Book II. Chapter 138. Resonance

“Then we have a plan,” Zalessky concluded after another few minutes of discussion.

By then, Rita and Bors had already loaded their rifles, fixed their bayonets, and shifted their revolvers into position for the quickest possible draw. Once a rifle had fired all seven rounds, it became nothing more than an ordinary spear. And not a particularly handy one, at that. Reloading meant feeding cartridges into the chamber one at a time and working the bolt after each one. It was no quick undertaking.

Lever-action rifles were far quicker to use and reload, but they were unpopular with soldiers and hunters because their cartridges were underpowered and their design less than reliable. If Milar was to be believed, of course.

“Wait.” Magister Tikhonov leaned forward again, just a little. He had gone quite pale and was slick with sweat. “We don’t know whether they have a stationary shield or a signal shield. And I don’t have enough rays in my Yellow Star for a detection seal.”

Zalessky cursed. Rita and Bors grumbled something unintelligible.

“Then we’ll have to hope for…”

“I’ll check.” Ardan cut him off and opened his grimoire.

Ardan had probably found himself in life-threatening situations involving Star Magic more often than Magister Tikhonov, but Tikhonov was still a Yellow mage. When it came to Star Magic, he simply had far more experience. Ard had no one to blame but himself for focusing on the Blue mage’s personal defenses and missing the possibility that Tikhonov might also have put up a barrier around the entire camp.

“But you don’t have any Ley-goggles with you!” Magister Tikhonov’s voice held equal parts fear and surprise.

“Give me a minute.” That was Ardan’s only answer.

He had no intention of explaining that Speakers could do without many of the devices Star mages used as substitutes for Aean’Hane techniques. Ard merely steadied his breathing and opened his mind to the world around him as it truly was.

Colors burst into Ardan’s mind, vivid yet blurred, like watercolor washed thin. Sharp as needles, they pierced his imagination, leaving invisible scratches on the “eyes” of someone who seldom saw the world the way Skusty had taught him to. In the Metropolis, with so much “dead Ley” and Star equipment, even a minute of such “sight” cost him hours, if not days, of nausea, dizziness, and migraines.

Out here in the wilds of the ancient forest, though, things were a little different. The shadows came alive and rose from the ground, resolving into vague silhouettes. Faces suddenly began to emerge in the contours of the age-old trunks, and the whispering canopy sounded more and more like unintelligible speech, as if he’d suddenly found himself in a crowd of foreigners, all shouting over one another in a language he didn’t know.

Ardi squinted and made out the murky veil wrapped around the camp. It clung to the pavilions and tents, pooled in the gaps between the planks, and anchored itself to the Blue mage’s staff with broad, tentacle-like tendrils.

“It’s a standard signal contour around the generation compartment, a hundred and fifty meters across, with an auxiliary seal attached,” Ardan said, more to himself than to the others. “If we cross it, all generated power will be rerouted to the active component.”

“There, you see!” Magister Tikhonov breathed, his relief plain. “We really should go back to Second Station, then head from there to First Station and wait for the military. There’s nothing we can do he—”

“Can you do something, Dar?” Zalessky asked without acknowledging Evlampiy.

Ardan gave the nearest stump a tap with his staff, so slight it was barely noticeable. He had been lying flat for the past half hour. A pale, bluish-white seal began to glow in the dirt under his torso, in that mysterious spot where a Ley-seal chose to flare beneath a mage. A thin stream of mist flowed from the staff’s finial, gradually taking the shape of a hand with a fountain pen clutched between its fingers.

“But, Captain, how did you get past the new standard ‘Misty Helper’ countermeasure?” Magister Tikhonov whispered, his bewildered gaze shifting from the spell to the enemy camp and back.

Once again, Ard said nothing. He could hardly tell him that the first thing he’d done after finishing his work at Talis an Manish’s office was refine his spell-cracker to defeat the very defense they’d devised against it. Besides, without all the additional knowledge and skills Ardan possessed as a Speaker, “Misty Helper” proved almost useless for cracking defenses and served only as a testing aid.

Ghostly encrypted script took shape on the pages of Ard’s grimoire. He ran his eyes over the data he’d received, looked once more at the construct wrapped around the camp like a spiderweb, then squeezed his eyes shut for a moment. Closing them wasn’t at all necessary to stop “seeing the world through Skusty’s eyes,” but Ard found it easier to return to normal that way.

