by Gage Lee
My Eclipse nature wanted to see its victim’s face. The dark urge had been amplified by my advancement and rose up within me so quickly I didn’t notice until it was almost too late. If the man hadn’t been protected by his armor, he’d have been drained dry in that moment.
Instead, my Eclipse nature gorged itself on half the jinsei in his core and stole away the last of the protection aspects in his armor. He was vulnerable. I could disable him and haul him off to face the elders.
Unfortunately, my assassin had an escape plan. He knew when he was outclassed and decided to run away to fight another day. The masked man made a complex gesture with his free hand and vanished in a burst of red light. A cloud of thick, stinking smoke filled the kitchen.
I staggered back into the living room and took a deep, shuddering breath. I raced upstairs to make sure there wasn’t another attacker hiding in my bedroom. The windows on either end of the upper floor gave me a good vantage point to confirm there were no other enemies hiding outside the cottage.
The assassin had come alone.
How the hell had he gotten into my quarters in the first place?
I stormed back to the School. Hagar and I needed to talk.
The Lure
I HAD NO IDEA WHERE to find my handler, so I started with her room. I banged on the door, and when that didn’t work, I pounded at her neighbors’ doors until someone answered.
“I’m looking for Hagar,” I told a final-year student who looked more than a little annoyed to have been woken up before his first class. “Have you seen her?”
“You know what time it is?” he asked. “Have you checked the exercise yard? I know she likes to do her calisthenics before breakfast.”
“Thanks,” I said.
I hustled down the hall and willed the School to show me the fastest way to the courtyard. I was surprised to find how much more quickly I could move through the building, now. It was as if my advanced core exerted more control over the shifting architecture.
Hagar wasn’t in the courtyard. Of course not, nothing could ever be easy.
I concentrated on my handler, fixing her image in my mind. When I had it as clear as I could manage, I demanded the school take me to her.
I wound my way up and down staircases, through twisting halls I’d never seen before, and up a spiral ramp lined with burning candles glued to the walls by ridiculous stalagmites of once-molten wax. I raised my fist to hammer on the door at the top of the ramp and almost punched Hagar in the face.
“What are you doing here?” she asked. For a moment, she looked as angry and displeased with me as the old Hagar.
“Someone just tried to kill me.” I showed her my bloodied arms through the shredded sleeves of my robes. “In the cottage.”
“That’s not possible,” she started, then shook her head. “Of course it’s possible. It happened. You can’t come in here. Let’s go back to your cottage.”
“What if they send another killer?” I asked.
“You defeated one, you can defeat another. Plus, I’ll be there to back you up,” she said.
“What if they send something else? Like a bomb.”
“That’s a fair point,” she said. “Give me a second.”
There was a loud clatter inside the room, and a series of grinding noises like Hagar was dragging furniture across the wooden floor. Light flashed under the doorway, red, green, and a shade of blue so bright it was nearly white. Finally, the noise stopped, and the door flew open.
“Come in,” she said.
I followed my handler into a room that was as plain and boring as any I’d ever seen. The circular chamber had stone walls topped by a plaster-domed roof crossed by a heavy pair of dark support beams. There were no windows or furniture, and no decorations on the walls. The only door was the one we’d entered through, and the only light came from a single dim orb floating near the ceiling.
“What is this place?” I asked.
“A meeting area,” Sanrin replied as he walked through the wall. “Tell me what happened, every detail.”
I spilled my story for the elder and answered a barrage of very specific questions. Where, exactly, had the man been standing when he vanished? What did he smell like? Was he wearing gloves?
Finally, after a solid ten minutes of interrogation, Sanrin crossed his arms over his chest and closed his eyes. His lips moved slightly, like he was having a conversation in his dreams. After a few moments of that, he opened his eyes and nodded.
“Brand and Claude have secured your cottage. They didn’t find any weapons or traps,” he said. “We’ll return there now to search for additional clues as to who attacked you, and why.”
