Book II. Chapter 116 - Once again

Chapter 116

Ardi stirred his tea and watched the leaves swirl in the cup. They were thin and black, curled into odd little shapes, and they reminded him of tiny worms. Obeying some intricate laws of physics, they rode the funneling current down toward the bottom, then let it carry them back up again.

They were simple tea leaves. And yet, calculating their motion would eat up hours. They were being pulled at by so many different forces that you might need an entire research team to chase them all down. Almost like when it came to skates and ice. In school, they taught people that the blade of the ice skate glides because it first cuts the ice, then melts it into a thin slick of water, and finally, it rides the little cushion that forms as a result. Except that wasn’t quite true.

Not long ago, a group of Senior Magisters, some of them mages and some non-Star scholars, tried to calculate exactly how a skate moves because of a bet. Their conclusion: modern science doesn’t have enough data to explain exactly why skates glide on ice. The current level of knowledge insisted that gliding on ice was impossible, or that the equation was missing something, some vanishingly small scrap of data that kept slipping away.

The Guild of Sciences had once offered a thousand exes to the first person who could explain how an ice skate is able to glide across the ice. Twenty years later, no one had managed it. No one had been able to put down on paper a thing that anyone who cared to could walk outside and observe with their own eyes.

And what did tea leaves and ice skates have to do with anything? Well, Ardan had become part of a phenomenon just like them: perfectly simple, and yet nearly impossible to explain.

He sat there stirring his tea, glaring at the plate of pastries like they’d personally wronged him. Why should a mutant’s poison force him to suffer a broken leg, excessive sweating, exhaustion of both body and mind, and still leave him unable to handle a large quantity of baked goods, or anything made from domesticated animals? And since Tess had made Ardan’s favorite blackberry pie for his birthday, the next time he’d get to eat anything coming from the oven would be somewhere near the start of summer.

So what, exactly, was so complicated about the simple act of having a cup of tea?

“How are you finding the capital, Ard?”

The complicated part was this: on top of the tea, and the pastries sitting just out of reach, Ardi was drinking it in the company of the Emperor and the Colonel. Not even the thousand-ex puzzle seemed as complicated as this one…

“I beg your pardon, Your Imperial Majesty?” Ardan gave a small start and turned to Pavel IV, who was sitting at the head of the table.

The Emperor raised the porcelain cup with his right hand, his pinky curled inward, the saucer held steady in his left, calm as ever. He looked the same as he had before, in that temple that had been nearly finished even back then. He was maybe a little more worn out than he’d been at Edward’s funeral, which was the last time Ardan had seen the Emperor, even if from a distance.

He was a short man—a few centimeters taller than the Colonel, maybe, but no more than that. Deep wrinkles ran across his lean face, and he had a number of round shrapnel scars, too. When the Emperor didn’t have to play the “face of the nation,” he didn’t bother to hide them under powder or talc, so they marred half his face in a way that was frankly ugly. Up top, his red hair was a bit messy and shot through with gray, and below, his deep-set eyes were such a dark brown they were nearly black.

The Emperor looked every bit the cavalry officer he’d been in his youth. And it wasn’t just the scars that made his history obvious. Half of his leg had been replaced by a prosthetic, which was why a black lacquered cane was leaning against the table, keeping Pavel IV Agrov company.

Ardan had met his share of dangerous men. And not only humans, at that. Was the Emperor one of them? More likely not. This was because Pavel IV played in a league all his own, somewhere past the reach of everyone else. The word “dangerous” didn’t capture so much as a sliver of what Ardan felt while sitting in this man’s company.

He’d sooner drink tea with the Dandy, Prime Minister Zakrovsky, Taisia Shpritz, Driba, and Lea Mortimer all at once than sit here next to the Colonel and the Emperor. His nerves would be less shot by the end of that experience. All right, fine, maybe Ardi was exaggerating a little. But only a little.

“The Metropolis, Ard,” the Emperor said, repeating his question, lifting his cup in a small salute. “You’ve been living in the capital for... more than a year and a half now, haven’t you?”

“Y-yes, Your Imperial Majesty,” Ardi managed to reply, tripping a little over the words.

The memory of how he’d spoken to the Emperor a year ago in that temple flashed through his mind. A chill went down Ardan’s spine. Oh, Sleeping Spirits… Why couldn’t a man go back in time and give his younger self a good smack on the back of the head, just to knock the gears into working order? With what he knew now, Ardi would never have let himself get away with even a shred of that flippancy.

The Emperor lifted his eyebrows a fraction in what passed for an encouraging gesture from him.

“It’s really beautiful here,” Ardi said, reaching for simple, almost childlike words, “in Old Town, at least. The New City, though... it’s not quite for me. It’s loud, and for all that open space, it’s somehow still cramped.”

“I’m afraid I have to agree with you there, Ard,” the Emperor said, setting his cup down on the table. “If not for the quicksand and the groundwater, we could build the city out instead of up. But there’s no helping it. We make do with what we have. The upside is that it lets us keep the cultural heritage of the past intact.”

The Emperor spoke of city planning as easily as if he’d had a hand in designing the streets himself. In reality, the truth was simpler than that: Pavel IV had taken the country over from his father, who, in the last twenty years of his reign, had grown too old and too sick to run much of anything. And when he’d come into power, he’d decided to do his utmost to ensure that the Empire prospered, and along with it, its capital.

This entire time, the Colonel had been boring into Ardi with a cold, even stare, saying nothing. It was the look of steel sliding into some poor wretch’s throat. There wasn’t even anything personal in it, only the simple fact that this was what steel was made to do.

They’d been sitting in the office for half an hour now, trading the occasional remark that meant nothing at all. They were waiting for the people the Emperor had summoned.