“I can open a window in the signal contour for a few seconds and disable the shield’s link to the power-generation compartment, but the mage will know we’re here anyway,” Ardan said.

“What about the accumulators?” Zalessky nodded toward Ard’s belt, where Ertalain crystals glinted in their mounts.

Zalessky had clearly been involved in this sort of thing before, given how well he grasped the finer points of working with war mages.

“It’ll cost us,” Ard admitted.

“Risky,” Zalessky bit out.

Ardan had to agree. Breaking into the signal contour would take only a few rays of the Red Star, which made sense, since the defenses had been designed specifically to counter Ley-goggles (the very ones Milar and Ardan had used when they dealt with the Wailer in the Castle Tower). But cutting the stationary shield off from the generators… that would take an entire Green accumulator.

Ardan didn’t know how many rays the enemy mage had. For obvious reasons, he couldn’t simply put blind faith in the insignia on a stranger’s Star epaulets. He had even less idea how many accumulators the mage possessed. Using up a crystal before the battle had even begun could cost them dearly.

And yet…

“Can’t we do it without tripping their alarm? Otherwise, it kind of defeats the purpose.”

“No,” Ardan answered at once. “They’re part of the same system. To neutralize the shield, we’ll have to breach the contour.”

Zalessky swore.

“Clever,” he admitted, glaring at the Blue mage, who had his back to them and remained utterly absorbed in tinkering with the generators.

They went silent again for a few seconds.

“What do you think, Dar?” Zalessky cracked his neck and checked that his bayonet was secure.

“I’ll give the signal when the shield goes down.”

“Then we follow the plan.” Zalessky kissed his fingertips, then touched them to the moss. Rita and Bors did the same. A traditional rite in a deeply superstitious profession. The Cloaks, the guards, the military, even the fire department all had similar “good-luck rituals.” “By the way, what’s the signal?”

“A fire will break out in the camp,” Ardan replied calmly, with a composure that surprised even him. “The shield is powered by Ley-cables, and they run directly beneath the pavilions and tents without any insulation whatsoever. The whole camp should go up in flames.”

“Oh. Well, that’s encouraging.”

“Concussed, but not fini—”

“Rita,” Zalessky cut her off, though he, too, looked far more optimistic. “Could the generators blow up too?”

Ardan grimaced. He, too, would have been glad to avoid a duel with the mage and neutralize him from a distance, but...

“It’d take too long to explain, but it can’t be done.”

“Too bad,” Zalessky breathed, then added curtly, “Move out.”

“Good luck,” Magister Tikhonov called after them, hugging the ground.

Evlampiy’s paltry rays left him absolutely useless in a fight despite his Yellow cloak, so they’d decided to keep him back as emergency backup. What sort of backup, exactly? None. They simply didn’t want to hurt the feelings of a man who had shown unexpected courage by volunteering to put his neck on the line.

The Hunters fanned out, staying low. Ardan kept to Rita’s flank, moving soundlessly through the forest and using the trees and brush for cover. He felt the wind on his face and set each foot down heel first, then rolled it along the outer edge to the toes. All just as Shali had taught him.

To the matabar’s nose, the field camp’s smells came into sharper and sharper focus. The smell of oversalted porridge mingled with the sharp reek of boot grease slathered over the hunters’ boots to protect the leather from wet undergrowth and scratching branches. The stench from the latrine pit, which even humans could sometimes smell on windless days, no longer gripped his chest like a suffocating vise. Instead, it only called up the memory of long treks under the Spirit of Day, back when Ergar had taught him to track mountain goats.

The Hunter fought to break free. It clawed at the cage in Ardan’s mind. It howled and growled, trying to force its way out. Again and again, Ard felt the claws in his hands straining to extend, felt his toes press against the leather of his boots until it creaked. His fangs lengthened and retracted by turns, scraping his gums and lips. Here among the trees, even if they were nothing like the vast forests of Alcade, the Hunter was in its element. It couldn’t understand why Ard was holding some sort of stick instead of drawing his father’s cold claw, casting off his extra hide, hiding in the shadows, and beginning the hunt.

Ardan brushed the feelings aside, stepped to the very edge of the shield, and checked the Misty Helper’s data again. The Misty Helper had gone unnoticed inside the shield’s structure and, in only a few moments, broken the defense down into its component parts with enough precision for even a first-year at the Grand to handle it.

Well, no. More likely a second-year in the Engineering Faculty, but...

