Book II. Chapter 137. Dragonfire

“I don’t question the theory that dragons once truly existed.” Magister Tikhonov sat by the fire, holding his plump hands toward the flames. “But the theory raises a whole host of questions. Questions about the theory itself.”

Short and somehow oval from every angle, he looked a little ridiculous. He was not ungainly, weak-willed, or the sort to shy away from an argument. But among the hunters, with their weather-beaten faces and keen gazes, Magister Evlampiy Tikhonov looked like a man lost in the woods. His pressed expedition outfit, now badly stained and rumpled, had clearly been bought right before they set out. He went through handkerchief after handkerchief, wiping his perpetually damp face. He had even tried to argue with Mr. Zalessky over his yellow cloak and for nearly an hour refused to remove it along with the rest of his regalia.

He insisted that military regulations did not forbid wearing regalia under martial law, whether it applied locally, as it did for them, or across the entire Empire. Zalessky countered that, for now, those decisions were his to make.

Magister Tikhonov was not especially attached to his yellow cloak and Star epaulets. More likely, Magister Tikhonov, a good-natured scholar, was simply worried there might be trouble later, once he was back in the Metropolis, if the Guild heard about his “willfulness.” Using Star Magic without one’s regalia was, after all, quite a serious offense.

“And what exactly are they, Lamp?” His back against a tree, Zalessky sliced strips of rabbit meat from the spit with his knife and bit them straight off the blade. “Your objections to dragons?”

Evlampiy broke into a delighted smile that lasted only a moment. Zalessky had a very simple and obvious way of showing his fondness: he shortened other people’s names, addressed them familiarly, and let them take the same liberties with him.

“Dragons specifically? None at all,” Magister Tikhonov replied, quick to recover. “They’re very much the stuff of fairy tales. For ages, people believed in Ice Ornakz, the creatures people call Snow Beavers, and they turned out never to have existed.”

“Or maybe they simply haven’t been found yet,” Rita said. She lay sprawled on her bedroll, gazing at the stars.

They had stretched a small heat-resistant canopy over the fire, securing it to stakes they had driven into the ground. Smoke gathered beneath it in a sort of dome, then dispersed through the alchemically treated fabric. Canopies like that cost a great deal of money and did not last very long, so they were saved for emergencies.

They had almost reached the ninth sector, with only a few hours of travel left, and there was no question of saving the canopy now. Traveling at the pace of their slowest member, Magister Tikhonov, the party had reached the rough boundary between the sectors much faster than they had originally expected.

Now, as the fifth day of their journey burned down to a scarlet sunset, they were already just one final push away from the place where Marat’s squad was believed to have clashed with the strangers. Magister Tikhonov had not suddenly discovered hidden reserves of strength. What made the difference was what he knew.

Magister Tikhonov understood Anomalies as few others in the Empire could. What’s more, his knowledge was strictly practical. Together with the Hunters’ experience and expertise, that knowledge had made their passage through the Park almost easy, strange as that seemed now.

“Take bones, for example,” Evlampiy continued. If Magister Tikhonov loved discussing anything, it was dragons. He was utterly obsessed with them and, by his own account, had been since childhood. “Since modern Star science began, no scholar anywhere has recorded a single fossilized bone. Not one. Not even the smallest.”

“Maybe they’re porous,” Bors said with a shrug. As always, he was busy with his favorite pastime: first sharpening his short axe, then cleaning his revolvers and rifle. “Like bird bones. That’s why they don’t fossilize.”

Anyone unfamiliar with the work Bors, Rita, and Mr. Zalessky did might have found it odd to hear the three of them debating fossils with a scientist. But all three had spent many years with the Hunters’ Guild, and plain professional necessity had taught them far more than the rumors going around ever hinted at.

Most Hunters, of course, are adrenaline junkies who give little thought to tomorrow. Adventure draws them in, along with easy money and the chance to see the whole Empire on someone else’s dime. The Empire alone covers one-sixth of the planet’s total landmass. For many of them, a Guild contract is also the only way out of the trap they fell into before signing it.

