Chapter 106
Aloaeiol watched as Ard stood there, unable to move. It was as though something invisible and impossibly strong had taken hold of the young man’s body. The captain, who had spent the past several hours in the back seat, only shifted her gaze between the boy frozen in place and the house.
She saw the veins bulge on his face, his knuckles whiten where they clenched his staff, and yet, for all his straining, he couldn’t break the unseen hand that had gathered every part of him into a single, coiled spring of steel.
At the same time, Captain Pnev was running toward the house with a grenade and a revolver in his hands. Aloaeiol should’ve maybe called out. Asked the captain to stop. He’d been swept up in the heat of the moment, eager to help a potential ally—the vampire—and catch the mole, according to what she’d overheard. He had forgotten himself entirely.
Did Aloaeiol bear a small share of the blame for this? Could her story that had moved Milar to lay out the murky details of his own past (Aloaeiol truly hadn’t known that Elvira had spent half a year in a hospital for the mentally unwell) have unbalanced Captain Pnev? Could it have made him so reckless that he hadn’t even noticed that he was about to storm a building alone? Perhaps.
She would not learn the answer anytime soon. Even now, after spending the better part of a day with this pair, hidden beneath her veil, she still suspected Pnev. She simply couldn’t do otherwise. She could not let herself believe that what had happened several years ago had been nothing more than an ugly coincidence. A joke of the Eternal Angels, who, in their blindness, had failed to notice the lives undone by it.
And so, she remained silent. She needed to be certain that she hadn’t saved the life of a traitor to the Empire down there in those sewers.
Milar vanished inside the carelessly-built cabin, and then came the explosion. It wasn’t the ordinary kind of explosion caused by gunpowder, nor the kind that came from damaging the combustion chamber of a Ley-generator.
Quite a different sort of roar drove Aloaeiol to press her hands to her ears and lose her hold on her veil. She saw Corporal Egobar look at her with barely-contained fury and… contempt. She didn’t blame him. She herself was not entirely sure she was acting honorably. That was why she stuck to the rules of the Daggers.
A dark whirlwind that looked like the mud of a spring puddle started spinning in the very same spot where the cabin had just stood. It crushed the boards that had only moments ago been a wall. It spun the roof in the air like a straw hat. And as for the snow and ice—there was no trace of them left.
The shadows of the South Port lengthened and, streaming along the ground, reached toward the center of the blast. There, inside the whirlwind of liquid darkness, a figure stood, draped in a cloak stitched from the gloom itself. He was holding a staff that resembled a sunbeam, though it was a sunbeam that would cast twilight upon everything, not true light. To the right of the Dark Aean’Hane stood another figure, also hidden beneath a cloak, but this garment was perfectly ordinary. It was the kind of thing the supply department issued to all of the Cloaks.
Moments stretched into minutes.
Aloaeiol saw a piece of the whirlwind break away from the wild dance of shadows and wrap around the vampire. It forced him to his knees, pressed against his face, and faster than the eye could follow, it turned the undead creature into a small heap of white ash that scattered across his old, threadbare clothing. The captain watched as the grenade, tumbling among the wooden splinters, bent and crumpled in on itself until it burst with a brief flash that couldn’t pierce the wall of darkness.
And then the captain saw the last figure of that dreadful scene, which rang out with echoes from the age of Ectassus and Gales.
Captain Pnev.
Several meters above the ground, his revolver no longer in his hand, he was clawing with twisted fingers at ropes spun out of black mist that had bound his body. But each motion he made passed straight through, encountering no resistance.
Aloaeiol couldn’t see the face of the Dark One, but she could guess that he was staring unblinkingly at Ard, who couldn’t so much as move.
“You cannot save them all, Egobar,” the Dark One spoke in the tongue of the Fae. “Aror didn’t manage it and neither shall you.”
The Dark One moved his staff just slightly, and before Milar, arching a phantom neck, an enormous serpent coiled out of the clouds of black smoke. Opening its dusk-colored eyes, it struck.
Milar’s enchanted suit flared to life—one of Dagdag’s creations that was usually issued to the Daggers. While normally capable of stopping a single spell of the Blue Star, it only delayed the serpent for the briefest moment. The creature only swelled with darkness, drinking it from the whirlwind, and accompanied by Milar’s cry that was full of horror and pain, it punched clean through his chest. Where his heart had been beating an instant before, a bloody hole now gaped.