“I’m sincerely glad that you managed to find yourself a worthy match here in such a short time, Ard,” the Emperor said, raising his cup again. “I hope your union with the lovely Tess Orman, now Egobar, will be a lasting one, and that your days with the young Mrs. Egobar are joyous right up until the hour you meet the Eternal Angels.”

Here was another thing Ardi knew thanks to the papers, the same as everyone else: the Emperor was a deeply devout man. However, that didn’t stop him from crushing any attempts by the Church to meddle with politics, and doing so in the harshest way possible.

“Thank you, Your Imperial Majesty,” he said.

He was feeling about as awkward as it was possible to feel. And the fact that Paarlax’s posthumous work was lying on the table in front of him, with a crumpled sheet of his own calculations teetering on top of it, did nothing to make that better. If anything, it produced the exact opposite effect.

To his relief, someone finally knocked on the door.

“At last, our guests are here,” the Emperor said. He set his cup back down on the table.

If you didn’t know any better, you’d have assumed that the man at the head of the table was someone perfectly ordinary, if a little colorful. Even his suit cost only a touch more than one Ardi could have afforded.

“Come in,” said the Colonel, finally speaking after half an hour.

The first through the door was Lieutenant Dagdag. He came in wearing a severe business suit, a pince-nez perched on his long, hawkish nose. He was a short man but a thickset one, bald, with a full and majestic beard. Anatomically speaking, he was a flawless example of mixed human and dwarven blood.

“Your Imperial Majesty.” Dagdag bowed, crossed to the table, and took the seat beside Ardi.

On his way past, he gave the young man a short, slightly displeased nod of greeting. Dagdag couldn’t stand having reports reach him late, and Ardan was perpetually behind on his paperwork. Not because he was careless, but because there was always something more important to do.

“Good...” The Emperor glanced at his wristwatch, which was the plainest kind possible. It was an officer’s watch, the same kind they handed out to every graduate of the Military Academy. “...almost evening, Lieutenant Dagdag.”

The door creaked again and another gentleman appeared at the threshold. He’d been thin once but had gone soft since, as his narrow shoulders and sagging belly could attest to. His belly was tucked away under a vest with a stiff back. This was a corset by another name, only made for a man. He wore a burgundy suit that was obviously tailored to his measurements. His patent leather shoes reflected the lamplight, and the round bald patch at the top of his head managed the same trick just as well.

He made no effort to hide it. With a hat in one hand and a staff made from Ertalain in the other, he stepped calmly into the room.

“Your Imperial Majesty.” His greeting came out sounding more like a formality than anything else.

He was acting like this was far from the first time he’d found himself in company like this, or like he carried enough weight of his own to not feel pressured by those dark eyes. Over his suit, he wore a black cloak. His epaulettes denoted a strange number of rays: three, then four, then three again, then two, then three once more, and finally, a single one. A Grand Magister’s medallion swayed against his chest as he moved.

The man had a bloated face, his nose was bent a little to one side, and his hair was thinning and gray. He took the seat beside the Colonel.

“Colonel,” he said by way of greeting.

No one else came in. The doors were also locked from the outside, and Ardan caught sight of two mages positioning themselves in front of them. Apparently, no one else would be getting into the main office of the Second Chancery until this conversation was done.

“Gentlemen.” The Emperor leaned back in his chair and laid his hands flat on the table. “Thank you for answering my request to come to the Black House.”

“Of course, Your Imperial Majesty,” Lieutenant Dagdag said at once, inclining his head.

The Grand Magister only offered a brief nod in response, though there was respect in his dark eyes when he did it.

“Corporal.” The Emperor gestured toward Ardan with an open hand. “Please.”

Ardan cleared his throat. He pulled Paarlax’s book toward him, opened it to the page he needed, and set his sheet of calculations down beside it.

“I think I’ve found the theoretical basis that makes a method of long-range communication possible.”

For a moment, the same silence that had filled the office half an hour before settled over it. It was regal, stately, and completely impenetrable.

“Your Imperial Majesty.” The Grand Magister turned sharply toward the Emperor. “With all due respect, isn’t this a farce?”

“Grand Magister Uynov, I’d ask you to hear the Corporal out all the way through, and only then will we go on.”

Uynov… Ardi had heard that name before, likely during a lecture.

The Grand Magister bowed his head again and turned to Ardi. For some reason Ardan couldn’t quite put his finger on, he could feel the dislike directed straight at him. He could feel it right through his skin, and underneath it, there was a thin thread of pure, undiluted malice. Maybe the man had been busy with something important when the messenger had pulled him away to hand him the Emperor’s order.

Either way...

“First, I’d like to point out that my theory is built on Mr. Paarlax’s research,” Ardan began. “The heart of it, in a nutshell, is this: you don’t transmit the whole array of data. You transmit data about the data. The smallest possible version of it.”

Lieutenant Dagdag and the Grand Magister frowned in unison. It was likely that they had no idea what he was talking about just then. And it wasn’t because Ardan was some kind of genius. It was just that Paarlax’s work wasn’t even a year old yet, at least not if you counted from when it was published.

“The point isn’t the act of transmitting information. It’s creating a disturbance in the Paarlax field,” Ardan went on, pushing his sheet of calculations forward. “Since the field is a constant, any distortion in it can be calculated almost by definition. All you have to do is identify the distortions themselves, or, to use the old word for them, the disturbances. Then, with a receiver seal, you can read those distortions and record them. Which, broadly speaking, is the method of long-range communication.”

Without so much as asking for permission, the Grand Magister took Ardi’s calculations, then pulled the book with Paarlax’s research over to his side of the table.

