Book II. Chapter 133. Shield Duel

Still counting toward sixteen, Ardan let the buzzing, reveling crowd sweep him out into the street. Gentlemen in clothes that barely qualified as tailcoats or suits waved their glasses and growled contentedly. Their companions clung to the men’s arms, heels clicking and cheap beads jingling, their laughter ringing out.

Maybe it didn’t matter where a crowd was or how it was dressed; it would always behave more or less the same. Drunk, loud, and downright savage. And so Ardi rode a wave of other people’s clamor and sharp elbows, which jabbed him in the side now and then, and before long found himself beneath the starlight.

Oil lamps and candle lanterns barely held back the gloom of the cool northern night. If the full moon happened to peek out from behind the lazy clouds, you could make out a strip of bright white light far in the distance. At first glance, the horizon looked wrong; where a black gulf should have marked the place where the ink-dark sky met the earth, a bright band gleamed instead. In truth, the explanation was quite simple. The Great Glacier reflected enough light at night to be visible even from that far away.

Ardan leaned hard on his staff to favor the leg that had started aching after several days in the saddle and looked toward the captains. While the crowd of drunken gawkers fanned out along the edges of what First Station called a sidewalk, though it was really no more than a plank walkway, the captains conferred in low voices. At first Ardi couldn’t tell what was holding things up. Then he noticed Rogov and Melin watching the guests and revelers spilling out of the hotel, both men equally and openly irritated.

But why were they...

“No need to thank me, Skofsky.” A hot whisper tickled his ear.

Ardi turned around, but only long enough to see Taisia settle back down from her tiptoes; she was already moving several paces off to one side. Ardan’s irritation with Taisia eased somewhat. Enough, at least, for him to stop his count at “fourteen.”

Even if Rogov or Melin had been planning something less than honest, or even outright illegal, they would have to put those schemes on hold. Even two Blue mages were unlikely to risk acting as though a hundred pairs of eyes weren’t watching, however alcohol-soaked those eyes might be. Drunk or not, they belonged to witnesses.

“Captain Skofsky,” Rogov called. He was trying to keep his face from twitching, but whenever he spotted a certain reporter in the crowd, he invariably lost the battle. “How long are you going to hide among the gentlemen?”

The gentlemen and the women with them looked first at Rogov, then at Ard, who stood nearly a head taller than even the tallest person in the crowd, and then back at Rogov. Laughter, open and unmistakable, spread through the crowd. Plainly, they weren’t laughing at Ardan.

Rogov’s grimace deepened. Melin took several steps back, clearing what would soon be the “arena” for the duel. The Hunters also came out into the fresh air to gawk at the brawl, but kept apart from everyone else.

“Captain Rogov,” Ardan said curtly. He opened his grimoire... then immediately closed it again.

He had no idea what sort of arsenal the former magical artilleryman had at his disposal. In the army, Rogov would have learned area-effect spells, the kind meant for groups of targets, and he would have trained in strategic magic as well. The unspoken ban on using such magic at the front did not prohibit anyone from developing it or honing its use on proving grounds. Nor was the ban itself anything more than an understanding among nations: once this particular demon was let loose, there would be no putting it back.

Which, broadly speaking, the captain had already demonstrated in the caves of Bear’s Rift.

Did that mean Rogov had no command of individual military seals? Most likely not. Still, by that logic, his arsenal ought to be quite limited.

“Ha,” Rogov huffed when he saw Ard move.

The spasm faded from his contorted face, and a triumphant smile took its place. Beside him, Melin impatiently wound his red beard around one finger. Apparently, they had taken Ardi’s failure to open his grimoire entirely the wrong way. His plain-looking wooden staff, bearing no engraved seals of any kind, had helped create that impression too.

“It’s like I’m about to take candy from a baby,” Rogov whispered under his breath. A human wouldn’t have heard a thing from that distance. “A concussed baby, at that...”

“Gentlemen!” Melin barked as he stepped between the two contestants. “Let me remind you: friendly duels are conducted under the rules governing shield competitions. Deliberately harming an opponent will be deemed malicious use of Star Magic and punished to the fullest extent of the law. Is that clear?”

