The woman was still hitting the barrier when Sael drifted closer, her palms slapping against the translucent wall with a flat, dull sound of skin meeting something that wasn't going to move. Her breathing had gone ragged, and every few seconds she'd twist and kick, then slam her hands again, then twist again, in a cycle that was burning through whatever energy she had left.
"Let me go! You can't do this! Let me go!"
Sael watched her for a moment, then...
"My apologies," he said.
And moved forward.
The woman saw him coming and pressed herself against the far side of the binding field, her back almost flat against it, her hands up in front of her chest. The defiance was still there in her jaw and her voice, but her eyes had changed. They were tracking like a cornered animal.
"Stay away from me," she said. "I haven't done anything. You have the wrong person. I was — I was just a servant, I was running because I was afraid, everyone was panicking and I—"
Sael raised his hand, palm open, and the field contracted gently around her. It wasn't enough to hurt, but good enough to hold her still.
"No — no! Don't touch me! Don't—"
He placed his hand on her forehead.
Under other circumstances, Sael would have talked to her. Sat her down, asked her questions, given her the chance to explain herself in her own words. That was his preference. People deserved the opportunity to speak, even people who had done terrible things, because the act of speaking was itself a kind of dignity, but the black veins climbing her throat told him what he needed to know about the reliability of anything she said.
The person underneath was still in there, but whatever came out of her mouth would be filtered through whatever had been planted in her, and separating truth from instruction at that stage was a process that took weeks of careful work he didn't have time for.
Her memories, on the other hand, couldn't lie. Memory was stored deeper than corruption could reach at stage two. It could be suppressed, fragmented, made harder to access, but it couldn't be rewritten. Not until stage four or five, by which point the host was usually gone entirely.
Sael cast [Read].
The woman's eyes rolled upward. Her body went slack inside the field, her arms dropping to her sides, her head tilting back against his palm. The thrashing stopped and her breathing slowed to a more shallow and mechanical one.
Sael kept his hand steady and began.
"What is your name?"
The question wasn't for her, exactly. She couldn't hear him in any meaningful way. But [Read] worked on association. The mind organized its contents around anchors — identity, place, time, emotion — and asking a question out loud prompted the subject's memory to orient itself toward the answer.
Images came. They were fast and overlapping, then...
Lyssa. Her name was Lyssa Vael, from a town called Hethbridge, south of the Orlys border. Seventeen, not twenty. Younger than he'd guessed.
"Where are the rest of you?"
There had to be others, f this one had been Corrupted, and sure enough, the images shifted.
It was a cellar with a low ceiling. Five people seated around a table, their faces lit by a single candle. An older man with a scar running from his temple to his jaw was speaking, his voice too muffled for Sael to make out the words, but the others were listening with rigid attention. Lyssa was at the far end, her hands in her lap, her eyes down.
The image flickered to another room, different location. The same scarred man, standing over someone Sael couldn't see, his hand extended. A vial of something dark held between his fingers.
Then another flicker, this time in a stable. Pegasi in stalls. The scarred man again, this time from behind, walking away down a road Sael didn't recognize. A signpost at a crossroads, the lettering too blurred to read. A building with a red door. The smell of nighthollow, sharp and acrid, and Lyssa's hands shaking as she ground something in a mortar.
The flashes were coming faster now. Sael pushed gently, trying to stabilize the stream, to slow it down enough to catch details, then Lyssa grabbed his wrist.
Sael's hand was still on her forehead. Her eyes were still rolled back, and her body was still slack inside the binding field. She should not have been able to move at all. [Read] suppressed voluntary motor function entirely, that was the point, it kept the subject safe and still while the spell did its work. The fact that her hand had come up and closed around his wrist meant that whatever was moving her arm wasn't voluntary.
Her grip was stronger than it should have been.
"NO."
The voice came out of her mouth, but it wasn't hers. It was layered, three or four voices stacked on top of each other, speaking in unison with a half-second delay between each one that made the word smear across itself.
"No, no, NO!"
Lyssa's nose began to bleed. A thin line of red ran from her left nostril, over her lip, and down her chin. Then her ears. Then the corners of her eyes, where tears should have been, replaced by thin trails of blood that tracked down her cheeks and dripped off her jaw.
Sael pulled his hand back from her forehead but her grip on his wrist held. He looked at her face and tried to make sense of what he was seeing.
He'd studied corruption for longer than most people had been alive. He knew its stages, its mechanisms, the way it colonized a host's channels and gradually replaced their will with something else's. He knew what it could do and, more importantly, what it couldn't do at each stage of progression.
Stage two corruption could influence behavior. It could implant compulsions, dull empathy, create blind loyalty to whatever their cause was. It could make a seventeen-year-old girl from a town called Hethbridge walk into an imperial feast with poison in her pocket and not hesitate.
What it could not do, at stage two, was kill the host.
Corruption, the energy, was parasitic. It needed the body it lived in. Killing the host at stage two was like a vine tearing down the wall it was growing on; it didn't happen, because the vine needed the wall more than it needed anything else.
