Book II. Chapter 131. Underground Ruin

“We need to follow the cable,” Taisia whispered, that familiar note of resolve in her voice. The very note that always made arguing with Miss Shpritz absolutely pointless.

Ard turned toward the cave. Beyond the mouth of the fissure, the battle still raged. Flashes from multicolored seals danced across the wet walls. (Ardan shook his head: why, why did the colors of the seals have nothing whatsoever to do with the color of the Star being used?) In their flickering light, silhouettes of Hunters appeared and vanished as they hacked at the last of the potbellied creature’s writhing guts with their broadswords. Rogov unleashed another sequence of spells. Flame surged toward the ceiling, flooding the entire cave for an instant with light so bright that Ard could make out the rear ranks of the undead still pressing forward from the darkness. A fair number still remained, but Melin and Rogov were steadily thinning the herd. Judging by their coordinated movements and short, clipped commands, Zalessky’s Hunters clearly earned whatever they were paid for such dangerous work.

“I’d say we should call Zalessky instead,” Ard said, though he already knew what her answer would be.

“Who else, then?” Taisia nodded toward the cave. “Bors? Rita? One of their people? Any of them could easily be an accomplice of whoever laid this cable. Or of the Puppeteers. If those aren’t one and the same in this case.”

Ardan rubbed the bridge of his nose and nodded reluctantly. Taisia was right. The expedition numbered eighty-seven people. No matter how thoroughly the Black House had vetted their backgrounds, it hadn’t been enough; otherwise, there never would have been a mole in the first place.

“It might be dangerous in there,” Ard warned.

“If it were truly dangerous here, we wouldn’t have been allowed anywhere near the cave at all.” Taisia’s voice was calm and reasonable, as it always was when it came to her work. “Think about it, Skofsky. A whole caravan of more than eighty people drove up to Bear’s Rift, then climbed inside. If anyone alive were still running things here, they’d have made sure we never got anywhere near the place. Mined the entrance, posted a guard, or at the very least blocked the fissure with rocks. We found none of those things, which means the owners either ran as far away as they could, or they’re already rotting in tight little boxes.”

Ardan paused for a second, weighing the pros and cons, but in the end he had to agree. Taisia’s reasoning was superficial, yet for the moment they had nothing better to go on.

“Let’s go,” Ard said. He raised the torch over his head and led the way forward.

The fissure was a bit narrow, but still wide enough for a grown man to enter without difficulty. The ceiling hung only half a meter above Ard’s head and dipped lower now and then, forcing him to duck. Within a few minutes, his lower back began to ache.

Damned mutant...

The Ley-cable followed the curve of the vaulted ceiling, neatly secured in brackets. Ardan examined it by torchlight and found himself appreciating the workmanship. The brackets had been driven in at even intervals, roughly thirty centimeters apart. Each held fast, without the slightest give. The cable’s sheathing hadn’t worn through anywhere and didn’t rub against the stone. Of all the Ley-wiring Ardan had seen in recent years, this looked sound enough to earn Professor Convel’s approval.

Which was saying a lot.

A few steps later, Ard spotted the first voltage gauge on the cable. A small brass cylinder gleamed in the torchlight, held to the sheathing by a copper clamp. A tiny needle showed beneath its glass window. The needle rested at zero, just as expected. Energy no longer flowed through the cable, but finding a gauge there was odd.

Voltage gauges were installed wherever the load could “wander,” as the Star Engineers put it, so the readings had to be monitored constantly. Such precautions were only necessary for critical equipment that was highly sensitive to fluctuations.

“Be careful, Taisia,” Ardan whispered as he mentally readied an Ice Tail and a modified Orlovsky’s Shield.

Twenty steps farther on, Ard found two more gauges and a splitter fitted with copper terminals. A second, thinner cable branched off from it into a side fissure. The installation had been assembled with a sure hand; this was no amateur job. It bore none of the small mistakes novice non-Star mechanics tended to leave behind. Anna’s husband, for example. Whoever had done the work had formal training in Star mechanics and most likely several years of practical experience.

“This was done by professionals,” Ardan said, sweeping his hand over the cable.

“And what does that tell us?” Taisia asked from behind him.

For a while, Ard said nothing as he gathered his thoughts. The sensors. The splitters. How expertly the cable had been laid. And yet there was the cave packed with undead, and the dead Shaggyers in the Rift. The pieces simply would not fit together.

