Book II. Chapter 122. Steel

When he drew closer, Ardi lifted a hand to knock, but there was no need. He didn’t exactly feel the tingling in his fingertips the way he always had before. Instead, he seemed to catch something at the edge of his awareness rather than his field of vision. Something like an ephemeral ripple, existing nowhere except in his own imagination.

Transparent as the edge of a wind-ruffled lake, the ripple enveloped him in a halo that did not exist. For a moment, the halo gathered over the Empire’s crest on his Second Chancery corporal’s papers. The instant it found the double-headed phoenix, it slipped back beyond the gates. With a dull creak, the gates opened directly in front of Ard, revealing... a second set of gates.

Lately, Ardan’s senses had grown much keener, especially for Star Magic and, more broadly, Ley. This was partly due to the far larger shard of the name of the Ice and Snow he now carried in his consciousness. But the presence of the Blue Star played a part as well. Lord Aversky had warned him about this and explained that from the third star onward, a mage begins to undergo a fundamental transformation in perception. After all, however small the patches of altered brain tissue that constituted the stars might be, the brain itself was still genuinely changing and restructuring itself.

So it went beyond merely being able to see Star seals as they took shape at distances beyond ordinary human sight.

Ardan shuddered involuntarily and stepped into a peculiar kind of vestibule. At once, the first set of gates began closing, revealing the trick. From the outside, they had looked perfectly ordinary: a wooden base with wire screwed to it and sheet iron secured with long, thick nails. A standard folding gate, not the most secure, but it did its job.

But when Ardan turned around, he could see for himself that the other side was another matter entirely. Steel, perhaps sixteen millimeters thick, stared back at him. No ordinary machinery could move it, so entire networks of Ley-cables rose from the ground to connect to the gate supports, while generators hummed somewhere in the distance. Generators with only one purpose: opening and closing the passage.

The second set of gates opened the very moment the previous set closed behind Ard. They looked more formidable still. The steel was twenty-three millimeters thick, enough to stop most revolver rounds, except perhaps those used by ogres and certain mutants.

A separate generator drove the gate panels. Ardan passed between them into a remarkably well-kept yard. Stone rang beneath the heels of his spring boots, and all manner of structures stood around him: low storage sheds, several booths, something like miniature fortifications, and a single two-story building, broad, long, and rectangular, enclosed by yet another fence.

A little farther off, a small infantry gun the size of a baby carriage sat there... with its barrel partially melted. And something else...

Ardan swore despite himself and tightened his grip on his staff. Ard came to a halt, entirely against his will. His legs had simply stopped obeying him. They froze as if rooted to the ground and refused to take another step.

What he saw was enormous. Not enormous like a truck or a railroad car. Their size was something you got used to sooner or later. But this... thing... made him feel something else entirely. The way you felt beside a gigantic predator waiting only for the right moment to break its prey’s spine with a single blow.

Something created for one purpose alone.

Its squat steel hull gleamed faintly in the sunlight breaking through the clouds. The rivets still glistened with moisture from the morning fog. Angular and crude, it sat like a puffed-up duck atop two immensely wide tracks, each link roughly the size of a dinner plate.

The track links glinted with a greasy, oily sheen. Morning was retreating from Metropolis, and in its half-light the thing seemed less a machine than a monstrous beetle crouched to spring, its belly pressed against the concrete. Its steel armor was unusually thick and uneven, marked with weld seams and those same rivets. The armor overlapped in layers like a lizard’s scales, and cold radiated from it. Not the cold of winter. No, no. Something altogether different. The cold of iron that knew no mercy because it had been torn from the earth, purified in fire, and forged for blood alone.

The turret sat atop the hull, raised slightly on its mounts. Round and flattened, like the top sliced off a skull. A barrel jutted from that “skull” like a dead man’s finger pointing into the void. Several meters long and as wide as Ard’s head, it ended in a gaping hole, utterly black.

