Book II. Chapter 142. Once Again - Resonance

Two men climbed out of the rubble, sending up clouds of brick dust as they shoved debris aside.

The first was tall and gaunt, with a long neck, an elongated face, and a thin, drooping mustache. He looked like a beanpole dressed in a Blue cloak. Ard, forever pinning nicknames on every new person he met, christened him Beanpole on the spot. The second was squat and thickset, with a clean-shaven head and a sturdy, knobby chin. He looked more like a bug-eyed punching bag than a man. So, without giving it much thought, Ardan privately dubbed him Kettle.

Both bandits wore military-pattern Blue cloaks, and the style was fairly new. Even their movements were surprisingly well coordinated. Ardan had the sense that these two had been fighting as a pair far longer than Melin and Rogov themselves had served in the Hunters’ Guild.

“Skofsky...” Rogov grated, barely audible. He did not turn. “The generators?”

“Fifteen minutes,” Ardan replied just as softly. “Maybe less.”

“Then let’s not waste time.” Melin bared his bloodied teeth. “We’ll make it quick.”

Lord Aversky, may the Eternal Angels receive him, often said that in a real fight, “quick” could mean anything from the first seal to the moment you died. Ardan therefore regarded Melin’s promise with some skepticism but did not object. He only checked Orlovsky’s Shield, dozens of translucent discs shimmering before him and the motionless Taisia, then reinforced it with another contour, spending two more rays of the Green Star.

Beanpole snapped his staff up first.

A pale blue seal flared beneath his boots, its runic arrays forming a delicate, lacelike pattern. Squinting, Ard found, to his own surprise, that he could make out its main structures without much trouble. A free array at the base, governing the element of air; a static contour around the perimeter to fix the wave’s direction of travel; a matrix of frequency parameters crammed into the seal’s upper-right corner; and a fine modulation function, neatly inscribed to alter the sound wave’s wavelength in midflight.

An acoustic blade, invisible to ordinary eyes and inaudible even to a matabar, tore across the square. But Rogov struck his bent staff against the cobblestones a fraction of a second before Beanpole completed the casting. A red-and-gold circle flared beneath the captain’s scorched, battered boots. At its center lay a matrix of density arrays, with four runic sockets at the corners controlling particle dispersion.

A dense cloud of smoke black as pitch burst from the head of his staff, laden with tiny particles of soot and coal dust. A moment later, the roiling cloud condensed into a translucent wall. The enemy’s invisible acoustic blade slammed into it. Only the residual rumble reached Rogov, making the captain stagger and spit a gob of pinkish saliva onto the cobblestones.

“Light it!” he barked without looking back.

Melin stood shoulder to shoulder with Rogov, already rapping his staff against the ground. A small red seal, barely eighteen inches across, opened beneath his feet. A dense runic ignition array pulsed at its center, with a temperature-gradient matrix suspended from it. A needle-thin stream of scarlet flame burst from the head of his staff. The instant the flame entered Rogov’s smoke, it transformed the barrier. The carbon suspension was saturated with free Ley spilling from the burning generators in the basement; when it caught, it went up with the fury of a forest fire. The black smoke became a wall of roaring fire racing straight toward Beanpole and Kettle like the wide-open maw of a beast.

The generators were flooding the surrounding air with purified Ley, allowing all four to draw on it instead of their accumulators.

The battle erupted. As Ardan watched it unfold, he gradually came to understand why Lord Aversky had been in no hurry to teach him coordinated combat. It simply required far more time, not to mention training partners.

Rogov would cast a Shield Charm, which Melin would immediately transform into an attack spell. Then Melin himself would cast a protective seal, and Rogov would use it as the basis for his own attack. That was how they traded roles with every casting. Even without knowing the finer points of paired combat, Ardan could see that their coordination had been honed by years of serving together in the Imperial Army.

Ard had nonetheless spent several evenings in the Library at the Grand, poring over Lord-General and Senior Magister Stepan Berso’s theoretical works on paired combat formations. Now, for the first time, he saw the rules and doctrines set down on the printed page take physical form.