The Dark One once again moved his staff a fraction, and the whirlwind spat Milar out. His lifeless body, leaving behind a line of crimson droplets falling unhurriedly onto the snow scattered by the blast, crashed down beside the car.
A cry rang out. It was like a howl and a roar all at once.
Ardan, who hadn’t been able to move so much as a finger until now, fell into the snow. It was as if he had been pressing against an invisible wall all this time, and that wall had vanished only when Milar’s remains had struck the wheel of his own car.
White symbols blazed across his staff. Right now, Captain Aloaeiol could no longer bring herself to call the thing that had taken his place a “young man.” Cloaked in a mantle of long wolf fur that burned with icy light, what stood there was something between a wolf and a man instead.
With an inhuman cry that had been stripped of all reason, leaving behind only primal fury and pain, the beast slammed his staff against the ground.
Aloaeiol could barely draw breath. She was certain that, were it not for the work of Ivan Kornosskiy, who had turned her into a mutant, she would’ve died on the spot. Her own breath would’ve torn her chest to ribbons after freezing in her lungs. Even the air of the street seemed to halt, streaming down in a thick haze.
A rumbling began.
It was low, coming from deep within the belly of the world. It was the kind of thing one might hear while standing at the foot of a mountain when an avalanche starts coming down from somewhere far above, grinding and erasing everything in its path. In such a situation, while curled up into a small ball in the face of an indifferent element, you could only hope blindly that you would be spared today, and that the Eternal Angels were on your side.
However, here in the South Port, there was no room left for the religion of men anymore. And so Aloaeiol watched buildings turn to dust. Watched the great steel cranes crumple like cheap paper. She watched the avalanche come in from the canal—it looked like a cat’s gaping maw.
The half-wolf, half-man lifted his staff above his head as though it weighed a hundred kilograms. And along with his movements, the avalanche leaped upward, and then, still obeying the gestures of the staff pulsing with light, it came down on the heads of the Dark Aean’Hane and his servant.
Or rather—it ought to have come down on them.
The Dark One smashed his staff against the ground and the whirlwind of darkness scattered into a hundred long, dark rays of unholy light. Coiling like serpents, they pierced the avalanche through, and then fell upon it from the “back” like a school of starving, predatory fish. They tore at it, ripped into it, and shredded it, turning the sky into an endless succession of flashes. And then everything went still.
Where the mantle of burning ice fur had been, there was now only a green cloak, and the half-wolf had been replaced by a hunched-over young man who had blood trickling down his chin.
Aloaeiol saw that his amber eyes were still burning with fire.
She should’ve done something. At the very least, she could’ve said: “Don’t!”
The Dark Aean’Hane, for some reason she couldn’t guess, was in no hurry to attack. He simply stood there, wrapped in his cloak of impregnable gloom, and waited.
With another cry, the corporal slammed his staff against the ground. This time, a green seal flared beneath his feet, and the snow glittering in the air was drawn into it in fine threads. Three vibrating cannonballs of ice formed above the head of his staff, and with sharp claps, leaving white streaks in the air behind them, they hurled themselves forward.
The concrete of the quay was ground to powder in their wake and the ice that had covered it scattered to either side. Aloaeiol didn’t doubt for a second that the armor of the only tank she had ever laid eyes on—the crown jewel of the lethal genius of human engineering—would not have withstood such an attack.
And the Dark One… He, too, smashed his staff against the ground once more. And beneath his feet, a seal of Star Magic flared. A cloak of fire vaporized all three cannonballs, sealing the mage off. And by the time it fell away, the Dark One was already in the sky.
At his back, the gloom had stretched into two enormous wings that were exuding liquid mist from within. He flapped them, and then, flying only a few meters above the ocean, going faster than a bullet, he headed toward the south—somewhere away from the capital.
And his servant, showing a speed and nimbleness no human was capable of, ran the other way—north. Toward Baliero. Every now and then, the steel of long claws flashed beneath his cloak, and the torn pantlegs and shreds of boots could no longer hide his fur and paws.
Aloaeiol had no idea whether this was a werewolf or a mutant. She didn’t dwell on it for long.
Paying no mind to Ard, who was struggling not to collapse as he leaned on his staff, she finally found the strength to climb out of the car. She ran to Milar. Or rather, to what was left of him.
