Book II. Chapter 115 - Silence

Chapter 115

Pencil in hand, Ardan was holding a wooden board with a sheet of paper clipped to it, and writing out formulas around the borders of a schematic of the Arena. It was true to scale, so all he had to do was factor that into his calculations.

“Maybe we should go to the movies?” Tess asked. “They’re showing another comedy.”

“Sure.” Ardi nodded and got a little more comfortable, making sure not to bump the board with his chin.

“That tickles!” His... wife laughed.

That day, because of routine maintenance on the theater’s Ley-equipment, the performers had been excused from rehearsals—both the troupe’s actors and those who, like Tess, performed concerts. The Dandy had been right. Less than six months after its opening, the Baliero Concert Hall had become a magnet for all the performing arts.

That evening, however, Tess and her musicians would be playing at “Bruce’s” because of a private arrangement they’d made with Arkar. He’d seized his chance two days earlier, when they had all gathered at the bar to celebrate Ardan’s birthday, and had talked Tess into doing a show for him.

“You need a haircut.” Tess squirmed. She turned a page and gave the top of Ardi’s head a light nudge with her heel.

How was that even possible? Simple. He had commandeered the finest pillow a person could ask for. Legs stretched out across the rumpled sheets, he lay with the back of his head resting on the small of Tess’ back while she was sprawled out on her stomach, reading.

When Ardi had learned that Tess had the day off, he’d decided that the lectures at the Grand could get by without him, for one day at least. Especially since the first one was History of Star Magic, which had been slowly turning into a political and economic debate class (this explained why the subject was taught throughout all six years of a mage’s education), followed by Star Jurisprudence and, finally, two sessions of Practical Military Training.

“And a shave.” Tess laughed again as Ardi’s morning stubble pressed against her backside.

From the third semester onward, every course would cut back on lectures that had to do with their secondary subjects. History of Magic, for example, was now happening only once a week, and Jurisprudence was every other week. The time this freed up was mostly given to the primary subjects of any course.

“It’s too comfortable here,” Ardan countered and glanced at the watch lying on the nightstand.

The hands had already crept past noon and they were still lazing around in bed—naked, laughing, simply resting in each other’s company and savoring one of those rare moments when they didn’t need to be anywhere.

“Then tell me what you’re doing over there.” Tess closed her book and rolled over onto her back, right beneath Ardi’s head. “And scoot over a little.”

Ardan shifted a little higher and gentle fingers started twisting his hair into curls. Tess sank her hand into his shock of hair, weaving the strands and unweaving them again, occasionally stroking his cheek. For a moment, Ardi had to fight his heavy eyelids and the drowsiness permeating his slack muscles.

“I’m trying to work out a way to get the sound from the stage to reach the very back rows of the Arena.” Ardi tapped his pencil against the board. “We’ve got eighteen days left. So, I have three days to solve this. Otherwise, even if I figure out how to do it, the whole thing will still be a bust.”

Tess had agreed to perform at Mr. Brolid’s Arena practically the moment he’d asked. And in all the days since, she hadn’t once asked how Ardan meant to make the performance itself possible. She hadn’t even mentioned that the parties with the most at stake had been wrestling with the problem for years. In fact, the Dandy had hired several engineering companies before the plans for his concert hall had even been drawn up.

For all of Mr. Belsky’s sincere love of the arts, he had no intention of forgoing personal profit. And the more seats there were, the greater the final take from the ticket sales would be. The companies had produced nothing more inventive than a marriage of classical opera-hall architecture and modern Ley-equipment.

Belsky and his late chief architect had squeezed every last drop out of the place. In the end, they’d managed to fit in two thousand and two hundred seats, which made the Baliero Concert Hall the largest theater in the world.

“So, what are you thinking?” Tess asked while still playing with his hair, which really had grown out.

It wasn’t like she was interested in Star Engineering. They simply liked listening to each other. Especially when one of them was genuinely passionate about a subject. Ardi could just as happily spend hours listening to Tess talk about music and poetry, even though he was as ignorant about them as a cobbler was about Star Magic seals.

“The problem is distance,” Ardi began to explain, tracing his pencil across the schematic. “Brolid’s Arena holds, in theory, twenty thousand people. And it’s not a theater. There’s no dome, no parabolic walls to gather and direct the sound. Just a bare oval bowl under the open sky. The sound coming from the stage will scatter before it even reaches the middle rows.”

“What about Ley-amplifiers?” Tess asked. “Like Arkar’s, only bigger.”

“They already tried that. Brolid placed four of them around the edge of the stage two years ago, back when he was trying to put on something like a military orchestra concert for the opening ceremony of the season.” Ardi remembered the stories Agatha Spree and Lucius Raft had shared with him back when he’d been new to the Arena. “The sound carried to the twentieth row. Past that, it turned into a cacophony. Or there was nothing at all. Amplifiers work on the cone principle. Like a bullhorn. They push a sound wave in one direction. But the Arena is three hundred and sixty degrees. The audience will be sitting all the way around the stage, not just in front of it. The cones will overlap, interfere with each other, and at the seams, you get either a roar or silence. After that concert, they say Brolid spent a week at an ear doctor’s.”

Tess snorted softly and ran a finger along his brow, smoothing the crease that had settled there.

“Don’t frown. You frown when you think. And then you complain that your head hurts.”

“I don’t complain,” Ardi grumbled. He had recently discovered that his weakened Matabar blood had saddled him with yet another affliction: migraines and fatigue.

