The trestle supporting their passage looked as rickety as a half-burned barn. He wanted to press himself flat against the bin, but he couldn't tear his eyes from the waterfall. The ropes creaked onward. The bin climbed upward. The storm of the falls was so loud he couldn't tell if his eyes were damp from mist or tears.
The canal reached its apex, leveling out and heading for a wooden platform overlooking the falls. Joti shouted in surprise: a forest appeared from nowhere, the trees' thick roots thrusting down into a shelf of solid water. Boardwalks and platforms surrounded the roots and trunks. People moved among them, sheltered from the rain by tarps and enormous leaves as pale green as an Artusker. There was no solid land anywhere to be seen.
"Congratulations." Shain stood, waving to a man watching them from the platform. "You've arrived at the Peak of Tears."
14
The wizard smiled at Haniel, and tossed the sword lightly between his hands. The woman from the gym was speaking about the rules of the match.
If this was a test from the Order, and she could think of nothing else that it could be, she had either failed it very badly, or was about to. She should have been more attentive to the ebb and flow of Power around her, picked up on the other wizard earlier, and avoided the situation altogether. Now, they were about to fight a duel with both weapons and magic, and Haniel suspected very strongly that she was thoroughly overmatched with both.
The gong sounded, and they started to circle each other. He made a few feints in her direction, and she retreated. She started to swing the hammer in a slow circle in front of her.
She could not see far into the wizard's mind, he was making sure of that, and she could not get much of a sense of the strength of his power. However, she had to assume that he could make her think and possibly even do whatever he wanted. What was about to happen to her was going to be horrible, and Haniel's goal was to get it over with as quickly as possible and not to win.
The basic tactic with the hammer and knife, against a sword, was to try to tangle the sword with the hammer and chain. Moving out of range of one of the wizard's feints, keeping the hammer swinging, Haniel decided that she would try to do this; she would fail in all likelihood, the wizard would win, and the ordeal would be over—but she would possibly be left with a small amount of dignity and it hopefully would not take much time.
Trying to betray as little of her intention as possible, she released the hammer at her opponent's sword. He ducked the blade out of the hammer's path and closed in on her. She blocked his first slash with the knife, while she wrapped her right hand in the chain, and then used it to block his second blow. She whipped the chain, so that the hammer came at his feet from where it had fallen, and he stepped away.
Haniel untangled the chain and resumed swinging the hammer in front of her. The wizard took longer than he had to regaining his balance. Haniel was fairly sure he could have pressed her and ended the match then and there. She glared at him, impatient.
All of a sudden, they were not in the gym at all, but on the streets of the capital, watching an annual parade. Children were laughing, and the smell of frying food filled her nostrils. The wizard smiled at her, and lunged with the sword. The weight of the chain swinging in her hand pulled her back to the gym and she stepped out of his way.
That was nothing—simply a reminder of how things really stood, and a hint of the other dimension in which the battle could be fought, if the wizard wanted. He had showed her something pleasant—to let her know that the next thing she saw could be just as awful.
Haniel's original plan still seemed good, if not better: fight aggressively, and go down swinging and soon. She waited for him to regroup after his last lunge, and then released the hammer at his sword.
He surprised her by letting the sword get wrapped in the hammer and chain. Going on a warrior's instinct that she had doubted she possessed, she pulled on the chain and closed the distance between them, raising the knife in her other hand to strike. He released one hand from the tangled sword, and grabbed the handle of the knife, keeping the blade away from him. Locked, they both pulled and waited for something to give.
And then Haniel could not breathe. In the gym, she was not sure if she could breathe or not, but in her mind, in another world, she was living the experience of a man who could not breathe. He could not move either; she felt dirt underneath his cheek.
Breathing or not, in the gym, she somehow remained in a stalemate with the wizard.
The not-breathing man was dying. Haniel realized that she knew exactly who he was, but she was too preoccupied, both with his dying and with her own contemporary struggle, to bother to place him. As he died, his existence unraveled for Haniel— whether this was a choice of the wizard or a feature of his dying was not clear to her.
The release of the man's memories gave Haniel her only degree of freedom. While she could not breathe in his present, and could not budge the wizard in hers, in his past she could move about. She was acquainted with the man's past, and the memories that she moved through were familiar to her, although the source of this familiarity was neither clear nor important to her.
The man's life was unexceptional, which could have added to the feeling of familiarity: family, farming, the slaughter of animals, sex. Haniel rushed through it all, desperately, looking for something that she could not name.
It was dully clear that someone was killing the man, and that the killer was a wizard. The wizard Haniel was fighting, in all likelihood—showing her something he had done in the past. Fueled by the man's anger at his own death, sparked by a hope of posthumous revenge, she searched more desperately through his memories.
She found it in a tavern. With alcohol dulling his senses and exciting his emotions, the man fought savagely against two others, over something that had seemed extremely important—but which he had no memory of in his dying moment. She let the anger and indifference that he had felt in the fight consume her utterly.