“So, in other words,” Dagdag said, pinching the bridge of his nose between two fingers, “you’re planning to send not a message, but a message that says a message exists?”

“No,” Ardan said, shaking his head. “There’s no need to transmit any meaningful information at all. The smaller the distortion to the Paarlax field, the more stable it is, because it assimilates into the Ley Lines more slowly.”

“But if it’s just data about the presence of data, how do we read it, Ard?” Dagdag spread his hands out.

Ardi placed his own grimoire on the table.

“If sound is just a wave, then information is nothing more than one particular cipher of it.” Ardan had been mulling this over on his way to the Spell Market. “If you make the distortions work on the principle of vibration, sending out short waves of them, you can use those to build-”

“A language.” Dagdag’s eyes went a little wider, showing his square pupils. “With a theory like this, you could build a language, one that two units could use to talk to each other. Or even more than two, if you set up a transmitter...” Dagdag drummed his fingers on the table. “What’s the range on your distortions, Ard?”

“I based the calculation on an attempt to transmit a single runic link,” Ardan said. He reached for his paper, but it was still in the Grand Magister’s tight grip. “In that case, the range, before errors start piling up from outside distortions, comes to about a kilometer. But if you make the wave shorter, sending far less information, say a single rune, or maybe even just the fact that a rune is there, then the range could stretch to fifty kilometers.”

“Just that much?” Dagdag frowned and went straight back to drumming his fingers against the table. “I see. It’s all because of the Ley Lines, right?”

Ardan nodded.

“In the areas where the Ley Lines aren’t so...” He waved a vague hand through the air. “...dense, the range can be higher.”

“How much?” The Colonel asked curtly in that deep voice of his.

Ardan didn’t answer right away.

“Up to a hundred kilometers,” he said with a shrug.

“And that’s from one device to the next,” Dagdag said slowly. “And if you set up relays, then... how much ground could we cover?”

Again, Ardan didn’t answer right away.

“In theory, on paper… as much as you’d ever need.”

Dagdag went pale and hiccupped.

“Communication... at almost instant speed... From Swallow Bay to the shore of the Reverse Ocean... From one end of the Empire to the other...”

“Not almost instant. Instant,” Ardan said, shaking his head. “Assuming perfect synchronization, a message encrypted through distortions in the Paarlax field, even if you sent it clear across the Empire, would take roughly twenty-five hundredths of a second to reach its target.”

“Twenty-five hundredths of a second...” Dagdag repeated. “Are you sure, Ard?”

“In theory?” Ardan said. “Yes. The research of Grand Magister Paarlax, may the Eternal Angels receive him, proves it’s possible. But when it comes to actually building the thing...”

Ardan fell silent. He remembered that blinding flash again, the one that would’ve burned him down to the bone if not for the shield of the training ground.

For a while, the office went quiet again. Then the Emperor, who had been listening attentively this whole time, turned to the Grand Magister.

“Mr. Uynov, your verdict?” The Emperor asked, his tone level.

Uynov pushed Paarlax’s book and the crumpled paper away. For a while, he studied Ardan, who was sitting across from him, in silence. Finally, he turned to the Emperor and said, in a tone that left no room for argument:

“These are the ravings of a feverish, boyish mind. Nothing more.”

Ardan choked on air and started to open his mouth, but he wasn’t given the chance to say a word.

“Maybe in some perfect world, the kind that exists only on paper and in the imaginations of half-educated students, something like this might be possible,” the Grand Magister went on. “But not in reality.”

The Emperor nodded and turned to Ardan.

“Mr. Egobar, you have a few minutes to convince me that...” Pavel IV glanced at his wrist again. “...I haven’t wasted nearly an hour of my time on your enthusiasm for Star Magic and your desire to use it for the good of society. Such enthusiasm deserves better than this.”

It made sense that the Emperor would take the Grand Magister’s word over his. Any reasonable person would’ve done the same in the Emperor’s place. He was just a second-year student, after all. But Ardi was dead certain of his theoretical work, all the more so because the experiment, even though it had failed, had still justified his findings even though it had been trying to answer a completely different question.

“Grand Magister Uynov, please show me where my calculations are wrong.” Ardan pushed his crumpled sheet of paper back across to him.

The Grand Magister’s upper lip twitched. He was acting like what had just been slid in front of him wasn’t a sheet of paper but a generous helping of cow dung.

“I’m not saying they’re wrong, young man.” The Grand Magister’s voice hitched a little when he said those last two words. The man was obviously trying to hide his distaste for Ardi. And for some reason, Ardan was certain that it had nothing to do with his long fangs or his amber eyes. “I’m saying it’s nonsense. Dangerous, anti-scientific nonsense.”

“But you’re not giving me anything concrete to work with!” Ardan protested, and he meant it.

“It’s not my job to give you anything concrete, student!” The Grand Magister had finally lost his composure, and his voice rose a little. “That’s what you have professors for. And I’d advise you to worry more about passing your end-of-year exams than about scientific problems.”

“The fact that I study at the Grand doesn’t cancel out what’s written right here.” Ardi held his ground and jabbed a finger at the sheet of calculations.

The Grand Magister sighed and closed his eyes for a moment.

“Fine, young man. Then answer me this. How do you build a device with enough power to produce the necessary intensity of short-wave disturb... distortion in the Paarlax field? And for that matter, what kind of device is it even supposed to be? On top of that, this mythical device needs to avoid emitting any incidental interfer... distortions of its own. Otherwise, the errors pile up before the message, or, as you put it, the signal, is ever sent.”

Ardan felt the chill crawling up his back.

“I don’t know.”

