Chương 161: Chapter 158. Respect

For what it was worth, a few decades on the battlefield had taught Teodorus Nox what to expect from a fight. Against things that weren't mages, it was usually simple. Dungeon monsters, for instance, were strong, sometimes vast, but they came at you the way an avalanche did: committed, and stupid about it. You read the line of the charge and you weren't on it.

As for men and anything near enough to them, they were faster and craftier than beasts, but men still had to swing the blade or loose the arrow, and a battle mage who let a swordsman close enough to matter had already made a mistake worth dying for. None of that troubled him much anymore. It hadn't in years. To Nox, other mages were the only fights that ever truly were fights. Because a duel between mages was not about who held the larger fire.

People imagined it that way — two men hurling power until one ran dry — and people were wrong. It was quieter than that, and far faster, and almost the whole of it happened in the mind. It was a reading, done in seconds and the slivers of seconds between them: the gather of mana at the other man's fingers, the shift of his weight, the spell taking shape behind his eyes a breath before it ever reached his hands. You saw what was coming.

You chose the answer to it — not always your strongest spell, but the right one, the single weave that closed the door he was opening — and then you had to actually make it, clean and fast enough to land in the half-instant it would still matter. Choosing wrong lost. Choosing right and weaving too slow lost. You fought three exchanges ahead of the one you were in, and you won, if you won, because your mind had simply been quicker and better than his.

Nox had lived in that narrow space for forty-three years and there were perhaps five men alive he'd call his equal in it. But all of that — the reading, the mind game, the knife's-edge timing — was the grammar of a fight between mages who were evenly matched. It only mattered between near-equals. And by Nox's own reckoning, careful as it always was, a boy of nineteen simply could not be that. Not to him.

Experience was a thing you accrued one war at a time, and power followed the same slow law; nineteen years was not enough to gather enough of either to stand across a circle from Teodorus Nox and make it a contest. He had been certain of that. He was rarely certain of anything he hadn't earned the right to be certain of. So. Why was he in the air? He considered the question with the seriousness it deserved, which was considerable, given how much air there suddenly was. He'd gone up a long way.

The arena had dropped away first, then the walls, then the Magisterium's roofs, and now the city itself sat small and tidy beneath him; streets like stitching in a coat, the river a thin grey thread. A breeze he had not requested moved his robes. Damn. He had lost. That part was not in dispute. Teodorus Nox, forty-three years a battle mage, four wars, seven insurrections, had lost a duel to a boy of nineteen. He simply could not, for the life of him, work out how. It wasn't that the boy had beaten his guard.

It was that the thing had been over before Nox wove a single spell. Not one. He had not finished one weave. In four decades of war he had never once failed to at least weave. He turned the question over a few times, but sadly, it did not improve. Damn. Perhaps, he thought, he had misjudged the Archmage. Quite possible, since old men kept their secrets, and Gaius kept more than most.

Which brought him to the conclusion — and Nox found he preferred this theory, hanging up here with the wind in his ears — that the Archmage had so openly favored the boy because said boy was not a boy. There were potions. Rare ones, half-legend, the sort whispered about in the deepest archives that allowed any old man who drank them to be twenty again while countless hard decades sat untouched behind their eyes. That would explain a great deal. It would, in fact, explain everything.

Because what Nox had felt across that circle was not the magic of nineteen years. It was technique you only earned by doing a thing ten thousand times, and it was married to raw power that no nineteen-year-old core could possibly hold. Those two things did not live together in the young. Ever. So the boy was not young. A potion. Obviously. Nox decided to believe that. It settled his stomach considerably, and it rearranged something that had been quietly nagging him for the better part of five years.

He had thought Gaius had gone soft. That had been the quiet talk: the great Archmage, in his dotage, lifting some clever academy boy out of the lecture halls and seating him at the high table over the heads of men who had bled for it. Nox had watched it happen and wondered what the old fox was up to, and concluded, generously, that perhaps he'd simply lost the thread. But he retracted that now.

Gaius had not lost the thread, no, no, no, he was holding one end of a very long thread and had declined, for years, to show anyone where the other end went. Whatever the boy truly was, the archmage knew; and had let the whole Magisterium go on believing it was favoritism rather than say so. A man did not bury a thing that deep unless it was worth burying. Which made the clever move — the surviving move — no longer "needle the boy at council until he breaks." The clever move was to stop.

Keep his head down, his title, and his questions to himself, and watch patiently. Watch until he understood what game the old man had actually sat them all down to. This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience. Nox breathed out. Up here, well clear of the shouting, the staring and the wreckage of his afternoon, he found himself — of all the absurd things — nearly at peace. He would concede and honour the terms to the duel.

And he would not, so long as he drew breath, provoke that young man again. The wind turned him slowly to face the sun. Damn, he thought, one final time. He really had lost.

Adom stood in the middle of the circle with his head tipped back, watching a magus fall out of the sky. He hadn't been gentle about the lift, though he hadn't been cruel either, and for a few seconds Nox had hung up there as a dark speck against the pale afternoon, too far to read. Then the speck had begun, slowly, to grow. The whole arena was watching it with him. Half full at least, more filing onto the tiers by the minute, and every last face turned up at the sky, mouths open, saying nothing.

Even the wards had gone quiet. Adom kept his hands loose at his sides and his attention up. He'd half expected an attack. That was the dangerous part of putting a battle mage in the air; height was a problem you could solve with the right spell, and Nox had years of right spells. The fall gave him time, too. Adom was ready to catch whatever came: a blast aimed down, a spell to arrest himself and turn the drop into a strike, anything. But nothing came. It was odd, because the man wasn't unconscious.