By stage five, the body was still walking and breathing and stronger than it had ever been, pushed to the absolute ceiling of its physical potential, but the person who'd once lived inside it was gone. An empty shell, worn like a suit of clothes, puppeted by whatever the corruption had become. It was literally death, and one of the most disgusting kinds Sael had ever seen.
But Lyssa was stage two. The veins on her neck confirmed it, so she should have years, perhaps decades before the corruption threatened her life.
And yet her body was shutting down. The bleeding was accelerating, her skin had gone the color of old paper, and the pulse Sael could feel through her grip on his wrist was hammering, then stuttering, then hammering again. The corruption seemed to be was burning through her channels like a fire set deliberately in a house the arsonist still lived in...
It was then Sael realized it was destroying her on purpose.
To use [Purification] on a corrupted host, you had to bring them near death first, and then wait. The corruption, desperate to survive, would surface and that was when you hit it with the spell. Any other way and one risked killing the host along with the parasite, because the spell couldn't tell them apart when the corruption was still buried.
For having used it so many times, Sael knew the method, but said method assumed the host was alive when you got to that window, and whatever was happening inside Lyssa was going to kill her before he ever reached it.
Sael stopped trying to understand it and acted. He placed his free hand against Lyssa's chest, over her heart, and cast [Shock].
The pulse hit the teenager like a slap. Her back arched inside the field, her mouth opened in a scream that came out thin and strangled, her hand released his wrist, and then she went limp while her head dropped forward, her arms hung at her sides and the bleeding from her nose and eyes slowed, then stopped.
This also cut off the layered voice mid-syllable.
Sael held his hand where it was for a few seconds, monitoring. Her heartbeat and breathing resumed, and while the black veins on her neck were still there, they'd stopped spreading.
She was unconscious. The corruption was still inside her, but it could do nothing when the host lost consciousness, much less kill her, so Sael withdrew his hand and floated back a pace.
He looked at the unconscious girl suspended in the binding field, blood drying on her face, and felt an uncomfortable weight settle in his stomach.
"Hmm..."
This was a worried hmm, and for good cause because Sael had spent decades hunting corruption. He knew is well enough that he'd stopped expecting surprises from it a long time ago, yet tonight, it had surprised him.
A stage two host burning itself alive from the inside, the corruption torching its own vessel for no reason that fit anything he understood, that wasn't supposed to happen. He would have told anyone who asked that it couldn't.
Which meant his understanding now had a hole in it. And holes in your understanding of something that had already swallowed civilizations whole were for lack of a better word, not good.
He turned toward Orlys and began the flight back with the girl.
***
Sael descended through the night air over the feast grounds with Lyssa suspended in the binding field beside him. The crowd below noticed him before he landed making heads turn, voices drop, and by the time his boots touched the grass near the main entrance, the guests in his path had already stepped aside without being asked.
Jade Emperor Daeren was waiting outside the tent. He'd come out at some point during Sael's absence and was standing with the guard captain at his shoulder, arms folded, watching the sky. His gaze went to the girl first — took in the dried blood on her face, the black veins visible above her collar, the limpness of her body inside the field — and then to Sael.
"Is that her?"
"Her name is Lyssa Vael," Sael said. "Seventeen years old, from a town called Hethbridge, south of the border. She's been corrupted. Stage two." He lowered the binding field until Lyssa was hovering a foot above the grass. "I need a secure room, and I need her kept unconscious until I come back tomorrow."
The Jade Emperor didn't ask for elaboration. He turned to the guard captain. "I want the second tent cleared, two guards on the entrance at all times, no one enters without my direct order or the Archmage's."
The captain struck her fist to her chest and moved.
Sael spent the next several minutes in the tent working in silence. He set four containment spells over Lyssa's body, each one layered and anchored to the others so that if any single binding failed, which was unlikely, the remaining three would compensate. Over the top of those, he placed a sleep ward calibrated to trigger the moment her brain activity approached wakefulness. Then he added a secondary alert ward, linked to himself across any distance, that would fire if the sleep ward was somehow breached.
He checked each layer twice. Then he checked the room, then he checked the layers a third time, which was a lot, admittedly, but he was not willing to take any chance.
Daeren had followed him down and watched the entire process from the doorway and when Sael finally stepped back from the stone table where Lyssa lay, the emperor looked at the four visible layers of magic humming faintly around her in different registers, and then at the girl's face underneath them.
"She that dangerous?"
"The corruption tried to kill her while I was reading her memories," Sael said. "It burned through her channels from the inside. I stopped it by knocking her unconscious, and it can't act while she's out, but if she wakes before I've dealt with it, the same thing might happen." He looked at Lyssa on the table. The blood had dried on her face in thin lines, and in the lamplight of the stone room, she looked very, very young. "She's also a child who was used by people she likely trusted, Daeren. I'd rather she survive this."
Daeren was quiet for a moment. "Tomorrow, then."
"Tomorrow."
They walked back toward the main tent together. The feast noise reached them before they got there as someone had apparently made the decision to restart the music, and the sound of drums and conversation was spilling through the silk walls into the night air.