“Good. You’ve grasped at least that much, young man.” The Grand Magister was leaning on the words young man so often that it was becoming clear: for some reason Ardan couldn’t fathom, he had earned the personal dislike of this Grand Magister who stood so close to the Emperor. “Let’s continue with this little lecture you’ll end up owing me for. Suppose that by some engineering miracle, out of materials we’ve never heard of, using calibration equipment we can’t even dream about, we build an emitter. Answer me this. What happens when two waves of distortion from two different emitters collide? Or do you intend to build one single line of communication and nothing more?”

Ardan grabbed at the lifeline the Grand Magister had handed him without meaning to.

“The Paarlax field.” He patted the book. “It isn’t a plane. It isn’t anything at all except exactly that, a field. The waves don’t have to collide.”

“They don’t have to collide,” the Grand Magister drawled, a carnivorous smile spreading across his face. “Do you hear yourself, boy? Is there a single experiment with this Paarlax field of yours that backs your theory up? Our knowledge of it still amounts to exactly one volume.” He pointed at the open book.

Ardan started to open his mouth, but then he saw the Colonel’s stare as he shook his head. He did it so quickly and subtly that no one caught it but Ardi and the Emperor. Grand Magister Uynov knew nothing about Lea Mortimer’s device.

“No,” Ardan lied flatly.

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“There. You see, young man?” The Grand Magister let out a sharp grunt. “Now, let’s put it all together. Colliding waves. Hundreds, no, why hundreds, hundreds of thousands of emitters, all of them generating waves of distortion around the clock… And those waves collide and couple with one another. What does that remind you of?”

“A chain reaction,” Ardan said quietly.

“Exactly. And what does any uncontrolled chain Ley-reaction lead to? To the uncontrolled release of all the energy built up inside it. In other words, to an explosion.” The Grand Magister shoved the sheet of paper back toward him with clear contempt. “I’m sure you’ve already run into this in your own experiments. Haven’t you? You blew something up. Most likely, given that you surely used blanks, the reaction affected... the accumulator crystal in your generator emulator. And that’s what blew up.”

However unpleasant a man Uynov might’ve been, he was still a Grand Magister. And, by the looks of it, a Grand Magister of Star Engineering. A couple of minutes with his calculations had been enough for him to realize exactly what Ardan had used as the starting point for his theory.

“There’s your concrete thing to work with, young man,” the Grand Magister finished. “This isn’t the theoretical key to creating a method of long-range communication. It’s brazen speculation based on a fresh and still poorly-understood discovery that was made by a far greater mind than yours.”

“But the theory-”

“Is empty and backed by nothing but equations,” the Grand Magister cut in. “And building a prototype isn’t just absurd at its very foundation, it’s flat-out dangerous. Only a genuine madman would start building a prototype on the basis of such a limited understanding of something this hazardous. Then again, what else could you expect from a student of Aversky’s? You’re every bit as narrowminded as your mentor, young man. And every bit as worthless to science. You’d do better to mind your own affairs.”

“Did you manage it, Ard? Did you stop the experiment? Was the apparatus destroyed?”

“Mr. Aversky was not a worthless man.” Ardan felt something dark, something he already knew too well, beginning to rise up in his chest.

“Aversky was blind, arrogant and stupid, and he paid for it with his own life,” the Grand Magister said with a dismissive wave. “And you’re rushing headlong after his shadow, as this scrap of paper makes perfectly clear. Its proper place is the wastebasket.”

“Aversky died because he believed in what he was doing!” Ardan felt the table slowly become colder beneath his hands.

“Aversky died because he always ignored the rules and look where it got him!” The Grand Magister’s voice rose again. “And you, you insufferable boy! You’re proposing that we take research that isn’t even a year old and use it to build some unknown apparatus that could lead to catastrophe!”

“You have no right to talk like that about-”

“I have every right!” The Grand Magister lost the last of his composure, shoved his chair back, and got to his feet. “If not for that... for that... Aversky, my daughter would still be alive!”

Ardan flinched back a little, and the cold, along with the darkness that had been rising in his chest, drained away. Uynov. Now he remembered where he knew that name from. That had been the maiden name of Aversky’s wife. She’d been the daughter of a Grand Magister of Star Engineering…

But that tragedy still didn’t give the man the right to...

“Gentlemen.” A soft voice broke up their argument.

Everyone spun toward the Emperor, and Ardan nearly choked. He looked away at once, remembering where he was and whose presence he was in. As for the Grand Magister, a man who could level an entire city block, well...

“Your Imperial Majesty, I most humbly beg your pardon for the garish scene you’ve just witnessed.” He bent so low that his teeth ground together from the pain in his lower back.

“Sit down, Mr. Uynov,” was all the Emperor said.

Whatever titles Uynov held, however many Stars his epaulettes showed he had, despite the vast knowledge he commanded, when faced with the Emperor, none of it mattered. And it had nothing to do with the man’s crown. It had to do with Pavel IV himself. Merely standing in his presence would make you feel like the entire Empire was watching you with all of its unshakable, monstrous might.

“Based on your discussion, gentlemen mages, I gather that, at least in theory...” The Emperor leaned on the armrest again and rested his cheek against his fist. “...this idea holds up.”

“Only on paper, Your Imperial Majesty,” Uynov confirmed with a bow of his head.

“Lieutenant Dagdag.”

“Yes, Your Imperial Majesty?”

“Remind me, if you would, how our conquest of the sky and the building of airships began, fifteen years ago?”

“With a paper that included a theoretical report on the possibility of creating a separate Ley-echo... that is, a mobile Paarlax field!” Dagdag replied crisply, like a soldier.

For a while, the Emperor looked at everyone gathered there in silence, then checked his watch for the third time.

