Chương 15: Authority

A fireball came down from the eastern lip of the bowl before I'd finished my breath. It was huge and unlike any of the tidy combat-scaled shapes the candidates around me had been throwing at each other for the last twenty minutes, but a round ball of compressed heat half the size of a cart, and it fell into the bowl trailing its own column of smoke behind it. Surprisingly, it was from Eydric, seemingly trying to kill everyone in a thirty-pace radius, myself included. Did I hallucinate the no-killing rule?

The eleven candidates encircling me scattered in eleven different directions like a flock of birds. Two of them dove sideways, three threw barriers that were not going to be big enough to matter, and the rest just ran. I dropped flat and rolled hard to the south, the flag still clamped against my ribs under my tunic, and the fireball hit the centre of the bowl and went off almost immediately. Heat washed over my back, but I kept rolling.

A boy on the far side of the bowl had been mid-cast when Eydric's fireball arrived. His hands were halfway through a wind spell, and either the shockwave or the panic or both had torn the shape out of his control, and I saw the spell collapse in on itself and the mana go wrong. It happens to any caster who loses focus mid-form. The mana doesn't disappear and has nowhere to go but outward, and it went outward into him.

He caught his own cast across the front of his tunic and the air around him ignited, and he started screaming. Four of his teammates reached him at the same time, tackling, stripping at the burning fabric, throwing water glyphs and smothering with their cloaks. I came up onto my knees and started to stand.

"Howl! Your hand!" That was Rael, from my left, closer than he had any right to be. He had one arm extended toward me and the other already locked on Eydric's wrist beside him, and in his palm was something I had never seen in my life: a small hollow lantern shape, carved from something pale, holding a single cold flame at the centre of it that was not behaving like fire. The flame was blue and still.

"Give me your hand, now, Howl!" I lunged for him when the spell from a glyph hit me in the ribs from the right. A push spell, crude but strong, and it threw me sideways off my feet and sent me skidding across the dirt of the bowl about five paces from where Rael was standing. I rolled, got my hands under me, and looked up. The boy who had done it was already forming a spell. Fire this time, orange and bright, compressed between both palms, and he was aiming it at my chest from about ten paces away.

Close enough that I was not going to dodge it and far enough that I was not going to reach him before he released it. Rael looked at him. I had never seen him irritated before. Amused, yes. Theatrical, constantly. But the expression on his face in that second was something else entirely and then he spoke." STOP." … The word came out of Rael's mouth but it was not… Rael's voice. Something deep underneath it carried a resonance that hit the air and kept going.

For a fraction of a second I thought I was hearing what a lion might sound like if a lion could speak, though I had never heard one and was guessing from what I had been taught about house Solenne. The boy immediately stopped. His spell died in his fingers and he stood there with his mouth slightly open and eyes unfocused, looking down at his own hands as if he could not remember what he had been doing with them. Every other candidate in the bowl had frozen too.

Not as completely, but enough that the spells in the air guttered and the shouting died and for about three seconds the only thing moving was the smoke. I knew what that was. Every student of the great houses knew. Lionspeech. The Authority of House Solenne, carried in the blood, rare even among the family. Rael's words had landed on that boy's will and pressed it flat, and the boy had no other choice but to obey. Every great house carried something like this. The Vashren had their Combustion Sight.

The Kaelith had their reading. These were the Deep Magics, Authorities that lived in the blood and could not be learned or stolen. You either carried one or you did not. I had one too. The Aridis Authority was called Dreaming Eyes, and gave visions of probable futures, vivid enough to inhabit. I had even dreamed, once, when I was younger. Strange dreams full of places I had not been and faces I had not seen. And then, around ten or eleven, the dreams had stopped. I was not sure when exactly.

One season I was dreaming and the next I was not.

"Howl, now!" Rael's voice, his real voice this time. The Authority's effect was ending, and the victim's hands were twitching, the confusion already clearing from his face. I lunged. My fingers closed around Rael's, and the lantern's flame came up in a wash of white light, and the bowl around us filled with noise. A dozen spells were firing at us at once.

I saw the braid-girl's fire lance and the redhead's pale concussion and someone's earth spear all moving toward the space I was standing in, but none of them were going to arrive in time, and I saw this because the light from Rael's lantern was already lifting me off the ground. The bowl stretched sideways around me. The fireball's afterglow stretched with it.

The eleven candidates stretched into long pale streaks along the edges of my vision and then dissolved, and then the trees stretched, and then the sky stretched, and then all three of us were inside a noise like wind moving through a crack in the world. I could still feel Rael's hand in mine, and Eydric's arm pressing against my shoulder on the other side of Rael. That was all I could feel. The world rebuilt itself around us in the space of a breath. We came down hard in a patch of moss under a low stand of pines.