Melin and Rogov worked together with the easy rapport of a seasoned jazz duo, like Tess’s musicians onstage at Bruce. Each captain played his own line, yet at the same time each complemented the other.

Kettle, who had been shielding Beanpole, struck his staff against the scorched earth once more. A broad green seal opened beneath his feet, its triple contour encircling a central runic array that governed the density of the medium. Along the seal’s edges, free directional runes flickered, altering themselves from moment to moment. Ard saw, in that instant, how deftly Kettle applied the basic technique for revising a spell at speed. A transparent whirlwind, barely visible to the naked eye, burst from the seal and at once raced to meet Melin and Rogov’s wall of fire.

The impact dulled his hearing for a moment. Fire and wind crashed together in midair and, for one long second, blurred into a hazy band of plasma. Within it, the oncoming rush of wind tore sparks of flame apart. A moment later, the wall of flame was ripped to shreds and flung back toward the captains in uneven, ragged tatters of living fire.

Melin was already forming the next seal. A new pattern flared on the ground, half-hidden by a curtain of dust that rose almost to his knees. This one held a transformation matrix that altered the lingering structure of the previous spell as it continued to unfold, along with three static runic arrays that governed something Ardan had no time to identify.

As the new equations took hold, the rebounding fire swept around the captains in an arc and surged toward their opponents once more, now divided into three cords, each aimed at a different point. One flew at Beanpole’s head, another at Kettle’s belly, and the third skimmed only a few centimeters above the ground, aiming for their opponents’ legs.

Beanpole clearly had no time to conjure anything, so he answered at once with Resonance.

An unseen fan of sound, pulled from the remnants of his earlier acoustic spell, swept across the Square and sliced diagonally through all three fiery cords. Another sound wave rolled down the street with such force that tiles flew off the roof of a squat warehouse three buildings away and shattered into brown rubble across the dusty cobbles. Somewhere behind the veil of Fog, beams groaned plaintively, unable to bear the resonant load. In the next house, every last pane of glass shattered and rained down onto the cobblestones with a ringing clatter.

But one cord of fire, or rather, what remained of it, still broke through. It licked at Beanpole’s right shoulder and, before he could raise a defense, burned through the sleeve of his battered jacket all the way to his skin. Beanpole ground his teeth and adjusted his grip on the staff without shifting so much as a millimeter. At the same time, Kettle moved to cover him and struck again with his own staff. A compact, whirling funnel, something like a tornado, burst from the tip of the staff. A complex, multilevel seal with four nested runic arrays shimmered beneath the dark vortex. Ard could decipher only the most basic parameters: pressure, angular velocity, Perimeter density, and some other function that allowed the structure to sustain itself.

The transparent tornado, visible only in the way it warped the air, began spinning above the ground and hurtled toward the captains with astonishing speed.

If Rogov hadn’t brought his staff down and released his spell in time, there would have been nothing left of the captains or of several houses behind them. Rogov raised a wall of smoke in front of them both. This time, though, it had multiple layers: two static reflection contours and a whole constellation of absorbing elements powered almost to the limit. Any more strain, and the seal would inevitably Break. The tornado passed through the first layer, losing most of its speed. It forced its way through the second, shrinking as it went. By the time it reached the third, it was no longer a tornado, only a slow, heavy breath of autumn wind, barely strong enough to ruffle their hair.

But apparently, that was exactly what Kettle had been trying to achieve.

The instant the wall of smoke absorbed the blow, Kettle struck again with his staff. A sudden rush of compressed air swept into the smoky haze, scattering the coal dust in every direction.

The very Shield Charms meant to stop the whirlwind instead spread it over the entire street in a fine, cutting drizzle of searing-hot soot particles driven by Kettle’s wind. A trap calculated almost to perfection.

Ardan had no illusions. If he had been in Rogov and Melin’s position, he would have met his father on the paths of the Sleeping Spirits at that very moment.

Rogov barely managed to conjure a defensive seal beneath his feet, built on a reflection array and a dense static contour of ten runic links. The seal rose around him in a rounded dome that looked something like a knight’s helmet. The spell deflected the main rush of cutting dust, but its edge still clipped Rogov’s left side. Dark blood welled through a hole in his jacket and quickly spread.