“Something to think about tomorrow,” Ardan reminded himself once again, and struck the ground with his staff.

At that same instant, a black-and-scarlet seal flared beneath his feet, and four dark ribbons that looked like carnivorous worms slipped from the head of his staff. Their bottomless, funnel-shaped maws gaped greedily as they sank into the invisible dome surrounding the field camp. For one brief instant, a golden film shimmered across the dome; within it, jagged dark lines were already zigzagging outward. The effect was something like an infection taking hold in a human body: first those branching veins and capillaries flushed green, then darkened.

The Blue mage recoiled sharply from the generators, banging his head on one of the valves in the process, and screamed. At the back of his mind, Ard noted that it might be worth taking another pass at improving the Misty Helper, since it had failed to detect the module responsible for soundproofing.

Fortunately, everything else went off without another hitch. Before the Blue mage, still screaming and shouting something to the others, could even grab his staff, the dome flickered one last time, turned to fine golden dust, and melted away.

Ardan broke into a run, heedless of the countless flashes from the Ley-wiring and the blue fire springing to life. It devoured the fabric of the pavilions and tents as savagely as it did the clothes and skin of anyone unlucky enough to find themselves near the sparks. The Hunter howled with delight, savoring the hunt ahead. Ard’s legs carried him through brush and over hillocks, across ravines and past the occasional stump left by storms and gales. For a matabar, covering a hundred and fifty meters through the trees was no harder than crossing a street for a Baliero city Peacockslicker.

And you might have thought the hunters would fall behind. That Ardan would charge into the strangers’ field camp alone. They didn’t. A few seconds later, the Blue mage picked up his staff, opened his grimoire, and checked the accumulators in his rings. When the camp was little more than thirty meters away, hand grenades whistled through the air.

Zalessky, Rita, and Bors, drunk on alchemy, proved every bit as fast as Ardan. By the time he manifested a seal for the third time that day, all three had thrown a grenade apiece without breaking stride and apparently had no intention of stopping there.

The explosive’s fragmentation casing looked a little like a giant ice pop, only it was mounted on a traffic cop’s signal wand instead of a stick. It crashed down among the tents. Scarlet flashes burst among the screaming figures, flinging sharp metal petals in every direction. The metal ripped into their faces, spraying thick blood through the air. It punched through the scorched, still-smoking chests of those who had already stripped off their jackets and shirts.

Then the screams reached them. Three more explosions followed; gunfire cracked in their wake. Rita, Bors, and Zalessky fired from three different directions, each using the trees for cover. Again and again, they worked the bolts of their rifles and fired. Bullets hissed over the scorched earth, cutting into those lucky enough to have escaped the flames and grenade shrapnel.

They didn’t know exactly how many people were still in the camp, so the sight of nearly ten bodies, bullet-riddled, torn apart, and smoking, gave them hope for a fraction of a second. Then return fire shattered it.

From behind supply crates and the plank walls of the showers and field kitchen, the strangers fired back with revolvers, aiming toward the pale muzzle flashes blooming in the forest.

“Captain!” Zalessky shouted, no longer bothering to hide.

Despite the fire and explosions, they were still outnumbered, and the Hunters were forced to take cover behind the tree trunks almost as soon as their opponents got their bearings.

Less than three seconds had passed since the fighting began. Ardan cast another glance at the page of his grimoire and once again struck his staff against the ground. The seal took longer to form than prescribed by military doctrine, but Ardan hadn’t practiced it often; he had put off working on it until the start of the next Magical Boxing season. It was too specialized and not particularly effective; at best, it could set up a combination in the ring, not hold up in real combat where lives were at stake.

This time, a drop of ink flew from the head of Ard’s staff. It expanded like a soap bubble, then suddenly burst and instantly shrouded the whole area in an impenetrable inky haze, swallowing both the camp and its surroundings. The grass crunched underfoot, frozen stiff by the cold, and the flames that only moments before had hissed hungrily over the fabric of the tents and pavilions suddenly went out.

Cries rang out. In several languages at once. Ardan could clearly hear Galessian, Takhian, and Ngian.

At first, the enemy’s shots came faster, their muzzle flashes flaring brighter and more insistently against the inky veil. Soon, though, they appeared less and less often, glimmering faintly in the magical darkness. As planned, the Hunters shifted position and opened fire again. The Hunters’ view was clear, and each bullet sent another soul to the Eternal Angels.