“Yes, Captain Melin,” Captain Rogov replied with marked formality.

“Yes, Captain Melin,” Ardan answered in exactly the same manner, because Mages’ Guild protocol required it.

Oddly enough, at that moment none of the three was under contract to the Hunters’ Guild. Whenever mages actually began using Star Magic, all their other contractual obligations were suspended for as long as the magic was in use.

In other words, as soon as Rogov and Ardi faced each other in a duel, both would be required to abide by the rules and regulations of the Mages’ Guild. Once the duel ended, whatever contracts they’d signed would go back into effect. No matter who had signed with whom.

The law was a very peculiar one, the sort that never came into play in an ordinary citizen’s life. But that was precisely why Star mages needed lawyers of their own, lawyers who understood Star mages’ affairs and the laws that governed them.

“Any use of artifacts or accumulators is forbidden,” Melin continued. “Violating this provision will likewise be considered a crime. Is that clear?”

Rogov and Ardan once again replied in unison. Ardi had to admit he felt a little awkward. The last time he’d taken part in anything like this, it had all ended with his opponent being sent to the Eternal Angels. Yes, you could say Gleb Davos had been asking for Cassara’s bullet, and if he’d kept his mouth shut, nothing would have happened, but...

Ard tried to put those less-than-cheerful thoughts out of his mind.

“We’ll draw lots to decide who attacks first and who defends.” Melin was already reaching into his pocket for a kso coin when Rogov spoke in his thin, whistling voice.

“Don’t, Unmir.” For the first time Ardi could remember, Rogov called his partner by name. “Let Mr. Concussed choose for himself.”

Melin shrugged and turned to Ardan. Ardan considered for a couple of seconds before he replied.

“I’ll start by attacking.”

Both captains raised their eyebrows slightly. Even Magister Tikhonov and Senior Magister Ostrozhskaya seemed surprised. Their yellow cloaks flashed briefly amid the crowd. Ardi checked his watch. It was a quarter to seven, so “dear Chaz” would be showing up here soon.

Damn it.

In his mind, Ardi said the words in a perfect imitation of Miss Shpritz.

“Then... Both of you, get ready!” Melin shouted, trying to sound like an emcee, and stepped back several paces. “On the count of three!”

Rogov and Ardan lifted their staves off the ground in unison, and the crowd... And the crowd went right on rumbling and cheering. Only a few people, most of them Hunters, fell quiet and straightened slightly. Not that they were in any danger, but those who’d been lucky enough (or unlucky enough) to witness war magic firsthand no longer took it so lightly.

“Three!” Melin shouted, then darted off the street and onto the sidewalk.

Neither of them struck the ground with his staff. Not because they had both lost their minds at once, but because neither Ardan nor Captain Rogov had any reason to be the first to manifest a seal. Neither of them knew exactly what he might need.

A shield-dueling contest had a slightly different objective. Put simply, the whole contest came down to the most basic principle of war magic: each contestant had to spend the minimum number of rays to raise a shield capable of neutralizing the maximum number of an opponent’s rays.

No one needed to inflict physical harm, and anyone who injured an opponent, or even threatened to, could be punished under the law, especially if the Black House got involved. That turned the whole thing into a bit of a farce. To raise a shield, you had to see exactly what you were defending against. And to attack, you had to work out exactly what you would need to break through.

So when Gleb Davos pressed Ard to get his shield up nearly two years earlier, he was actually cheating a little. In a contest like this, the mage on defense usually had the edge: he could wait, choose the right countermeasure, and try to outguess his opponent, while the attacker was often working blind. But that changed the instant the defending mage lost his nerve and cast his seal first.

But waiting too long was frightening too.

By the rules of the duel, the attacker won if his spell crossed the boundary: a line drawn half a staff length from the defender’s chest. A staff length was an ancient unit of measure used only by the military. The rule was designed to keep the two duelists from dragging a staring contest out for several hours.

And so a stereotype took root in the popular imagination: in shield duels, the mage who began on defense had the advantage.