“Yes, that’s a fair objection.” Evlampiy nodded with as much enthusiasm as before, if not more. “But the biology doesn’t work. Don’t forget that according to our current understanding, a dragon is a reptile. If a reptile had porous bones, how would it survive up among the clouds? Not to mention that a full-grown specimen, again according to our current understanding, would have to weigh between ten and twelve tons. And even if, by some miracle, its bones had a structure like a bird’s, its muscles, internal organs, and tough scales would all be perfectly ordinary.”

“There have been accounts of dragons all over the world for thousands of years, Evlampiy,” Rita reminded him. “They’re even mentioned in Estenyen’s journals from his time in Sergeant Mendera’s unit.”

“And for a time, people all over the world believed the planet was flat,” Tikhonov parried easily. “Then they believed it was a sphere. It isn’t really a sphere at all, of course, but a planetoid. Never mind… Anyway! A sphere, but one at the center of the whole universe. So the claim that if most people believe in something, it must therefore be true is fundamentally wrong. What’s more, let’s not forget the square-cube law. For a dragon to lift its twelve-ton mass into the air, it would need a wingspan of forty or even fifty meters! That’s pure nonsense. It doesn’t even make for good fiction.”

“All right, all right.” Zalessky jerked the knife so sharply that he nearly sent the chunk of meat flying off the blade. “But we all remember what you Star folk believe, right?”

“Yeah,” Bors agreed.

“Yeah, yeah,” Rita droned. “You’re right, Drab.”

“Well, there you have it.” Zalessky nodded. “Gentlemen, if dragons created this wretched Star Magic from the art of the Onakhne, as you Star mages yourselves believe, then…”

“Yes!” Magister Tikhonov slapped his knee. “That’s exactly right, Drab! That is precisely what I’m writing my paper about. What if we assume dragons are Aean’Hane from the very beginning, from the moment they’re born…”

“Ah, right, so that’s what they’re called,” Zalessky muttered, then stuck yet another piece of meat into his mouth.

“…and can bend the Ley to their will? Then the biological constraints automatically fall away.”

“Sounds logical enough,” Bors and Rita said in unison after exchanging a glance. Then Rita continued on her own. “So why, by your own account, won’t those geniuses at the Guild of Sciences approve your requests to join Borskov’s expeditions?”

“Yeah, yeah.” Bors sniffed. “That fop is as slippery as an eel. He can wriggle through any crack. Mr. Borskov is always the one who gets the most funding for anything and everything. Too bad Borskov and Bors only sound halfway alike. Maybe I’d develop talents like that too.”

Magister Tikhonov gave a mournful sigh and shook his head.

“The trouble is, there are obvious contradictions in that reasoning.” Magister Tikhonov spread his hands. “If dragons truly were born able to manipulate the universe, just as the Aean’Hane do, and if they also had a high level of intelligence, an advanced society of their own, and all the other advantages of our humble civilization, then we have to face the obvious conclusion.”

Magister Tikhonov let a decidedly theatrical pause hang, then delivered it:

“None of us, human or Firstborn, would even exist,” he said. “Dragons wouldn’t merely be the ultimate predators. The descriptions of their appearance make that clear enough; as you rightly pointed out, those accounts are remarkably consistent even in folklore. They would simply enjoy total superiority. The Firstborn, like humans, would have had no room to evolve. The world would look much as it does now, but dragons would occupy eighty percent of it. And even if you and I had managed to evolve from primate ancestors into modern humans at all, we’d be living under entirely different conditions.”

The Magister paused, caught his breath, then returned to his favorite subject.