“Not bad.”

Scarlet light flared, and the ink-black darkness was sucked into the head of a staff as though drawn silently down a drain. Not Ard’s staff. Someone else’s.

The Blue mage stood among a few smoking scraps of cloth, a respectful distance from the generators. No wonder he still hadn’t manifested anything, even though the fight had already been going on for five seconds.

The enemy war mage had preferred to spend that time getting as far as possible from the machinery that might explode.

“An unexpected arsenal.” The mage looked perfectly calm, certain he wouldn’t share the fate of the eighteen or so people already dead or moaning in agony. “Certainly not military. Might I venture a guess . . . the Black House?”

Ardan took his place opposite his opponent. Now he could study the mage’s face. It was smooth and fastidiously groomed; apart from a carefully shaped mustache and a short, pointed beard, he was clean-shaven. Ardi had seen something like it before. In Baliero, men trimmed their mustaches and beards that way. So the mage was clearly from the Metropolis.

An Imperial mage, sure enough.

The Peacock.

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“And you, sir, aren’t much of a talker, it seems.” The mage shook his head and lifted his staff a little way off the ground. “Then let’s not waste time. I’ll still have to try to decipher your grimoire afterward.”

Ardan and the Peacock began casting at exactly the same moment. But Ard was faster.

A brilliant white seal seethed beneath his feet, and for an instant the Peacock’s face showed genuine surprise. Churning with Ley, the construct rewrote itself from moment to moment, keeping his opponent from reading its structure. Only at the very last instant before it manifested did it assume its true form.

A sharp-tipped cone of ice sprang from the head of Ard’s staff. It spun hard, sucking in air, and shot away with a sharp pop. It left white streaks behind it, kicked up swirls of snow, and dusted the frost-covered grass with fluffy snowflakes. It fell only a couple of centimeters short of the Peacock’s shield.

Actual lava oozed from the enemy’s staff, forming what looked like a shapeless earthen rampart. It spat sparks and shielded the Peacock from the incoming ice. But the Ice Bullet never reached its target. There was no hiss, no burst of steam, nothing one might expect from a clash between opposing elements.

Instead, the Ice Bullet took yet another form: it shattered a meter from the lava. By then, the next seal had sprung from the churning Ley beneath Ard’s feet. Before the dozens of shards from the previous spell could touch the ground, an entire field of flowers bloomed around the Peacock. They were so transparent they seemed almost made of glass, and they swayed gently, chiming like drops of meltwater when spring finally came.

Lush buds unfurled on tall stems, something like a cross between peonies and roses.

The shards showed them no mercy.

They mowed down the field in an instant, and the sound of icy droplets gave way to the chime of shattered glass dancing through the air. And in place of a dozen shards from the Ice Bullet, hundreds of petals from the Ice Flowers soared skyward. They wheeled in a furious circle, scoured the earth, turned the grass into a green haze, and gouged furrows through the soil, then came crashing down in a sudden, falcon-like dive, straight onto the Peacock’s head.

The Peacock struck the ground with his staff. Ardi didn’t see it. All he caught was the outline of a seal, and he sensed even that by some new, still-unfamiliar means rather than seeing it with his eyes. It didn’t matter that the seal was hidden behind a curtain of dust and the lava rampart. Everything was just as Lord Aversky had said: from the Blue Star onward, mages no longer saw seals with their physical eyes...

A black plume of some kind of gas burst from the finial of the Peacock’s staff. The moment it touched the lava rampart, the complex, two-part shield split apart. A small orange snake raced along the very center of the rampart. Then a column of liquid fire erupted from its crest like a blast from the volcanoes of Skaldavin and Selkado and shot upward to meet the petals of the shattered flowers.

They collided somewhere in the middle, and everything around them was swallowed by scalding steam. Ardan knew full well that his quick feint had failed, but he held off on Resonance. Instead, he focused on tracking his opponent’s combination.

In one seamless movement, the Peacock swapped out the accumulator in his rings and struck his staff against the ground, bringing a third seal into being. The black smoke and gas still swirling beside the lava wall were sucked into the liquid flame; the steam created by the two spells was drawn into the flame as well.

Aversky had taught that if you failed to neutralize an opponent’s attack, you should turn it to your own advantage. But before the Blue Star, duels never lasted long enough to allow any real practice with that tactic.