He'd been lucid again within a breath or two, Adom could feel it in the shape of his mana. He simply… didn't do anything. He fell, and let himself fall, and the only spell he reached for was the obvious one, right at the end: a cushion of air that took the speed off the last stretch and set him down on his feet on the stone, neat as stepping off a stair. There was no follow-up, nor second spell coiled behind the first. Huh.

Nox straightened and squared his shoulders while Adom shifted his weight, because a proud man back on his feet in front of a crowd might well have one last thing to say with magic, and just as he had finished preparing his next few moves… Nox sighed. Then he lifted both hands, open, to about shoulder height and said, "I yield." … Huh? Well… That was fast, Adom supposed. Not unwelcome, as this was the entire point, more or less, the result he'd been counting on the moment he'd opened his mouth at that table.

But he'd braced for more of a fight to get here. Threats, at least. A second round. Some wounded-pride theatrics before the man came round to the obvious. He'd had a whole patient afternoon budgeted for it. For a moment, he even wondered whether the Magus was faking the lapse, baiting him into dropping his guard for a sneak attack — until he remembered something. He's proud, Gaius had told him once, but he's reasonable. Of all of them, Nox is the one who'll know when he's beaten. The trouble is getting him there.

Okay. Fair enough. Around them, the arena had found its voice, though not in the way Adom might have expected. Everyone loved an underdog, but no one was chanting and cheering for the boy who had just dropped an old veteran out of the sky. It was, Adom supposed, to be expected. They were Magisterium people aftr all, every one of them, and they knew better than to be seen openly enjoying a senior magus humbled by a junior. That was the sort of thing that got remembered, and held against you, for years.

So instead they murmured in a low, rolling tide going round the tiers, head bent to head, hands over mouths. Whatever they thought, they kept it close. Nox lowered his hands and looked at Adom without frowning, which caught Adom's attention mostly because, as far as he could remember, it was the first time the man had managed it. He was not smiling, and no one would have mistaken him for pleased, but the contempt Adom had grown used to seeing there was almost gone.

"That," he said, "was an informative bout." Adom considered several responses. Most of them were honest, and therefore unkind.

"... Erm," he said.

"Yeah. For me too." It was not, on reflection, a convincing thing to say to a man you'd just lifted halfway to the clouds without weaving more than a handful of spells, and Nox did not seem to appreciate the accidental joke. His frown came back for half a second, then he exhaled deeply, and visibly put it away.

"We should get back to the council." He rolled one shoulder, testing it.

"The Archmage will have arrived by now."

"... Sure," Adom said. They went up out of the circle together, the murmur parting around them as they climbed the steps.

"For what it's worth," Nox said, eyes front, "consider the terms met on my side. You'll have my support at the table. I keep my word."

"... Thank you."

"Don't thank me. I lost a bet." A pause.

"Badly." The walk back was the quietest thing Adom had ever been part of inside these walls. They went up out of the arena and into the Magisterium proper as one loose group, the magi in front and the staff trailing behind, and nobody said anything the whole way. The only one Adom couldn't place was Beth. He looked for the red of her knitting somewhere in the group and didn't find it. Sometime between the arena and the corridor, she had gone.

Nox walked beside him the entire way and said nothing, which Adom decided to take as a courtesy. They reached the chamber, and Merlin pushed the great doors open, finding Gaius already inside. He sat in his chair at the head of the table, robes settled, a small cup of tea in both hands, looking like he'd been there for hours. Beside him sat Beth, knitting, with a cup of her own at her elbow. Neither of them looked the least bit surprised to see a line of shaken magi walk in from a duel.

Gaius looked up over his cup.

"You're all late," he said. Adom almost laughed. The whole afternoon had happened because the Archmage hadn't been in his chair to stop it, on account of being late. And here he was, comfortable and rested, telling the room off for poor timing. Still, no one corrected him.

"Well, don't stand in the doorway." Gaius set his cup down and gestured at the empty chairs.

"Sit. We have a council to hold." And so the council went on. If anyone had expected the duel to come up, they were disappointed because Gaius opened the month's ledger and worked down it as though the last hour simply hadn't happened, and because he didn't mention it, no one else did either. The business of the empire didn't pause for one bruised magus. The assignments went round.

A border matter for Xerion, a Treasury reading for Beth, a research dispute, a diplomatic errand, all the ordinary work of keeping a large and complicated thing from falling over. Adom listened to it, and for once he was actually listening instead of counting the minutes. His own came last.

"Magus Sylla." Gaius turned a page without looking up.

"A research posting. Pre-imperial runework, the old sites beyond our borders. There have been reports of signatures worth a proper look, and you've the training for it." He set the page down.

"It means travel. A good deal of it, for some time. I'd want you gone within the week."

"Understood." It was a real posting, and it was also a lie. To the table, he was going abroad to study old runes, but to Adom, and to the man who'd written the order, he was going to find Morgana. A few questions came his way — where he'd start, how long, whether he wanted company — and none of them carried the old edge, which was new.

"That's the month." Gaius closed the ledger.

"Thank you, all of you. Do try to come back in one piece. It's tedious, replacing people." Chairs scraped. The magi rose and went out at their own pace, a word here, a nod there. Nox tipped his head to Adom as he passed — slight, but seen, which was the point — and the room emptied by degrees while Adom stayed. There were details left that didn't belong in front of the others, and Gaius knew it, and let the chamber clear without rushing anyone. Merlin was the last out.

He paused at the threshold like he might say something, thought better of it, gave Adom a look of approval, and pulled the great doors shut behind him. The latch settled into place, then it was just the two of them. For a moment neither of them said anything. Then Gaius raised his cup an inch, like a toast to nothing in particular, and Adom huffed out a laugh.