The transition between Hagar’s secret meeting room and my cottage happened between breaths. It was so smooth it took my brain several seconds to catch up with my body. On top of the sensory changes I was dealing with from my core advancement, that was almost enough to make my empty stomach do a dangerous flip-flop.
Hagar put a hand on my shoulder to steady me and looked at me curiously.
“Are you all right?” she asked. “You don’t look so good.”
“Just a little disoriented,” I said. “I’m not used to popping in and out of places without warning.”
“Ah, yes,” Sanrin said. “I often forget most don’t often use that method of travel.”
Truth be told, I wasn’t sure how Sanrin had moved us. Portals were energy intensive and usually required static gates on either end to work. The fact that he could blink us across the School with seemingly no effort made me wonder who else knew that trick.
“We need to search this place,” Hagar told me. “Go through everything, let us know if you find anything out of the ordinary. We’ll help you.”
Sanrin had already started rifling through my desk. He opened and closed the file drawers with calm efficiency, then started in on my closet. Hagar threw my bedclothes back, flipped my mattress, then shook my pillows out of their cases. From the rattles and banging coming from downstairs, Claude and Brand were doing the same search on the first floor.
I ducked into the restroom off my bedroom and flipped open the top of the dirty clothes hamper. It was Thursday and laundry wouldn’t pick up until Saturday, so the hamper was filled with sweat-stiff exercise clothes, my informal robes for daily classes, and an assortment of underwear and socks. I shook out each article of clothing. I used my new jinsei sight to examine each item, hoping that would help me locate something of interest.
Nothing.
I opened the medicine cabinet over the sink and looked over its contents. It held my toothbrush, a tube of toothpaste, a stick of deodorant, and some ibuprofen for the muscle aches and pains that came from working out too hard. I checked the bottles, popped the top off the deodorant, and even squeezed a little paste out of the tube. Nothing there, either.
I went through the small cupboard under the sink next. There were some towels, a few cleaning supplies, and something dark shoved all the way in the back of the cupboard, mostly concealed by the plumbing.
I reached back into the shadows and pulled out a matte black jumpsuit.
The same one I’d worn when I’d attacked Albert and fought his bodyguard. I hadn’t wanted the school laundry to find that, so I’d hidden it in the last place I thought they’d look. It had been under there ever since. My eyes roamed over the black material for a second, and a burst of excitement rushed through me when I caught a spark of jinsei where it didn’t belong.
“Found it!” I rushed back into the bedroom, the jumpsuit in my arms. “Right here!”
A thin crystal square, no bigger than my pinky nail, was attached to the back of the suit’s right shoulder. It was surrounded by fitful sparks of sacred energy, and its surface was cracked in two places. An intricate script had been carved into the square’s surface, but was now almost obliterated by scorch marks.
“Well,” Sanrin said. “Someone certainly doesn’t like you very much.”
“Is that an ancho
r?” Hagar said. “I’ve heard of them, but I’ve never seen one in person.”
“That it is,” Sanrin confirmed. “This is definitely how they breached your defenses, Jace. Where did you get this jumpsuit?”
“It’s what I wore when I went after Albert,” I said. “His bodyguard must’ve stuck it to me while we were fighting. I had no idea.”
I felt both stupid and vulnerable. I should’ve checked the suit as soon as I returned to the cottage. Of course, at that time I was still an initiate without the advantages of an adept core’s enhanced senses, so it would have been much harder to spot the crystal anchor. I also had no idea what an anchor was, or how they could have used it to track me, so it would have been easy to assume the square was just part of the suit. My frustration turned slowly to anger.
I’d been kept in the dark about so many things, and now one of those things had bitten me. Enough was enough.
“Maybe if people told me what was going on, I would have caught this,” I said. “If that’s what the assassin used to reach me here, then they could use it to send more of their people.”