Melin, though, was a fraction too slow.

Melin managed to raise his staff and begin conjuring a shield, but the trailing edge of the wind-driven drizzle, thick with coal dust and glass grit, struck his right hand before he could complete the seal.

The air cracked as if a branch had snapped. Melin’s hand, severed from his forearm, went flying off to the side along with a broken piece of his bent staff. Melin swayed but stayed upright, pressing the stump to his chest with his good hand. Blood fountained from the stump in a wide jet, drenching his leather jacket.

“Melin!”

Rogov struck the ground with his staff so hard the tip nearly bit into the soil, then conjured Resonance from the remnants of his own fire, smoke, Sparks, and smoldering heat. A vast mushroom of black smoke burst from Rogov’s staff and billowed above the street, half a block wide and shot through with red veins of fire. Small dark flashes pulsed inside the spell, breaking the blaze into hundreds of separate pockets. The air around them was so saturated with Ley it had become superheated steam. Wherever the steam met the suspended coal dust, the dust began to ignite on its own.

Beanpole and Kettle immediately raised some sort of intricate shared shield shaped like a ship’s ram. Beanpole created a sonic barrier that reflected Resonance’s shock waves, and Ardan noted with detached interest that the barrier took shape not as a solid wall but as thousands of minuscule pearlescent plates that broke the enemy spell’s energy into a multitude of separate pulses. Kettle added a squall of cold wind. Inside it, two opposing currents of different densities spun, drawing heat from the flames and carrying it off in opposite directions.

A complex, multilayered structure, the kind Ardan had only ever seen illustrated in theoretical works on war magic.

The bandits’ shield held. The surrounding houses did not. The smoke ballooned above the street, then rolled over the roofs of the neighboring buildings. Three wooden structures standing downwind went up all at once like dry kindling. Fire raced across their wooden roofs so quickly that within half a minute Ardan heard the crack of collapsing rafters and distant cries from somewhere farther down the block.

Somewhere, a cow began bawling piteously, then fell silent, then lowed again. Ard silently offered it a brief apology and forced himself not to think about the people who might still be inside the burning houses.

Under cover of the smoke screen, Rogov finally left his position. During those few seconds of battle, he had not allowed himself to move once.

Rogov dashed over to Melin, seized him by the collar, and hauled him a couple of steps to the very edge of the street, straight beneath the charred stone cornice of a former grocery store. Right there, without wasting a second, he yanked off his belt and bound it tight around Melin’s wounded arm, above the elbow.

“Hold on, beard, hold on. I’m about to hea—”

“Don’t waste time.” Melin forced the words through gritted teeth. “Finish them off first, then heal me. Otherwise, we’ll both die here. We’ve done some real damage. You should be able to pull more power from the Stars than they can. They’ll reach Saturation any moment now.”

“You’re a fool, Melin.”

“And you’re the idiot, Rogov. Go.”

And Rogov went.

Back where he’d been, he drove his staff into the pavement and unleashed such a cascade of seals that even Ard couldn’t analyze them fast enough. No, Rogov wasn’t even half as fast as Aversky. But working spells this intricate at that speed, Ard himself might have managed only two for every three Rogov cast.

He was truly lucky the Peacock had turned out to be a military engineer and not a real war mage.

Free runic arrays drifted above the pavement in dense, trembling clouds. Static contours flared and died in less than the blink of an eye, while parameter matrices shifted as the spell unfolded, as if they could hear someone else’s orders.

And here was the most terrifying part: Ard could use this method of conjuring to create a dozen different seals, but Rogov fused them into a single seal!

Fire, smoke, ash, and heat twined together above the street into a single creature, like a colossal serpent of flame with a dozen heads. Each head carried an inscribed targeting array; together, they converged on a single opponent along separate precomputed trajectories. Beanpole managed to turn aside two heads with sound blades and split a third with a directed acoustic pulse. But the fourth passed beneath his shield, diving all the way down to the pavement, then burst up from below, directly beneath his feet.

Beanpole screamed.