So the Peacock steered both components into the already crumbling shield, and Ard did nothing to stop him. Then liquid fire began streaming along the ground, following the tip of his staff. Not lava or anything of the sort, but actual living, liquid flame. Or perhaps it only looked that way to Ardan from where he stood, since he could sense strands of gas woven through his opponent’s seal.

So the white-hot plasma snaked toward Ardan like ink from a calligrapher’s pen, scorching the earth as it responded to every movement of the Peacock’s staff.

Ard didn’t budge. Without a single wasted motion, he drove his staff into the soil. An Ice Wall nearly a meter thick snapped into place in front of him, drawing moisture from the air and the earth in shimmering ribbons.

“Ha.” The Peacock forced out a chuckle, then swung his staff.

Obeying the mental command, the plasma serpent curved and soared into the sky with a roar. There it coiled once more, then plunged down in a fiery dive, just as the ice petals had a moment before. A triumphant smile spread across his opponent’s face. Ardan’s shield protected him on only one side, and there was no way he could alter its structure in time, let alone manifest a new one.

But he didn’t need to.

If Ardan had learned one thing in the Arena, it was this: sometimes the surest way to win was to let your opponent think he was winning. It was much harder to defeat an opponent who stayed focused on countering your seals than one who went entirely on the attack.

Ard reached out with his mind toward the Ley he had released around him. Resonance, after all, took far less time than forming seals, so by the time Ardan’s jacket began to smoke, the block of ice before him had already cracked.

Four plates, each two handbreadths thick, hurtled toward his opponent, whistling as they sliced through the air. Rather than trying to punch through what remained of the lava shield, which still held some Ley, they closed around the enemy Blue mage with a deafening crash, locking him inside a translucent cage.

The plasma serpent burst apart a meter above Ard’s head, searing his shoulders and neck with stinging sparks.

The air smelled of burned flesh.

Ardan gritted his teeth, but his concentration held. The ice walls around the Peacock grew thin, and dozens of long, sharp crystalline spikes shot out in every direction. They splintered the neighboring blocks of ice and punched straight through them, trying to reach their intended target.

His opponent shouted something.

The seal beneath the Peacock’s feet flared with the telltale light of Resonance. The PeacockPeacock’s left arm lay on the ground, severed at the elbow, but he only gritted his teeth and leveled his staff at Ardan. The ice cage exploded into a whirlwind of fine spray. Black smoke rushed toward Ard, gradually thickening and flashing with greenish-yellow Sparks.

Ard watched the fountain of blood and knew full well that if he couldn’t defend himself, he would walk the paths of the Sleeping Spirits. Then the truth hit him. What was happening now had nothing to do with the Arena or its strict rules. This was no training duel at the Grand, where even if you went all out, the most you could do was send another student to the medical wing (or end up there yourself).

His earlier close calls certainly hadn’t been shield duels, or even brief clashes that barely counted as fights. They had simply been dangerous situations Ardan had survived through quick thinking, the element of surprise, or his opponents’ own mistakes.

“On paper, Ard! On paper! But in a fight, you have to survive! And preferably come through it in one piece! Or at least in good enough shape that afterward you won’t... You won’t always be able to rely on cunning to solve everything, Ard. There won’t always be explosives on the train or a passive protective seal in the manor, and you may have to take down a demon or some other creature on your own. And all those useful qualities of yours? Your resourcefulness, your imagination, your cool head? None of them will help you one bit in a real battle!”

And for the first time in the past two years, Ardan truly found himself in the thick of it. This was no duel. It was a fight to the death, plain and simple. Either he would see the next dawn or the Peacock would.

The realization struck in a sudden, desperate flash, scalding Ard’s mind and making him falter for an instant. Maybe he was afraid, or maybe he simply didn’t have the experience, but he hesitated. He tried to take in his opponent’s Resonance all at once, read every part of it, and choose the right shield. But he didn’t have enough time.

So all Ard managed was to pour as much Ley as he could into a basic two-part shield, swapping the accumulators in his rings at the same time. Two wings of snow crossed before him. Their sweep whipped up a sudden gust that blew the smoke aside, while a dense veil of snow swallowed what remained of the fiery scythe.

But Ardan had made a mistake.

And those same green Sparks slipped through the feathers. They streaked in, slicing first through his clothes and then through his skin, biting deep into flesh and bone.

Ard barely held back a scream of pain and fear. He felt the poison seeping into his blood, reminding him of that wretched mutant.