And come to think of it, the whole thing was a little like those brief shootouts between cowboys. Just without the risk of taking a bullet in your own gut.

“Hey, what’re you two standing around for?” someone in the crowd called out, only to get smacked on the back of the head by a Hunter.

The man with the wine bottle rubbed the back of his head and turned to confront whoever had hit him, but one look at the imposing Hunter made him lose his nerve. His companion, grimacing as fiercely as Rogov, yanked her hand from the crook of her escort’s arm and walked off into the crowd.

“Mr. Rogov.” Ardan opened his grimoire again. “If it isn’t too much trouble, please put up your best elemental-kinetic shield.”

“Go right ahead, Skofsky.” The captain gave a snort and, of course, didn’t cast anything.

Ardan shrugged and flipped through several pages. From one of them, yet another modification of the “Ice Bullet” stared back at him, this one scaled for a Blue Star. Military doctrine followed the same principle. Broad, general-purpose seals could be scaled up; narrow, purpose-built ones could not.

And, tellingly, a seal that generated vortices of compressed air sat on the facing page of the grimoire. Ardan had made the trade with Agatha Spree for a reason: he had given her a stripped-down, encrypted basic version of his own “Ice Doll,” the version Miss Spri had tried and failed to cast on the club grounds. Miss Spri’s seal, though of course she hadn’t created it herself, was the basis for this modification.

Knowing Rogov might not be ready in time, or might fail altogether, Ardan considered adjusting the parameters so the spell wouldn’t strike the captain’s center of mass.

“How much longer are you going to take, Skofsky?” Rogov was the one hurrying him along now. “By now, I could’ve... I don’t know. Grown old a second time, maybe.”

A ripple of chuckles went through the crowd, but Ardi flinched as though someone had slapped him. He’d heard words like those before.

Melin stood off to one side. “He really is shell-shocked.” He let out a breath.

Thanks to Elena’s fascination with Non-Star science, as well as his own voyage aboard the Airship, Ardi knew that although ice was water in solid form, it had variations of its own, which Non-Stellar scientists called phases. Under ordinary conditions, ice existed only in the first phase, which had two subtypes: ordinary “snow” ice and the kind that crystallized at high altitude. The natural world simply never produced pressures high enough or temperatures low enough to alter ice’s molecular crystal lattice.

Maybe someday in the distant future, once human technology had advanced still further, someone would find a way to reach the necessary temperatures or pressures and create later-phase ice. The device Mshisty had used to breach the defenses above the laboratory near the coast of Angel’s Tear might work too. But probably not. It was too different an approach.

Ardi looked at the seal again, mentally applied the new parameters to it and focused on what his senses told him.

He couldn’t test this seal in the city. It had been born of several “parents.” The tragedy at the museum was the mother of this modification, one that already deserved a name of its own. Its father was the scroll that Mshisty, now a Grand Magister, had given Ardan on the Colonel’s orders.

So yes. Ardan listened closely. To the wind ruffling the tall grass. It had come back wearily from a distant journey, after racing a spring storm that clawed at the edge of the horizon and threatened to gather strength before crashing down on the Metropolis with raw force.

Ardan took a shard of Merry Eastern Wind’s name and set it into what remained of Miss Spri’s “Air Bomb” seal.

Then Ardan turned northwest. Toward the shimmering line of snow that divided the black sky from the gray earth. Ardan filled his lungs with icy air, and in its chill he heard the crunch of footsteps on a snowy slope and the sharp bite of the season’s first frost.

The shard of the Ice and Snow’s name answered in the voice of a winter forest. This time, though, the answer seemed to come both from the Great Glacier and from somewhere deep within him. Ardan didn’t let his thoughts linger on the unfamiliar sensation.

Instead, he tried. Tried with every scrap of focus he could muster to hold two shards of different names in his mind at once. An invisible steel band clamped around his head, and breathing suddenly became a task no easier than wading against a river’s current. A current still calm, for now.

But the instant Ardan raised his staff and slammed it into the ground, that calm current went savage. It hit him with the fury of an outraged force of nature, as if some mortal had dared challenge its dominion.