It stared straight at Ard.

The muzzle of a tank gun.

Ard couldn’t tear his gaze from that perfect black circle. It was as bottomless as the pupil of a beast that had eaten its fill and grown lazy, a beast that had already chosen its prey but had yet to decide whether to kill now or later.

In that man-made darkness lay everything summoned by a name Ardan never wanted to hear: the whistle of a shell, a deafening explosion, a blinding, scorching flash, a soundless death, and then silence that swallowed everything.

Ard had seen military seals powerful enough to smash through a brick wall. Sleeping Spirits. Even without the “Ice Core,” his “Ice Tail” alone would have reduced not just the entrance to the Crimson Lady’s bar but half the former factory that housed the brothel to rubble.

But this... this was different. At once simpler and cruder to the point of bloody madness, yet paradoxically more honest. No Star Magic or art of the Aean’Hane; no runes from the language of the Fae, no mathematical formulas rendered as geometric seals on the pages of grimoires.

Just steel, gunpowder, and someone with the will to pull the trigger... if there even was one somewhere inside that steel hulk.

And Ardan stood before that behemoth with his three stars, his staff, his grimoire, and his accumulators holding a thousand exes, and he felt the truth of what he really was. A sack of bones and meat. Fragile, soft as clay, and unquestionably mortal. The sort of creature one shell, just one, could reduce to nothing but a fine mist of blood settling over scorched ground and memories.

“He’s a beauty, isn’t he?” Dagdag’s voice came from behind him.

Ard said nothing. He kept staring into the barrel.

No one Ard knew had ever faced tanks at the front. Not Arkar, not Hector, not even Milar. They had all done their fighting before the first prototype rolled out of a factory hangar somewhere on the outskirts of the Metropolis. At the time, it was called a “self-propelled, tracked, medium-caliber artillery gun.”

Ten years had passed since then, and now Ard stood before a real tank. It was one of the hundred and fifty the Empire possessed, according to official figures. All nations disclosed such figures under the Dunsfield World Pact on the Disclosure of Quantities of Heavy Armored Military Equipment, a treaty intended to ease tensions.

But everyone knew that every country understated its totals to some degree.

“How... how can anyone fight something like that?” Ardan asked, swallowing audibly.

He edged a little closer and raised one hand toward the armor, meaning to touch it, but couldn’t bring himself to do it. His hand stopped short, checked by something intensely painful and, for some reason, impossibly sad. Then he backed away.

Dagdag stepped closer, about to reply. Before he could, Ardan answered Dagdag’s first question.

“A monstrosity, Dagdag.” Ardan barely held back a grimace. “It’s repulsive.”

“Well.” Dagdag cocked his head and tapped his chin with one finger. “It’s a war machine, Ard. Not a civilian ass-hauler. It’s supposed to look brutal. And frightening. That way, the enemy won’t poke his head out of the trench. Better yet, he’ll refuse to go anywhere near the trenches in the first place.”

Ardi said nothing. Dagdag wore a blue coverall over his work clothes, the fabric streaked with grease and machine oil. Clearly, the two of them were talking about two different things. And perhaps, in that moment, Ardan understood a little better why the Fae disliked iron and why bringing it into their enchanted land was considered a serious crime.

“Figured out where we are yet?” Dagdag asked while they still stood beside the tank.

“As he left the office, Ardan cast a quick glance at the book tossed carelessly onto the desk. The book that concealed a monstrous secret. There on the second page, a photograph had frozen the seal trials in time.

A stone square two hundred and fifty meters across. That was what it showed. A square with stone trees and grass; stone streams and puddles; stone trucks and cars; fragments of stone birds that had fallen and shattered; stone statues of beasts frozen in absurd poses; and more... and more: people turned to stone and bound to posts, their faces forever contorted in screams of agony.

Everything the dreadful magic touched had turned to stone. Lifeless, dead stone created by Ley.”