Before, he could devote hours to various problems, scholarly papers, his own research, and seal practice. Now, after around four hours of work, his thoughts would slowly tangle, his focus would slip, and he’d start craving fresh air.

“You do. Quietly, in Matabar, under your breath. But I still hear it.”

Ardan wanted to object, but Tess laid her hand across his mouth. It was soft, warm, and smelled faintly of the floral cream she’d rubbed into her hands before bed. Ardi seized the opportunity and kissed her fingers. Tess pulled her hand away and flicked him on the nose.

“Go on,” she whispered, her breath hot against his ear. “These infernal cones of yours won’t work?”

Ardi didn’t correct her. His agreement with Arkar was slowly breaking Ardi of his bad habit of always pointing out when people said something wrong.

“They won’t,” he confirmed, and flipped the board around to show her the schematic. He did this even though he knew perfectly well that to Tess, his drawings looked no more meaningful than sheet music looked to him. “I’ve been thinking about something else. What if, instead of pushing the sound out from the stage, we caught it and passed it along?”

“Caught it... with what?” Tess arched a fiery eyebrow.

Ardi smiled.

“With magic.” He tried to say the words in a mysterious tone, but the attempt obviously didn’t land. “Suppose... there’s one seal on the stage, acting as a receiver. It could capture everything that happens within a few meters of it. Every sound, every note. That has problems of its own as well, because you’d have to filter the music from the background noise somehow, but it’s still just a theory for now. And from there...”

Ardan fell silent and bit the tip of his pencil.

“From there?” Tess lifted her head a little to see his face.

“From there, you have to transmit the captured signal somehow,” Ardi said, not entirely sure if he was thinking correctly because the groundwork he’d done on long-range communication methods kept shoving its way into his current work. “We wouldn’t do it through the air, obviously, since we couldn’t handle the distortions of the Paarlax Field... But maybe through a Ley-channel. If it was wide enough. And directed from the start. One seal to another. If you place, say, forty small, stationary emitter seals around the Arena, each linked to its own generator, both to keep interference down and offset the inevitable accumulation of errors...”

“Forty?”

“Maybe more,” Ardi added after a moment. “Three or four per each section of the stands. The idea is not to amplify the sound the way everyone else has tried to do it.”

“You don’t want to amplify it?” Tess echoed.

Ardan nodded.

“If you try to amplify the original signal, the accumulation of errors will turn it into unintelligible mush.” Ardan circled one of the calculation results. “But if you record and relay it down a chain... then each emitter can work almost independently. It would be like every section had its own little orchestra playing exactly what the stage was playing, exactly when it was playing it.”

Tess fell silent, absently winding a strand of his hair around her index finger.

“What about the delay?” She asked, and Ardi turned his head around in surprise.

“What?”

“The delay, Ardi,” Tess repeated. “If sound is reproduced in different places with even a fraction of a second’s difference, then a listener sitting between two different sources... seals, I mean, will hear an echo. At the theater, they keep that in mind whenever they’re placing the musicians in the pit. If a cello sits too far from the first violin, in certain rows, you’ll hear the sound echo.”

Ardan stared at her wide-eyed. Tess raised an eyebrow.

“What is it, Ardi-the-Wizard?” She smiled. “I don’t understand your formulas, but I understand sound. It’s my job, after all, darling.”

“No.” Ardan shook his head and turned back to his schematic. “You’re right. Absolutely right. The delay... yes. That’s a problem. A Ley-channel carries a signal faster than a sound wave moves through the air, but not instantly. If I use one central seal and run forty channels from it out to forty emitters, the closer ones will receive the signal before the farther ones. The difference will be small, but for music...”

“For music, that’s still catastrophic,” Tess finished.

“Exactly.”

“So... Is this a dead end?”

Ardi stared at the schematic again. The Arena’s oval stared back at him, along with the little rectangle of the stage. Dots representing the orchestra section and circles of tiered seating crowded the page. He’d marked the forty repeater seals and the one central seal over it. He could use Ley-channels of different lengths, but then each signal’s transit time would differ.

And in that case, even if he tuned the apparatus at the very start, errors would still pile up at some point and the system would slip out of sync. And even if it didn’t, the whole setup would be so fragile that it could exist only on paper.

Tess rolled onto her side and Ardi’s head slid off her lap and onto the pillow. She propped her cheek on her hand and looked down at him with a half-smile.

“You’re wearing the same expression I saw when you tried to cook steaks for Boris and Bazhen.”

Ardan winced a little. He’d never cooked farm-raised meat before and had decided to experiment. Purely out of curiosity. And his two friends had volunteered to be his test subjects.

That was how they’d celebrated their first thousand exes of revenue at the apothecary. Well, almost celebrated.

“I did cook the steaks in the end,” Ardi grumbled.

“On your second try,” Tess agreed. “Or rather, with the second pan. You melted the first one.”

“I didn’t melt it. I overheated it.”

“It turned black and curled up, Ardi.” His wife laughed merrily. “It curled up. The pan curled up.”

Ardan opened his mouth to mount a counterargument but Tess leaned over and kissed him. It was soft and brief, landing at the very corner of his mouth. Then she pulled away and, in one fluid motion, sat up on the edge of the bed, swinging her feet to the floor.

“I’m hungry. I’ll fix us something.”

And she stood up.

Ardi never managed to produce an answer. He’d meant to say something, but his mouth somehow forgot how to shape words. Perhaps it was because Tess, despite being entirely naked, rose from the bed as if she were wearing an evening gown and a fur coat. She moved with the same calm, unforced grace she displayed on the stage.