“What’s more, modern science has raised a new question. How would a dragon’s brain have to be structured, and what would it have to be capable of, to withstand constant Ley exposure of that magnitude?” Tikhonov picked up a long, charred stick and nudged the logs a little so the coals wouldn’t spill out of the fire pit. Smoke was one thing, but they had to hide the firelight itself as well. “Sustaining a dragon’s very existence would require a colossal amount of Ley, as much as a large steel mill consumes in a day. Not one of the natural Anomalies we’ve managed to discover and catalog over the centuries can withstand even a tenth of that load. It follows that, from the standpoint of both biology and Star science, the dragon is nothing more than a shared cultural myth rooted in the collective consciousness.”

“Then why, Lamp, do these myths, as you call them, turn up everywhere?” Zalessky gave the word myths a distinctly skeptical edge.

Rita and Bors murmured their agreement once more. Once again, they were not pressing Evlampiy because they enjoyed arguing with him or badgering him for details about his research. Every profession simply had its own ultimate prize. For Star Engineers, it was the Methods of Long-Range Communication. For businesspeople, it was a company of their own, one capable of competing with giants such as the now-defunct Bri-i-Men. In short, almost every profession had one.

For years, the “dragon” had been the ultimate prize for hunters. The chance to be the first person in modern history to discover the mythical creature. Many of those who had made a life of hunting Anomalies and the beasts of the Dead Lands might not even have given the subject a thought at first. But years passed, one season gave way to the next, and they too came down with dragon fever.

“Because people came into contact with one another long before railroads and modern ships.” The Magister set the stick aside and interlocked his fingers to illustrate his point. “We’ve exchanged information since time immemorial. Only the volume and speed of that exchange have changed; people have always been drawn to what is new, including new people. So cultures mingled, and...”

“I can think of one striking example of cultures mixing.” Bors let out a crude guffaw. “Look at Rita. Half her mug tells the whole story.”

“When you’re asleep, you filthy bastard, I’ll cut your dick off,” Rita said, more relish than anger in her voice. “I’ll leave your balls, though. That way you’ll want to fuck but won’t be able to. Though... I don’t think much would really change in your pathetic life.”

Bors laughed first. Then Rita herself joined in, and finally Zalessky chuckled too. Ardi had already grown used to the peculiar way hunters talked to one another, and the Cloaks were no different. Milar said that was how they coped with stress and fear. And sometimes with plain boredom.

“All right, gentlemen and Rita.” Zalessky finished eating his meat, wiped the knife on the grass and then on his own pants, and returned it to its sheath. “We’re up at dawn. Dar, you’ve got first watch. I trust your magic, of course, but an extra pair of eyes never hurts. Wake me in two hours.”

“All right.” Ardan nodded.

Dar Skofsky... He wondered who at the Black House was in charge of aliases. An odd sort of name.

“In the morning, we’ll decide how best to approach their camp and where we should even start looking for it.” Zalessky pulled off his jacket and draped it across his chest, then tugged his cowboy hat down over his eyes. “For now, let’s get some rest. While we still have the chance. Tomorrow... is another day.”

And the instant Zalessky, Rita, and Bors closed their eyes, they fell asleep. Their breathing evened out, their heartbeats slowed, and mere seconds later they had already settled into a peaceful, if light, sleep. Arkar could do that too. So could Milar.

They had both said that the first thing any soldier learns is how to fall asleep on command. In any position. In any situation. No one in the clearing had any ties to the Army, but apparently they lived much as soldiers did, so the hunters had learned the same trick: falling asleep at once, without all the tossing and turning.

Magister Tikhonov, naturally, had no such knack. So he unscrewed the cap of his flask and drank a little of the bracing brew Ardan had made for him back on the first day of their journey.

“You know, Captain, I think I’ve already lost about nine kilos.” Evlampiy pulled his knitted vest away from his side to make the point, showing how loose it was now. “Before I left, my wife kept saying how glad she was that I’d finally have to do more walking than just going downstairs to my study. Well, you know, from the bedroom to the study.”