She smashed her forehead into the wizard's despite the fact that he was wearing a helmet and she was not. This did little more than surprise him, but that was enough for her to shift her weight onto one leg, and knee him in the groin as hard as she could with her other.
She was only dimly aware of doing those things. The pain from head-butting the helmet was inconsequential in light of the man's dying, of the man's murder. Senseless death and oblivion were moments away, and while part of her struggled with the wizard in the present, this seemed more like a memory, unimportant, in light of the suffocation that consumed most of her being.
The wizard doubled over. Haniel shifted her feet, let go of the handle of the knife, adjusted her grip on the chain with the other hand, and caught another part of the chain with the hand that had held the knife. She positioned herself behind the wizard and wrapped the chain around his neck.
Then she knew who the un-breathing man was: he was the father of the little girl she had dreamed of the night before, and all the nights before that. And as, in the last moment of his dying, the man looked into the face of his killer, the face that looked back at him was her own.
The gong sounded and the gym girl's voice was saying that Haniel had won. She dropped her weapons and staggered, gasping for air, which she had thought she would never breathe again. After a moment, she collected herself somewhat and was surprised to see that she was still standing. She bent down, picked up her weapon, and started to walk towards the door.
The wizard picked up himself and his sword, and took off the helmet. "Leaving?" he called after her. "Without giving me a chance for revenge? That's not sporting."
Haniel stopped and turned. "Any time, any place you name: with naked blades, you son of a bitch."
The wizard stiffened. "That would be the second time that you have threatened the life of a wizard of our Order. Very few people survive the first time."
"Really?" Haniel had lived with Bronzino long enough that some of his love for the technical side of magic had rubbed off on her. "I don't make
a threat out of what I just said. I won because you let me—and we both know that you won't do that again, especially with something at stake."
The wizard reached in a pocket, and extended a hand holding a gold coin in her direction. "Take your winnings, then."
"Go fuck yourself."
She left the gym and went home.
Chattiel and Bronzino were both loafing in the sitting room, not speaking to each other. She wondered what was going on with them, decided she did not care, went into her room, and closed the door. She put down the hammer and knife, got out her emergency bottle, and waited to feel better.
The next day, Haniel arrived at the tower and was sent to a room filled with dusty books, and told to read and summarize them. All of the books were by minor wizards from over a hundred years ago, and none of them seemed to be about anything in particular. There was a desk and chair in a corner for her to work at; in the center of the desk, there was a single gold coin.
By lunchtime, Haniel had yet to read a single interesting or important thing in any of the books. It occurred to her that she had walked into what every other Adept feared the most: a personal feud with a wizard. Taking inventory of the people she knew, Haniel found herself depressingly short of potential allies, and decided to seek out Mantyger.
Advanced Binding was on one of the higher floors of the tower and Haniel had not been there since Mantyger's promotion. There was a main room, with benches, tables, and Bound scribes. The wizards' offices opened off of this room, and Haniel walked along the wall, looking for Mantyger's.
When she was a few feet away from a closed door, a muffled voice called out. "I can't talk now, the day after tomorrow is better."
Haniel opened the door and found Mantyger surrounded by papers, dressed in a black tunic and trousers. She looked up impatiently. "I said, I can't talk now, the day after tomorrow is better."
"I thought you might not have known who it was."
"Why wouldn't I?" Mantyger looked genuinely puzzled. "We'll talk the day after tomorrow."
Haniel nodded, left, and went back to the books. Six hours later, she left, still not having encountered a single thing in any of them that seemed in any way significant. She left the gold coin where it had been.
In the Adepts' quarters, she confided in Bronzino, telling him everything from the sparring match with the wizard, to her conversation with Mantyger. "What was I supposed to have done?"
Bronzino had been listening gravely. "I mean, you ought not to have offered to fight him to the death."
"But—"
"I understand why you did. It's just that you're expected to not do things like that. It's part of it all. I don't know what I would have done," he said, anticipating her question. "I don't practice hitting things with a hammer at a gym, for one thing, so it's not a situation I'm likely to be in."
"Do you think he was looking for me?"
"Must have been. He'd read your file, if he knew about you threatening Bour."
"Why was he looking for me?"
Bronzino sighed. "Look, if they send you back to the room with the books, just take the coin, and maybe that will end it all. That's your problem: you're taking it personally and trying to win an argument, when you should just be letting Them know that They won and that you're ready to move on."
"But—"
"It doesn't matter that you think you're right. You might be, you probably are. You only belong to Them."
"Six hells, I guess I'll take the coin. I could use the money."
He smiled. "That's the spirit." He nodded at the emergency bottle, and accepted the drink that he had turned down earlier. "If I'm being very blunt, there's two exceptional things about you, in relation to the rest of the Order, so he was there on account of one or the other of them."
"And they are?"
"That you know how to fight, and that you tried to kill your old Master."
"Go on."
"If he was there because you fight, he's probably sizing you up for one of the paramilitary branches of the Order, either Enforcement, Failures, or Discipline. They take people who can do magic and hold their own in a fight, and they're always desperate for them. I'm surprised that it's taken one of them this long to find you, actually, it always seemed like you'd be perfect for one of them."