But Ardan didn’t stop there. Now he had a chance to test everything the city’s dead Ley had kept out of his reach, not on paper but in action, against a military mage. He intended to make the most of it. Straining his mind to its limit, he began cycling through modifications and parameters so quickly that the seal beneath his feet began to seethe with blue-white foam.

Rogov’s eyes widened, and he slammed his staff into the dusty road. Dust surged toward his knees, only to vanish at once in fiery flashes. Brick by brick, the Wall of Fire Brick rose to hide Captain Rogov from view, astonishing Melin and the Yellow mages alike. It was a standard modification of a Blue Star seal, designed to guard against two-part spells that combined kinetics with elemental force.

This version was designed to counter ice. That was the only parameter Rogov, a mage with years of experience, had managed to read. He hadn’t even been able to tell exactly how many rays his opponent had used. To be honest, neither had Ardan.

NovelPhoenix is where the author publishes this chapter, and this copy was made without their consent.

Could the symbiosis between the art of Aean’Hane and Star Magic be expressed in terms as simple and commonplace as the rays of stars?

Hardly.

As Ard shaped the seal, it seemed he was repeating what he’d done beside Angel’s Tear: subjecting his mind to something it had never been designed to withstand. Pain seared through Ardan’s head. Everything swam before his eyes. It felt as though he wasn’t forming a seal at all, but trying to climb to the peak of Ergar’s Hut while clinging to the rock with nothing but his teeth.

And yet, he did it.

The seal shone brighter than usual, and a blue vortex began swirling above the finial of Ardan’s staff. It crackled with tiny snowflakes and strained to open, like a snowdrop unfurling its petals in the sun’s first rays, but it could not. Those same snowflakes, which only a moment earlier had danced in a ring around the vortex, suddenly linked their delicate points together.

They chimed like little bells, growing larger and more resonant until they joined to form a diamond. Then they tightened further, taut as a wound spring. An unseen force dragged them inward, into the vortex. The vortex tried to break through the walls of its icy prison. It tried, but it could not.

Frost spread across the ground beneath Ard’s staff. An icy wind pinned the dust to the road. People nearby began turning up their collars and blowing on their hands, watching in surprise as little clouds of vapor escaped their lips.

Captain Rogov kept feverishly draining his Stars, forcing his wall of fire from yellow toward orange. Ardan felt as if he were holding an entire house in his hands. Maybe two. A little longer, and either his body would fail under the pressure of his own spell or his skull would split in two. Yet the seal still wasn’t ready. It had already drunk his Blue Star dry, extinguished his Green Star, and was now devouring the last remnants of his Red Star.

Nearly a full second later, just when he could bear the strain no longer, the seal drank its fill, and Ardan immediately let fly... a small arrowhead. It was almost identical to the one kept in the museum: the arrowhead Remi, the cook from Sergeant Mendera’s squad, had pulled from Baskhag’s armor.

Trailing a blue streak through the air, the icy arrowhead, with a whirlwind of frost locked inside it, punched through Rogov’s Wall of Fire Brick. If “punched through” was even the right phrase. The bricks of orange flame never so much as trembled, and their color did not change in the slightest. Then a hole simply appeared in Rogov’s own shield, some ten centimeters from his head.

An instant later, Rogov was hurled almost half a meter sideways. To his credit, he stayed on his feet and never lost his concentration. Even when he realized that the entire right side of his body, from his boots to his temple, was coated in a white, sparkling crust of ice.

Rogov’s lips turned blue in an instant, and his teeth began chattering like castanets.

The icy arrowhead dwindled to a white speck amid the silvery flashes of the tiny stars in the night sky. Ardan had calculated everything just right: the spell did no harm to Rogov or to anything else.

“Nutcase,” Rogov said yet again. He dispelled the spell and shook off the crusted snow. “I’m going to bed.”

With that, he headed for the sidewalk, where he shouldered his way through the crowd of gawkers and disappeared behind the hotel doors.