She stretched, raising her arms above her head, and the warm midday light, slipping through the half-drawn curtains, settled across her back. It ran along her shoulder blades, swerved down the curve of her lower back, and then caressed the dimples just above her hips. Her hair, fiery and long and tangled, slid over her shoulders and hid part of her back. But not the part Ardan’s eyes had drifted to.

Tess turned, caught his gaze, and tilted her head a little.

“Weren’t you supposed to be solving a problem?”

“I am solving it.” Ardi’s voice came out hoarse, and he fixed his eyes pointedly on the board. “I’m solving it right this second.”

Tess laughed. It was low and throaty, the kind of laugh that sent a shiver down Ardan’s spine, and started toward the door. He heard the soft pad of her bare feet across the parquet floor. He heard her humming something under her breath. Ardi was pretty sure it was a melody she’d been learning the week before. He heard the click of the wardrobe door in the hallway. Apparently, she’d thrown something on after all.

Or she hadn’t.

It took a truly heroic exertion of willpower, but Ardi did not turn around to check.

He had a problem to solve, after all. The delay in sound reproduction. And seals. A full forty of them. Or forty-one, if you counted the central one.

Ardan fixed his gaze on the drawing and made himself think about Star Magic, not his wife. And, by the Sleeping Spirits, that turned out to be no small feat.

And yet…

One central seal wouldn’t work. Channels of different lengths would lead to nowhere good. So, he needed to come at the problem from a different angle altogether.

The sound of the icebox opening drifted in from the kitchen, then the tap of a knife against a cutting board. Tess was humming that same melody. Ardi closed his eyes and pictured her for a second: standing at the counter, barefoot, wearing his shirt or without it, knife in one hand and half an onion in the other. He’d watched this scene so many times. And every time, he reacted like he was seeing it for the first time.

Focus, Ardan, he hissed at himself. Delay. Channels.

What if it wasn’t just one channel?

Ardi opened his eyes and sat up, leaning his back against the headboard. At once, his pencil began scratching across the paper.

What if he didn’t run a separate Ley-channel from the central seal to each emitter? What if, instead of a single source, he made a chain of them? Then each emitter seal would receive its signal from its neighbor, not from the central one.

Ardan absently turned the ring on his finger.

Yes. It wouldn’t even be a chain. More like a ring. A closed circuit around the perimeter of the Arena. The signal would enter at one starting point, then spread around the ring, activating each seal in turn.

No. That still wasn’t it. The first seal in the ring would receive the signal before the last.

Ardi crossed out the schematic and began again.

“Fried eggs or omelet?” Tess called out from the kitchen. “We still have some of those wild turkey eggs Arkar brought over.”

There was a certain irony in the Overseer of the Orcish Jackets helping a Corporal of the Second Chancery track down food he could actually digest. Food a Matabar half-blood’s stomach could handle wasn’t easy to find. He had to buy from the same shops as the goblins. Their digestive systems were almost identical to a Matabar’s.

“Omelet,” Ardi replied, not looking up from the paper.

“With what?”

“Whatever’s available.”

“There’s some root vegetables, Shaggier ham, and yesterday’s leftover mushrooms.”

“All of it.”

A pause.

“All of it together?”

“Snowflake, I’ll eat anything you cook.”

“That’s not a compliment, Ardi-the-Wizard.” Laughter drifted in from the kitchen again. “You eat absolutely anything you’re allowed to eat.”

Fair enough. But Ardi didn’t argue further because, in his head, one half-formed thought had caught hold of another. The ring hadn’t worked. The chain hadn’t panned out either. What if the transmission wasn’t linear at all? What if it was simultaneous? What if he built a field instead of a channel? Something that mirrored the natural, unified Ley-structure and didn’t pass a signal from point to point, but existed at every point at once?

It would almost be like using Resonance, only in an open area instead of inside a single mage’s mind. The Ley, after all, never truly vanished. It only drifted back, eventually, into the ephemeral underground Ley Lines.

Ardi went still with his pencil in midair. Now he just had to figure out how to produce a miniature Paarlax Field.

The simplest idea was hiding in plain sight. If two seals were connected directly by runic links instead of Ley-channels, and thus fused into one structure, then a change of state in one would instantly be reflected in the other. That, in fact, was the principle behind every multipart seal: information passed between the parts instantly, not just quickly. That was because, strictly speaking, they didn’t transmit information to one another in any familiar, logical sense. Seals linked through the Ley were simply parts of the same structure.

Ardi glanced toward the kitchen again, where the light melody still filled the air.

What if he thought of seals as tuning forks? Two tuning forks at the same pitch: strike one, and the second sings because the air between them would carry the vibration, not because the first sent a signal out. Only here, instead of air, there’s the Ley-field. And in the “air” between the seals of such a Ley-field (a Ley-net, really), distance would mean nothing at all. The resonance would happen instantly.

The only question was how to contain such a field. On the theoretical side, it all fit together neatly enough. All he needed to do was create a seal the size of the entire Arena. Nothing to it. He only had to scrape together a volume of Ley-energy approaching mathematical infinity…

Or did he?

Ardan began to write quickly. What if he changed the original idea just a little and made the central seal on the stage a source resonator? Then the forty small seals around the stands could become receiver resonators.

So, on paper, it worked: the central seal would capture the sound wave and convert it into a Ley-vibration, and all forty receivers would then reproduce that vibration back into sound—simultaneously.

There’d be no delay. No interference. The listener in the back row would hear what the listener in the front row is hearing. At the same time.

Ardi wrote: “Calibration. Each emitter: individual amplification coefficient. Tie to distance from the stage.”