Ardan didn’t know. Like most Star mages of his rank, Magister Tikhonov was well off. True, his home wasn’t in the Outskirts, but it was a fine house in one of the satellite towns surrounding the Metropolis. That was where people moved when they didn’t need to stay in the city all the time and had enough money to build a substantial house with its own boiler room.

“You’re absolutely sure the brew won’t do anything terrible to me?” Evlampiy asked yet again, shaking the flask.

“Of course, Magister Tikhonov,” Ardan replied yet again, exactly as he had before. “You have a very large reserve of... strength. So you won’t even notice any side effects when you stop taking the drug. Your body will simply burn off everything it has... accumulated.”

Evlampiy smiled and pressed a finger into his cheek.

“You may not believe me, Captain, but I used to be very thin.” He turned back to the fire and held his palms out to it. “Then I got married. My wife always had a delicious dinner waiting, and there was my desk, my inkwell and pen, and... somehow I didn’t even notice until I could no longer fit into my own clothes. Then I moved on to a second set, then a third. And when our child was born, I simply...” Evlampiy waved a hand, then propped his chin on that same hand. “I’d always thought I would escape the fate of my older colleagues in Star science and never end up with a belly. I was too sure of myself.”

A kind, plump man who loved his wife, his children, and dragons with all his heart. Imagine that. Dragons.

“Is that why you volunteered to go on the expedition?” Ardan asked.

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Evlampiy stared at Ard, startled. When he spoke, bewilderment colored his voice.

“Because of my obesity?”

“Sorry.” Ardi smiled, realizing his question hadn’t come out quite right. “I meant because of the dragons.”

“What made you think that, Captain?”

“The Winged-Horned,” Ardan said. “If they truly haven’t died out, or if they ever existed at all, then the way they fly must be at least somewhat like a dragon’s. And if you can find them and study them, you’ll have proof of your theory. That means a place on Senior Magister Borskov’s upcoming expedition.”

Evlampiy said nothing for several seconds, then gave a faint, restrained smile.

“That’s right, Captain. You’re very perceptive.” Tikhonov pulled his jacket tighter around himself. It, too, was now too large for him. “You see, I’m no field researcher, Captain. And certainly no brave war mage. To be honest, I only ever leave the house when my wife has had more than enough of the same four walls and the company of small children and their governess. Then we go into the city. Sometimes we even go to jazz concerts. Just recently, in fact, we went to the Arena to see Mrs. Tess Orman perform... oh, Egobar. Egobar now. Have you heard of her?”

“Not much,” Ardan replied evasively.

“An amazing singer.” Evlampiy smiled again. “And an excellent actress, too. It’s a shame we couldn’t get tickets to The Death of the King.”

“Mm-hmm,” was all Ardi said.

They fell silent for a while, listening to the logs crackle in the fire and watching the smoke seep under the tarp.

“Now you probably want to ask what someone like me is doing among people like you.” Evlampiy’s smile thinned a little. “Oh, the Light… Sometimes I get so scared it’s hard even to breathe.”

Magister Tikhonov’s heart raced so fast it was hard to distinguish one beat from the next. At times, the beats blurred into a rapid drumroll. But his heart wasn’t pounding like that because he was lying. Evlampiy truly was afraid.

“Honestly, I don’t know either,” the Magister said, answering the question he had left hanging. “In that moment, everything just came together. I felt as though I were watching myself from the outside. I even wanted to stop myself. To shout at myself: ‘What are you doing, you fool? You could get yourself killed. You have a wife and children. You wanted to start fixing up the garden this summer, and the car has started acting up again.’ But I never did. I suppose I got scared again. I just don’t know what I was afraid of, exactly.”

Ardan looked again at Evlampiy, who was short, plump, and every inch the archetypal scholar. Evlampiy truly was afraid. Terrified, his knees trembling. But could Ardan call him a coward? If anything, the opposite. Magister Evlampiy Tikhonov had proved himself one of the bravest people Ardi had met along the way. Most astonishing of all, Magister Tikhonov himself had no idea. No idea how much courage he had in him, hidden beneath his love of dragons, his excess weight, his shyness, and a life narrowed to his bedroom and his study.