“I’m running late for my next meeting.” He rose to his feet—everyone at the table shot up at once—and put on his hat. “Colonel, be so kind as to brief those present on the matter of secrecy, and the consequences for anyone who violates it, and the consequences for their families. As for this method of long-range communication...” The Emperor turned his gaze to Ardi. “...good work, Corporal. We’ll see what we can do with it. But if, or rather, when you come up with new ideas, be so kind as to send them along through the standard channels. Gentlemen.”

“Your Imperial Majesty!” Four voices thundered in unison.

And the Emperor, without another word, left the office.

* * *

Ardi stared at the official letter in his hands. It had been signed and stamped with an embossed seal:

“Dear Mr. Egobar,

We are hereby notifying you of the funds being transferred to your account at the Imperial Bank.

Over the course of the latest accounting period, the Spell Market recorded the following sales:

1. 32 Ice Bullet seals, unencrypted, under the general license of the Mages’ Guild. Listed price: 46 exes, 73 kso.

Mr. Egobar’s share, per the signed agreement, came to: 261 exes, 69 (rounded up) kso.

2. 183 Ice Bullet seals, encrypted, under the general license of the Spell Market. Listed price: not specified.

Mr. Egobar’s share, per the signed agreement, came to: 84 exes, 18 kso.

In addition, the Spell Market, acting as the patent registration agent, withheld a 10% agent’s commission for its monthly oversight of patent law compliance.

The following are royalties earned during the latest accounting period based on the patent: “A Variant of the Variadic Function for Implementing Free-Parameter Calculations in Two-Star Military Star Magic.” The patent is in the name of etid Ard Egobar, and the earnings amounted to:

79 exes, 13 kso.

The total remuneration for this accounting period amounted to:

425 exes, 00 kso.

The funds will be transferred within five banking days after the above order is signed.

Senior Accountant of the Spell Market,

Magister Enol Brooks.

Date signed: the 14th day of the Month of Stars.”

And since the sum ended up being pleasingly round in every sense of the word, Ardan had no trouble adding it to his current bank balance. After deducting what he’d spent on the previous and the new prototypes of the sound system for the Arena, on a copy of The Symmetries of the Ley-field, on the rent for the new place he and Tess were living in, and the money he’d sent to Shaia and Erti, the balance in Ardan’s account was now a little under a thousand exes.

That high number, which, while still just three digits, was quickly heading toward a fourth, hadn’t just grown thanks to the royalties from the Spell Market over the past quarter. All the Black House bonuses that had finally landed in his account had also helped a great deal. Like every institution of the Crown, the Black House received its funding at the start of each calendar year. This meant that the bonuses accrued at the end of one year often carried over into the next.

“And even that won’t be enough,” Ardan sighed, tucking the letter back into his wallet. He placed it into the compartment with his checkbook.

On the floor of the training ground in front of him—a floor he still hadn’t managed to scrub completely clean of the scorch marks from the last explosion—lay a working, reasonably-functional prototype of the sound system.

The recorder blank obediently recorded the sound. Then, after shaping it into a beam that carried a simple set of information about the sound wave, which was encrypted as the basic Sound Illusion spell, it sent that beam into a second blank, the repeater. Only this one had two plates rather than just one. The first plate received the information and processed it, then passed it along to the second plate by way of a distortion in the Ley-field.

The gap between them was exactly seven millimeters. At precisely that distance, the mathematical errors sat at a level close to zero. And so, the second plate, the one with the seal, took in the distortion, analyzed it, and reproduced the sound.

Could this prototype be called proof that his theory based on the Paarlax field was correct? Of course not, because in his experiment, Ardan was working with the most basic values there were. To say nothing of the fact that the prototype was full of holes.

The most obvious one was the question of what you should do if some interference pops up between the “recorder” and the “repeater?” The answer, broadly speaking, was nothing. In that case, the repeater wouldn’t repeat the Sound Illusion spell, which they taught the first-years at the Grand, but some random cacophony instead. Ardi had neutralized that possibility with a Ley-cable. He’d simply tied the spell to Ertalain wiring, and that had canceled out any interference.

But again, the wiring only kept the spell in its original form for about seven hundred meters, and past that, even relays wouldn’t save things. The signal would come out unreadable. And setting up relays every half a kilometer, give or take, would take more infrastructure than anyone had. Never mind the cost, it was the other potential issues that made it unfeasible. Like the chance of an outside party tapping in, the vulnerability to the elements, and so on until one covered an endless list of “buts.”

But!

The five-blank system sitting on the training ground floor in front of Ardi worked. And it worked well enough. The sound carried with no delay. The generator emulators were in no hurry to explode. And the errors, though they kept piling up (near-zero still wasn’t zero), stayed at a perfectly manageable level.

On paper, the Arena would need something along the lines of a hundred and sixty-four units and eighty-two kilometers of low-gauge Ley-cable. That would blanket the stands and the future floor section in a single wave of sound. And at every point in the Arena, that sound would arrive at exactly the same volume, with no delays and no interference of any kind.

“Once again...” Ardan tapped his pencil against his chin, picked up the sheet, and ran the figures. “Housings with third-class insulation for the spell plates: 3,840 exes. Spell plates rated for third-class reliability: 9,920 exes. Carving the seals into the third-class plates: 2,480 exes. Ley-wiring: 6,150 exes. All told, the whole thing comes to...” Ardan sighed and placed the page of calculations back down on the table. “...22,390 exes.”

Over twenty-two thousand exes... It was an insane number. No bank on the planet would hand a loan like that to a second-year at the Grand. And even if one did, then at the standard three-percent-a-year rate for businesses, which was actually lower than the rate they charged private borrowers, the payments would still amount to more exes than Ardan could ever earn.