Ardan nodded. He doubted he would ever forget the first time he had seen the results of strategic magic trials, back in the laboratory at Mr. Aversky’s estate.

“The Black House testing ground,” Ardan replied tersely.

“Yeah.” Dagdag nodded. “And the only thing keeping me from smacking that mile-high head of yours for those reports, Corporal, is that we’ve got more important business.”

“But I brought everything I was supposed to!” Ard protested.

“Can’t turn back time.” Dagdag shrugged; he was a half-dwarf and barely came up to Ard’s stomach. “Reports have to be turned in on time, because if they aren’t turned in on time, I get a headache. And I try to restore balance to this precarious world by making the person who gave me that headache feel it too... Come on, Ard. Milar and I will show you something.”

“He’s here too?”

“Where else would he be?” Dagdag answered with a question of his own.

He ran a hand over his thick, coarse hair, leaving it streaked like his clothes. Dagdag, the Black House’s chief engineer, could have earned at least a Senior Magister’s medallion if he’d wanted to... if such “trifles” had ever interested Dagdag. Then he headed toward one of the small sheds that served as hangars.

Ardan looked at the tank once more. His gaze swept from the gun barrel and turret to the place where the... driver was probably supposed to sit? Machine operator? Mechanized artillery operator? What did you call whoever controlled this hulking engine of death?

Then again, it didn’t matter. For a moment, Ardan’s eyes lingered on a deep hole that had been melted into the steel. A finger’s width across and somewhere around eighteen millimeters deep. Its edges had blackened and curled inward, hardening into droplets of steel “glass.” Everything about it said bullet hole, but somehow Ardan doubted that...

“Corporal!” Dagdag called to him.

“Yes, yes,” Ardan replied. He turned and set off across the stone parade ground after Dagdag.

Had the stone been part of the original plan, Ardan wondered, or was it the result of testing one of Grand Magister Aversky’s final creations (may the Eternal Angels receive him)? Now Ardan understood why Mr. Aversky had chosen to base strategic magic on transfiguration. If you can’t penetrate or destroy the armor of several tanks firing at soldiers, then... you can simply turn those tanks to stone. Together with everything inside them, animate or not.

Rounding the replica of a front-line fortification, Ardi finally caught sight of Captain Pnev himself. He sat in the now-familiar wheelchair. With his right hand, he tried in vain to straighten the blanket that had bunched up over his severely atrophied legs; he held a cigarette in his left and smoked. Apparently, somewhere along the way in rehab, Milar had given up trying to quit smoking. And Elvira, his wife, had taken pity on her wounded husband and hadn’t insisted that he quit.

In fact, ever since Milar was wounded, Ardi hadn’t been able to bring himself to visit him and his family. He simply... couldn’t.

At the sight of Ard, Milar broke off his clearly losing battle with the blanket. Smiling gently, he gave a barely perceptible nod. There was no “Magister, I’m glad you chose this!” or “Ha! What do you need those boring Grand Magisters for? We’re more fun!” Only a single nod, a rather restrained one at that, and... for Ard, that was more than enough.

And, truth be told, simply knowing he wouldn’t have to set foot in the Grand’s Library again anytime soon went a long way toward calming Ard’s nerves. He wouldn’t have to keep wondering whether one of Aror’s students in a Black cloak might come around any corner.

“So what are you going to show me...”

“Ta-da!” The flourish was clearly rehearsed. Dagdag was plainly trying to outdo a seasoned emcee in sheer enthusiasm as he yanked the cloth cover off the machine Milar had been smoking beside.

More precisely, he tried to.

“For fuck’s sake... why does everyone else always make it look so easy... Milar, it’s caught on something over there. Take a look, will you?”

“Of course, Dagdag. Just let me loosen up my knees, and I’ll make it over to your bumper in no time.”

“Eternal Angels, stay away from mine, you pervert on wheels... Ah, to the Sleeping Spirits with it, I’ll take a look myself!”