A tongue of fire pierced clean through his right thigh, burning through muscle and tendon all the way to the bone. Beanpole swayed but stayed upright, propped up by his staff, while foul, greasy smoke billowed from the charred hole in his leg.

Kettle tried to cover Beanpole. Kettle conjured a broad, active wind shield in front of him, then hurled it at Rogov as if he meant to skip a stone across the surface of a lake. The spell was a dense disk of compressed air, a booming echo vibrating at its center. The disk whistled over the pavement, slicing through stone slabs and shearing off what remained of the cast-iron fence.

Rogov countered with a seal of his own, a complex chain of mirrored runic arrays that reflected the air disk back at Kettle. Kettle knocked his own disk aside with a counter-gust, but doing so cost him precious fractions of a second and more Ley.

Kettle didn’t stop, though. Three more disks like the first shot from his staff at Rogov, one after another, each slightly smaller than the last but faster, and each coming from a different angle, so Rogov couldn’t protect himself with the same type of shield.

Rogov sent the first back with the same mirrored seal. He blocked the second with a curtain of smoke so dense that the disk stuck fast in it, like a knife in wax. He met the third with a cone of superheated air that sent the air disk back. Kettle easily dispelled his own spell, but once again it cost him time and Ley while Beanpole recovered.

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Rogov saw that Kettle was nearing the dangerous threshold of Saturation. Burning through generators rather than accumulators made no difference; the effect was the same. He struck for the last time. He drove his staff into the pavement, activated the final major seal in his combat repertoire, and a column of flame as tall as three men flared above Kettle. At Rogov’s feet, a concentric seal shimmered with a triple temperature matrix. At its center, Ard made out an inordinately complex containment construct, the kind he rarely encountered in another mage’s work. It kept the flame from spreading outward and forced all the flame’s energy to converge at a single point.

The column slammed down, contracting into a tight cone of fire, and engulfed Kettle before he could put up any defense at all. He vanished inside the flames for two long moments and tried to raise a wind barrier, but he couldn’t form even half the runic array. When the column died, only a black, shapeless heap remained on the pavement. A choking, sickly-sweet odor curled from it, one Ard had known since the caves of Bear’s Rift.

Beanpole watched Kettle die without batting an eye.

“More for me,” he mouthed.

Beanpole balanced on his one good leg, leaning on his staff. New threads of Ley were already reaching out from the head of the staff, weaving themselves into an extraordinarily complex composite seal. Ard read the wave’s parameters, its frequency and amplitude, and realized Beanpole was preparing a sonic blast powerful enough to reduce Rogov, Melin, and the whole block around them to a heap of humming rubble. Beanpole had evidently decided he had nothing left to lose and chosen to expend all his remaining strength.

But at that moment, Melin, who until then had been sitting under the eaves and clutching his stump, raised his broken staff in his left hand. He was on the brink of Saturation, and his one remaining hand could barely hold the staff, let alone wield it properly. But as Ard realized a moment later, Melin had been holding his real trump card in reserve all along.

Resonance compressed all the invisible Ley that was slowly fading from the air around Melin into one dense, brilliant point. The seal beneath his feet blazed with an almost white light, while shreds of earlier spells began to flicker in the air, drawn into the broken staff.

A fist-sized sphere of superheated air, compressed until it was as dense as stone, burst from the broken staff toward Beanpole. The thing drifted forward, oddly slow and almost lazy, and looked utterly harmless, but Ard knew perfectly well that the deceptively small sphere held enough energy to punch through tank armor. That seal had been designed for exactly that purpose.

Beanpole saw the sphere and tried to raise a sonic shield, but his half-manifested seal collapsed under the pressure of Rogov’s Resonance as Rogov came to Melin’s aid. The sphere struck Beanpole in the chest and passed straight through him, leaving a neat, round hole with charred edges in his cloak. Beanpole remained standing for another moment, staring at his chest in disbelief…

“Shame… all that… money…” Then he slowly sank to the cobblestones and never moved again.

