Both Pat and Roth had backpacks on them. But that wasn’t the main attention-grabbing sight.

  The Good Doctor was holding a human bone in his hand with a serious expression on his face.

  “Why the bone?”

  “I want to bone Lady Edna.”

  Every single person in the room turned their attention to Roth. The poor doctor glanced around, put away the bone, and hid his face in his hands, with his ears quickly gathering color.

  “I am very, very sorry! It was just a joke! Horrible joke!"

  Pat sighed.

  “He needs it for the Spell.”

  Joe nodded, even though he couldn’t understand anything. Roth coughed.

  “What would you usually associate with Death, Joseph?”

  “Skeletons, dead bodies… oh. I see.”

  “Exactly, young man! The bone is a perfect Symbol! I have some others, but the simpler, the better.”

  “So, one needs something associating with the thing he tries to do for a Spell to work?”

  Roth shook his head.

  “Not necessarily, but any Symbol makes it easier. You can draw the cornerstone concept from your Mind just as well, but Symbols are straightforward and easy to use. It’s almost like fire - would it be easier to create fire from nothing, or just use the closest source of it?”

  Oh!

  “The source, of course!”

  Pat interjected.

  “I remember the story you told me, Roth. About the best test for a Mage.”

  “Ah, you mean one of the first University tests? I agree, it is one of the best examples of how Magic and Symbols in particular work.”

  Joe raised his eyebrow.

  “Can you tell me a short version?”

  Pat scratched his head.

  “An aspiring Mage is left in a huge room, in the middle between four pillars with fire on top. The room is full of torches on the walls, from top to bottom, left to right, every single wall is covered to the brim with them. And Mage is told to light them all up in seven minutes. Obviously, nine out of ten fail. The one that doesn’t, gets a mark right away, counting towards the end of the semester.”

  Full of torches, and light them up in seven minutes? Symbols?… Oh. Oh!

  “Because they never realize that it’s easier to use already existing fire on pillars?”

  Roth clapped.

  “Perfect answer, young man! That is exactly right. Just grab a fire off the pillar, toss it to any torch, then spread it around. Simple and easy.”

  “This is a scummy test, to be fair,” added Pat. “The Symbols are a subject that is studied later in the same year, and before that, Mage has to figure it out himself. Or herself. Either way, this is more about thinking outside of the box.”

  “Which is why the successful one gets a grade straight away.” Roth chuckled. “I failed it too. Wasn’t my proudest moment, when I learned about Symbols and Association.”

  Joseph scratched his chin.

  “Wait, but wouldn’t older students just tell everyone how to pass the test?”

  “Oh, teachers know about that too, which is why there are several of them about the same subject, and they shuffle them around very often. For example, another one is to get water to be in mid-air, not on the ground - the last part is important. The water is in a pot. Nobody realizes that you don’t have to get the water out of the pot - the only condition is for the water to be in the air, not on the ground. Even funnier, it counts even if you just hold the pot yourself for some time, without using any Magic at all.”

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

  “Now that definitely sounds scummy.”

  Roth chuckled.

  “It is, but it’s always fun when new students figure it out. They usually become famous straight away. It is because Magic is really all about thinking outside of the box, using mental connections and imagination to force your own view of reality. Which is why first tests are made this way.”

  So now it was out in the open, that Roth was a Mage, specialized in Death-related Spells. Joseph excepted something like that. Not like the crew was hiding it well either.

  It was just him, Roth with Pat, Irfan, Xander, and Ralf in the Boat Deck. For whatever reason, the quartermaster decided to join them. It would be a good opportunity for Joe to ask some questions that were living in his head throughout the entire night.

  They departed without much fanfare. Irfan and the doctor duo in one boat; Xander, Ralf, and himself in another. The rhevalian offered for their old adventuring trio to go together, but Joe insisted on being in the same boat as Xander, which the latter accepted with a surprised expression on his face.

  Ralf took the controls. As they were leaving the ship, the dragoncat turned his head to Joe.

  “You wanted to talk about something? Shoot away.”

  Joseph nodded.

  “Two things. First, where did you find the armor sets?”

  Xander chuckled.

  “You never searched the second warehouse near the mine, did you? They were right there all along, together. We never found the second half of the set you are wearing, and Lady Edna had no idea about it either.”

  “So, I guess I’m stuck with these two for the rest of my time?”

  “You can give them to me if you so wish.”

  “Your body is already one big pillow of pure muscle, Zan," Ralf grumbled. "Why do you need those puny decorations? Leave them for beggars. This armor saved kid’s life twice.”

  Joe saw a subdued smile on Xander’s face.

  “If you say so. What’s the second one, Joe?”

  “The hand-to-hand training…”

  The quartermaster sighed.

  “I saw that coming from the beginning. I am not against it, but… I have barely any time.”

  “Can I help you in any way?”

  Xander scratched his chin, then snapped his fingers. Joseph stole a peek at them before the rhevalian put his hand away.

  Pat wasn’t lying one bit.

  “I have an idea. You have a good education, right?”

  Joe nodded.

  “I do.”

  “Then how about that? You help Grigory and me with counting and dividing the loot we are getting, and I use my free time to help you?”

  “You mean everything in the Hold? Sure, I can do that.”