“Tess,” he called out.

“Yes, darling?”

“When you tune your instruments before a concert, you all tune them to a single reference, don’t you?”

Footsteps came from the kitchen. Tess appeared in the doorway wearing his shirt that had been fastened by only the bottom two buttons, a wooden spatula in her hand. The fabric barely reached mid-thigh, and for a moment, Ardi once again forgot what he’d meant to ask.

“We use the oboe,” Tess said. “The oboist plays the concert A, and everyone tunes their instruments based on that.”

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“Why the oboe?”

“Because it has the most stable tone. It’s the least affected by temperature, humidity, or a musician’s fatigue. The oboe sounds the same at the start of the evening as it does at the end.”

Ardan snapped his fingers.

“I need an ‘oboe.’”

Tess leaned against the doorframe and crossed her arms, the spatula sticking up over her shoulder like a little banner.

“For the Arena?”

“A reference resonator, I mean. One seal that sets the frequency for all the others. Stable, unchanging, and indifferent to outside conditions.”

Tess watched him with an expression Ardi had learned to recognize. It wasn’t bafflement, and it wasn’t boredom. It was more like a quiet admiration she never put into words because she knew Ardan would immediately start waving it away.

“You’re on fire,” she said.

“Our omelet’s about to be,” Ardi answered, sniffing the air.

Tess gasped and vanished back into the kitchen. The pan banged. Something hissed. Tess bit back a curse and Ardi laughed, tearing himself away from the schematic for the first time all morning.

He looked at it again. There were forty-one points inscribed across an oval. Lines, formulas, crossed-out parts… He had three days. Three days in which he needed to calculate every coefficient of every runic link, determine the amplification coefficients for every sector, and, the hardest part, find a way to bind them all into one unified system. How could he do this, exactly? To test the idea, Ardan would need to visit the “Stables.” The idea itself was simple enough: two or more seals could be joined into one by runic connections that formed bridges between them.

So, all he had to do was somehow transmit a runic link over a distance. Or find a way to anchor one in space. And even if that proved possible, the truly mundane question remained: where, and more importantly, with whose money, was he going to get a hold of the equipment? Because a setup like that wouldn’t cost a mere dozen exes, or even a few hundred.

But all of that were tomorrow’s thoughts. Today was Tess’ day off. And the smell of omelet had filled the air.

Ardi set the board aside, got up, pulled on his pants, and walked into the kitchen. Tess was standing at the stove, stirring something in the pan, and his shirt rode up on her just enough to remind Ardan that not all of his problems were Star-based ones.

He came up behind her, slipped his arms around her waist, and buried his nose in her flower-scented neck. Tess tipped her head back onto his shoulder and, still stirring, said quietly:

“You know if you distract me now, we’ll end up with no food.”

“I know,” Ardan answered, and didn’t let go.

“Ardi.”

“Mm?”

“The omelet.”

“It can wait.”

“It won’t wait. It’s already set. Ardi. Hands.”

“What about my hands?”

“Get them away from there.”

“From where?”

Tess turned around, set the spatula against his chest, and, almost too calmly, pushed him back half a step.

“Sit. At the table. And wait. In three minutes, you’ll get breakfast and everything else.”

“Everything else?” Ardi echoed while settling in at the table.

Tess didn’t answer him directly, but she smiled in a way that made Ardan immediately decide that he’d be able to survive three minutes somehow.

He picked up the pencil he’d left on the table only the day before and sketched, right on a napkin, a diagram of the central seal. Or was that the “incoming” seal? Three minutes… It was just enough time to figure out what Ley-load a generator would need to hold the function steady.

Tess set two plates on the table. One was huge and steaming. It had an omelet with everything she had listed and, by the looks of it, some things she hadn’t as well. The other was a fraction of its size, with a far simpler omelet.

“Eat,” she commanded and sat down across from him, one leg tucked under her.

Ardi looked at his plate. He looked at Tess, disheveled, in his shirt, still gripping the spatula. He looked at the napkin and its diagram.

“Thank you,” he said. And he was thanking her for more than just the omelet.

The corners of Tess’ mouth twitched.

“Go on, eat,” she reminded him. “While it’s still hot.”

Ardan picked up his fork. The omelet was, as always, magnificent. The problem was starting to give in. And the three minutes Tess had promised had nearly run out.

And, most important of all, no one was shooting at him, no mangled bodies of children lay around the corner, no monsters lurked in the shadows, and no enemy spells were whistling overhead.

Ardan looked out the window.

So… why was he always trying to give his brain something to chew on when it grew restless from sheer idleness?

Sleeping Spirits. It wasn’t like he liked adventure!

* * *

“If. You. Don’t. Work. I’ll. Sell. You. At. The. Flea. Market.” With each clipped word, Ardan turned the wrench and tightened the clamp nut.

At last, Ardan exhaled and mopped his sweat-soaked forehead with his second handkerchief of the day (Sleeping Spirits, humans could sweat!), stepped back, and surveyed his handiwork. And even setting aside the mutant’s poison, which now had him changing clothes far more often just to keep from stinking up half the block, he had still spent a tidy sum.

He’d managed to grab a few “blanks” for cheap on Sleepless Street, but even that hadn’t done much for his budget. The blanks were small boxes of cheap Ertalain alloy with a very pliable plate set inside. You could inscribe a seal onto that plate even without specialized engraving equipment, like the kind used to etch seals into staves and the far sturdier plates found in industrial seals and large stationary shields.