“No,” Sanrin said. “The anchor is a onetime-use device. Though your assailant may not need an anchor to return. If he has a strong enough emotional connection to a location, a skilled portal pilot could get him here. From the sound of your fight, his emotional connection will be quite strong.”
“That’s great,” I said. “I mean, really awesome. I’ll have to move out of here. If assassins can pop in and out anytime they want, I need somewhere safer to live.”
Hagar and Sanrin exchanged glances. I didn’t like that look at all.
“You should stay here,” Sanrin said. “I’ll have Claude and Brand arrange for a security detail to be stationed outside the cottage. If there’s another attack, they’ll respond within seconds.”
“I’ll stay here, too,” Hagar said. “We’ll be safer together.”
“We’ll be safer where the assassins don’t know how to...” I stopped, frowned, then glared at Sanrin. “You want me to stay here as bait.”
“That is such a crude term,” Sanrin said. “I prefer to think of you as a lure. I have no intention of letting the assassins get their jaws on you. When they make another attempt, we’ll catch them. Our interrogation of their assassin will get us that much closer to cracking open the heretic network. And then we can put an end to this whole sordid chapter of Empyreal history.”
That sounded incredibly dangerous to me. It also sounded like a way to speed things along and get the elders to focus on finding my mother.
“If I do this,” I said, “then you’ll start looking for my mother, right away. If she’s out there and someone knows who she is, then she’s in danger.”
“You have my word,” Sanrin said.
Something about the way he said those words made me hesitate. There was a strange evasiveness in his tone, as if he knew something he didn’t want to tell me just yet.
We eyed one another warily. Then I nodded.
“I’ll do it,” I said.
The Garbage
THE ELDERS WANTED ME to keep my usual schedule. If I suddenly went into lockdown mode, whoever had sent the assassins would be much less likely to send another killer after me. Since the elders wanted the bad guys to take the bait, I continued to attend classes, spent time meditating with Rachel, had meals with my friends, and pretended I wasn’t worried about another attempt on my life.
And that’s how I found myself underneath the School of Swords and Serpents alongside the rest of the students in my Intermediate Alchemy class. Professor Ardith and Headmistress Cruzal had taken us down there on what they referred to as a “field trip,” but the rest of us were quickly realizing it was an unpaid maintenance detail.
This,” the headmistress said, “is the containment area for the School’s waste disposal system.”
“The garbage dump,” Clem said, much to the delight of the rest of the class. “Honored Headmistress, I’m not sure what this has to do with our Intermediate Alchemy course.”
Professor Ardith clapped his hands and tutted at the chuckling students gathered around him in the narrow, damp, and somewhat sticky stone corridor deep beneath the School’s main campus.
“Quiet,” he said. “That includes you, Ms. Lu.”
Rachel giggled at Clem’s statement, and was much slower to get her laughter under control than the rest of us. She fidgeted next to me, hiding her face behind her hands, her shoulders heaving as she struggled to stifle her amusement.
“I’m sorry,” she gasped, at last. “Please continue, Professor.”
“The School has need of your assistance, students,” Ardith said, pacing back and forth in the small space like a strutting rooster. “The containment vessels are currently filled with waste aspects. We need to transfer those aspects into transport vessels so they can be disposed of properly. This is not pleasant work, but it will give you all practical experience in handling dangerous aspects.”
“Now we’re garbage men,” I muttered, setting Rachel off into another burst of choking laughter. She elbowed me in the ribs as Ardith glared at her.
The professor was clearly unamused with Rachel’s laughter, and he pointed one slender finger at her over the heads of our classmates.
“Since it appears that Ms. Lu cannot control herself, she will be our first volunteer,” he said. “Headmistress Cruzal, please step over here, beside me, and we will begin.”
With his boss out of the way, Ardith raised his hands toward the opposite wall of the hallway. Thin threads of jinsei sprang from his fingertips to the faint outline of a design inscribed into the stone. Silver light poured through the complicated pattern, eliminating edges that had been weathered and rounded by the centuries. Despite its great age, the scrivening etched into the wall had no missing links or loops and appeared as sound and strong as the day it’d been created.