People capable of setting up an underground laboratory this well would never have allowed the undead to reach the surface. That would have caused too much needless commotion, and people who had spent months preparing the place would never have been so foolish. Not to mention how much attention the undead would have drawn along the main road linking Yellik and First Station.

“I think there was an accident of some kind,” Ardan said without much conviction. “Someone was conducting research here, and something didn’t go according to plan. The undead in the next cave could hardly have been part of the original plan, so... I don’t know, Taisia. Maybe the Shaggyers above are just...” Ard waved one hand vaguely in the air. “The result of a cascade of mistakes. One led to another, and so on.”

“An accident of some kind. Someone was doing research. Something went wrong,” Taisia echoed, a note of irritation in her voice. “I can be vague too, Skofsky. Any ideas about what kind of accident?”

Ardan shook his head; he had no answer yet.

The fissure veered left, then right. From there it descended farther, then widened without warning and opened into another chamber. This one was smaller than the last, about twenty paces across, with a low, uneven ceiling and a relatively dry stone floor. It looked completely different.

The first thing Ard saw was the device.

It stood in the center of the cave. Its sheer size stopped Ard at the threshold for a moment. A massive coil of fine Ertalain wire, as tall as a man, wound around a wooden frame cinched with steel hoops. The strange spindle had been set upright. Its loops of wire rose from floor to ceiling like the coils of a giant spring, each as thick as a little finger. The loops had been carefully coated with insulating varnish that had gone dark, and they reminded Ard of something.

Then he remembered Driba’s apparatus in the dungeons of the Larand Monastery of the Sisters of Light. Driba’s had been built a little differently: its probe descended from above and caught the lightning. Here, the arrangement was exactly reversed.

A thick rod of Ertalain alloy, crudely cast and ground, disappeared straight into the stone floor, as if it had been hammered into the rock like a nail into a floorboard. Roughly half a meter of the rod jutted above the surface, coated in soot and some kind of dark, dried-on crust.

Metal boxes surrounded the coil, connected to it by cables of different thicknesses. They closely resembled Seal Vaults, though they were larger and lacked sensors. Most had been overturned; some lay on their sides with their lids wrenched open, scraps of broken wire and melted remnants of Ertalain plates dangling from their steel innards.

Someone had destroyed the apparatus. Or else, by some inexplicable means, it had destroyed itself.

The apparatus had cracked in three places. Mangled, twisted coils of wire jutted through the gaps. Its wooden frame was charred on one side and streaked with black resin on the other. Two of the four steel hoops had split and twisted like strips of tin. The floor around it was strewn with glass shards, pieces of insulation, and whitish grit that looked like lime dust.

And there were bodies around the apparatus, too.

Human remains.

Ard counted five. Three lay close together by the far wall, their positions suggesting that they had clung to the last shreds of hope before they died. They had tried to crawl away from something, but hadn’t made it. Their work clothes, made of heavy fabric, were dark with moisture and had already begun to come apart at the seams. The skin on their faces and hands had taken on a grayish-yellow cast and was covered in dark blotches. The bodies gave off that same sickly-sweet, cloying smell that had been turning Ardan’s stomach for the past hour.

The extent of the decay and the way the cartilage in their ears and noses had dried told him they had been lying here for ten days, if not a full twelve.

The fourth lay beside the coil. He had fallen facedown, arms spread wide. His back was covered in burns, the fabric of his shirt fused with his skin into a single lumpy black-and-pink crust. This one had died sooner than the others. Most likely, when the apparatus went haywire, a blast of pure Ley-energy had sent him to the Eternal Angels.

The fifth, though, made Ard stop short and swallow hard.

Something that had probably once been a man lay by the far wall, in the darkest corner of the cave. The body had been torn to pieces so violently that even Ard, after all he had seen during his service with the Second Chancery, couldn’t tell at first where one piece ended and another began.

The left arm lay three paces from the torso. The right had been torn loose at the shoulder joint and dangled like a limp sleeve, attached by a single strip of skin and sinew. His rib cage had been smashed inward, the broken ends of his ribs jutting out. The entrails that had spilled through the tear in his abdominal wall had long since darkened and shriveled into a shapeless brown mash covered with tiny white maggots. The head remained intact, but the face, deformed by a blow or crushing pressure, had swollen and darkened so badly that the man was utterly impossible to identify.

A staff lay beside the body. Or rather, what was left of one. It had snapped in half, and its head had splintered open, spilling shards of the accumulator. A little farther on, scraps of a grimoire lay strewn over the rocks. The grimoire had once been thick and bound in leather. Now it was ripped apart as though someone had set out to leave no trace of the nameless mage’s writings. The pages, soaked through with moisture and blood, clung to the stone. The ink had bled across them, forming brown blots that looked almost comical.