Then you hooked a generator up to the blank, which had just one input and one output, and tested your invention before sinking enormous sums into it. Except that even the blanks were twenty-eight exes apiece.

Ardi had snagged his at sixteen exes each. He’d needed five. And so, he had spent exactly eighty exes. And nearly seven more on engraving styluses.

Thanks to that, he now had a whole chain of blanks sitting before him on the floor of the test platform in the “Stables.” Each one was wired to a generator emulator. The principle was exactly the same as the blanks: this was another small box fitted with a simple household accumulator and made to mimic the properties of a generator. Linked to one another by Ley-cables, the boxes were laid out at scale-accurate distances, reproducing the conditions of the Arena in miniature.

Ardan took off his leather apron with its attached belt and tool pocket, set it on the table, and closed his Ley Mechanics textbook. This one was required reading from the fourth year onwards at the Faculty of Star Engineering, not the same textbook first-year students of the Grand used. Although Ardi preferred seal engineering, he’d still had to start digging into Ley Mechanics as well. Long before this experiment, in fact.

“Have to check everything.” Ardan set the starter aside and turned back to the rolling chalkboard.

He’d picked that up at a discount as well. A neighborhood school not far from “Bruce’s” had been selling it off, and Ardi had spotted the “for sale” notice on his way home. He’d saved almost an ex and a half on it! Timofey Polskih would probably have been proud of him, and Ardan had come to understand Polskih a little better as well.

The laboratory itself, which had been left to him in Lord Aversky’s will, had changed a great deal over the past six months or so. New cabinets now lined the walls, filled with very valuable books and treatises, and with stacks of handwritten papers that Ardan had been painstakingly cataloging and sorting into folders.

A card catalog cabinet, dented and rusted in places, now stood against one wall. A chalkboard Ardi hardly ever used lay a little way off. It wasn’t like the constant running from desk to board, board to platform, and back again tired him, exactly—it simply irritated him. Which was why he’d bought the rolling one.

The writing desk had acquired a thicket of letters and papers, and the alchemical station sat off to one side, growling, crackling, and gurgling from time to time, with a new table standing beside it. New to Ardi, anyways. He’d fished that one out of the Tend flea market, too. He’d gotten it for next to nothing: a thank you, a few minutes of chatting, and a couple dozen kso. Granted, he’d had to fumigate it for beetles and roaches afterward, but the purchase was still worth it.

In the technical bay below the platform, the generators hummed at the edge of hearing. Ardi had replaced their blades, fuel combustion chambers, and oil pans. All in all, the units looked like they could last a few more years, provided Ardan looked after them as attentively as a gardener tends to his flowers, if not more so.

“All right, then.” Ardi lifted the board with its scribbled sheets, flipped through a few, and pulled his pencil from behind his ear. “We have an incoming seal.” He pointed with his pencil at the bulkiest of the boxes, then shifted it to the neighboring blanks. “And two repeaters. Nothing complicated there. The only catch is the transmitters.”

Cables ran from the first blank, which had a brassy sheen, to the neighboring boxes. Those boxes weren’t “repeater” boxes, though—they were something else entirely. The plates inside those boxes carried engraved seals responsible for a single function: transmitting a runic link. How was that done? The best method Ardan had come up with was to vary the Ley-voltage at the output.

It was something like a letter sent through the mail. But in encrypted form. And the seal on the last blank, upon receiving the message, would decode it and fold the new data into its function. The idea was nothing new; this was exactly how people had once tried to crack the problem of long-range communication. But the attempt had failed for the same reasons every other attempt had failed: the Ley-charge faded over longer distances, and errors began to accumulate in such numbers that filtering them out became impossible.

Even so, in theory, it might just work in Ardi’s case, given the number of intermediate blocks and the comparatively-small area of the Arena. Compared to the scope of the long-range communication method problem, the Arena really did look no bigger than a pinprick.

And the calculations made it all seem plausible. He simply needed to add another forty transmitters to the forty repeaters. But that was on paper. And in the real world?

Ardan jotted a note on yet another sheet of paper:

“Wide-area sound system. Prototype 1. Configuration 14. Test 1.”

In the real world, Ardan had recalibrated the transmitter seals more than a dozen times. They kept refusing to hold the right voltage in the Ley-wiring for even a few moments. The signal came out either too weak for the receiver seal to read or so error-ridden that nothing came of it anyway. And that was at a range of only a few meters!

It was no wonder, then, that long-range communication methods remained the coveted prize. This was the kind of Star Engineering problem that minds the world over had been wrestling with for more than half a century… and getting nowhere.

“All right, fine, what we’ve got here isn’t long-range communication, it’s just a variation on a Ley-amplifier,” Ardi reminded himself, picking the starter back up. “Or an amplifier repeater... I wonder if there’s even a proper term for this thing of mine that still refuses to work!”

Ardan squinted at the blanks like his steadily-mounting frustration might somehow affect how the system ran. But there was no longer any point in putting off the next test. Especially since he didn’t have many chances to run them left. The cheap plates inside the blanks only had a tiny bit of resistance to sustained Ley exposure.

Ardi had done his due diligence and calculated his system’s maximum load before he’d even begun. It had worked out to about twenty-two tests in total.

“Three... two...” Ardi threw the switch.

Eyes squeezed shut, he instinctively stepped back and nearly somersaulted over his own desk. If not for Edward’s invention, he probably wouldn’t have even lived to wake up in a hospital, especially since no one would’ve been able to get through the armored and warded door of the “Stables.” They would’ve ended up searching for Ardi’s charred and mangled remains for months.