Silence hung over the street. In the silence, every sound stood out with startling clarity: the crackle of burning houses, the distant shouts of the surviving bandits on the rooftops, and the soft, ragged breathing of the two captains who remained in the middle of the ravaged district. One stood leaning on his staff, his somber gaze fixed on the ground at his feet. The other sat beneath an eave, pressing the stump of his arm to his chest. Blood was already drying into a dark crust on the coarse fabric of his jacket.

Ardan immediately opened his grimoire, calculated the parameters, and cast a simple healing seal. At once, he felt his weary muscles begin to relax. The healing seal did its work. The wound in his lower back closed, but Ard still struggled to breathe, and every breath brought a sharp pain in his side. Using his staff for support, he pushed himself up onto his right knee. He was just about to call out to the captains when he suddenly heard an unpleasant sound, one that had already become all too familiar.

The dry click of a rifle bolt being worked. Then another. And another.

On the roofs of the surviving houses that framed the square, dark silhouettes began to rise into view. The riflemen had waited patiently in their hiding places for the magical firefight to end, unwilling to be caught in an errant blast of fire or wind. Once they saw the fighting was over, they began taking up firing positions. Four silhouettes appeared at first, then seven, then a dozen. At some point, Ardan stopped counting.

“Rogov! Melin! Over here!” Ardan willed the translucent disks into a tight mesh, but he couldn’t extend them far enough to reach the captains.

The first bullet whistled through the air and struck a paving stone two paces from Melin, throwing up a fountain of stone chips. The second passed too high, but the third smacked against the pavement right at Rogov’s boots.

“Run, beard, run! Come on!” Rogov caught Melin under his uninjured shoulder. Together they rushed toward Ard’s shimmering bluish mesh dome. They stumbled over the tattered hems of their cloaks and left a trail of blood behind them.

Then a full volley erupted from the rooftops overhead. Five, maybe six shots blended into one dry crack. Bullets snapped against the dome from different angles, spraying showers of white sparks. Again and again, a bullet vanished along with the disk it struck, and the next disk took its place.

Melin and Rogov lurched into the shelter of the dome and collapsed onto their knees beside Ard. Both were breathing hard. Rogov’s red-bearded face looked even grayer and sootier than usual, while Melin could barely keep himself upright. He sagged sideways, bracing himself on the paving stones with his good hand.

“Skofsky.” Still clutching the bent staff in both hands, Rogov looked up at Ard. For the first time since they’d met, the familiar arrogance had vanished from his gaze. “Not bad.”

Ardan only nodded because he still couldn’t speak. Above them, the dome shuddered beneath the hail of lead. Somewhere beyond the street, in the darkness between the burning warehouses, boots were already pounding and gun bolts clacking. Worse still, rainbow-hued light continued to stream out of the hotel basement some seventy meters directly ahead. That meant the generators were drawing ever closer to the threshold at which the chain reaction described in the protocols would begin. It would end with the entire building and part of the street being blown sky-high.

The fight had lasted twenty seconds at most, yet it still wasn’t over. Quite the opposite. But that was exactly why Ardan had asked Zalessky to have them deploy.

Click.

“Think you can get a shield up before this...”

Ardan stared at Taisia Shpritz in surprise. She had come to and now held a scorched revolver at arm’s length. One of the many explosions from the mages’ duel must have flung it within reach. She had the muzzle pressed directly against Ard’s temple, the hammer already cocked.

“...Mr. Mole?”

“Damn it, Taisia, do you really have to find out right now?” Rogov shouted. He gestured with an open hand, first toward the wounded Melin, who was whimpering faintly, then toward the rooftops where the shooters were firing down on them. “While we’re under fire? And with Unmir wounded?”

“I got too close, Alton!” Taisia shouted back, straining to be heard over the roar of gunfire. She pressed the revolver’s barrel even harder against Ard’s temple. “Who? Who killed my father?”

Ardan felt as if he were asleep. Not merely asleep, but caught in a terrible fever that had tangled his thoughts with warped reality and with something else entirely, something insane.

The gunmen made no effort to conserve ammunition. Fortunately, Lord Aversky had been right: Blue mages generally couldn’t care less about firearms. Enough shields wheeled around Ard and the others to stop another hundred rounds.