Going to Boris would be pointless. However rich he happened to be, a request like that bordered on trading on their friendship. If only Ardi could be certain that the tickets would sell... And even assuming all twenty thousand of them did…

You didn’t need Arkar’s nose for business, or Bazhen’s, to see something this simple. To draw a crowd that size to a jazz concert, the tickets had to be cheap.

This was no Baliero, after all.

And it was no Markov Canal, either.

Even with the most optimistic estimate, with three-quarters of the seats being sold at twenty-five kso a ticket, the take would come to just 3,750 exes. That would be plenty to save the Arena and the Magical Boxing tournament in general, but it wouldn’t cover even a fifth of what the equipment cost.

“And it really does work,” Ardan sighed, studying the blank with the repeater inside it.

His seal really did “read” the distortions in the Ley-field well enough. To manage it, though, Ardi had drawn on his own work with transmutational runic links and additional spaces. It was something he’d named, simply and aptly, “multidimensional seals.” This was something he wasn’t ready to share with anyone yet, not even the Black House.

Not because of greed, or professional paranoia, or because he’d caught Edward’s mania and now considered himself the smartest man in the room, or the whole world, for that matter. It was simply that, to arrive at the very idea that a Star seal could be multidimensional, you first had to step past the limit of nine rays. And so, if he suddenly came out with this distortion decoder seal, then...

His grimoire had been gone over very carefully after Captain Pnev’s clinical death. They probably hadn’t tried to break its cipher since Ardan had given them no reason to suspect him of anything. But for men like Grand Magisters Moshain, Krayt and Uynov, just one or two looks at the vectors and the schematic of the seal Ardan had used to heal Milar would be enough to smell something wrong. That was because for... “classical” Star Magic, a design like that should have been downright impossible.

And so, Ardi could show off his distortion decoder, but then he’d have to pray to the Sleeping Spirits that he wouldn’t wake up on a cold table under the lamps of one of the sealed, hidden laboratories of the Crown. Or maybe it’d be the Black House… or whoever it was that dealt with that kind of thing in the Empire.

And speaking of Grand Magister Uynov...

The Day Before…

Ardan signed his name—he did so quickly and with no fanfare—at the bottom of several nondisclosure forms. The last of them forbade him from sharing any information at all about the simple fact that this conversation had ever taken place.

“Mr. Uynov?” The Colonel, who was back at the head of the table now, looked at the Grand Magister, who was hesitating.

He was in no hurry to sign the most important document of them all: a ban on disclosing the details of, or even mentioning the existence of Ardi’s theoretical work.

“The young man may be the first, but he won’t be the last.” Uynov set down his pen with the nib resting on the rim of the inkpot. “If a notion like this found its way into Egobar’s restless head, it can find its way into someone else’s. The Star Magic community ought to know a theory like this exists.”

The Colonel steepled his fingers.

“Mr. Uynov-”

“Colonel!” Uynov said heatedly. “You don’t understand! This young man came to you because he obviously serves the Black House. But someone down the line, after reading The Symmetries, might try to put together a unit of their own. Not the same one. One like it. And not in some backwater, but right here in the city. Hundreds will be hurt. Maybe thousands.”

“Mr. Uynov.” The Colonel repeated for a third time, his voice harder and more clipped now. “Sign it and go. Leave the rest to the Crown and to us.”

“The community has to know...” The Grand Magister kept repeating himself like a wind-up toy. “I have to report this to the Mages’ Guild... no! To the entire Guild of Sciences! We have to be ready. We have to draw up safety protocols. Rules. Oversight committees. Developments like these are far more dangerous than the training grounds ever were!”

“Mr. Uynov, as I recall, you were the one holding back the rollout of the training grounds for regular civilian use.”

“Because a complex, compact, stationary shield fed by several generators at different Ley-voltages is quite literally a ticking time bomb!” Uynov barked. “And the fact that it still hasn’t gone off tells you nothing at all, except-”

“Except that you need to sign that document,” the Colonel cut in. “Mr. Uynov, His Imperial Majesty and I both value you, and we recognize you as quite possibly the finest Star-security engineer in all the world. But this is a matter of state import. And you are required… I’ll stress that word: required to sign this document. And I’m afraid you will not set foot outside this office until I have seen your signature.”

“If I’m the best in the world, then listen to me just this once!” Uynov slapped the table. “Twenty years ago, you and His Imperial Majesty wouldn’t hear me out about the training grounds, but hear me now! What this... this spawn of Aversky’s is proposing is not safe! And it may never be safe, not even after a decade of research!”

“Uynov!” Ardan had never heard the Colonel raise his voice before today. “Tell me honestly, Uynov. Would you be saying all of this right now if the man sitting in front of you wasn’t the Corporal, but some other young mage?”

Uynov answered. But not right away. He did so only after a brief hesitation, one so quick that it was almost impossible to catch.

“Of course.” The Grand Magister’s eyes narrowed a fraction. “And I don’t recall you and me ever being on such familiar terms. Let’s not spoil our relationship, Colonel.”

And yet, even if the Emperor could have shut Uynov down with ease, the man was still a Grand Magister. And on top of that, he possessed a Black Star. It made no difference how many rays that Star had, or how many his other Stars had.

The Colonel gestured at the sheet of paper, not with an open hand, but with a single finger.

“Sign it.”

For several long moments, the Colonel and Uynov stared each other down. Then Uynov scrawled a broad, sweeping signature across the document and walked out of the office without a word, his staff rapping against the floor. He slammed the doors behind him hard enough to make the Emperor’s portrait on the wall sway a little.

The Colonel watched him go with a thoughtful look, then turned to Ardan.