Ardan blinked furiously, wiping at his eyes to clear the whiteness the bright flash had left behind, and walked over to the edge of the shield. On the platform, the melted blanks still smoldered, and the generator emulators burned with multicolored magical fire.

“Ahgrat,” Ardan muttered glumly. He went over to the platform’s control panel and flipped the forced ventilation switch.

The floor thrummed, the duct flaps lifted, and with a guttural rumble, they started pumping the noxious air out from under the shield. It wasn’t poisoned, exactly, but he didn’t feel like taking chances either way. As Lord Aversky himself had used to say, may the Eternal Angels receive him: “Safety regulations are written in blood.”

That particular phrase had carried a far more terrible weight for Edward than for many other mages. His wife had burned to death because of his own negligence and zealous need to advance his research.

Once enough time had passed, Ardan switched off the ventilation and raised the shield’s manual shutoff lever. The vibration in the trough that ringed the platform died away, which was a sure sign that the invisible shield was down.

Ardan scooped up his board, stepped over the rim, and walked over to what was left of his creation. He had no one to blame but himself. And in any case, testing was definitely over for the day, and around a hundred exes had gone up in smoke.

Once again, Ardi found himself thinking about Mart Borskov’s words.

However much a Star Mage might earn, it still wasn’t going to be enough as long as they weren’t obscenely wealthy, like Edward had been. Or at least close to it.

“So…” Ardi crouched down. With his pencil, he began nudging the splintered blanks and charred plates. “What’s the problem?”

He shifted from his crouch into a half-reclining sprawl, legs stretched along the floor, and glanced at his board.

“All those cascading errors, plus the constant filtering, could have caused overheating and knocked out the forced shutdown block. But that was accounted for from the start.” Ardan was reasoning aloud, steadying himself with the sound of his own voice. He picked up one of the plate shards and looked it over carefully.

“No signs of failure in the failsafe system.” He made a note of that on the page.

Then he picked up the little box that had housed the incoming seal, the one meant to capture the sound from the gramophone. The gramophone had been playing the same record over and over for hours. Ardi had spent the whole day listening to Tess’ songs, including “The Cat” and the one she’d written for him.

“The incoming seal did its job as well,” Ardan noted, surprised. “Then what’s the problem? It’s one thing when nothing works at all. But an explosion caused by overheating, that’s another thing entirely…”

Beyond what the empirical evidence suggested, the first and only suspect the math turned up was the cascade of errors. Sending a piece of information as tiny and insignificant as a runic link, by way of voltage differentials no less, was a dubious business to begin with. So, Ardan had foreseen this possible trouble from the outset. Especially since its theoretical side had been laid out in considerable detail by the engineers who had tried this same approach to solving the long-range communication problem.

They hadn’t sent runic links down the chain, of course; they’d sent Ley-signals carrying a far greater volume of information. Still, the general principle was the same.

“Could it be...”

Ardan pulled the emulators closer. If every single one of the blanks had done its job, then the only thing left that could have affected the outcome at all was the power supply. But that was something you usually checked last because few things in the world were calculated as meticulously as the output of Ley-generators.

The entirety of modern life depended on them, from street lamps at one end to sewer systems and the newfangled central heating at the other. The Empire had gone so far as to break ground on enormous generation stations, whose machinery was the size of entire buildings.

Professor Convel was part of the review board responsible for vetting and approving the calculations for the future stations. Naturally, this was a fact that he mentioned during more or less every lecture.

And so, Ley-generation was such a thoroughly-studied subject that for several years now, Magister theses on it hadn’t been permitted. Of course, every once in a while, someone would put forward a new idea. But it was always something so narrowly specialized that grasping the topic required tons of supporting knowledge. And given the volume of literature involved, tons was almost not even a figure of speech.

“And what are you going to tell me?” Ardi turned the melted housing of an emulator in his hands. Crimson accumulator dust spilled out from it.

The prototype hadn’t required voltage any higher than the Red Star, so he’d managed to cut costs there, at least.

At first glance, the emulator looked as if someone had thrown a Spark into it. A modified one, at that, which meant…

“The reaction started from the inside?” Ardan’s eyebrows went up.

He set the first emulator down and picked up the second. Judging by the precise way the walls had melted, the fire here had also begun inside the box. The other emulator boxes told the same story.

“What, did they sell me defective crystals?” Ardan exclaimed, and his eyes went to his desk.

The receipt from the Spell Market still lay there. If they really had sold him a batch of defective household accumulators that had been cracked, for instance, or too rich in impurities, or so poorly faceted that the crystal planes had barely reflected anything, then…

Ardan’s gaze dropped to the floor. He’d used the same accumulators, only with a greater number of rays, in the generators beneath the platform.

“Ahgrat!” Ardan shouted. He dropped the board, stumbled, sprang up, and bolted for the control panel.

With a drowning man’s urgency, Ardan slapped his hands down on the generators’ emergency shutoff levers. Pretty soon, the “Stables” sank into an acrid gloom, which was slightly broken up by the daylight that crept through the narrow windows up by the ceiling.

The fans went quiet. The humming around the perimeter of the platforms gradually dwindled down to nothing.

Ardi’s heart hammered. He didn’t want to imagine what could’ve happened if that had been him instead of those melted emulator boxes.

“All right, hold on,” Ardan snapped at himself. “I bought the accumulators a whole week ago. And they were working fine until now...”

Ardan looked at the floor again. He stared at the spot where the hatch and the fold-down ladder leading into the generator compartment were. The real generators, unlike the emulators, had their own safety circuit. If every defective accumulator currently being used in households went up like this, there wouldn’t be a single living soul left in the world.