“Go to sleep, Evlampiy Tikhonov,” Ardan breathed, infusing the words with his will.

In any other situation, influencing the mind of a Yellow mage without eye contact would have taken effort, even if his Stars held only the bare minimum of rays. But… Evlampiy was exhausted. Physically and emotionally. So he yawned, and only a few seconds later the Magister, wrapped in his jacket, was snoring peacefully on top of his own sleeping bag.

Why hadn’t Ardan helped Evlampiy sleep before, choosing instead to make a decoction? For the same reason Aean’Hane shouldn’t call down rain whenever a dry spell settled over the fields.

Why had Ardan helped now?

Because every now and then, Aean’Hane was still asked to let the heavens send down a little rain to save the harvest.

And not even Atta’nha knew where that line lay.

Ardan sighed, took out his own grimoire, and opened it to the chapter with his calculations for transmutational runic links. He returned to working out a new principle for creating seals. To build a theory of multi-dimensional seals, Ard needed neither reference books nor related research papers, though he had needed both for his work on transmutational runic links. All he needed was his imagination and, preferably, an arithmometer.

With no arithmometer, Ardan sharpened another pencil stub with his father’s knife and began writing out the supporting calculations in a thin, cramped hand.

For now, Ardan’s main task (aside from reaching the ninth sector; finding out what had happened to Marat’s squad; determining whether the Puppeteers were involved; and returning home to the Metropolis, preferably without destroying anything along the way) was to find a way to stabilize the structure. Of course, making the seals multi-dimensional still meant creating transmutational runic links, but even once Ardan had worked those links out completely, he still wouldn’t know how to use them to stabilize the structure. Because playing roulette every time, at the risk of frying his own brain, was no plan at all. And it certainly wouldn’t appeal to the other Star mages.

Yes, Ardan had no intention of keeping his research locked away in a cabinet at the Stables. He simply saw no point in it.

Ardi sighed and looked at the sky. Black and low, strewn with multicolored stars and thin streaks of dark cloud.

As always, wonder and magic drew Ardi away from the problems at hand. Unfortunately, that couldn’t last long.

***

“Fuck my life. I was really hoping Fuzzy Felt was the only thing that had attacked Marat and the others,” Rita said, then passed the binoculars down the line.

Bors lifted the binoculars to his eyes and let out a low whistle. Up ahead, there really was a camp, tucked into a deep ravine: the bed of a pond that had dried up after the tributaries feeding Cold Lake shifted course.

In some ways, it even resembled Second Station, with similar poles wrapped in Ley-wiring and running back to a bank of generators. Here, though, the generators sat directly beneath a sagging tarp instead of inside a shed. Several rested on wooden platforms, with fuel cans stacked neatly beside them.

Sled tracks ran through the clay toward the generator section. Wooden panels now covered them, and every so often people walked across those panels. They looked little different from the Hunters themselves: the same leather jackets, weather-beaten faces, dirty boots, and the same mix of weapons: revolvers, hatchets, and knives, with only the occasional rifle.

After watching the camp for half an hour, Mr. Zalessky’s party had counted about ten people in all, which did not quite square with the story told by the Hunter who had died at Second Station.

“That’s a mage,” Bors breathed after a brief pause. “And the fucker’s wearing Imperial Star epaulets!”

As for Fuzzy Felt, that was the name of a particularly nasty anomaly. It looked... like a fluffy dog’s tail. Or maybe a roll of wool ready to be spun into thick yarn. A tail with no dog attached, mind you. And a tail that actually walked. On two thin, frog-like legs.

When it shook itself, it released spores into the air that caused very lifelike hallucinations in anyone who breathed them in. That was how Fuzzy Felt defended itself and attacked at the same time.