“That was risky, Mr. Skofsky. You put everything you had into a single attack.” Melin cleared his throat. “But a bet’s a bet.”

Melin headed toward Ard, pulling several rolled-up pages from inside his coat as he went.

No one questioned what had happened. To anyone watching, Ard’s spell looked like a specialized technique cast with exceptional speed. Even half a minute later, only Ardan could still see the white streak scoring the sky. The streak of his own useless spell.

Too long to cast.

Too hard to stay focused.

And almost impossible to use in a city. The Dead Ley wasn’t the only reason. The art of the Aean’Hane defied calculation, so the math had to rest on broad assumptions. Even so, it showed that if Ardan hadn’t changed the parameters and the spell had struck the ground instead of flying toward the clouds, then...

“You... you... what have you done?”

“Their door’s hollow.”

...

“Their door’s hollow... that’s what he was thinking... You’ll fill out the paperwork yourself!”

Maybe it would have handed a building over to the Crimson Lady... or two... or the whole street they were standing on right now. Or a couple of blocks... Or...

“Good night, Captain Melin.” Ardi’s tongue was so numb he could barely move it.

He took the seal diagrams and put his full weight on his staff. Barely able to stay on his feet, he headed for the hotel. All he could think of now was a bed, cocoa, and deep sleep. Preferably without dreams.

***

By some miracle, Ard’s wish came true. For once, his journey through the dream of the Sleeping Spirits gave him exactly what he wanted. He made it to his room and stripped in a hurry. He used a dipper to rinse off with ice-cold water from a small barrel, then climbed into bed beneath a blanket that wasn’t half bad. The bed itself was uncomfortable, but at least he didn’t have to share it with bedbugs, gnats, or any other vermin.

He hadn’t planned on waking the way he did. He had expected the sun to edge up over the horizon and hit him in the eyes; instead, Ardan woke to a sharp, unpleasant smell, the kind that would make even a seasoned drifter think twice about walking into a saloon. And in this case, it had nothing at all to do with a matabar’s sense of smell.

Ardi reached for his staff, but before his fingers could touch the cracked lacquer on the oak branch, he heard the click of a hammer being cocked.

“I’ll shoot first,” said a rough male voice with a rolling burr.

Ardan slowly withdrew his right hand before his fingers reached the staff. But his left hand, at that very moment...

“Given your record, Corporal, I doubt you could get the knife from under the pillow beside you and throw it straight enough to hit me. I’d still have time to shoot.”

“Corporal.” Ardan shook his head and at last managed to make out the silhouette seated in the armchair across from him. The fatigue from the long ride, his depleted Stars, the mutant’s venom: not even all three together could account for how his colleague had slipped into Ard’s room unnoticed.

A man of about forty sat in the armchair, one leg crossed over the other, idly turning a massive revolver in his right hand. Its bore was so wide that the recoil would have snapped an ordinary person’s wrist and wrenched his shoulder out of joint. Gray had already spread from his temples to his crown, silvering his medium-length hair, but his beard was still blacker than engine oil.

A narrow, sharp, weather-beaten face. Keen, beady eyes that never missed a move Ard made. The stranger’s left eyebrow was completely gone, replaced by a burn scar. The right was reduced to scraggly little islands of what had once been a thick brow.

He wore ordinary cowboy clothes: high boots, heavy trousers, a shirt, a plain vest, and a leather jacket. Nothing remarkable. Not even the scar. Had Ardi not picked Tess up from rehearsals so many times, he might not have noticed a thing. Now, though, he could clearly tell scars made with prosthetic wax from genuine ones.

“I can’t say I’m very glad to see you here either, Corporal,” the Cloak said. He spun the revolver on one finger, then slid the iron back into its holster with a deft flick. “My name is Lieutenant Shosa. I’m an operative with the Eighteenth Department. I was assigned to First Station six months ago to gather information about a suspected connection between the Hunters’ Guild and the Puppeteers.”

With that, Shosa drew papers and a distress medallion from his inside pocket in one slow, careful motion. The medallion could probably get a signal to Yellik, perhaps through some sort of relay system, but it was unlikely to be of any use. Even if Shosa got a distress signal out right away, help wouldn’t get there in time.

