’ve been choosing for their enchantment to be active. His cane, likewise, clapped each time it hit the road.

“No,” Anad said slowly, then shook his head. “Yes. This is the biggest operation I’ve been part of,” he said, his head turning back to look at the long line of Regulars stretched out behind the dozen tuxedo-clad elite of the Order. Mediators. Tailcoats, commoners called them, for good reason.

“You’re from the capital, yes?” Sir Reghald asked rhetorically. The man knew the answer to his own question, and continued on without waiting for Anad to respond. “From what I’ve heard, Mediator Warren thinks quite a lot of you. That’s no small thing.” “My understanding is you’ve dealt with Tinks before.”

“Gevar… Mediator Warren,” Anad corrected quickly. He had to be careful not to use her first name so casually. “She’s been very kind to me. Taught me… more than I can really say.” Literally. “But, as for dealing with Tinks, just a small raid last month,” Anad changed the subject. “A handful of Tinkerers, though they argued we should call them Clocksmiths the entire time, and a single sorcerer. We outnumbered them by so much, they gave up as soon as we kicked the door in.

“It was nothing like this. I’ve never seen so many Regulars, and the…” Anad hesitated.

“Tailcoats,” Sir Reghald interrupted. “It’s okay. You can use the term. It’s shorter than what we call ourselves in ‘proper’ company. Royal Mediators of Order and Balance. Doesn’t really roll of the tongue,” he said, his white-gloved hand coming up to twirl the end of his perfectly waxed mustache. “Or Mediators. Either is fine with me, just make sure you choose the correct one among more proper company.”

“Right, the Mediators,” Anad said, using the shortened but correct term. “I haven’t seen this many together since my Academy days. Are we all really needed for an Enclave?”

“The sorcerer you dealt with, did he have a chance to turn on his watch when you arrived? Did he fight back?” Sir Gerhald asked.

“Yes, and no,” Anad said, then quickly continued. “He turned on his watch, but his magic only changed the color of things. Not really much of a threat. He tried to use it to hide by making his outfit blend in with the wall, like a chair. But, it was too late, we were already in the room, so he just looked…silly. It was kind of awkward more than anything, really.”

Sir Reghal nodded. “The powers of the Chaos Sorcerers are by their nature, unpredictable. It was good you faced one so…tame…for your first encounter. There are many out there with much more fearsome abilities.”

“And you think some of them are here in this mountain enclave?” Anad asked, looking up the path towards the mountain not so far in the distance. It wouldn’t be long before they got there.

“Possibly. We’ve been trying to sniff out the location of this enclave for over a year since we got wind there was one in the area. But,” Sir Reghald held up a gloved finger. “Our intel suggests it’s been here for near a century. There could be any number of Chaos Sorcerers within its stone walls, as well as the forbidden technology the Tinks are notorious for meddling with.”

“Clocks?” Anad asked, his mind going back to the devices in various states of repair in the building they’d raided. Sure, clocks powered sorcerers, but they were hardly a threat on their own. Unless…

“Wait,” Anad went on. “You don’t mean they have weapons from the wars in there, do you?”

Sir Reghald gave a sharp nod. “We believe so. Weapons hoarded from a time best left forgotten.”

“That’s dangerous,” Anad said softly, his eyes back on the mountain. The mission had just gotten significantly more important, and risky. Odd he hadn’t been briefed on that, though.

“That’s an understatement,” Sir Reghald said. “But it’s also why we’re here. This is our role.”

“Do you think they have a Reaper?” Anad asked.

Sir Reghald gave a sharp laugh. “If I thought there was one of those monstrosities here, we’d have twice as many Mediators with us. At least. No, no Reapers. Just Tinks and sorcerers.”

Anad let out a short breath of relief.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

“I understand, but if I can ask, why wasn’t I told about the weapons before we left? Or the size of the enclave? Until we met the Regulars on the road this morning, I had no idea the size of the operation,” Anad said.

“We couldn’t risk a leak,” Sir Reghald said. “This is your first assignment outside the capital, and frankly, the timing of your arrival at our garrison was a bit too…convenient.”

“You believe there’s a mole in the Order?” Anad asked, the words too shocking to stop from escaping his mouth. “You thought I might be it?”

“I’m nothing if not careful,” Sir Reghald said. “Prove yourself here today, though, and we’ll get along just fine.”

Anad nodded at his senior while he chewed on his bottom lip, then looked again at the mountain. An enclave with multiple sorcerers and forbidden weapons? Was he up to this? He lifted his walking cane and gave the top a slight twist, then unsheathed half of the razor-sharp blade. A thumb wide and barely thicker than a sheaf of paper, the indestructible blade radiated Order to his sensitive eyes, and a sense of calm washed over him.

Yes, yes he could do this.

“I hear you’re good with a sword,” Sir Reghald said.