As always, Dagdag’s speech was a remarkable mix of Angels, Spirits, scientific terms, and, now and then, the choicest dockside profanity. The profanity, however, was something of a trademark of the Black House as a whole.

Dagdag circled the machine, cursing as he caught hold of the cover, and tried again with another flourish:

“Ta-da!” He yanked it off once more.

This time, the cover came away cleanly, revealing a sight already familiar to Ard: the elongated body, black paint gleaming beneath a coat of lacquer, silver running boards, bulging fenders, and the sleek, streamlined contours that made an Entio unmistakable.

The car was indeed an Entio, one of the rarest and most fashionable cars around, quite literally built one at a time. The price had something to do with that: twenty-three hundred for the base model was still an insane amount of money, though hardly the highest on the market. But the real reason was that design engineer Albert Entio’s factory had no plans to scale up just yet. They were constantly working to improve every system and built cars only to order, one at a time.

Take Boris: he’d already been waiting his turn for more than a year and a half, and he was still waiting.

“He doesn’t seem impressed, does he?” Dagdag asked Milar without turning his head toward him.

This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

“He doesn’t seem impressed,” Milar agreed, sighing sadly.

Ardan just spread his hands.

“So what am I supposed to find impressive?” he asked. “Well, yes, it’s a rare car.”

Milar blinked twice, then covered his face with the very hand holding his cigarette.

“Oh, that was a mistaaake,” he drawled in a voice from beyond the grave.

“Rare?!” Lieutenant Dagdag wailed like a fire siren. “You mean Albert’s bodywork, you ignorant hillman? You wannabe cowboy! You beanpole without an ounce of mechanical sense! You built one sound system, that’s all, and now you think you’re hot stuff?!”

Ardan took a step back and held up his left hand in surrender, but it was already too late. Dagdag was revved up. And once he got revved up, he was just like his mechanical creations: there was no stopping him.

“This body right here!” Dagdag walked over to the car and gestured with both hands at its profile. “Built to my blueprints! I used the same formulas I use to calculate a projectile’s aerodynamics! The idea is that air resistance drags on a car in exactly the same way, so you have to fight it!”

Ardan nodded. He didn’t really care, but if he looked closely, this “Entio” really did have far smoother and somehow... more gently rounded contours than the one Eorsky had.

“A new exhaust system!” Dagdag continued down the list as he circled the car. “Lightweight components all the way through! I shaved off nearly a third of a ton! And the heart! The heart, you thickheaded mage!” Dagdag bounded over to the hood and lifted it, revealing the engine and the rest of the machinery. “Lowered center of gravity! An inline six-cylinder engine, not a four-cylinder! Two point two liters of displacement! Chain drive! A driveshaft! Eighty-four goddamn horsepower! A top speed of a hundred sixty miles an hour! And most important of all, all-wheel drive, may a Mountain Troll tear me apart! Plus cast rims to cool the brakes!”

Lieutenant Dagdag stepped back from his creation and looked at Ard.

“A car... That scrawny ass of yours rides around in a car, Corporal...”

“Hey!” Milar started to protest, then thought it over for a moment and shrugged.

After all, the old Derks really was a car, and it too was Dagdag’s handiwork, so the whole point of the strange insult was unclear.

“...but this is no car!” Dagdag continued, nearly licking the sloping bodywork. “This is a work of art!”

“Dagdag.”

“What?!” Dagdag roared.

“Then why doesn’t your work of art have a roof?” Ardan asked, cocking his head. “And it doesn’t have a second row of seats, either.”

Dagdag slowly turned toward Milar, who was laughing. His mouth fell slightly open.

“Milar, by the blood in my human heart, maybe we should put you behind the wheel after all?” Dagdag pleaded, all but in tears. “It’s like talking to a donkey! He’ll wipe out on the very first turn! And there go six thousand five hundred government exes.”