While Ardan examined the apparatus and the bodies, taking care to touch as little as possible and commit as much as he could to memory, Taisia did what she did best. Quietly and methodically, she rummaged among the charred papers scattered across the floor, trying not to cut herself on the partly melted aluminum archive boxes. She picked up each scrap, held it close to the torch, peered at it, then either set it aside or hid it in her jacket pocket.

Her fingers were usually manicured and adorned with rings. Now they were black with soot, but she didn’t seem the least bit bothered.

“Skofsky,” she called softly. Ard turned and saw Taisia standing by the far wall beside something he had at first mistaken for a mound of stones.

Up close, the mound resolved into cages.

Iron cages, crudely welded from thick rods and arranged in a row along the wall. Six or seven in all, each roughly a meter by a meter. Something moved in three of them.

Ard stepped closer and held up the torch. Beyond the bars, dark, contorted silhouettes thrashed about. Undead. Small and misshapen, they battered themselves against the bars with dull, heavy thuds and reached crooked, scab-covered fingers through the grating. A soft, gurgling wheeze came from their throats, sounding faintly like air leaking from a punctured wineskin.

“They were conducting Necromancy experiments here,” Ardan said in a hollow voice. “Very advanced Necromancy, at that.”

“And...”

“That pack in the next cave is most likely a byproduct. Failed experiments, either deliberately turned loose or escaped on their own after everything here went off the rails. Maybe there used to be a pen there, but with the device destroyed, the containment seal gradually lost its charge. Once the charge fell to zero, the undead escaped to the surface. And the ones in the cages—” He nodded at the bars. “They’re apparently the last test subjects.”

Tense, Taisia scanned the cave, and Ard clearly heard her heartbeat quicken. Miss Shpritz tried not to show it, but the air began to smell of fear.

“Skofsky,” she began in a low voice. “If they were conducting experiments here and something went wrong, then who sent the person running this place to the Angels?” Taisia pointed her torch at the mutilated body by the wall. “What if the thing they were growing is still roaming around somewhere in here? Some fucking higher undead?”

This page reproduces a chapter taken from the author's official page without permission; reading the published story there supports its author.

Ard understood what had caused that sudden surge of fear and quickly tried to reassure her.

“If one of the higher undead were here, Miss Shpritz, we’d all be lying beside these poor bastards by now,” he said firmly. “Or at least we would have detected it on the way down. No. Something else is going on here, but it’s definitely...”

Ard fell silent mid-sentence. He looked around, unsure, then glanced back at the broken staff lying beside the mangled body. He stepped closer and crouched, bringing the torch near the staff’s splintered head. Part of an engraving remained on the shaft, just below the break. The seals had clearly been machine-engraved and set in the precise sequence required by Mages’ Guild regulations.

One seal remained intact enough for Ardan to identify the spell by its telltale marks: Pink Star, some kind of Shield magic.

Ardan slowly straightened and felt a chill run down his spine, one that had nothing whatsoever to do with the dungeon’s damp. A Pink mage. Fifth Star. So whoever was behind the destruction of this laboratory had proved powerful enough to tear a Pink mage to pieces in his own lair, amid his own equipment and his own creations.

Something suddenly clicked into place in Ard’s mind.

There was a third party involved.

Those strangers he and Milar had only recently learned existed, the ones they preferred to keep quiet about for now. If these unknowns, including the vampire who had bribed Driba’s apprentice, had been here, if they were the ones who had done all this, then what was happening reached far beyond the scope of an investigation into poachers and corruption in the Hunters’ Guild. Even with their suspicions of a connection to the Puppeteers.

Ardan cast a quick glance at Taisia.

The journalist stood by the cages, filming the undead with her portable camera. She paid little attention to anything else, which made perfect sense for someone with no expertise in Star science. Ard seized the moment, bent down quickly, and gathered several surviving pages of the grimoire from the stones. They were wet and dirty, but some still bore legible formulas and equations written in a small, slightly clumsy hand. Ard rolled the pages into a tube and tucked them into the inner pocket of his jacket.

“It’s time we headed back,” he said, trying to keep his voice as even as possible. “Before anyone notices we’re gone.”

Taisia looked back. Torchlight caught in her blue eyes, and a predatory spark flashed there.

“We haven’t seen everything yet, Skofsky.”