A few moments after Professor Ardith activated the scrivening, the intricate design faded away to reveal an open archway into a silo-like chamber. I saw a cluster of tall, thin cylinders through the opening, and caught a glimpse of the much larger room past them. It was impossible to say for certain how many aspects those vessels could contain. If I had to guess, I would have said they held several million aspects.
“Ms. Lu,” Ardith said, “please step into the chamber. The silver vessels are for containment, the copper vessels behind them are for transport. You will find a small spigot at the bottom of each containment unit, and a focusing funnel at the top of each transport unit. Your task is to transfer the waste aspects from the spigot to the funnel. I suggest you open the spigot very slowly and very carefully. You may begin when you are ready.”
“Hey,” I said and caught Rachel’s arm. “Just crack the spigot a tiny bit. Cycle your breathing, transfer the waste aspects through your aura, then purge them into the funnel. Don’t try to rush.”
“Thanks for the advice,” Rachel said and squeezed my hand. Then she stepped away from me and marched into the garbage dump.
Ardith’s eyes flicked from me to Rachel, and his lips twisted into a smarmy smirk. Of all our professors, he was the one who wore his clan allegiance on his sleeve the most clearly. He didn’t think anyone but his beloved Resplendent Suns were capable of performing even the simplest of actions, despite the fact that I’d shown repeatedly that there wasn’t anyone in the School better at handling aspects and raw jinsei than I was. Even without my core, the experience I’d gained working with Hahen put me far, far ahead of any other students in my class.
“Let’s get closer,” I said to Clem and pulled her toward the other side of the hallway, where we could get a better look at Rachel’s progress.
“I don’t like this,” my friend whispered. “It’s dangerous.”
“I agree,” I said. “Ardith’s being a very special kind of jerk today.”
“Cruzal should know better,” Clem muttered. And then we were too close to the teachers to speak and had to worm our way
through the other students to get a front-row seat to Rachel’s attempt.
She’d already cracked the spigot open by the time we could see her, and her aura contained the first waste aspects that had leaked out of the containment vessel. Her face was wrinkled into a disgusted frown at the stink and slimy feel of the rot aspects she’d already processed. She wasn’t used to handling waste like this, and the handful of disgusting green motes clogging her aura must have tasted like a hearty gulp from a gallon jug of spoiled milk.
With one shaking hand, she closed the spigot and cycled deep, cleansing breaths through her core. The air in the waste unit was far from pure and clean, but it was a far cry better than the disgusting mess in Rachel’s aura. As we watched, she fashioned one of her serpents and guided it toward the funnel. With each breath she took after that, the rot aspects flowed out of her aura and into the transport vessel. It was a gross, annoying job, and I was impressed at how well Rachel had handled herself. She’d lost some aspects by not using a serpent to gather them from the spigot, but she’d still done very well.
Much better than I had my first time in Hahen’s laboratory, as a matter of fact.
“I suppose that’s acceptable for a Disciple,” Professor Ardith said. “When you’ve cleansed your aura, you may exit the chamber and our next volunteer can continue the process. Perhaps we’ll finish the transfer by sometime next year.”
“Considering her background, she’s done very well,” Headmistress Cruzal said. The words set my teeth on edge, and I opened my mouth to say something.
Only to be stopped by Clem’s sudden stomp on my toes.
“Don’t get yourself in trouble,” Clem said. “Rachel can handle herself.”
While my friend’s words were true, that didn’t make it any easier for me to swallow my anger. I knew what it was like to be treated like dirt. Clem didn’t. Still, it wouldn’t do any of us any good for me to start a fight with the headmistress. So far, she liked me. If I upset that apple cart, there was no telling what kind of trouble I might get myself into. Assassins were enough for me to deal with at the moment.