Ardan nearly choked on air.

“Sixty-five hundred?!” Now it was Ardan’s turn to shout in exasperation, in almost the same tone Dagdag had used. “I won’t even go near that museum piece! It would take me years to pay it off!”

Milar only made a face that could have passed for philosophical contemplation, or for a man desperately wishing for a toilet.

“It’s not like you have a choice, Magister,” he replied calmly. “Get changed, and we’ll start training.”

Ardan looked at the low sky over the capital.

“Do you have a spare?” Ardan asked, almost in tears.

“I’ll bury you under a rock, right here and now, with my own hands, Corporal!”

Ardan sighed.

At least he wouldn’t have to write reports anymore. Naturally, he didn’t say that out loud.

* * *

Ardi impatiently twirled a pencil around his thumb, using the clever trick he’d picked up by watching one of the designers at Talis an Manish’s design office. He hadn’t mastered it right away, but the trick helped him stay focused and gave his fingers and fine motor skills a little workout. Ardan suspected that his problems with forks and spoons, pens, and anything else that called for small, precise movements had nothing to do with the realities of life in the forest, but stemmed, quite simply, from matabar physiology.

And perhaps, if any of it had mattered to him in the least, he could have conducted the research needed to prove his theory, but... what did it matter?

“...and with that, we can conclude our review of the methods for linking several arrays of runic links into a single complex, high-order architecture.” Professor Convel continued his lecture beside the graphite board.

An Ertalain alloy wand shimmered in his hands, inscribed with several seals. At the Grand, professors often used wands. A few dozen spells were enough to destroy one, but a professor might not need to cast that many in a month. When the need did arise, though, they were extremely convenient and could double as pointers. And that was all that remained of the once “revolutionary” technology.

The same was true of the Analyzers, though. They had lasted a little longer, until the Puppeteers made using them pointless, first in the Empire and then throughout the world. What was in it for them? Ardan had no idea.

“Now, consider the following problem.” Dressed to the nines as always, in a suit fashionable enough to rival those worn by the Baliero regulars, Professor Convel walked to the edge of the board and turned a wheel, raising the first board to reveal the second beneath it. “Here’s a warm-up for your brains. You have two cranes in a workshop. You need to transfer a load from the claw of one crane to the claw of the other by way of an intermediate platform. All the load’s specifications are given in the problem description. You have...” The professor glanced at the outrageously expensive watch gleaming on his wrist. “Half an hour left. After that, anyone who wants my advice can hand in a completed drawing. But only if it’s complete! Forgive me, my splendid young prodigies, but I don’t have time to go over rough sketches today. Get to work!”

Professor Convel smoothed his graying hair, now sparse with age, and removed his glasses as he returned to the lectern. He settled into the armchair, looked up at Ard, and gave him a brief nod. Ard nodded back and picked up a small, worn card from the edge of his desk. Its printed lettering was hard to make out in places.

Probably not from age, but from all the times other hands had gone over it, leaving behind the marks of sleepless nights and hundreds of hours spent working on the problem.

“Task description:

You have two gas cylinders containing volatile substances of unknown density. Mix these substances in a third cylinder to feed the compressor station. To ensure a stable result, the mixture must have a 50/50 ratio, with a permitted margin of error of 0.5 percentage points.

Once the compressor station has processed the mixture, transfer the mixture into a piston system to raise a load of unknown mass to a height of 8.65 meters.

Failure conditions:

Use of volatile substances whose total weight exceeds 13% of the load’s weight.

Task completion condition:

The load is successfully raised to the height specified in the description, with all requirements met.”

Ardi looked at the card again and tapped the sheet of paper with his pencil. For the first time, Professor Convel had given him a personal assignment that couldn’t be solved with Star seals alone. Ard would have to set up a sensor array to monitor the process...

Though why bother.