My knees hit first, Eydric's shoulder caught a root, and Rael landed on his feet. The lantern in his palm guttered once and went out. Whatever had been in it was spent. The sound of spells was gone, and so was the chase. The air here smelled new, and the only noise was the three of us breathing. Rael looked at me, then at the bulge under my tunic where the flag was.

"Well," he said, slightly out of breath.

"Hello, Howl Aridis. Welcome back. It seems we have a great deal to talk about." The gold text bloomed in front of my eyes the moment I'd caught my breath. [+15 Mana Pool] [Level Up!] Level 22 > Level 23 +15 Mana Pool [Mana Pool: 98/415 > 208/415] A sudden jolt ran through me, my pool came up on its own, a steady rising weight behind my ribs that did not stop until it was more than halfway full, and at the same time the tiredness in my limbs simply lifted. The ache behind my eyes was gone.

The thinness in my channels was gone. My legs felt like legs again instead of the worn-out ropes they had been a minute ago, and whatever fatigue I had been carrying out of that bowl was simply gone. Every level up felt like this. I let out a long breath and felt my shoulders drop for the first time in twenty minutes. If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

"Catch!" Something sailed at my face right after the voice. I caught it without thinking and saw it was a small glass vial, corked, heavier than it had any right to be, with a faint blue glow moving under the glass like a slow tide. I didn't ask. I pulled the cork with my teeth and drank the whole thing in one swallow. It went down cold and then hot, and my pool climbed in a steady line I could feel behind my ribs. Two-twenty. Two-fifty. and finally: [Mana Pool: 328/415].

It stopped there, and the warmth spread once and faded. I closed my eyes and let my head tip back against the moss.

"... Thank you."

"You're welcome," Eydric said.

"Aah, don't sweat it," said Rael. I pushed myself into a sitting position against the base of the nearest tree and realized I wasn't panting anymore. Eydric was and Rael somehow even more. Both of them had their hands on their knees, and Rael's hair was sticking to his forehead. He straightened enough to look at me and narrowed his eyes.

"Could've sworn you looked worse than me thirty seconds ago." He turned his head toward Eydric without fully straightening.

"Eydric. That elixir, what grade was it again?"

"Low."

"How low?"

"Low enough that I wasn't sure it would actually do anything. I had two of them, and I was saving the better one for an emergency." Rael looked back at me. I'd gotten my breathing all the way back under control by then, and I could feel the last of the warmth from the vial still settling into my channels.

"Axiom perks," I said. The Solenne boy laughed loudly, and dropped the rest of the way down onto the moss beside Eydric with both arms out at his sides.

"If I'd known that, I would not have done what I just did to come save you. Absolutely not. I would have let you walk home on your own two perfectly recovering legs." I let him have that one. I was too comfortable to argue, and while I was grateful for the save…

"By the way," I said to Eydric, "what was that?"

"Which part?"

"The fireball. The size of it. I thought you were trying to kill everyone in the bowl, me included. And with the no-killing rule, that was a real gamble." Rael grinned.

"Okay. None of it was what it looked like." He dragged himself up onto his elbow and pushed his hair back off his forehead.

"We heard you fighting before we saw you. You were not subtle, Howl Aridis. There were candidates shouting our team number from three directions at once, and we were running in a straight line trying to catch up. By the time we got to that bowl we could see you in the middle of it with like, eleven people around you, and Eydric said — what did you say?"

"Eleven is a lot," Eydric said.

"Eydric said eleven is a lot. Which is how Eydric says we are about to get very involved in something catastrophic. We had maybe twenty seconds to come up with a plan, because walking in casting was going to get us flattened the instant we showed ourselves."

"So what did you do?" I was getting really curious now.

"Made them run. That was the whole plan." Eydric replied.

"Eydric's fireball was actually about the size of a dinner plate, but I put an illusion spell of a bigger, and scarier version of the same thing over it about half a second after it left his hand. Nobody in that bowl was going to stop and check the mana density of something that looked like it was about to land on their head, right?."

"And there was no shockwave." Eydric added.

"Yeah, and by the time anyone noticed, they were twenty paces away and no longer in formation, and you were on the ground rolling away, which, good instinct by the way."

"Thanks."

"Oh, and the boy who caught his own cast," Rael pointed at his own chest and grinned.

"That was me. I'm very proud of that one. There's a little trick for making someone look the wrong way for half a heartbeat, and half a heartbeat is all you need if the person you're nudging is a mage mid-cast holding a complicated shape in his hands. Just one small tug, right on the attention, and the whole thing comes apart in his face. Literally in his face. I'd been saving that trick for something special, and that boy walked right into it."

He started using his villain laugh again, and seemed to notice me judging him, and immediately spoke.