Sleeping Spirits! A four-component Resonance! Of everyone Ardan had fought before, perhaps only two could have managed something like that: a sober Saimon Davos ten years ago, and Agatha Spree.

And if Ard didn’t do something, then… he’d die. Right here and now.

He immediately flipped the grimoire to the page with the medical seal, but never got the chance to use it. The Peacock had taken advantage of the brief reprieve to seal his own wound; now, with the gnawed stump raised, he conjured several seals at once.

The first conjured an entire constellation of blue Sparks. The second sent them straight into what remained of Ardan’s shield with a blast of air. The spells swept the snowy wings away, tearing through the barrier in their path as if it were paper instead of woven rays from the Green and Blue Stars.

Ardan felt the poison gnawing its way through his muscles and bones. He raised his staff to form another shield, but he was too late. The Peacock had already invoked another Resonance. Now a bolt of lightning, bright white at the core and bending like a willow branch, tore free from the head of his staff.

Ard managed to discern several of the spell’s parameters and narrowly avoided the last and greatest mistake of his life: he did not raise a shield based on the element of earth. Such a shield would have neutralized the lightning, but the white core would have sent Ardan to join his father and great-grandfather among the dead.

Worst of all, the Peacock wasn’t even aiming to kill Ard then and there. He simply wanted to deny Ard the chance to invoke another Resonance. He needed to break the chain of elemental spells so he could “repaint” the Ley that had spilled into the air around them.

And Ard had no choice left. A sphere of water enveloped him, spinning like a top gone mad. It absorbed the lightning but redirected the white core into the forest, where the core felled several trees and dissolved into the air.

The Peacock bared his teeth and… lifted his staff off the ground. He wasn’t about to burn through his remaining accumulators manifesting anything.

Damn it!

If Ard had been more adept with his Blue Star, the extra rays would have let him seize the initiative. But he had no experience, no knowledge, no skill! So all the Peacock had to do was wait for Ard to decide.

Either Ardan would try to heal himself and purge the poison, in which case the Peacock would launch a decisive attack while Ardan was defenseless, unable to raise a shield while working such complex healing magic. Or Ardan would go on the attack himself, but with his Resonance combination broken, he would have to manifest the seals all over again, and the Peacock would be able to defend against them.

Ard’s heart pounded faster and faster. Aversky had been right. Ard couldn’t use the space around him to his advantage at all. He couldn’t take his opponent by surprise. He lacked both the willpower and the time to use the shard of the Name of the Ice and Snow. So all that separated him from the paths of the Sleeping Spirits was his own staff.

”Time to die, you bastard,” the Peacock spat through bloody froth.

Invisible fingers closed around Ard’s throat. Their grip was no weaker for being unseen, and they were cold and sticky at once.

He made his choice.

Gripping the staff in both hands, Ardan drove it into the ground. He had one last trump card, one he’d already used in the Arena. But he had never tried to imitate Aversky’s fighting style in a real battle.

One after another, the seals bubbled up in clouds of foam, flickering impossibly fast, their parameters shifting in a dizzying dance; only at the very last instant did they manifest and unleash a barrage of spells on the Peacock. Ice Bullets mingled with Ice Cores in countless variations, hammering against the Peacock’s shield as he kept feeding it power.

Just as a vortex of water had spun around Ard not long before, its twin now enveloped his opponent. This one, though, was fashioned not from wind and water but from earth and fire: the same seal, cast in two forms.

A pleased laugh rang out from inside the blazing cocoon. As Ardi switched from one accumulator to the next, he felt the rays in his mind gradually wink out. The earth around his enemy had already been churned to muck, covered in crusts of ice and drifts of snow, but the Peacock was still holding out.

And then it all stopped.

A puff of steam escaped Ardan’s mouth, and a drop of pinkish blood slipped from his upper lip and fell to the ground. His vision swam, less from the poison spreading through his chest than from overexertion. His head rang, and blood trickled from his nose.

How many years had Aversky spent mastering rapid seal rewriting coupled with rapid casting before he could use the two together so effortlessly, as though he were merely playing with elementary seals to amuse himself? And the Grand Magister wasn’t fighting at the three-Star level at all…

“You won’t have time,” was all the Peacock said. The shield around him was already blurring into that same plasma haze.

The Peacock never took his eyes off Ard’s belt, where only a few accumulators remained; the rings on Ard’s hands were already empty. Resonance required at least one ray in any Star.