Sael stopped outside the entrance.
"I think I'll head home," he said.
"You are the guest of honor, my friend."
"I know. And I enjoyed tonight more than I've enjoyed an evening in a long while. The drinks and food were wonderful, the company was better." He looked at the entrance, where light and noise poured out in equal measure, and then back at Daeren. "But I'm tired."
Daeren studied his face for a few seconds. Whatever he found there, he didn't argue with it. He put a hand on Sael's shoulder, squeezed once, and said, "Then rest well, my friend. We'll talk tomorrow."
Sael went inside to say goodnight.
He found Margaret and Richter at the head table. Margaret was sitting with her hands around a cup of tea that had gone cold, staring at the surface of the table, visibly lost in her own thoughts. Richter was standing behind her chair, his posture straight, his hands at his sides, and his eyes found Sael the moment he came through the entrance.
"I'm heading home," Sael said, when he reached them. "I'm tired."
Margaret looked up.
Sael had known her long enough to expect what came next. Some remark about leaving early, or a joke about how he'd managed to turn a perfectly good feast into a crisis inside three hours, delivered with the edge she reserved for situations where she cared more than she wanted anyone to notice.
But she didn't say any of that. Instead, she looked at his face with the same attention she'd been giving the table, her eyes moving carefully, and whatever she saw there made her set her tea down.
"All right, grandpa," she said. "Get some rest."
Her voice was gentle. Margaret's voice was never this gentle, and Sael would have preferred the sharpness.
Richter's reaction came at a slight delay, his bushy brows drew together by a fraction, his head tilted a few degrees to the left, and Sael could see the thought taking shape behind his eyes as plainly as if he'd written it out and held it up.
They both knew, as far as Sael could tell, that he didn't get tired, not physically at least. So when he said it now, he could see it register, and was fairly sure neither of them believed he was talking about his body.
"Goodnight, Archmage," Richter said, as expected. "I'll come see you at your house tomorrow morning , if you'll have me."
"Of course, Richter. You can come any time."
Sael thanked them both, and left.
He found Oz was outside, perched on one of the fence posts near the pegasus tethering area with his feathers smoothed down and his eyes half-closed. He might have been sleeping, though, that seemed out of character for him.
He hopped down when Sael appeared and fell into step beside him, his talons clicking against the packed dirt of the path.
They walked instead of flying.
The feast noise thinned behind them as they moved down the approach road, past the last of the lacquered carriages where a few drivers still sat on their benches waiting for their lords, past the tethered pegasi — one of which was still eating grass, even now, in the dark, with the same total indifference it had shown that afternoon — and onto the main road into the city.
The lanterns along the road gave way to starlight while the air cooled, and the only sounds were their footsteps and the distant murmur of the gathering shrinking behind them.
Oz let the silence last longer than Sael expected. They were nearly through the outer edge of the merchant quarter, closed shops dark on either side, before he spoke.
"The girl."
"Yes."
"You are troubled."
"I am."
Silence again. Their path took them through the market square, and Sael glanced toward the east side where the tea stall had stood that morning. A bad feeling had settled low in his chest, one he was having a rather hard time ignoring.
Oz suddenly made a short, percussive sound, expelled through the nostrils. If Sael hadn't known better, he'd have called it a laugh.
"What's amusing?"
"You," Oz said. "It is interesting, seeing you unsure. I don't get to witness it often."
Sael looked down at the dragon walking beside him. "I'm rarely in control of what happens, Oz. I react. Efficiently, I'll grant you, but it's reaction all the same."
"Then stop reacting." Every trace of amusement left Oz's voice. "Act. You are a demi-primordial, for Dragonkind's sake. You carry the power of beings who shaped the bones of this world, and you have spent centuries wasting it on the most wretched of human instincts: contentment. The need to do enough and call it sufficient. You sit and wait for your enemies to move first for longer than most kingdoms on this continent have existed, and I tell you plainly, Archmage, it is beneath you. You hold power that every ruler in any age would tear their nations apart to possess, and yet you refuse to wield it until you have no other choice. That is not wisdom, it looks more like sloth."
"Well, ouch."
This actually hurt a bit.
Oz said nothing else, and that was the end of it. But the words stayed with Sael as they walked. Oz was harsh, proud, and also had the luxury of speaking without tact because he had never once in his long life needed anyone to like him, as with most dragons. But he was right. Sael could feel it in the same place he felt the bad feeling.
The enemy was making moves in the dark. Quiet, patient moves, and Sael had been doing what he always did: waiting for the next problem to show itself, then handling it when it arrived.
He'd set things in motion with the guild, and the alliances he was building with the rulers of the world were real and progressing, but all of that was slow work, and slow work assumed you had time. If the corruption had changed then the timeline he'd been operating on might already be wrong.
He thought about the old days. The years on the road, before the reputation had solidified around him and people started bringing their problems to his door instead of the other way around. Back then he and his companions went looking. He moved through the world and found the rot before it found him, and there was a sharpness to that way of living he hadn't felt in a long time.
Perhaps... perhaps it was time to take to the road again.