"His teammates got to him fast, by the way. He's going to be fiiine. I checked on the way past. Burn was mostly on the tunic."

"On the way past?"

"Yeah, how do you think I got to you without getting blasted by one of those crazies? I was invisible."

"I see. Well, thank you," I said.

"Both of you. Really."

"Aah." Rael flapped a tired hand in my direction without lifting his head.

"Stop it."

"You're welcome, Howl." My eyes dropped to the lantern near Rael. He caught the look and opened his mouth, but Eydric got there first, which was unusual enough that Rael raised his eyebrows and rolled onto his side to watch his him do the explaining for once.

"It's called a Wandering Lamp," Eydric said.

"We got it during a side objective. About twenty minutes after you took off, we crossed paths with an old shrine up on the ridge, northeast of where we split. The door had a three-layer mana-lock on it, Rael and I split the work between us, and when we got it open there was a wooden box inside. The lamp was sitting in the box with a folded note. One use. Activate it, and everyone touching it gets pulled to a random safe point in the grounds."

"So, here," Rael added, gesturing around us at the trees.

"A shrine?" I sat up straighter.

"What was in the other rooms? Was there anything else inside?"

"Just the box and the note. It was small. Sartheon probably built it a week before the exam and will tear it back down before the next one."

"What else did you find?"

"Oh, now you're asking." Rael sat up properly and started going through the inside of his jacket.

"Two marked beasts on the way in. Small one first, I took it. Second one had antlers the size of my forearm and put Eydric into a tree. But he handled it and I coached."

"Don't believe him, he just screamed."

"Well, I coached at volume."

"You just screamed." Haha, these two were funny.

"Moving on. We found two more shrines after the first. One had a reinforcement charm inside, low tier but clean. I gave it to Eydric, because he's the one who gets hit." Rael held up his left hand, and there was a thin silver band on his middle finger I hadn't noticed.

"What's that?"

"This," Rael said, "is the one thing in my pockets that did not come from a Sartheon shrine. This is a family heirloom and my father does not know I have it on me, and if he finds out, I will not be returning home." I leaned in. I could not help it.

"What does it do?"

"Three charges. Ninety seconds of genuine invisibility per charge. I used one to get to you in the bowl, which leaves me two." His eyes fixed on mine.

"Howl. Swear to me. Not a word to anyone. If this comes back to my father I am a dead man."

"He means it," Eydric said.

"I swear." I made a small sealing gesture across my mouth.

"I didn't see anything."

"Thank you."

"Hey Howl," Eydric said, still flat on his back, "can you fight with a staff?"

"Mmm? Yeah, it is my main weapon, actually. My combat instructor started me on one when I was seven. Why?" Eydric reached into a small pouch on the opposite side of his belt from the ward-stitch one, and pulled out what looked like a pencil. Pale wood, a finger long, tapered at the ends, with a tiny dark stone set into the middle of it so small I almost missed it.

He pressed his thumb against the stone for about a second, the pencil unfolded in his hand in one quiet motion, the wood lengthening from both ends at once, while the stone grew with it until it was the size of a small coin at the centre of a proper fighting staff about as long as my forearm and a half. He held it out to me.

"We found it at the third shrine. Same side objective chain. Neither of us has a use for it." I reached out and took it.

"Thank you." This was the staff promised by the system, just like the elixir Eydric handed me a minute ago. I had been waiting for it without being worried about it, because the System always delivered the material rewards one way or another, and the only part I ever really got to enjoy was guessing which route it would pick this time. It could come as a gift from a stranger, a scroll in a satchel I happened to open, an item found in a shrine by two teammates I had walked out on an hour ago…

I hadn't guessed this one at all. A small smile pulled at the corner of my mouth. I also wanted to talk to Rael. There were things sitting between us that needed saying, and I could feel the shape of them in my chest, but we were holding a flag in a forest full of people who wanted to take it from us, and the conversation was going to have to wait. I stood up and brushed the moss off my knees.

"We should move." Rael looked up at me, nodded once and got to his feet. Eydric was already standing. The Solenne boy unfolded the map and held it between the three of us, and there it was. Team twenty-eight. Our number, sitting on the parchment in a small bright pulse, exactly where we were. Rael looked at it for a long second.

"Well," he said quietly.

"That's going to be fun." I leaned over his shoulder. There were two extraction points on the map, both marked with the same thin red circle. The nearest one sat to the southwest, past a stretch of dense forest and what looked like a river crossing on the terrain lines.

"How far is that?" Eydric asked.

"Three hours," Rael said.

"Maybe a little more, depending on the terrain and how many people try to kill us on the way." Three hours... I gripped the staff in my right hand, felt the stone at the centre pulse once against my palm, and looked at the two of them.

"Shall we go, then?"