No one had any idea exactly how nature had produced something so bizarre. Likewise, no one knew how an entire illegal camp had come to exist in the ninth sector, mage and all.

The man in the blue cloak wore Star epaulets that spoke volumes: five rays, five again, then six. He was busy at the generator bay. He had set his staff aside and put on a special mask and leather gloves. Now he was working on one of the generators. Apparently, vibrations from the unstable mounting had bent one of the blades in the lower rows.

The nastiest breakdown of all, one that demanded considerable dexterity, plus plain old long arms. Unless, that is, you stripped off the entire casing, dismantled the walls, and pulled out the whole combustion chamber to make the blade rows easier to reach.

As Professor Convel liked to say, “Engineers and mechanics are natural enemies.”

“Ard,” Zalessky whispered to Ardi. “Can you hit him from here?”

Ardan gauged the distance. It was roughly three hundred meters from the spruce woods, choked with broken branches and toppled trees left by the recent storm, to the poachers’ camp (call them poachers for now). Even if he used an Ice Bullet modified for speed and range, he still couldn’t be sure the Blue mage, with that distinctly “military” number of rays on his Star epaulets, hadn’t cast a passive shield on himself. Or that he didn’t possess an enchanted Star artifact, one he regularly recharged in the mornings. Either form of protection would make the shot uncertain; the only question was which one he was facing.

Of course, the military loved to debate the finer points of getting through either kind of protection, and whether the attack or the defense took shape first…

Something to think about tomorrow, Ardan told himself. He pulled himself up short. Then he answered aloud.

“Maybe, but I can’t say for sure.”

Zalessky nodded.

“Then that’s off the table,” Zalessky breathed. He adjusted his glass eye.

“What if…”

“What if you did less talking and more thinking, Bors?” Rita cut him off and took the binoculars back. “Then you’d realize that our only advantage is the element of surprise.”

Bors muttered a few curses and shot Rita a sour look, but she was once again focused on the camp.

Ardi couldn’t quite make sense of the relationship between these two. At times he thought they were friends. At other times, it seemed only one thing kept Bors and Rita from a bloody fight: the knowledge that Zalessky would kill them both if it came to that.

“Drab, this is still nonsense.” Rita lowered the binoculars again and handed them back to her commander. “Based on everything Ant told us, may the Eternal Angels receive him, there should be at least a hundred of these bastards here. Not a paltry ten. Fine, say there’s a Blue mage, but that still doesn’t explain... It doesn’t explain anything.”

Zalessky took the binoculars and studied the camp for a while. A little way behind them, Magister Tikhonov breathed heavily and tried to put on a brave face. He had chosen a rather strange way of going about it, of course. Considerably thinner now, his face drawn, Tikhonov chewed on his jacket cuff and kept glancing at the seals carved into his staff.

Not the cheapest option, but a perfectly standard general-purpose staff made of lightweight aluminum with the bare minimum of Ertalain. Just enough to keep it from bending or losing too much Ley during casting. Every scientist who didn’t practice Military craft used one.

The only seal on Magister Tikhonov’s staff that might have helped in this situation was a Universal Shield modified for the Yellow Star. Imperial military doctrine held that mages like Tikhonov were supposed to make sure they survived the first few seconds of a fight, then pray to the Eternal Angels that a war mage was nearby.

So... perhaps over the past two years, Ardan had grown to understand, even accept, what Mart Borskov had done when orcs attacked the northerners’ caravan.

“Maybe the others went to the Park,” Zalessky suggested, handing the binoculars to Ard.

Ard refused once again. He didn’t need them, and under the circumstances, maintaining his cover had already begun to seem rather foolish. So Ardi worried less and less about passing himself off as Captain Skofsky. He did still keep the Water Mask on his face because it didn’t cost him much energy, but that was all.

For now, though, the others had more pressing concerns than their companion’s strange behavior. Besides, they still thought he was concussed.