“For now, Corporal, don’t be in a hurry to build devices of any kind.” The Colonel slid open a drawer and took out a little tin of hard candies. “So far, the good you do outweighs the harm. But you have a ruinous habit of picking up speed. And if Mr. Uynov turns out to be right and you blow a city block or two sky-high, the Empress Consort’s favor won’t be enough to save you.”

“Yes, Colonel.” Ardi forced the words out, then quickly added, “And unrelated equipment, may I build that?”

The Colonel tossed the candy into his mouth and studied Ardi for a few seconds.

“Unrelated how?”

Ardan quickly laid out the problem he was dealing with. The Colonel shifted the candy from one cheek to the other and rubbed the tips of his right thumb and forefinger together. He always did that when he was settling his own nerves. It was a small gesture, and one Ardi had noticed long ago.

“Sound coverage across large spaces is also, as far as I know, a problem nobody’s cracked yet.”

“Yes, Colonel,” Ardan repeated.

“Just don’t tell me that you’ve sunk so deep into the rut Lord Aversky left behind, may the Eternal Angels receive him, that a sound system for Mr. Brolid’s Arena ended up being nothing more than a side effect of your research into the methods of long-range communication.”

Ardan looked off to the side and mumbled something indistinct.

“By the Eternal Angels and all the Saints.” The Colonel said it as flatly as ever, without the smallest flicker of feeling, only cracking the candy a little between his teeth. “It’s exactly the other way around... Sometimes, I have to believe in fate, Corporal. Or, more precisely, in its rather cruel sense of irony.”

The Present Day…

In the end, Ardan had managed to get permission to build the sound system, but only on one condition: the technology had to be safeguarded by a patent bearing the Crown’s endorsement. This meant that anyone who wanted to copy the thing would first have to get the approval of the Second Chancery’s representative who oversaw every Guild. The Mages’ Guild was included in that since Star Magic patents fell under its purview as well.

And so, Ardan couldn’t even hope that some other interested party might buy his large-scale sound system from him. There were no extra exes coming from that direction. It all came down to this: he had a prototype, but he couldn’t show it to anyone as a way to secure investments, couldn’t get a loan from a bank, and he didn’t want to leave Boris dealing with the catastrophic losses if the whole venture fell through.

It was a dismal, vicious cycle.

He could always ask the Crown for funding, of course, but there was a catch: in this current climate, who was going to hand him twenty-odd thousand exes for something that wasn’t even guaranteed to work? And forget twenty thousand... What he really needed was a full thirty to buy enough gear to have a margin of error. Something was bound to give out during the testing and tuning, so he needed some leeway.

“And there are only two days left,” Ardan drawled.

There were still seventeen days left before the deadline John Brolid had told him about, but if Ardi didn’t come up with the money within forty-eight hours, not a single company that could build the equipment he needed would take the order. On an industrial scale, what Ardan needed wasn’t really all that much, and it didn’t require particularly reliable materials either, so production would take about three days. Or four, depending on how backed up the assembly lines were.

“The heir of Aror this, the heir of Aror that, and in five whole centuries of life, my great-grandfather managed to make nothing but enemies.” Ardan threw up his hands. “And then he passed the whole lot of them down to me as an inheritance, no less.”

Ardi let his gaze roam across the “Stables.”

There was still one option left...

Several Hours Later…

“Mortgage the building?!” John nearly fell out of his chair. “Are you out of your mind, Ard?! The Arena is the last thing standing between me and a future spent floating belly-up in the Azure Sea! And we’re not just talking about me ending up on the church steps with a begging bowl here. The banks would eat me alive! If I miss the payments on the loans I’ve already got, at least I can still cover the debt by selling the place! But without the building, I’m not just bankrupt, I’m a dead man! A real reeking cold one with nothing savory about him at all!”

“John, the prototype works.” Ardi gestured toward the equipment laid out beside them.

Brolid paced from one end of the office to the other with that rolling walk of his, taking quick little steps and gnawing on his thumbnail.

“A prototype, Ard!” John groaned. “A prototype, not a working unit. And with all the genuine respect in the world for you, you’re, oh Eternal Angels help me, just a second-year student at the Grand! A student! Not some Magister from an engineering company bolted onto a halfway-decent little factory!”

“But you can see for yourself that it all works,” Ardan repeated, and this time, he gestured at the prototype with both hands instead of just one.

“It works. I can see that.” John nodded. “And you’re sure you can build the full system required to cover the entire Arena?”

“It’s not all that hard. In theory.”

“In, demons take my bald head, theory! In theory, Ard!” John spun toward him so sharply he nearly tripped. “Do you even hear yourself?! You’re asking me to risk every last thing I own over a couple of tin cans and a theory of yours!”

“No one’s going to just hand us a loan, John,” Ardan said, shaking his head. “Not me, not you. And if you go to the Six, then you really will be risking everything. The Crown won’t pay for it, either, not when it’s already got plenty of its own things to spend money on.”

“Aren’t you friends with the Overseer of the Orcish Jackets?”

Ardi didn’t bother mentioning that he hadn’t laid eyes on Arkar since his own birthday. To say nothing of the fact that, lately, none of the other members of the gang had been turning up at “Bruce’s” either.

“I don’t think they’ve got that kind of cash just sitting around, John,” Ardan said instead. “And nobody’s going to start selling off assets on our account.”

John let out a heated, heartfelt curse, then walked over to the window that looked out at the Arena’s inner grounds.