Haniel had never considered this possibility: Enforcement of Judgments, Failures to Appear, and Discipline within the Order were all prestigious, in their way, so she had not seen them as part of her future. "You think I belong on a goon squad?" She smiled in mock reproach.
"You obviously have the skills. They like their wizards to complete their training directly under them, so I thought they would have gotten you by now."
"And if it was because I tried to kill Bour?"
Bronzino sipped his drink. "Well, then he was from Discipline. Discipline is proactive: they have a list, and you've obviously always been on it. Everyone knows when a wizard goes bad it can be no end of trouble. They don't like to let it go that far, so they keep an eye on wizards they think are likely."
"You think they'll kill me over this? Over mouthing off to an asshole in a gym?" Discipline within the Order was appropriately complicated, but there was only one frequently imposed sanction.
"No. They might watch you closer, wait longer to give you a staff."
"All the wretched gods. Do you think I'm likely to go bad?"
Bronzino went pale, and what little mirth had been left in his face vanished. "I think, at some point, Discipline might decide that the Order is better off with you dead. But I know you'll never go bad, Hanny."
It took her a moment to understand, and then she did not know what to say. His hand was resting on the table and she took it in hers. They sat holding hands for a few moments. Then Bronzino withdrew his hand and fussed with his drink.
"You don't suppose that you might have really beat him?" he asked.
That had never occurred to her. "No. I don't see how I could have."
"Look, it was probably both: Discipline also recruits from the list, keeps them close as they can."
"I don't want to work for Discipline."
"Do you want them to work on you?"
"Good point."
"If you did beat him outright, you know, you couldn't be handling it worse, from his point of view."
"I don't think I beat him."
They went to their rooms.
She was sent back to the books the next day, and pocketed the coin first thing. No one said anything to her over the course of the day, and she left trying to figure out if she had made it through a five-hundredth part of the room's tedious contents.
"Maybe there's something you're missing about the books?" Bronzino said when she had given him the update.
"Like what?"
"Maybe there's a secret or something in it. Maybe you're meant to find out."
"No. It's like they have all the wizard books that were written by nobodies, books that aren't even worth space in the library."
"Oh yes. The Order will take any book that they can get their hands on, but when the author was…well, insane or not especially smart, they dump them somewhere, and I guess you've found it. Say, though, Movsessian said something about Reginald the Uncertain, and Higher Contract theory, so if you see anything by him…"
"All the gods, leave me alone."
Haniel awoke the next morning to the smell of wood smoke and cooking food. The kitchen was seldom used at all, and never in the morning when everyone was always rushing to get to the tower, and she went out to investigate. Bronzino was standing over the stove, cooking eggs and bacon.
"What's this?"
Bronzino handed her a mug of warm tea. "Black flag on the tower." This meant an official day of mourning over the death of a wizard.
Haniel frowned, put down the tea, and balled her left hand into a specific fist meant to resemble a poppy flower, and held it over her heart for a moment, before picking up her tea. "Know who it was?"
Bronzino shook hi
s head. "I just saw the flag, knew we wouldn't have anything to do today, and went out and bought food. I imagine we'll hear soon enough." He handed her a plate, and they went to the sitting room and ate. After her second forkful of food Haniel screamed a curse.
"What is it?"
"Gods damned Mantyger. She knew we'd have the day off."
Bronzino's knuckles, wrapped around a fork, went white.
15
The bin slid toward the waiting platform, pulled onward by the creaking ropes. As soon as there was a solid surface beneath them, Shain stood and jumped lightly to the boardwalk. Joti followed. Rain pattered the platform, but a few feet onward, where the man who'd waved to Shain stood, a lattice of broad leaves guided the rainfall into the swirling gray waters beneath the boards.
"There you are." The man was closing on fifty, at least twenty years older than Shain, but there was no mistaking the affection in his eyes. "What took so long? Get arrested again?"
Shain swept her cloak from her shoulders and shook the rain from its oiled folds. "This time, it wasn't my fault. They even acquitted me."
"Just to be rid of you, I'd bet." The man lowered his gaze to Joti. "Out all that time and this is all you brought back?"
Joti stood taller. "You don't know anything about me."
The man snorted. "A runt and a bad attitude. You know how to pick them, don't you, Shain?"
"Since the eruption, it's not the easiest thing in the world to travel about snatching up young people," Shain said. "We eluded the war parties, but they're out there. That put a dagger in my talent acquisition. Would have come home empty-handed if not for a group of slavers being predictably stupid." She tossed her rumpled cloak at the man's chest. "See that gets a scrubbing, will you? I'm so sick of horses I'm ready to join the Griffin Clan."
She smiled and brushed past him, taking Joti through a maze of platforms, walkways, and sections of flat rock lifted above the shallow but immensely wide river flowing beneath them. He glimpsed one of the earth-filled bins from Dolloc Castle being unloaded into a wooden planter. The planters to either side of it sprouted fields of mushrooms.
Students of the Order Page 20