“Not the whole camp, Drab,” Bors countered, quite reasonably. “There’s only the bare minimum here, just enough to keep the camp running.”

“Bors is right,” Rita agreed, taking the binoculars back. “Four... five... seven pavilions. Eight tents. A field kitchen. A latrine. A shower... Damn it, Drab, it’s like they copied Second Station! Do you understand what that means?”

After a few seconds, Zalessky spoke through clenched teeth.

“It means we’ve got about a hundred bastards roaming the Park, and who knows what kind they are. They’re the ones who sent Marat and his men to the Eternal Angels.”

“We still haven’t seen the bodies!” Rita shot back heatedly without lowering her binoculars.

No one objected or tried to start an argument. What would have been the point? They had a completely different task now. A far more serious one.

“Any ideas, Drab?” Bors asked the question that mattered most.

Everyone turned to Zalessky at once. Sleeping Spirits, Ard wouldn’t have wanted to trade places with him. He gripped his broadsword and revolver tightly in his deformed hands. It must have been hard for him to breathe. An unimaginable weight of responsibility. And not only for the living...

Ardi couldn’t quite understand how anyone in full possession of their faculties could want a position like that. And it wasn’t just about commanding the hunters. Memories of the Conclave had stirred, too.

Accept that he was Chieftain of the Alcade Tribes? What nonsense.

What nonsense.

Ardi also realized he was nervous. Ever since he was little, whenever something worried him deeply, he would start thinking about anything at all except the thing itself.

“We need a prisoner,” Zalessky said at last, his voice grave. “We can speculate all we want, but without a prisoner...”

“There’s a Blue mage there, Drab, and—”

“I know!” Zalessky snapped, cutting off Rita, who was clearly alarmed. “But without a prisoner, we pack up this instant and run for Second Station, then on to First Station, as fast as our legs will carry us. Then we sit and wait for the military, praying to the Eternal Angels that these bastards don’t do anything here that forces our colleagues who patrol the Dead Lands to set up a Perimeter afterward. Is that understood?”

So that was what Zalessky feared... If foreign saboteurs were involved after all, they might try to create the equivalent of the Dead Lands in the Northern National Park of Natural Anomalies.

“Is that even possible?” Bors asked the question on everyone’s mind.

Instead of answering, Zalessky turned to Magister Tikhonov and pinned him with his lone eye. Tikhonov met that hard gaze for several moments, but soon gave in.

“That information is classified, but the Hunters’ Guild sent the Black House a report laying out what the Guild suspects.”

Ardi barely kept himself from asking, “What suspicions? And what report, in the name of the Sleeping Spirits?” But...

“What suspicions? And what report, in the name of the Eternal Angels?” Rita said almost exactly what Ardan had been thinking.

“The Guild suspects it may be possible. We don’t know for certain; this is only speculation based on circumstantial evidence. But the Ngians, together with scientists from Tazidah, may be researching the phenomenon of the Dead Lands.”

“We’re researching it too.” Bors frowned.

“Yes, but we aren’t trying to re-create it,” Magister Tikhonov corrected him. He shuddered despite himself, as if the very thought frightened him. “And according to our Guild, that’s exactly what they’re doing!”

“Re-create the fucking Dead Lands?” Rita nearly shouted, but caught herself in time. “Why the hell would anyone want to do that?”

“To fill their vaults with ingredients,” Zalessky answered for Magister Tikhonov. “Because they’re complete psychos. Because between the two, only Tazidah has any Dead Lands, and even theirs are small, tucked away on some eastern peninsula. Or maybe they mean to turn our entire border into one unbroken expanse of Dead Lands. Don’t forget Congress, Rita. The Charter of the North and all that. We’re living in a new reality out here now. And as we all know, it’s not exactly an optimistic one.”

“So that’s why you came tearing out here, huh?” Rita narrowed her eyes. “Because there’s reason to fear the Park could become some kind of testing ground.”