“The most basic mistake a war mage can make.” The Peacock winked, wearing a thin, smug smile. “Never use a combination to the point of completely draining your Stars.”

He swung his staff and launched the plasma serpent a second time.

“I know,” Ardan said through clenched teeth. He struck the ground with his staff.

Surprise mingled with fear in the Peacock’s eyes, then turned to horror. He had calculated everything correctly, after all. He had fully analyzed Ard’s Stars and determined how many rays each one held, even though Ard had made that harder by removing his Star epaulets beforehand rather than wearing false ones. So as the combination neared its end, he had reasonably assumed that the reserve was completely exhausted and that Ardan had made the mistake of leaving nothing for Resonance.

The Peacock could not possibly have foreseen one small wrinkle.

The last ray still flickered in Ard’s Blue Star: the tenth.

The plasma serpent was swept aside without resistance, just as the Peacock himself had swept away Ardan’s shield only moments earlier. The remains of the tents were tossed about like rags. A massive blade of ice tore through the ground, flinging aside giant slabs of earth that weighed several hundred pounds apiece. The air trembled with cold, and a crust of ice as thick as a pinky formed over everything that could freeze.

A blizzard swept over the ruined camp, finishing off those still shivering, not yet claimed by the Eternal Angels. For an instant, a huge four-winged eagle seemed to struggle free of the storm, hovering three feet above the ground, only to dissolve at once into a shapeless avalanche of snow.

The fifteen spells Ard had used fused into a single monstrous surge of Resonance. The Peacock had not even had a chance to prepare for it.

And when everything fell quiet, only two figures remained amid snowdrifts in no hurry to melt. Ardan, already down in the snow, his staff fallen from his hands. And the Peacock. The Peacock, though, was encased to the chin in a cone of ice, so tightly he could not even move his head. His skin slowly turned white and his lips blue, but life still flickered in his freezing body.

“Concussed or not, experience is one thing you can’t drink away,” Rita said, clearly impressed, as she and the rest of the Hunters emerged from cover. “Need help with anything, Dar?””

“No,” Ard replied curtly.

He didn’t mention that experience had played no part in it, or that he had just fought his first-ever open duel against a war mage.

But Ard’s thoughts were elsewhere now. He drew his father’s knife, bit down on the collar of his own jacket, pressed the blade to his chest, and began cutting away chunks of flesh ravaged by the poison.

Blood sprayed in every direction, spattering Bors’s boots.

“Shit! Knock him out, Drab!” Bors shouted, already raising his own rifle to strike with the butt. “The captain must’ve taken a blow to the head.”

Ardan had almost no time to explain exactly what he was doing. He could only hope he’d manage to cut out his own poisoned muscles before Zalessky and Bors clubbed him into oblivion with their rifle butts.

“Stop!” a familiar voice rang out. “He’s poisoned! The captain’s doing the right thing!”

The lacquered rifle stocks froze so close to Ardan’s head that he caught the distinctive scent of varnished wood.

Magister Tikhonov dropped down beside him, frightened and slick with sweat. He peered into Ard’s pain-clouded, exhausted eyes.

“Can I do anything to help?”

Ardan merely shook his head. Despite having a Yellow Star, Evlampiy was utterly useless when it came to applied Star Magic. Too few rays.

With another sharp motion, Ardan sliced off the last hunk of his own flesh. He swayed, nearly blacking out from the pain, then opened the grimoire and leafed through several pages before he found the healing seal he needed.

Yes, he should have learned the healing seals and drilled them until they were as automatic as his shield spells. Yes, he should have used Ice Tail in the duel, not the spells he’d already been using for years.

But!

All of that took time! And dozens of practice duels at the Magical Boxing Arena! Those took time too. Time was Ard’s most precious resource, and he had far too little of it. Even his accumulators were more plentiful.

“I’m going to throw up,” Rita wailed when Ardan sank his own fingers into the open wound.

That simple method told Ardan how deep the damage went. He entered the necessary parameters into the seal and touched his bloodied palm to the staff. Then he cursed inwardly, swapped out the accumulators in his rings, and touched the staff again.

“Are you sure you cut it all out?” Tikhonov braced a hand against Ard’s back, keeping him from falling. “If there’s any left, the wound won’t close up.”