On the other hand...

“If you shoot me, then—”

“Don’t even think about it!” Alton Rogov planted one torn boot on Ardan’s staff, pressing the staff against the exposed skin of his foot. As long as the staff touched someone else’s body, and therefore someone else’s Ley, Ardan couldn’t manifest a single seal.

“...then the shields will vanish, and you’ll be riddled with bullets,” Ardan finished, though he hadn’t even been planning to manifest anything. “Someone has put you under a spell or drugged you, Taisia. You’re obviously not thinking straight—”

“Shut up!” Miss Shpritz shouted, a feverish light blazing in her furious eyes. “As soon as you showed up in the capital, all kinds of shit started happening. Baliero! Dead children in the sewers! Churches blown apart! The Airship! And then you were seen in Larand, and with Shanti’Ra at the Delpas transfer station! Not to mention the rumors about some Speaker driving off a demon in a small town, like in a fairy tale, and about something else connected to the Conclave! Oh, right, I almost forgot: you nearly blew the Tazidahian embassy apart!”

Sleeping Spirits... Was the Colonel aware that a civilian investigative journalist had access to information many Black House staffers didn’t? The only events she’d left out were those at the Baliero Concert Hall, but they had been classified with such zeal that there might not even be ten people in the entire country who knew the details.

“I know how this looks from the outside, but—”

Who?! Killed?! My?! Father?!”

“I have no idea!” Ardan snapped, unable to contain himself, and batted the revolver aside.

A shot cracked. The bullet ricocheted off the wall and grazed Ardan’s shoulder.

“Are you out of your mind, Taisia?” Ard shouted, nearly losing his focus on the seal.

Orlovsky’s Shields flickered, and one of the bandits’ bullets passed dangerously close to Melin’s head. Melin groaned and pressed the bleeding stump tighter against his chest.

Taisia put the revolver away.

“You won’t catch me off guard again, mole.”

“If I were really a mole, do you think they’d ever have let me out of their dungeons? You’d never even have seen me,” Ardan roared, jabbing a finger at one of the shields as it broke apart. “And their ammunition may not be endless, but neither is my shield! This is sheer idiocy!”

“I don’t believe a word you say!” Miss Shpritz roared. “Coincidences like this don’t happen! They don’t!”

Ardan only spread his hands helplessly.

“Then why are you still alive?” he asked.

Taisia blinked several times.

“Right now—” Ardan sighed. He brought his wildly hammering heart under control, then continued in what he hoped was an icy voice. “I can kill you, Rogov, and Melin.”

“He’s right, actually,” Melin rasped. “We told you that right from the start, six months ago, Taisia: the Black House would never have overlooked such an obvious candidate.”

“And if he’d wanted to, he could have crippled me two months ago,” Rogov chimed in. “This mess, with all that demonic Speaker stuff mixed in, would surprise even a Yellow mage.”

“And what... would he have to gain... by saving us...” Melin swayed, shook his head, and pulled himself together. “Damn it. We have to decide what to do, guys. Otherwise, I’m going to bleed out right here.”

“Just shut up...” Taisia pursed her lips as a single tear rolled down her cheek. “Coincidences like this can’t happen...”

“Taisia, you’ve seen all kinds of things yourself. So have we. So apparently coincidences like this really do happen once in a while.”

Without a word, Ardan looked from the disheveled Miss Shpritz to Rogov and Melin, then back again.

“Only six months ago...” And the way they spoke to each other. The fact that they called each other by their first names wasn’t even the point. It was more that they seemed like old acquaintances. Very close ones, at that.

Then something clicked in Ard’s mind. How could Miss Shpritz, while she was in the capital, possibly have learned about a field brothel and corruption somewhere in the far reaches of the borderlands? If, as with the equations, he discarded the most complicated hypotheses, the simplest answer was the only one left.

Miss Shpritz had been told about it.

But who had told her?

“It was you...” Ardan drew the words out as he looked at the two captains. “You two gave Miss Shpritz the information about the baron-colonel’s corruption and the brothel.”