“I get by,” Anad said, sliding the sword back into the cane and turning the handle until it clicked shut. Even that brief exposure had filled his muscles with strength, and he fought down the urge to run all the way to the mountain while everything around him sharpened into focus.

Scents wafted into his nose; different flowers, the dirt beneath his feet, and the warm musk of a large animal that had recently passed. Wind swept through the trees, the rustling leaves painting a clear picture to his mind as they serenaded him with every step.

Ahead, a bird flew out of the bush, its wings moving in slow motion to his eyes, each flap sluggish enough Anad had to blink multiple times between a full repetition. The pressure in the air shifted with the movement of the people behind him, and Anad’s hand snapped up even before his brain caught up as to why.

“Impressive,” Sir Reghald said, his closed fist caught firmly in Anad’s grasp a few scant inches from the side of Anad’s head. “Most rookies wouldn’t have been able to stop that.”

“And you were sure I could?” Anad asked, even his own words sounding lethargic to his ears.

“I also heard you fall very deep into the Trance. Would you mind?” Sir Reghald asked, his eyes darting to where his white-gloved hand was held by Anad’s.

“Of course, sorry,” Anad said, releasing his hold.

Sir Reghald shook out his hand and stretched his fingers several times while giving Anad an appraising look. “Very deep,” he said again. “But, don’t let it go to your head. The Trance is a powerful tool, though a very straightforward one. Like your color-changing sorcerer, the magic of our opponents is often unpredictable and powerful.

“I once saw a sorcerer who could change clouds into whales. Up in the sky, not in the water. Not a very useful magic in a fight, you would think, right? Well, that’s what I thought until I finally caught up to him. He’d holed himself on a small island with his Tink friends, and as we closed in aboard our ships, we saw this old guy standing on the beach like he was going to take on the whole armada by himself.”

“What did he do?” Anad asked, the words coming out at a snail’s pace.

“He took on the whole armada by himself,” Sir Reghald said and shook his head at the memory, his white-gloved fingers stroking his mustache like it comforted him. “He had a grandfather clock beside him on the beach there, and we should’ve taken that as a warning. But we were young. Confident. When he threw his hands up in the air and nothing happened, we laughed.”

“It was a bluff,” Anad said, letting the Trance bleed out of him so everything didn’t feel so agonizingly slow.

“That’s what we thought too. Until the first whale fell out of the sky. Big enough to blot out the sun, it hit the ship beside us with a sound I’ll never forget, like the world itself cracking apart. In the blink of an eye, the whole thing was gone, along with everybody aboard, and a wave taller than these trees sent us bobbing with no more control than a toy in a child’s bath,” Sir Reghald said, his fingers twirling faster.

“He dropped…a whale on you?” Anad asked.

“Not just one. They fell like rain. The ones that hit the ships destroyed them outright in a shower of whale blubber and broken timbers. The ones that missed set the sea to roiling, crashing us into each other and throwing people overboard to get swallowed by the sea.”

“How did you survive?”

“Luck. One of the waves washed us up on shore, right over the sorcerer, and more importantly, over his clock. Knocked it over and must’ve broken something, because the rain of whale-death stopped long enough for us to make landing and take care of that sorcerer. We lost several Mediators that day, not to mention more Regulars than we have behind us today.” Sir Reghald finished his story with a shake of his head.

“That’s brutal,” Anad said.

“It was,” Sir Reghald agreed. “And it’s a constant reminder never to underestimate a sorcerer’s power. What may seem weak or useless can be anything but that in the right hands and circumstances.”

Anad glanced up at the sky and the clouds lazily gliding across it. “You’re sure that sorcerer isn’t here?”

Sir Reghald lifted his cane into the air to make sure Anad was looking at it. “I’m sure,” he said simply.

Anad blinked. “You didn’t take him into custody?”

“Right, you’re fresh out of the academy. Taking the sorcerers found in the capital alive works because they aren’t very powerful. Magic like changing the color of things. They aren’t a real threat. Out here, though, we face things far more dangerous. You need to think of the sorcerers you meet out here as living weapons. These are the things that ravaged our lands for almost a century during the Escalation Wars.

“Out here, you have a chance to stop one of these things, and I mean really stop, you take it. No second guessing. Every sorcerer out here you let go leads to another innocent body you’re going to find down the road. So, tell me rookie, do you have what it takes? Can you do what needs to be done?”

Anad looked Sir Reghald in the eye and nodded, but he couldn’t say the words. He’d trained to kill, but not to be a killer. There was a difference. If the situation called for it, of course he would do what he had to.

But, people like the Tinks? Just normal people with a risky hobby? They could be taken. Jailed. They’d be no threat then.

Anad glanced at the Mediator beside him, but the man was focused on the mountain ahead. Like Anad should be. Still, he found his eyes turning to the line of Regulars behind him. The column of men and women stretched as far back as he could see, which really wasn’t far considering the winding path, and he tried to remember if he’d seen any prison cells among the wagons.

No. No he hadn’t.