For exactly the same reason, Ardan didn’t quite understand why he’d been issued an identical medallion during his visit to Larand.

Ardi could hear the calm beat of Shosa’s heart. Shosa carried the stink of horse sweat, road dust, and clothes worn too long, but nothing else. Well, except perhaps for cheap cologne and that faint smell every mutant carried.

Yes. Yet another mutant sat across from Ard.

While Ardi carefully examined the documents, Shosa painstakingly removed his disguise. He pried the false scar loose with a small knife, cleaned the dried glue from his other eyebrow, slipped an almost invisible clip off his nose, then let his cheeks relax; he had been biting them from the inside to alter the shape of his face. Then he used the same knife to scrape off whatever was holding his wig in place.

Shosa had gone bald long ago, and his chin was bare too. So by the time Ardi had confirmed the documents were genuine, a tired-looking, round-faced man whose age was hard to guess was sitting in the chair across from him.

“It’s raining outside, and the wind is blowing,” Ardan said.

“By noon, they’re predicting a rockfall and a cowshed cleanup,” Shosa replied at once. He tipped his chin. “I’ve always found all these coded greetings a waste of time. With your Witch’s Gaze or good old-fashioned alchemical torture, anyone will tell you everything, including where his mother keeps her underwear.”

Ardi frowned.

“I, for one, have no idea where my mother keeps her underwear.” Ardi flung the documents and the medallion back to Shosa.

Shosa caught the papers and the artifact in midair, then slipped them back into his inside pocket.

“That’s the whole point of the joke, Corporal.” He rolled his eyes. “Apparently, a sense of humor wasn’t on the list of human traits you inherited. Get dressed, will you? I want to sleep too, you know. And I’m terribly jealous that you get to lie there in bed.”

Ardi thought the Sleeping Spirits had certainly denied Shosa a sense of humor, but he kept the observation to himself. He tossed the blanket aside, quickly pulled on his own version of cowboy gear, and went to the washstand. Ardan unrolled the leather bundle containing his toothbrush, tooth powder, and razor, then set about his morning routine.

“Go ahead, Corporal,” Shosa urged. “I’ve got things of my own to do, you know. And reports to write on top of that.”

Reports...

Sometimes Ardan thought the worst harm Parliament had done the Second Chancery wasn’t cutting its budget again and again, but burying the Black House under staggering bureaucracy.

“It all began with...”

By the time Ardi had worked up a white lather in the cup, loaded the shaving brush, and spread it across his chin, cheeks, and neck, he had already told half the story. And by the time the straight razor had sliced away the last of the stiff black stubble that had grown overnight, he had gotten to the part where he went to bed.

What had taken almost two weeks in real life fit into a fifteen-minute account.

“Weeell,” Shosa said, clicking his tongue. “I can’t say I expected to hear anything like ‘we walked and walked until we got there,’ but undead and Pink mages practicing... how did you put it?”

“Progressive Necromancy,” Ardan reminded him.

“Is there a regressive kind?”

“No idea,” Ardan answered honestly as he rinsed the razor and brush and packed them back into the bundle with his toothbrush and tooth powder. “But in his notes, I found references to Mr. Paarlax’s research and formulas drawn from it. That’s why I called it progressive.”

“I see,” Shosa said. Ardan never did understand what Shosa thought he’d understood. “You’ll find the information I gathered in here.”

Shosa reached into the inner pocket on the other side of his jacket from his papers and drew out a packet of papers bound in a leather cover with a strap.

“I’ll send your report with the first postman who comes through.”

“And what about...”

“The caches in the Park, possible shelters, and the routes taken by the most dangerous Anomalies are all in the papers I’m giving you,” Shosa cut in. After a brief hesitation, he tossed the leather “scroll” onto the bed. “Did you at least win anything worthwhile in the duel?”

Ardan cast a quick glance at his grimoire, suspended by chains from the head of his staff. Melin and Rogov had kept their word, and then some. They could, after all, have handed him encrypted documents, but they hadn’t stooped to tricks like that.