“And it cost us our commissions.” Rogov nodded.

“But the Hunters’ Guild pays even better than the army.” Melin snorted and jerked to one side as another bullet shattered the shield. “Taisia, you didn’t pay us enough to have this conversation under fire.”

Ardan couldn’t help remembering Fifth Street in Baliero. He’d been under fire there, too, talking with Liza-Alla, who had turned out to be a mutant serving the Puppeteers, the very ones who had orchestrated...

Ard’s train of thought came to a halt, and he turned to Taisia.

“There weren’t any Puppeteers...” he breathed. “The expedition has nothing at all to do with them. You just... just wanted to expose me...”

“And I—”

“Damn it! Taisia!” Ardan flung Rogov’s torn boot off his staff, then sprang to his feet. “I’ve spent three months stuck out here with you miserable idiots! Instead of studying at the Grand! Instead of maybe helping Captain Pnev and the department! Instead of doing my research! Instead of working at the pharmacy! Instead of, oh, Sleeping Spirits, living quietly and peacefully with my wife! You yanked me out here! To the edge of the Empire! Made me come all this way by train and put up with your endless, completely inappropriate sarcasm! Just because... just because you suffer from the very same smartest-person-in-the-room complex as Lord Aversky! Do you understand that if I don’t curse you out in the nastiest way possible,, I won’t be able to sleep?”

“You—”

“You stole three months of my life!” Ardan never even considered letting this... this... this lady finish. “If you were so sure I was a mole, then why didn’t you just talk to Milar? Or the Colonel?”

“The Black House hasn’t been trustworthy in a long time,” Taisia hissed, showing no sign that she intended to lower her pistol. “And I still—”

“Damn it, Taisia!” Ardan shouted with such force that his voice roughened into a growl and several of the marksmen on the roof went tumbling down. “I swear by my father’s grave, my mother’s heart, the Paths of the Ancestors, my oath to the Empire, my future children, my wife, and my own Name that I’m not a mole! Damn it, Taisia! Are you out of your mind?”

“That’s what any mole would say if he—”

“Ahgrat!” Ardan roared. “If you weren’t so insufferably sure of your own brilliance, you lousy hack, then you’d know exactly what happened this winter at Baliero Concert Hall and why they had to evacuate the Emperor!”

Taisia’s eyes widened.

“And another thing.” Ardan bared the scar the mutant’s blade had left, then pointed to the ricochet wound, which, like all the other wounds he’d sustained over the past half hour, was in no hurry to close. “I’ve already sent a mole to the Eternal Angels in that very hall! He may not have been the only one, of course, but we don’t know that yet!”

“Then why take your clothes off?” Rogov asked, by now clearly resigned to the absurdity of what was happening.

“His wounds aren’t closing...” Taisia drawled, lowering the barrel of her revolver slightly. “Matabar regenerate every bit as well as orcs do... But your great-grandfather—”

“Oh, that’s just lovely, Taisia!” Ardan waved his free hand. “You came up with this amazing, incredible theory of yours, then manipulated both the Black House and our investigation, all because my great-grandfather was Aror Egobar?! And because of some ridiculous coincidence, I—”

Ard cut himself off. Actually, to be completely honest, even Milar suspected him for precisely those reasons, as did half the Black House. So it was hardly surprising that Miss Shpritz had reached the same conclusions.

“You can report your suspicions to the Colonel.” Ardan shook his head. “I don’t know anything about your father. Please, let’s get to the ingredient warehouse. Now.”

“The ingredient warehouse?” Taisia frowned. “Why would we go there instead of fleeing this fucked up city?”

Ardan slapped a hand to his forehead. They knew nothing, after all. Not Miss Shpritz, damn her, not Rogov or Melin, not anyone else. They knew noth...

Ard’s eyes went to the minute hand on his watch. It trembled, jumping first forward, then back, while the case scraped lightly against his wrist. His watch was broken.

Ardan slowly turned to face the hotel. Flares of rainbow flame were already breaking through the rubble. That wasn’t supposed to happen for another ten minutes or so. But that was only if Ardan had calculated the time correctly. And he had calculated it with absolute precision. Except that after the explosion, after he’d blacked out, he’d based those calculations on the time shown by his watch. And it was broken.