Ardan mumbled something. Then his chest burned as though scalded with boiling water. As the others watched, Ardan’s severed muscles began to move. They stretched toward one another, writhing like worms in a dung heap. They tangled and intertwined, drawing back into a single mass. Then his skin, too, began to knit, slowly crawling closed one layer at a time.

Yes, healing magic was rarely pleasant to watch. Since Ardan hadn’t taken the time to run the calculations for anesthesia, it felt every bit as unpleasant. Several times, Ardan nearly blacked out, then jolted back an instant later.

That damned mutant poison...

After a few seconds that stretched into a couple of years, a rough, bumpy scar had already formed on Ard’s chest. When Ard’s body finally purged itself of the mutant poison, the scar... still wasn’t going anywhere. War magic left damage far too severe to undo so easily.

Still, Ardan wasn’t worried about scars. What worried him far more just then was the Peacock, already all but bound for the Eternal Angels.

“You overdid it, Captain,” Zalessky said wearily as he studied the trembling mage trapped in a cone of ice. “We won’t get a chance to question him, and... what’s with your face?”

Oh, right... the WaterMask. It had been foolish to expect his spell to survive a magical duel. He’d refined it, but he’d still cobbled it together on the fly. It was meant for investigative work in the City, after all.

“Eternal Angels!” Rita whistled. “He’s a looker!”

Without the slightest hesitation, Bors and Zalessky placed their fingers on the triggers and turned their rifles toward Ard. This time, they were unmistakably aiming the barrels at him, not the stocks.

Magister Tikhonov was the only one slowly turning crimson.

“F-forgive me... I didn’t know...” he stammered. “I h-hope y-you don’t hold it against me.”

“Lamp!” Zalessky exclaimed. “You know him? Because something tells me he sure as fuck isn’t Captain Dar Skofsky.”

“I know of him, but only secondhand.” Magister Tikhonov had regained his composure and nodded. “This is Ard Egobar. Husband of the singer Tess Egobar. But what... what are you doing here, young man?””

“A young man?!” Rita was still shouting. “He’s about twenty-five!”

“Nineteen,” Magister Tikhonov corrected her. Everyone fell silent again.

Meanwhile, Ardan marshaled his strength. His ears rang, and his vision swam. He leaned on his staff and struggled to his feet. Bors and Zalessky kept their rifles trained on him as he rose.

“No funny business!” Zalessky barked when Ardan reached for his inside jacket pocket. Fortunately, everything inside had survived.

Ardan pulled out his black document folder, still closed in its leather case, and held it out to Zalessky.

“Corporal Ard Egobar,” he said. “His Imperial Majesty’s Second Chancery.”

Without waiting for a response, he hobbled over to the Peacock. The nickname was a little odd, but Ardan hadn’t had time to think of anything better. Ardan stopped beside him, placed his hand on the Peacock’s head, and looked into his eyes.

“It really is... the Black... House...” That was all he managed to say before his body convulsed in its death throes.

Ardan didn’t bother to be gentle. He smashed through the Peacock’s exhausted defenses and stormed into his consciousness. Ardan wrecked everything in his path, turning the Peacock’s mind into an incoherent jumble of images as he searched for the information he needed. Before long, he found it.

“Ahgrat.”

“Bless you, Corporal.” Zalessky came over to him. “But... our whole operation was for nothing. The mage is already dead. And we can’t get answers from a corpse.”

The Peacock was dead. His head hung limply against his chest, and his swollen tongue lolled from his mouth.

“We were wrong...” Ardan whispered.

“What was that, Corporal?”

“We were wrong, Mr. Zalessky,” Ardi repeated, louder now, and turned back toward the southeast. Back the way they had come.

“What do you mean?” Zalessky pressed, frowning.

“There are a hundred and fifty of them, including three more Blue mages,” Ardan answered, sifting through memories that weren’t his. “And their goal isn’t to create Dead Lands at all.”

“Then what is it?”

“Something perfectly ordinary, Mr. Zalessky: the storehouse at First Station where they keep ingredients from the anomalies.”

Rita, Bors, and Magister Tikhonov had already come over to join them. Tikhonov was still looking at Ard with an apologetic expression, though he had absolutely nothing to apologize for.

“And where are they now?” Rita asked.

“I don’t know,” Ard answered honestly. “But six days ago they set out for Second Station. We missed each other.”

The ruined camp went as silent as a graveyard. Ardan now knew for certain that the camp was full of mercenaries and bandits.