“And I’m not the only one worried.” Zalessky nodded. “Or do you think the Crown would’ve given the Hunters’ Guild enough funding to field twice as many hunters as usual just for the Winged-Horned?”

Rita fell silent. Once again, Ardan saw what His Imperial Majesty and the Colonel had in common with the Puppeteers who opposed them. Both sides were constantly trying to make a single move serve several goals at once, and they often even managed it.

Perhaps the Colonel hadn’t even believed from the start that the Puppeteers could be operating in the Northern National Park of Natural Anomalies. Maybe the Black House and the Crown had simply wanted to verify the report from the Hunters’ Guild. A report neither Ard nor Milar had known a thing about.

“That’s the job, gentlemen. Everyone knows only what they need to know.”

“If I may, retreat seems the most logical option,” Magister Tikhonov ventured.

“It’ll take too long for the army to get here.” Zalessky shook his head. “We need a prisoner we can question.”

“What makes you think anyone there knows anything at all?” Rita hissed. “They could just be ordinary mercenaries, or some lowlifes hired for ten exes.”

“That’s probably exactly what they are.” Zalessky nodded.

“Then what are you...” Rita began. She shifted her gaze from her commander to the Blue mage poking around near the generators, then back to Zalessky, then again to the Blue mage. “You want to take their mage prisoner.”

She wasn’t even asking; she sounded certain. Her tone, to borrow Zalessky’s phrasing, wasn’t particularly optimistic. Quite the opposite. She had the look of someone who’d just realized she might be walking into her own funeral.

“We’re gonna die, Drab,” Rita breathed.

“We’ve got a Blue mage of our own.” Zalessky nodded toward Ardan.

“A Concussed Blue mage!” Rita, Bors, and even Magister Tikhonov whispered in horrified unison.

Zalessky turned to Ardan.

“Dar, can you handle him?” Zalessky asked with more than a little hope in his voice. “I saw you tear Rogov apart in a shield duel.”

“In a shield duel,” Ardan repeated pointedly, then thought for a moment. “In a fight, I might be able to send him to the Eternal Angels, but take him prisoner…”

Ardan shook his head. True, he’d gained some experience fighting Blue mages at the Arena: exactly one sparring bout, and that was it! And that wasn’t even counting Miss Agatha Spree. If not for the rules of Magical Boxing, every one of the others would have sent Ard to join his ancestors on the paths of the Sleeping Spirits several times over.

It wasn’t as though much had changed since then. Sure, Ardi had spent an enormous amount of time training with the “Tony” dolls in the Stables, but they were only dolls! They didn’t know how to hit back! They had no arsenal of their own to surprise Ard with: no unfamiliar seals, tactics, combinations, or any of the other things war mages spent decades of their lives mastering!

”We don’t really have a choice…”

”Do you have an alchemical potion that lets you see in the dark?” Ardi cut him off, opening his grimoire to the spell he’d been refining to fight Blue mages.

A funny bit of irony: of all the seals described in Nicholas the Stranger’s book, the military seals were the very ones Ardi hadn’t wanted to study or commit to memory. A few years later, though, they had become almost the only seals he used.

”In ordinary darkness, or…?”

”Or,” Ardan said, confirming Zalessky’s guess.

A diagram of the modified seal appeared on the book’s pages. He’d read about it on the train while traveling to Metropolis with Yonatan and the others.

”Cold Shadow,” a creation of Nicholas the Stranger, was several centuries out of date.

But with Ardi’s modifications, it would strengthen his Resonance-based combination. After all, his time at the club with Lucas, Agatha, and the others hadn’t been wasted.

”There’s one,” Zalessky confirmed. ”But it lasts only a minute. Give or take.”

”Then we’ve got a chance.” Ardan looked from the pages of the book to the Blue Star mage’s back. No referee. No rules. No protective dome over the Arena. ”Give or take.”

Magister Tikhonov hiccuped.