Hissing something unintelligible through his teeth, Ardan waited a few minutes for the system to cool down, then raised the levers back into place. Soon, the “Stables” came alive again, and the hum of the generators, still grumbling over the indignity, slowly faded away.

So, it wasn’t the Ertalain crystals after all.

“But what is it, then?” Ardan frowned and sighed. “Something keeps disturbing the system, and I can’t even…”

He fell silent.

Slowly, he turned his gaze to his scorched contraption, the one that had turned dozens of exes into cinders. Then, just as slowly, he looked at his own desk.

Disturbing the system.

Disturbances…

Disturbances!

Bolting like a fly-stung horse, Ardan threw himself at the desk. He nearly flipped it over. Toppled stacks of paper went flying and a rather expensive microscope fell and shattered, but he couldn’t have cared less. He wrenched drawer after drawer out of the desk, scattering documents, seal sketches, and unfinished calculations that had been part of dead-end research.

He was looking for only a few pages. Pages he knew almost by heart, but he still wanted to be sure he’d understood them right.

“Disturbances... The less information, the shorter the wave... The Echo. The Echo of Ley-disturbances!” He chanted. The things he had spent so long sorting and arranging scattered in every direction.

No one called it that anymore, however.

At last, he snatched up the page he was looking for, the one with only a handful of formulas on it. A little over nine months had passed since they’d first seen the light of day. Ardan had laid eyes on them slightly earlier than that.

“You did go through the Paarlax equations, right, Ard? I’m sure that with your appetite for knowledge, you simply couldn’t have passed them up.”

“I did.”

“Then you saw that they preserve their symmetry along both vectors of time. Whether one moves forward through time or back through it, the Paarlax equations preserve their symmetry.”

For nearly a year now, instead of calling it the Echo of Ley-disturbances, the term Paarlax Field had been in use.

Erzans Paarlax’s own equations—he had calculated the influence of the Ley Lines and expressed it through the novel concept of a field—did in fact preserve their symmetry. Their vertical symmetry—the symmetry along the axis of time. Which was what had made Lea Mortimer believe it might be possible to move along that very same axis.

And Paarlax had been interested specifically in symmetry through time as a means of proving that this field was constant and indestructible. And so the pages held no notes on horizontal connections.

“Damn it all!” Ardan nearly screamed. He snatched up his staff and his cloak, shutting down all of the “Stables’” equipment on his way out. Paying no mind to the metallic groan of the generators, he squeezed through the heavy armored door while it was still barely cracked open.

Ignoring the sharp, ugly pain in his hip, he sprinted to the “Derks” parked at the curb. He tossed the bag with his staff onto the back seat and flopped into the front.

It didn’t occur to him that he’d need to cross half the city. And maybe that was why the agency car took off without stalling even once. All of Ardi’s thoughts at that moment were somewhere outside the car, and so the car flew along the street, then along the embankment, with the effortless grace of a swallow that never has to think about using its wings.

* * *

Ardan yanked open the door of the Spell Market’s main office so hard that he almost tore it off its hinges. He charged into a space that had grown almost as familiar as home to him, cut across the showroom, swerved around an indignant customer in a green cloak, and moved up to the counter.

On the other side, near the register, Asirs was fiddling with something. He was the one who usually handled Ardi’s orders and purchases.

“Mr. Egobar,” the normally-welcoming Asirs said with a frown. “You’ll need to take your place in lin-”

“I need the posthumously-published TheSymmetries of the Ley-field by Grand Magister Erzans Paarlax!” Ardan barked.

A few months earlier, also posthumously, Paarlax had been granted the highest scholarly title. Not counting Archmage, naturally. That was a title that remained beyond the reach of the overwhelming majority of mages. There was currently just one Archmage in the whole world.

“You’re rather late, Mr. Egobar.” Asirs cast an apologetic glance at the grumbling Green Star Mage. “Copies are being snatched up faster than we can print them. There’s a six-month waitlist for preorders. It’s revolutionary research, after all. So, you’ll have to wai-”

“Doesn’t matter!” Ardan snapped. He had driven here from the “Stables” only because it was faster than going to the Grand. Though, getting a copy from the library would have likely meant standing in line until summer. “Are any of the reserved copies still here?”

“Y-yes,” Asirs stammered slightly, clearly taken aback by the outburst. “There’s one copy on hold for Grand Magister Moshain’s company.”

“Excellent!” His pulse hammered so hard in his temples that he honestly believed he was speaking quietly. “I’ll take it! How much?”

“Ninety-nine exes per copy, Mr. Egobar,” Asirs said, taking a small step back. “The demand is enormous, you see. The print runs come from the Guild itself, so they’re not all that large. And in any case, I can’t hand over someone else’s ord-”

With a growl, Ardan slapped his hand down on the counter and slid it slightly aside, revealing his Second Chancery identification that was hidden beneath it.

“Urgent. The. Copy. For. Me.” Ardan said with a pause between each word.

“Y-yes... O-of c-course... J-just a s-s-second.” Asirs nodded rapidly, his stammer back in full force.

While Asirs rummaged among the parcels wrapped in paper and tied with twine, Ardan whipped out his checkbook and wrote a check for the full amount.

“Here you are, Mr. Egobar,” Asirs said, his stammer back under control, and set the hefty package on the counter.

“Thank you!” Ardi shouted, snatched up the book, and put the signed check down.