“This is everything I have, Ard.” John’s tone grew heavy. “Everything that’s left of my family. The Brolids worked for generations, first to build this place, and then to keep it. This place. Right over there.” John stretched out his hand and pointed off toward the endless rows of seats. “I remember sitting with my father, watching a match. I saw flashes of every color. Shapes made of magic. Fire and water. And I thought about how beautiful it was. Not the Magical Boxing, Ard. No. Sitting there beside my father, watching something magical. Something straight out of a fairy tale. That was beautiful. And every time families come to the matches, it always feels like I’m back there with him again. With my dad. Like we’re there again. Among everyone else. Marveling. Shouting. Cheering.”

Ardan said nothing. Even if he’d wanted to comfort John somehow, he simply didn’t know what to say. The beasts of the forest had never taught him how to comfort a man in his hour of need, and nowhere in the she-wolf’s scrolls were there words one could use to soothe a troubled soul.

“My whole childhood happened here, Ard.” John pressed his forehead against the glass. “Every memory I have, Ard... it’s all here. In this sand. On these old benches that have needed a fresh coat of paint for years. In the cracked corridors and the lopsided locker rooms. In the company of the guys and girls who care, the same as I do, about giving people the chance to forget themselves for a little while and leave all their troubles and worries behind. Ordinary people... Not the ones who stand around looking important, sipping ten-ex wine at the intermission of some opera or play. Just... people. Hard workers. People who break their backs. The kind who, after a day or two off, go right back to it, praying they’ve got enough exes to make it to their next payday. Those are the people it’s all for, Ard. Not the lofty and the high-minded. The ordinary ones. The ones who are ordinary and all the more real because of it.”

An odd question popped into Ardan’s head: could John Brolid and Arthur “the Dandy” Belsky perhaps find common ground? For some reason, despite how similar they sounded, Ardi had a feeling the answer was no.

John, unlike the Dandy, didn’t reek of blood.

The rotund man smelled of joy. The purest, most guileless joy there could ever be. And that was what made it twice as hard to watch the thin tracks of glittering tears slide down his cheeks, reflected by the window.

“What odds would you give this venture, Ard?” John asked after a brief pause.

Ardan didn’t lie. He could’ve used Skusty’s art, could have invented anything he liked, but he answered honestly. Completely honestly. Because if he’d done anything else, he wouldn’t have been able to look at himself in the mirror afterward.

“Fifty-fifty.”

John let out a strangled little laugh.

“A coin toss,” he rasped. “You’re asking me to put everything on the line for that…”

Ardan stayed quiet. Could he himself have staked the house that stood on the bank of that swift mountain stream on a single flip of the coin? Probably not. He wouldn’t have had the strength for it.

And so, in that moment, Ardan learned just how strong an ordinary man could be. He was not a Star Mage. Not a mutant. Not a Firstborn. He was even short and heavyset, with a receding hairline and more than one chin. And yet, for all of that, John Brolid was stronger than many of those the Dream of the Sleeping Spirits had placed in Ardi’s path. He didn’t have a mighty body, or potent magic. This was something else. Something invisible, something impossible to touch.

“I can have the mortgage loan by tomorrow evening, Ard.” John wiped his tears away discreetly and came back to his desk. “The Arena’s worth around forty thousand. Though most of that is the land under it anyway... One way or another, I ought to be able to clear somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-two thousand.”

“That’ll be enough, John.”

The man lifted his glistening eyes to stare at Ardan.

“Just please don’t forget, Ard, that you’ve started a game of coin toss with my whole life on the line, all right?”

Ardan wished he could promise that it would all work out for them. In the end, he couldn’t.

As he left the Arena, for the first time in his life, Ardi found himself thinking that maybe strength wasn’t measured in rays at all, or in how many kilos a man could lift. Maybe it was measured in John Brolid’s... mysterioussomething…

That Evening…

“Anything interesting in there?” Tess asked with a teasing edge to her tone.

Normally, it was Ardi who asked his wife that question every time she brought home another novel. Pretty soon, they weren’t going to need just a few more shelves—they’d need a whole bookcase.

“Not really,” Ardan said evasively and looked away from the opening lines of an obituary in the Imperial Herald:

“Last night, Grand Magister Ostap Uynov was found dead in his study. At the time of his death, he was seventy-eight years old. The memorial service and the burial will be held once the Hospital of Heroes has completed the standard procedure for such cases and confirmed that the Seal of Long Years that had sustained Grand Magister Uynov, may the Eternal Angels receive him, did not fail at any point...”

Below it was a list of all the Grand Magister’s accomplishments, and words of praise from his colleagues. But it was hard to see how any of that mattered in the slightest now.

Seventy-eight years old... A Black Star Mage... A Grand Magister... and his journey through life had been cut short with a single snap of the fingers. Was Ardan afraid? Not really. Only an idiot would fail to understand exactly who the Colonel and the Emperor were.

Uynov hadn’t been an idiot, but maybe the shine of his own regalia had blinded him...

Ardan tested the air with his nose.

“What is it?” Tess asked.

“We’ve got company.”

Ardan got to his feet in a rush, winced for a second at the pain in his hip, and grabbed his staff that was resting against the wall. He walked over to the front door and, holding his own private modification of the Ice Bullet spell ready in his mind, he yanked the door open.

Arkar was standing on the doorstep, his finger raised over the doorbell.

He blinked a couple of times, then simply said:

“I need your help, Matabar.”

“I’d say I was having déjà vu, orc, except you’re actually looking pretty good,” Ardan sighed.

“Yeah, well, that’s one way to put it, Ard.” Arkar winked and tried to smile. Then his eyes rolled back. Ardan barely managed to lurch aside before a quarter-ton, two-hundred-and-twenty-centimeter-tall half-orc slammed face-first into the floor right next to him. A huge, jagged knife was jutting out of his back.

“Tess!”