He could make do with seals after all. Just hook up everything he could to the generators and... then he could skip gas pressure altogether (though hydraulics would work much better) and lift the load directly with pure Ley. But on an industrial scale, the cost of lifting the load that way would bankrupt the company within a month.

So the idea of building a system of seals for monitoring and analysis appealed to Ard because it seemed the most reliable solution. In practice, though, it proved unworkable. So once again he had to arm himself with the mathematical expressions for blanks and emulators.

The first thing he needed to do was install cross-connections in the system linking the cylinders. The obvious solution was to install a blank that would analyze the volume of the volatile mixture and send it to the next stage, but... why? He could simply let the required, precalculated volume build up in an auxiliary reservoir attached to the blank. Then there’d be nothing to analyze, just a perfectly ordinary magical toggle switch. As soon as the reservoir filled, the gas would flow through, and there’d be no need to calculate, weigh, or analyze anything.

Savings? Savings. And as his experience with the Arena’s sound system had shown, anything with the word “savings” attached to it was worth doing.

“Sleeping Spirits, I really am becoming like Polskih,” Ardan grumbled under his breath.

He quickly set up the equations he needed and worked out all the figures for the intermediate storage tanks. The margin of error worked out to the same “half a percentage point.” Even tying in a separate compressor station, complete with a simple pressure sensor and a basic blank housing a controller, amounted to only a few pages of calculations.

Ardan finished them in another ten minutes or so.

Ardi calculated the gas flow into the lift’s piston system and routed it there in the same straightforward way: with “gates” through which the “load” would pass. Not that there was much of a system there; it barely deserved the name. You raised the valve, and gas under enormous pressure burst free. It drove the piston. The piston, in turn, drove the platform. So all he had to do was adjust the cutoff point. For that, any pair of “blanks” fitted with simple seals that used a light beam would do.

As long as the beam remained unbroken, the valve stayed raised. The moment the beam was interrupted, the seal opened the circuit in the Ley-wiring and the valve came down. The lift speed could be controlled by the height to which the valve was raised. The higher the valve rose, the more gas it admitted; the feed rate fell in inverse proportion.

Oh, and add one more pair of blanks: build a scale into the platform and send its reading, as a voltage signal, through the Ley-cable to the blank in the compressor station, so the heavier the load, the more force the lift receives.

“Final setup...” Ardan underlined his final results. “Eight blanks, three sensors, three additional storage tanks, including one backup, and Ley-cable according to the formula: the system plus the length of the workshop itself.”

Ardi checked every seal that required a generator connection, making sure the seals drew on different generators instead of all sharing one. Then he tipped his head slightly to one side and looked over the design one last time. Yes, he would still have preferred to use Ley and nothing else. Not because he disliked Star Mechanics. It was just that... magic was more reliable.

A seal either worked or it didn’t (provided, of course, it had been calculated correctly); environmental conditions had almost no effect on it. So even Professor Convel’s remarks about how often clever engineering turned out shoddy could be discounted. But alas, everything came down to exes and how far engineering had advanced. No one had yet invented any incredibly compact, high-powered generators that...

Oh, right.

They had, in fact, already been invented. Though the plural hardly applied: there was only one, a single prototype. And none other than Grand Magister Paarlax had built it. Of course, the Black House and its trusted engineers had tried to reproduce the dead genius’s achievement, but alas. Without the prototype itself and the accompanying research, both stolen by the Puppeteers, the effort clearly wasn’t getting off the ground anytime soon.

Ardan checked the clock (there were still five minutes left in the lecture), gathered his writing materials, stowed them in his bag, picked up his staff, and crossed the classroom to the lectern.

“Let’s see how you’ve done, Ard.” Professor Convel held out a hand, and Ardan passed him the sheets containing his calculations and descriptions of the system.

Armed with a freshly sharpened pencil, Convel adjusted his glasses and began reading, occasionally making the arithmometer click beneath his fingers. Sometimes he wrote comments beside the formulas; sometimes he crossed something out (when Ley-mechanics was involved, damn the stuff). More and more often, though, he merely added a few clarifications.