The blueprints Melin had given him were easy enough to read, though they offered no explanations of the seals. But Ard knew enough to interpret them himself. The first seal, “Free Crossing,” made it possible to create a bridge. A bridge from any object the mage stood on to another object of the same material.

For instance, if a mage found himself at the edge of a rocky pass, he could use the seal to build a bridge strong enough to support an entire company of soldiers marching across it. The same method could be used to build a crossing from, say, one fallen tree to another, or from one piece of sandstone to another. The important thing was that the material at the point of origin had to match the material at the destination.

The second seal was designed to screen liquids for poison. The third worked on much the same principle, only it tested meat and other animal products.

And all three had clearly been modified to function with fewer rays. That reduced their capabilities to little more than the basics, but it also meant they drew far less Ley from the Stars.

All right, Ardan had exaggerated a little: Melin and Rogov had not, in fact, been above playing games with how the terms of the duel were worded. They had indeed handed over three military seals. Just not quite the kind an ordinary mage pictured when he heard “military.”

Military Star science wasn’t limited to seals meant for attack or defense. There were utility seals as well, for delicate jobs like drying gunpowder without igniting it or setting off an explosion. In Melin and Rogov’s case, since both served with the artillery, it was only logical that they would have a whole range of spells designed to make soldiers’ lives and duties easier.

He could at least be grateful they hadn’t shared some highly specialized bit of knowledge with him, such as how to cool the barrel of a howitzer. Ardi had seen something similar among the works in Aversky’s collection. May the Eternal Angels receive him.

So, on reflection, Melin had given Ard something that might actually prove useful on his upcoming journey through the Park. That was odd in its own way...

“If you don’t want to talk, you don’t have to.” Shosa shrugged, misreading Ard’s silence. “It’s up to you. All right, nice meeting you, Corporal. I guess the rumors about you were exaggerated. They made you out to be Major Mshisty’s heir apparent, every bit as destructive as the major himself. The Station suffered no damage from your stunt, and that’s a good thing. I’ll leave you to it.”

“And you...”

“I won’t even go near that cursed place you’re so desperate to reach.” Shosa held up his hands, rose from his chair, and headed for the side window. It looked out over the small space between the hotel and the shop next door. The buildings stood so close together that Ardan could reach out and touch the dew-damp brickwork of the other building. “You’ve got your work, Corporal. I’ve got mine. See you in six weeks. Good luck.”

With that, Shosa leaped out the window as calmly as though he were stepping through a door. Ardan merely blinked a few times, then gave himself a shake. So that was probably what it looked like to other people.

Then again, now that he thought about it, it had been quite a while since he’d mistaken a window for a door. He hoped that particular improvement was here to stay.

Ardan found himself alone in the room. He stood there bewildered for a while, then tucked the leather-wrapped bundle of papers into his travel bag and began putting on his regalia. He hooked his cloak onto the special fastenings at the shoulders of his jacket. Then he fastened the ray-marked epaulets to the cloak itself, threading them through its loops. After that, he hung the grimoire from his belt by its chains and took his staff in hand.

In the city, amid ordinary street clothes, a mage’s cloak could still somehow pass for an accessory. A strange one, but an accessory nonetheless. But now...

Ardan sighed. There were limits, but he didn’t give a damn what “polite society” thought of his appearance. A mage’s regalia and life in the field just weren’t terribly compatible. On horseback, he’d had to tug his cloak down, adjust it, or even roll it up altogether more times than he could count. Not to mention the stiff epaulets chafing his shoulders. He’d never noticed the epaulets before, but...

Ardi shook his head and stepped into the corridor. It was half past seven, which left him and Miss Shpritz only forty-five minutes to join the expedition.

Ardi crossed to the next door in just two steps and knocked.

“Come in, darling.”

Ardan frowned. Then he kicked the door wide open and nearly cast an Ice Bullet at the first person he saw who clearly wasn’t the flighty journalist. In Ardan’s mind, the connection snapped into place with the neat precision of one of Melin’s seals: “darling” meant “I’m being held hostage.”