“Ahgra-a-a-at!” Ardan screamed in pure, naked, almost animal panic and slammed his staff against the ground.

In an instant, a perfectly ordinary Basic Universal Shield swirled to life around them, the only kind that could protect them from a flash of pure Ley. But the rainbow fire winked out for a moment. Then the ground beneath their feet foamed with soap bubbles, and every sound on the street vanished all at once, as if someone had turned off a Ley-microphone. Ardan dumped every bit of power stored in his accumulators into the shield.

The accumulators shimmering in his rings were the first to crumble into crystalline dust. When even those weren’t enough, Ardan snapped replacements from the mounts on his belt into place with quick, sharp motions. He even channeled power from his own Stars into the shield after that. The spell, which normally looked no denser than the film of a soap bubble, suddenly flared into a rainbow bloom.

Exactly the same bloom that had surged up from beneath the ground. The hotel building, fragile as a house of cards and weightless as a capon, soared several meters into the air. Then every last brick, every ruptured pipe, every meter of cable, every table and chair, every cornice and bed, all the wooden paneling, and every scrap of wallpaper turned into a cloud of dust. Not even ash. Dust. Immediately afterward, a torrent of rainbow light swept down the street without making a sound, since Ley exerted no physical pressure at all.

It shaved sections off the rooftops and sliced several corners off the nearest buildings, laying their insides bare. The bandits who had come running at the sound of gunfire and were unlucky enough to be out in the street within a hundred meters simply melted. Literally. Like ice cream left in the heat. Their bodies absorbed an incredible charge of pure Ley and simply lost all cohesion. A shapeless scarlet ooze filled the empty clothes and faintly smoking boots: all that remained of a couple dozen bandits.

Those on the rooftops ducked back into cover and stopped firing. All the while, Ardan watched the multicolored currents from within the shield as it crackled and trembled, a web of fractures slowly spreading across it. He could only hope his safety training with Professor Convel hadn’t gone to waste.

The first thing Convel taught his students, before allowing them to work with generation systems, was how to raise a modified Basic Universal Shield against bursts like this, the kind caused by overloads.

So when the torrent of Ley receded into the now-still earth, no longer rolling in waves beneath people’s feet, Ardan, Miss Shpritz, Rogov, and Melin were still alive. And except for Melin, they were even relatively unharmed.

With one small caveat.

Ardan unrolled the case Tess had sewn, slid the staff inside, and slung it across his back.

He didn’t have so much as a drop of Ley left, or a single accumulator. What did accumulators matter, anyway? The Saturation effect already loomed ahead of him, the point at which any attempt to replenish his Star’s reserve from an outside source would simply make him black out.

Arkar had been so right...

“We need to get to the Guild’s ingredient storehouse,” Ardan repeated as he helped Melin to his feet and picked someone’s rifle up off the ground. “If we don’t, something terrible will happen.”

“Any chance of some details?” Rogov cast a skeptical eye over his bent staff, then tossed it aside and picked a revolver up off the ground.

“There’s no time, and…”

Out toward the steppe, grenades began exploding one after another. At the same time, Zalessky, Rita, and Bors opened fire, rounds rattling across the rooftops.

The hunters were probably firing as they ran, since they barely hit anyone, but…

One of the bandits on the rooftops yelled, “The Army!”

Another shouted, “The marshals are surrounding us!”

The bandits on the rooftops shouted over one another.

The plan had worked after all, at least in part, with one small hitch: the signal was supposed to be entirely different! So Zalessky was racing this way far too soon!

By then, Ardan wasn’t even cursing anymore. He simply vowed that from now on he’d never make a plan more complicated than “grab your staff, cast a seal, and hope for the best.”

“If you shoot me in the back, Taisia, I’ll survive anyway, but then… I’ll cut your ears off,” Ardan promised. He turned his back on Taisia, who still had him in her sights, and made a quick dash across the street. Until moments ago, that side had been just another stretch of street; now it looked like something stolen from Dagdag’s training ground.