Most were about stabilizing the system, safeguarding its weakest points, adding redundant contours, and keeping the entire test protected from start to finish. Only after all of that would the main contours engage. In other words, Professor Convel was fashioning a workable design from Ard’s student exercise, one you could send straight to the factory that very moment to order Seal Vaults.

The clock hand had already moved past the time the lecture was supposed to end. A few women from Ard’s class waited behind him with their sheets, shifting from foot to foot, but eventually gave up and retreated into the hallway. Most of the others copied down the problem statement, then left, planning to work through the problem itself on their own outside of class. It was only after another quarter of an hour (fortunately, Star Engineering was the last lecture of the day) that Professor Convel finally handed Ard back the sheets, now covered in cross-outs and handwritten notes.

“Not bad, Ard. Not bad.” Professor Convel removed his glasses, opened the case, and took out a small polishing cloth. “I’m glad to see you’ve resolved your problems with that shaky foundation and even managed to move beyond them. But tell me, my dear Ard, what am I to do with you next?”

For several moments, Ardi fought the urge to start reading Professor Convel’s comments and corrections at once. Then he tucked the pages into his bag.

“What do you mean, Professor?” he asked.

Once he had cleaned the lenses, Convel settled the glasses back on the bridge of his nose.

“What exactly do you think you were just solving, my dear Ard?” the professor asked, his smile thinner than usual.

Ardi looked at the card he had just placed back on the lectern.

“An individual assignment,” he answered, a little uncertainly. The card looked too worn for that, and it made Ard wonder, but... he was still on extended leave. And he didn’t feel like thinking too hard about the assignment, though guesses were already stirring in the back of his mind.

“Yes, Ard, of course.” Convel opened his desk drawer and took out a wooden box holding dozens of cards just like it.

Painted across the top of the box were the words: “Fourth-Year Star Engineering Exam Cards. Advanced-Level Group.”

Ardi started to lift his staff toward the back of his head, but caught himself just in time, before he could make a fatal mistake. The household accumulator’s crystal, mounted in the staff’s head, would have cost him half his scalp.

“Just so you know, you’re given six hours for the fourth-year engineering exam,” the professor continued. “Two and a half hours for calculations and theoretical preparation, and another three and a half to build a working system.”

Professor Convel glanced pointedly at the sheets sticking out of Ard’s bag.

“I can’t say you completed the theoretical portion. But if you’d had five times as much time as you did and known you would have to build a working system, I have no doubt you would have produced a far better result. So...” Convel spread his hands. “At this rate, by the end of your next year of study, I’ll have nothing left to surprise you with, Ard.”

Ardan said nothing. What could he say? That the thrill of his own research and the particular demands of his work at the Black House were driving him onward faster and faster? That much seemed obvious enough already.

“And I don’t have the expertise to teach at the Magister level.” Convel slipped the card back into the examination box, then returned the box to its place. “Nor, if I’m honest, do I have the desire.”

“Professor, I—”

“Learn to take a compliment, dear Ard.” Professor Convel cut him off, smiling as before, only now the smile was in his voice as well as on his face. “Then again, I’m not surprised... not surprised. You did manage to put together a sound system for your wife, after all, so... I’m sure it all comes down to motivation. I simply can’t recall anyone ever earning a degree from the Grand through independent study in the century and a half it has existed in its present form.”

Ardan could have lied. He could have used the art of Skusty. But he chose not to. He didn’t want to deceive Professor Convel. Convel didn’t deserve that. And yes, the Crown’s classified seal hid not only the sound-system patent itself but its creator’s name as well. But Professor Convel was intelligent. Truly intelligent. So, just as Professor an Manish had with the lockpicks, he had no trouble guessing the inventor’s true identity.