  Xander shook his head.

  “You don’t really have to count every single item. We keep everything in books already, all organized. Just be ready, when new stuff comes aboard.”

  “No problem. Unless I am stuck on the island somewhere.”

  “Good. Then, after dinner, if I am free, find me on the ship, and I will make you the fighter you wish to be. You don’t have to come if you are on the land, but I expect you to make up for it later.”

  Ralf chuckled.

  “See, even that hard-arse is finally in the boat with us. Just took him a couple of days and one destroyed island. Still can’t believe you managed to do it with that single firebomb. That’s one daemonic talent for destruction.”

  “More like luck, if anything. Circumstances were on our side most of the time.”

  “You made good use of them, Joe. You, Irfan, Pat have finished a job marvelously. Luck doesn’t have much meaning if one doesn’t know his way around it.”

  He agreed with Xander’s words full-heartedly.

  The Stone Maw Island wasn’t looking as imposing without the usual forest of the side. Lifeless wasteland has sprawled everywhere, with barely visible silhouettes of the buildings on the horizon.

  It was an unfamiliar and unnerving sight. The black leaves and ashen trees were mysterious and new. But the empty dry field presented the gruesome image, exposing the true magnitude of the disaster that ravaged the place.

  Not like it wasn’t his fault too, or anything…

  They left the boats in the same place. The truck was waiting for them right there, and with a free road, devoid of any obstacles, the drive to the mansion was expected to be very short.

  Pat took his place as the driver, with Roth as the passenger. The rest of the group loaded themselves into the back.

  “Hey, Irfan. How’s the night?”

  Hunter grinned.

  “Slept like a newborn.”

  “You wanted to see our promise through too?”

  He cracked his neck.

  “Not really. I wanted to see the place one more time. But finishing what we started feels good too.”

  “Clever.”

  Their destination was barely a kilometer away by now.

  Pat parked the truck right near the place where the front gates were.

  Lady Edna Fox was already waiting for them, sitting near the door frame.

  “Kinda unladylike for someone of your status to sit on the dirty floor of the mansion, looking at guests like a tiger on the walking meat bags behind the bars of a cage.”

  The Lady only Hmmm!’d in response. But after a small pause…

  “I was waiting for you, Sir Joseph.” She began, with an ominous tone in her voice. “I was waiting this whole night to ask you a simple question - what kind of Daemon-spawned idiot tosses a flame into the volatile environment, absolutely aware that it spread all over the place, and could potentially send the entire island flying right into Plane belonging to the Deity of Death?”

  That was unnecessarily elaborate, but Joe understood the gist of it. He glanced behind his shoulder.

  Pat was diverting his eyes away, whistling.

  “I have no excuse. I hated this gas too much, and I let myself go wild. I am sorry, Lady.”

  She was drilling him with her stare for quite a while, before sighing and standing up.

  “I suppose there is no limit to stupidity. At the very least, you did get a positive result out of it. Shades did not come back during the night.”

  “That might be only because there was not a single living being in this place,” Pat countered. “We can’t take it at the face value that Nature’s Bane vein was annihilated completely. Our crew left the Stone Maw empty last night and returned to the ship.”

  Xander nodded in confirmation. Lady waved her hand tiredly.

  “I hope this small piece of Praeryne torture ends today. Whether you know how to remove the Dead Weight’s hold over me, or not, I am ready for anything now.”

  Roth began to unpack his inventory.

  “No need to be so dramatic, Lady Edna. I have spent a lot of time on it, and I am pretty sure I found the solution. But first, I want to ask a couple of questions to be sure that my thinking process is correct.”

  The Ghost nodded.

  “Do ask away, doctor.”

  The familiar bone emerged from Roth’s backpack. Then a weird round metal emblem with eight spikes pointing outside. On the emblem itself, Joe noticed an hourglass, with a skull on top, surrounded by stars. Then an unfamiliar book showed up, with an image of a rhevalian with white fur, standing on top of a hill with a saber in hand.

  “Sorry for interrupting, but what is all this, doc?”

  “Ah, this?” Roth pointed at the emblem. “Oh, it’s a symbol of a Deity. Specifically, one named Aeriessythys, who governed over Death, Time, and Unknown. It was rather obscure religion back in the day, almost forgotten.”

  “Wait, Roth, isn’t it a great risk to drain concepts directly from Deity’s Domains?”

  Unexpectedly, it was Xander who asked this question.

  Doctor nodded.

  “It is, but I am not draining power directly, only using it as a representation. This is also a very gray area, but usually, it works… unless Deity has a very specific grudge against the Mage. But I hope I have never angered any in the past, so…”

  He smiled sheepishly. Joe then pointed at the book.

  “Oh, this one? Xander should know about it, right?”

  The rhevalian nodded.

  “I very much do. This is Aris the Confessor, The Prophet of Freedom. A folk hero, who, according to the legend, managed to drive away a giant army of intelligent monstrosities, spawned from the Daemon Ozzarath Draightar, an endless abyss in a form of a mountain. The army was keeping rhevalians as slaves, until Aris managed to gather allies and push them back. Then he found a way to make a deal with the Daemon, and negotiated for it to leave the world.”

  “Prophet of Freedom… wait, you found a way to free Lady Edna?!”