“Don’t kill me! I’m sorry! I didn’t know!” Panicked shrieks filled the room. A young man maybe three years older than Ard stood there wearing nothing but cowboy boots, clutching a wad of rumpled clothes over his privates. Then he pitched backward... out the window.

Ardan’s gaze snapped toward the bed. Just as quickly, he turned away and closed his eyes.

“Cra—Eternal Angels, Taisia, you’re naked!”

Miss Shpritz sounded thoroughly satisfied. She stretched, then slipped easily off the bed.

“Of course, Captain, indulging in the pleasures of the flesh with your clothes on can be very erotic, but only when you’re young and need to get it over with in a couple of minutes,” she said, smacking her lips. Then, her bare feet slapping, she headed toward her clothes scattered across the floor. “You’re a married man, after all. You should know.”

Ardan did finish counting to sixteen, slowly and with feeling, resisting the urge to make Taisia, say, walk around all day with donkey ears.

“What’s going on here?” he asked wearily. He was still standing with his back to her, though his eyes were open now.

“I couldn’t shake Nalensky, and he wore me out so thoroughly with his chatter that, once dear Chaz was too drunk to tell me from a local prostitute, I handed him off to a woman who got a few bills for her trouble.” Taisia had put deliberate venom into those two words. “As for me, I picked up a rather passionate, high-spirited lumberjack. Absolutely free.”

“The one who’s practically crying right now, stumbling as he runs and covering his privates?”

“And you—”

“I can hear him.” Ardan cut her off and pointed to his ears with the head of his staff.

“Then it’s strange you didn’t hear us last night, Captain.” There was something almost feline in the way Miss Shpritz drawled the words as she poured water from the barrel into the washbasin. “We weren’t shy.”

Ardan really had been that desperate for sleep.

“Damn it, Taisia! Then why did he go flying out the window? And what was that nonsense about ‘dear’?”

“It’s just a game, Captain,” Taisia replied, her voice unwavering. “Some men like to compete in bed with other men, strange as that may sound. They do it secondhand, by listening to women moan. So I told him we had to be quieter because my drunken husband, a mage, was asleep on the other side of the wall. To, shall we say, bolster... my sweet lumberjack’s motivation. And I must admit, he didn’t disappoint me. He tried so hard, Skofsky... By the end, I wasn’t bored at all. But the bed, unfortunately, is covered in... evidence of just how thoroughly he chased my blues away. Poor laundresses.”

Ardan drew in a deep breath, then slowly let it out through his nose.

“Don’t go making some crack about Nalensky’s prostitute and how I chose to brighten up my evening, Captain.”

“I’m not—”

“Oh, don’t lie, Skofsky.” Miss Shpritz made a dismissive little sound. “You’re as prudish as most people in the Empire. Only the northerners are worse. After all, if memory serves, you lived under the same roof as your wife even before the two of you were married.”

“That’s none of your concern, Miss Shpritz.”

“No, it isn’t,” Taisia agreed. “I just don’t like you judging me.”

“I’m not judging you,” Ardan countered with perfect honesty. As the forest beasts had taught him, he generally tried not to judge anyone at all. “I just wasn’t planning to become part of your bedroom games, Taisia. This is over the line. Even further over the line than everything else. All of it put together.”

Taisia came around to face him. She had washed and dressed but hadn’t put on makeup yet. And since she hadn’t unpacked her things, she wouldn’t be putting on makeup anytime soon. Ardi noted with some surprise that even without expertly applied makeup, Taisia was more than merely pretty. So perhaps he’d been wrong about why she was so good with makeup.

“I’ve already told you, Captain: you’re not my type.” Taisia’s heart didn’t skip a beat. “I’m turned on by men who are turned on by me. And you’re a lost cause in that department.”

Ardan frowned.

“Are you done?” he asked.

Miss Shpritz gestured toward her luggage.

“Will you help me, Captain?”

“Go to hell, Taisia.” Ardan headed briskly back into the corridor.

“That’s turning into our little catchphrase, Skofsky!” Her sharp laugh followed him.

Humans...