“When I look at you, Ard, I sometimes wonder what might have been.” The professor sighed and leaned back just enough to rest his shoulder blades against the back of his chair. “If your great-grandfather had lived in another time, a better time for all of us, how much good might he have done? And perhaps, if you and I lived in a better, far more...” Convel cast a sidelong glance at the newspaper on his desk. One of its columns discussed the outcome of Congress. “...more peaceful time, how much good might we ourselves do? Well... that’s the cruel irony. But off you go, Ard. And strange as it sounds, I’ll keep hoping that by the end of your third year you’ll slow down, so I won’t have to see that bored look in your eyes.”

“Good day, Professor Convel.”

“You too,dear Ard. You too...”

* * *

The apartment was heavy with the smell of cured duck. For the past few days, Tess had been preparing dried meat and salt-cured meat for him to take on the road, provisions that would sustain Ard throughout the long journey.

“Tess, I...” Ardan began as soon as he stepped through the door, but Tess gave him a warning shake of the ladle she’d been using to stir the curing brine.

“If you tell me one more time to mind my own business and say you can manage on your own, then this ladle will end up in your forehead.” Her green eyes flashed dangerously. “Understood?”

Ardan felt warmth spread through his chest.

“Of course, darling.”

“Then we’re agreed.” Tess nodded and returned to her preparations, which had already taken over half their kitchen.

Ardan could hardly carry more than a few kilos, so he could only hope to find something a matabar half-blood could eat at one of the outposts maintained by the Hunters’ Guild and the Mages’ Guild in the Northern National Park of Natural Anomalies, or in the nearest settlement. And it wasn’t as though Ardan had forgotten how to feed himself in the woods. The trouble was that hunting in the Empire’s handful of parks like this was punishable by several years of hard labor.

After taking off his shoes and coat, Ardan set his staff in its place by the wall and unhooked his grimoire from its chains. He went into the kitchen, slipped his arms around his wife from behind, kissed the top of her head, and rested his chin against her hair.

“Do you have today off?” he asked softly.

“I’m on leave until nearly the end of spring, Ardi,” Tess said calmly. “Tomorrow’s my last performance at the theater. Then it’ll close for a couple of weeks while the Ley-wiring and generator bay are overhauled. After that, the guys and I want to record something. What do they call it now? An album. So we’ll put all our performances on hold for three months. We want to release a record by summer.”

Bazhen and Arkar would probably have called this sort of approach “artificial scarcity.” Tess had chosen to leave the stage at the very moment when demand for her was growing by the hour rather than by the day. Her records barely had time to hit stores before fans and the merely curious snapped them up.

“What are you so happy about?” Tess asked. She could not even see Ard, only feel him against her back, but she had read her husband’s mood correctly.

Ardan didn’t bother denying it.

“I’ve made a decision.”

“And what’s that?”

“That I’ll resign from the Black House.”

“But, Ard, you...”

He shook his head.

“Not now, darling,” he clarified. “After Milar and I catch the people we’re hunting now. That’s when I’ll resign. As soon as we stop the Pupp—the conspirators, I’ll put in my resignation. I think I can help more people, including you and me, from a lab bench than I can running around with a badge from the Second Chancery.”

Tess froze, her ladle suspended over the pot of marinade.

“I wanted to tell you something too, Ardi.”

“And what’s that?”

“I...” Tess turned toward him and looked into his eyes. “I want to see our country. See the Empire. Every corner of it. The others are suggesting we put together enough material and tour the Empire. Not now. In a couple of years. Once we have listeners beyond the capital and the nearby major cities.”

Ardan nodded. He knew exactly how Tess felt.

“Come to think of it, we could play our final concert in Delpas.” She pressed herself even closer against him and rested her head on his chest. “Then we could leave for Alcade. How does that sound?”

“Perfect,” Ardan agreed.

They stood with their arms around each other. A clock ticked softly beside them. The race Ard was competing in was less than a day away.