“We’ve seen enough.” Ard tried to mimic Milar’s tone, the one that made it clear to everyone around him that arguing was pointless. Of course, Ard couldn’t pull it off. “If we stay even a little longer, someone will notice we’re gone. They’ll start asking questions. And we’ve already got enough questions without adding new ones.”

Taisia pursed her lips, but in the end she did not argue. She slipped the camera into its bag and headed for the cave exit. Ardan lingered another moment, took one last look at the laboratory, then followed her.

At the mouth of the crevice, he stopped and turned around.

Then he raised his staff and struck it against the stone floor. He flipped through his grimoire and cast a seal, not an especially complicated one. Blue light flared beneath his feet, and a hard, compact sphere of compressed air burst from the head of his staff. Yes, the very one Agatha Spree had used against him.

The sphere slammed into the ceiling of the narrow crevice that served as the entrance, and the crash shook the entire cave. The rock cracked, sagged, and collapsed, blocking the passage with rubble from floor to ceiling. A thick gray cloud of dust billowed up. Taisia and Ard squeezed their eyes shut and covered their faces with their sleeves, then broke into fits of dry coughing.

When the dust had settled a little, Ardan turned toward the ceiling, where the broken end of a Ley-cable still protruded from beneath the rubble. He pressed his palm against the sheathing and sent a raw Ley-charge of his own through it. A brief, dry crackle ran along the cable. The sheathing burned along its entire length with a dim, smokeless flame, and the Ertalain core inside melted and ran. Within a few seconds, all that remained of the cable was black, charred shreds hanging from twisted brackets.

Taisia watched it all in silence, and Ard was immensely grateful.

When they returned to the main cavern, they found the fight all but over. The floor was strewn with charred bones, melted stone, and smoldering scraps of dead flesh. The air hung over them like a dense canopy, so thick it seemed you could cut it with a knife and serve it by the slice, while the walls breathed heat like an oven that had only just been turned off. A few last skeletons, simple, flimsy things, still twitched somewhere at the far end of the cavern, but Bors’s hunters were already finishing them off with lazy saber strokes and no enthusiasm at all.

Rogov and Melin stood off to one side, arguing fiercely with Zalessky. Red-bearded Rogov waved his arms so wildly that his beard shook, while Melin spoke quietly and calmly. But Zalessky’s face made it plain that Melin’s measured tone grated on his nerves far more than Rogov’s sweeping gestures.

“...the contract spells it out in black and white: extra pay for category-three-or-higher combat encounters! And that’s over and above the cost of the accumulators we used!” Melin hissed, jabbing a finger at Zalessky’s chest. “What we just dealt with qualifies as category four at the very least! So write up the report for us, Mr. Zalessky!”

“The expedition leader draws up the report, and right now the leader is sitting in the coach eating sandwiches.” Zalessky crossed his arms and looked down at Melin. “Once we’re back up top, you can go see Nalensky and hound him about it. Now get off my back.”

“I’m not going near that clown again unless I absolutely have to,” Melin barked.

“Then you can do without the extra pay. I’ll settle up with you for the accumulators when we get back.” Zalessky shrugged and turned away, making it clear the conversation was over.

Ardan slipped quietly past all three, careful not to draw attention to himself. Taisia moved alongside him, keeping a low profile too.

Soon they left the cave with the rest of the party, climbed up through the crevice, and at last clambered into the open. Back to the steppe wind and the gray sky. Ardan drew a breath so deep his head spun. The air was clean and fresh, so utterly ordinary it could have brought tears to his eyes, and it smelled of nothing but grass, earth, and distant rain.

The very best air in the world!

As before, he and Taisia made sure not to linger anywhere longer than necessary. They climbed the hill and passed Nalensky’s coach as the mages strode briskly toward it. The other hunters dispersed among the campfires, where their sleeping bags already waited for them. They had an hour and a half to rest. Once the mages burned the Shaggyers’ bodies, the caravan would set out again.

Ard went over to his mare and made sure she was sleeping peacefully. He ruffled her mane, then slipped a hand beneath his jacket. His fingers found the rolled-up grimoire pages.

Taisia stood beside him in silence, squinting against the predawn light after the darkness underground. Then she took out her cigarette case and lit up.

“You took something from down there, Skofsky,” she said, staring off toward the distant hills.

Ardan, too, looked across the steppe and down at the caravan encamped below.

“It might only have seemed that way in the dark,” Ardi replied, putting Skusty’s lessons to use.

Taisia took a drag. One corner of her mouth gave the slightest twitch.