Then, almost at a run, trying to ignore a leg that had gone from aching to outright screaming, he burst out of the building and dove back into the “Derks.”

Ardan tore the thick paper open and ripped the twine apart with his fangs. Then he opened the volume, found its table of contents, and ran a finger down the entries.

“Not it... Not that one... Not that one either... Aha!”

He opened the book to a little past the middle and started leafing feverishly through the pages until he found the formulas and descriptions he wanted.

With trembling hands, Ardan pulled the crumpled page that contained his own calculations out of the inner pocket of his coat. Grand Magister Paarlax’s formulas showed that, regardless of the distance covered, the symmetry held up on the horizontal plane as well!

Ardan hurled the staggeringly-expensive book onto the seat behind him and, with his calculations still held in one hand, he stomped down on the pedals. The “Derks” grumbled, snarled, and after belching a column of gray smoke, it lunged forward.

* * *

“I need to see the Colonel!” Ardan demanded, staring into the eyes of the duty officer who was behind the desk in the foyer of the Black House.

The duty officers’ usual “booth,” where they spent their shifts, had been refitted into something that could at least pass for a room rather than just a closet.

“For the third time, that’s not possible, Corporal,” the duty officer repeated.

He was a man with a weather-beaten face and several ghastly scars running down his arms all the way to the backs of his hands.

“It’s urgent!”

“It’ll wait.”

“Ahgrat!” Ardan struck the floor with his staff. He felt the shields of the Black House brush against his mind with a dangerous, steel-edged touch, then withdraw the moment they came across his identification. They didn’t withdraw very far, though.

From beneath Ardi’s staff, frost shot out and slid up the desk.

The duty officer, without so much as a surprised grunt, swept the ice crystals off the desk. Anyone could find themselves on duty at the Black House, so the man sitting in front of Ardi right now could’ve been anyone at all. But Ardi didn’t care.

“I warned you, Corporal.” The duty officer shrugged. He turned and sent a short note through the pneumatic mail. “Whatever happens next, that’s on you alone.”

Ardan barely heard the end of the man’s sentence. He probably ought to have noticed that the cars parked outside the Black House were not the usual ones. He probably ought to have noticed that every window was tightly covered with curtains, and that around the main entrance, there were considerably more staff than usual. However, none of them were smoking, so it wasn’t a smoke break or some other silly tradition that had brought them out there.

When Ardan reached the right floor, he should’ve probably wondered what two dozen operatives lined up on both sides of the corridor were doing in these perpetually-empty hallways. Several of them even carried staves of pure Ertalain alloy that were adorned with military seals the likes of which Ardan had never even heard of.

He probably should’ve noticed that the operatives stationed right beside the door, a gray-haired mage and a middle-aged woman, were looking at him with clear hostility.

If Ardan had had even a portion of his wits about him just then, he would’ve likely noticed all of it. But he could hear nothing besides his own thoughts and his heart, which was pounding louder than orcish drums.

He burst into the Colonel’s office like he was entering “Bruce’s.” Ardi practically kicked the doors open and, brandishing Paarlax’s book with his calculations tucked inside it, he shouted from the doorway:

“I found it! Colonel, sir! I... found... the solution...”

As the door swung shut behind him, Ardi’s voice grew quieter and quieter. And in his mind, the question of how to turn theory into reality was gradually giving way to steppes, prairies, forests, the endless expanses of the Empire, and the company of Lieutenant Yonatan Kornosskiy.

The Colonel wasn’t seated at the head of the table at all; he was in the same seat Milar usually occupied. Then who had taken the Colonel’s chair?

A man whose face Ardan saw every time they held a meeting in this office—the portrait of Pavel IV had always hung behind the Colonel, after all. And now the man himself was sitting beneath that portrait, wearing an ordinary business suit, a short-brimmed felt hat held before him.

His Imperial Majesty, the ruler of the Empire of the New Monarchy, Pavel IV, was here in the flesh.

Ardi turned sharply, but the door was already closed.

He swallowed audibly.

He had interrupted a meeting between the Emperor and the Colonel.

“And what sort of solution have you found, Mr. Egobar?” Came the familiar voice. It was soft, but had real iron lurking underneath.

This was a voice Ardan had counted on never hearing again for as long as he lived. At least not in person.

“Your Imperial Majesty.” Ardan bowed, leaning on his staff. “Forgive the intrusion. I’ll wait outside.”

The Colonel looked like he was ready to breathe fire at this point, but the Emperor only leaned back in his chair and rested his chin on his fist.

“Well, since you’re already here, Corporal, if it isn’t too much trouble, please share this oh-so-urgent discovery of yours with us.”

The Emperor was courteous. Always, with everyone. It was a trait the journalists never failed to mention in the papers. Ardi had already met one such man who was always polite and courteous.

Duke-General Oleg Zakrovsky. The current Prime Minister and, on the side, the mentor to His Imperial Majesty.

Ardan swallowed again and, for no reason he could name, waved the book around; the sheet with his own calculations popped free of it. Ardi tried to catch it, realized he wouldn’t manage it, and let the slip of paper fall at his feet.

“Well?” The Emperor was plainly hurrying him along, while the Colonel was likely weighing options that involved exile, or more likely, the mines.

“I’ve found, in theory, with certain assumptions...” Ardan drew in a breath and steeled himself the same way he’d done as a child, back when he and Guta had jumped off a cliff and into a river. All you had to do was take the first step, and then whatever came next was simply going to happen. “...the solution to the problem of long-range communication methods.”

Whatever titles Pavel IV might’ve held, in that moment, silence alone reigned supreme.