“You’re lying,” she said simply.

“So are you,” Ardan replied.

Because he could see perfectly well that her jacket pocket bulged with hidden papers. And Taisia knew he could see it. And he knew that she knew he could see it. They could have gone on like that forever, but they both understood the rule of this game: whoever stopped pretending first would win.

“Good night, Skofsky.” Taisia waved and headed toward the coach. “Or morning... Eternal Angels, I can’t even remember the last time I got enough sleep!”

Ardan watched her go and allowed himself a weary smile. Then he hurried toward his own sleeping bag, pinning the dead Pink mage’s pages against his ribs with one elbow as he went. Two months remained before the expedition ended, he thought, and he most likely wouldn’t get enough sleep in all that time, either.

Then again, when had he managed to do that in the past two years?

***

Ardi swayed in the saddle, watching the wind play through the low grass that spread across the steppe. Glittering with dew, the grass rolled in green waves to the rhythm of invisible eddies racing by, eddies that carried stories of distant lands the steppe could never see. And so the steppe listened closely. Every so often, very, very softly, it whispered back in the rustle of the grass.

Clouds sailed overhead. Vast white forms strode majestically across the high blue, where birds soared beside mist-veiled roads through the sky.

The wind raced up to Ardi, tousled his hair, and tried to snatch the yellowed sheet of paper from his hands. But he kept it pressed firmly against the pommel of his saddle. The mare tossed her head, shaking out her mane and letting the fresh breeze brush her sweat-damp hide.

Ardi patted the mare’s neck and turned back to the sheet of paper. Perhaps for the first time in his life, he’d gotten lucky where Star Magic was concerned. In fact, he’d been so lucky that one might think the Sleeping Spirits had deliberately dreamed the whole thing into being.

Ardan was even about to write Milar a letter then and there, but he wouldn’t be able to send it until he reached First Station. In effect, he would have his own Black House contact there. After all, a settlement as important as First Station naturally had Black House operatives. It was the gateway to the Park, where rare natural anomalies could be found in greater numbers than anywhere else.

But the fact remained.

The pages of the grimoire that had survived someone’s deliberate attempt to get rid of the Pink mage’s book were not encrypted!

Or rather, they were, but the encryption used a very simple mathematical method based on shifting matrices expressed as runic arrays. Granted, without a key, cracking such a cipher would take several tedious years of trying one possibility after another. So at first Ardi had even given up hope. But then a thought flashed through his mind: the abstract symbols he’d seen on the way down into the cave might not have appeared there by accident.

Sure enough, the symbols were not random. They were markers spaced evenly apart. The shift value was encoded in the geometry of the intervals between them. By noon, Ardan could read every page!

“Taisia, did you know there was a huge scandal at the Pelican not long ago?”

“Chaz! Tell me everything this instant! I want to know it all, down to the tiniest detail!”

Senior Magister Chaz Nalensky sat on the driver’s box of Miss Shpritz’s coach, holding the reins of the four-horse team. At the Hunters’ Guild headquarters, he was the chief anomaly researcher’s senior assistant. Miss Shpritz herself sat beside him. She had traded her “traveling outfit” for a dress fit for the Pelican, one of the finest restaurants in the Metropolis.

She sat beside him, pretending to find the Senior Magister fascinating and to enjoy the way Mr. Nalensky kept touching her thigh, then her waist, then her forearm, as though each touch were accidental.

Chaz himself rarely joined Ardan and Taisia, since he had to manage a caravan of nearly a hundred people, porters included. But now the hardest terrain of their journey lay behind them, and they were only half a day from First Station. The caravan no longer demanded his full attention. That left the Senior Magister free to let his faintly oily gaze drift to Miss Shpritz’s décolletage, finding its mark more deftly than any tracker could.

“Now then, Taisia...”

Ardan turned away and chose not to listen to the details of high-society life in the Empire’s capital.

With an unrestricted pass to the Grand’s Library, Ardan had read several works banned by the Al’Zaphir Pact. And no, he hadn’t broken any “international laws” (Bazhen had once tried to explain to Ard how any laws could apply beyond the borders of their own country, but Ard had never really understood any of it); it was more that...

Ardan shook his head.

He had no idea how any of it worked. Their Star Jurisprudence lectures had not yet gotten to matters like these, simply because, at this point, hardly any student could gain access to forbidden literature. But apparently Ard’s clearance and the nature of his work allowed him to study such material, in case he ever had to face people who knew how to put that knowledge to use.

In any case, he had a cursory grasp of the principles of Necromancy. Elementary Necromancy, at least. Yet even that proved enough for him to recognize something else entirely in the surviving papers. Something that lay not only beyond Ard’s own knowledge, but beyond anything he’d read about in the Library.

Put simply, the Necromancy he’d read about concerned creating lesser undead and using them as servants. Such ideas emerged on the Eastern Continent after the institution of slavery had been abolished. But the promise of workers who cost nothing still tempted those who needed hired hands.

Then, of course, Necromancy evolved, and at some point maleficence split off from it. But those were details. What mattered was the wholly different approach to Necromancy Ardan found in the papers. So how could Ardi be so certain when his knowledge was only superficial?

“Paarlax,” he whispered, the word clipped, as he looked at one of the formulas he knew well.

The necromancer in the caves had been working on something that might connect Necromancy to the Paarlax Field. To what end? Ardan had no idea. He couldn’t even guess what use any forbidden discipline might have for the latest discoveries about the structure of the Ley.

Could the Pink mage have been searching for a way to create a Lich’s phylactery? Long before Ectassus fell, Star mages had lost the secret of becoming immortal as one of the higher undead. After the Dead Lands appeared, the world’s Liches arose from rare natural phenomena within the Paarlax Field, formerly called the Echo of the Ley. Perhaps the Pink mage was trying to understand how that process worked. Considering how closely the Northern Park resembled the Dead Lands, that would make considerable sense.

The question that mattered most was whether the Pink mage was pursuing his research solely to serve his own ambitions or to carry out someone else’s orders. And for now, Ardi did not have a single lead that could shed any light on the question.

“And that, Taisia, is how it all ended!” Mr. Nalensky exclaimed, all but shouting. He had spent all this time completely absorbed in his stories about what had happened at the Pelican. “If my secretary’s letter is to be believed, of course. I demanded that he send me all the latest news from the capital. After all, one must keep a finger on the pulse of our close-knit community!”

“Of course, Chaz.” Miss Shpritz was still smiling, though Ardi noticed the faint twitch in her left eyelid.

Well, Taisia certainly had patience and self-control to spare.

“Have you managed to resolve the problem with Captains Rogov and Melin?” Taisia asked in an ingratiating tone, plainly trying to change the subject as quickly as possible.

Nalensky’s mouth twisted slightly. He clearly didn’t care for the subject.

“I wrote out vouchers for them to take to the Guild office,” he said, his jaw tightening. “They can sort it out with the clerks when we get back. I’m a scientist! Not a front-desk clerk.”

“Of course, Chaz. That’s exactly right,” Taisia said, once again offering her most “sincere” support.

Ardi, meanwhile, silently objected. Come to think of it, with Nalensky’s bureaucratic post, he was about as close to being an “administrator” as anyone could get. Practically the definition of one, really.

“I can see the city!” someone shouted from somewhere up ahead. “There’s the Station!”

The caravan came alive. The Hunters perked up, and even the horses tossed their heads and snorted with something like enthusiasm. At any rate, the wooden wheels had certainly begun to creak far more energetically.

“Taisia, at last we’ll be able to take a proper shower!” Mr. Nalensky exclaimed with fresh enthusiasm, then wiped his face with the edge of his yellow cloak.

Taisia apparently had her own idea of what counted as a “proper shower.” In her view, cold water from a barrel warmed by the sun was unlikely to qualify. Nalensky, however, seemed to leave the capital fairly often, so he appreciated even a small comfort like that, at least by the standards of someone from the Metropolis.

“Exactly right, Chaz,” Taisia agreed once more, without the faintest trace of sarcasm in her voice.

Still, Ardi was certain sarcasm was exactly how Miss Shpritz was coping. In any case, their journey to the Park was nearing its end. Ardan opened his grimoire; he’d fastened a calendar to its final page.

He pulled the pencil from behind his ear, crossed off another day, and smiled. However slowly, the number of squares left until he could go home was shrinking.

Ard jerked sideways, startling the mare.

“It’s all right, northern sister,” he whispered in the language of wild beasts, then patted the animal’s powerful neck again.

Ardan was surprised to realize that he really had called the capital home. Perhaps, though, what he meant was not the city itself, or even the apartment on Markov Canal, but a red-haired girl who smelled of spring flowers blooming beside a stream.

Ardan slipped the unknown mage’s pages back into the grimoire. Pencil still in hand, he took Tess’s letter from his pocket. Now he knew what to write to her.

“My darling Tess,

“I miss our home. Here, far from you, I...