His body sat propped against the wheel. Aloaeiol fell down beside him, drew him onto her lap, and tried to press his wound shut. To her horror, she realized that it was already too late. Dagdag’s suit had managed to weaken and redirect the attack to some degree, but… it hadn’t been Star Magic.
Captain Pnev’s chest now had a hole the size of a roll of tape in it. And he was not a mutant, nor a Firstborn. He was a man. Only a man. Recklessly brave, mad with courage, and so very dead. After all, even a mutant or an orc could hardly have survived without a part of their heart. Inside the hole, the last spasms gripped what remained of the captain’s engine—an engine that was so much like his own automobile. It had been battered and patched up a hundred times over, but it had still been able to get the others out of any kind of trouble.
Until today.
“Forgive me,” Aloaeiol whispered softly, pressing his head against her stomach. His eyes had gone dim and glassy. “Forgive me…”
Paranoia. It was the flaw in Ivan Kornosskiy’s calculations that everyone knew about—including his own son, and even Aloaeiol herself. Milar had been right, and…
“A volumetric wound,” a muttering pierced her thoughts. “The depth is twenty-two centimeters and six millimeters. Complex damage has been done to the muscular, nervous and bone structures.”
Aloaeiol looked up. Beside her in the snow, his staff set aside, sat Corporal Egobar. Above his grimoire, a phantom pencil hewn out of a whitish mist hovered. And Ard himself, with his own pencil, was rapidly scribbling something across the pages of his grimoire.
“If the bleeding and arterial repair are halted at the same time, thrombosis might be induced, so an array for incremental tissue regeneration must be added… Fuck!” Ardan shouted.
This was the first time the corporal had cursed in the tongue of men in front of her. His pencil, damaged by the weather, had stopped writing properly. Without hesitation, he pressed his hand to his mouth and tore at it sharply, his fangs taking the skin from his index finger and nearly some of the flesh as well. After letting the blood stream over the pencil, he carried on with his notes.
“Ard…” Aloaeiol called out, but he didn’t hear her. “Ardi, listen… Listen to me, Ard! He’s dead. Milar is dead. There’s nothing more to be-”
“Even after the failure of all systems, the brain does not lose its integrity for another six minutes,” Ardan muttered indistinctly, as though he had lost his mind. “The heart is only a muscle with additional peculiarities. The biggest problem is the bone structure and the spinal cord. An error in their restoration may cost him some motor function. The books written by Debius Sopr said so. He was executed in 468 for the creation of complex archetypes of undead… Anita Omavaya also wrote about this. She was executed in 482 because she tried to chimerise her own child. And-”
“Ard, come to your sen-”
Amber eyes flared with a bright fire, looking straight into her soul.
“Be silent!”
Aloaeiol felt her own lips close against her will, doing so with a finality no force could break. The seal was tighter than two bricks bound with cement. The captain had always been confident in the defenses of her mind, the ones she had been taught how to erect in the High Forest. Those defenses didn’t last a second against the avalanche that came down upon her mind.
“With incremental regeneration of muscle and bone tissue…” As if nothing had happened, as though he hadn’t just shattered the defenses of a mutant and a Listener in passing, the corporal went on. “Shit! I need a double seal… no, a triple one. But I don’t know how to combine three healing seals. I can’t even really combine two! And even if I did…”
The corporal stopped muttering and looked at Milar, and then at his own watch.
“Four minutes and forty-three seconds,” he said. “Four minutes and forty-two seconds left… I must carry out three manipulations at once, but at the same time, do so incrementally. I have to ensure that they don’t overpower one another. Even with several seals combined into one, such a structure is not possible. This wound cannot be healed by classical Star Magic below the Black Star.”
Aloaeiol exhaled and looked at Milar again. She ran her fingers gently through his hair, which had stuck to his forehead. How would she find the strength to bring Elvira the news?
By the Eternal Angels and Sleeping Spirits…
“But if the seal is folded into itself,” the corporal went back to the pages of his grimoire. “If an additional false space is created… a subspace… The structure will be unstable. Any error in its construction will lead to a cascading collapse that will slam into the mind of the caster, and his Stars will burn out.”
Turning the page, the corporal once again opened his skin with his fangs, denying his Matabar blood the chance to close the wound.
“Four minutes and sixteen seconds,” he said and went back to scratching across the paper. “An inner subspace will fold the seal and close the processing cycle for the rune arrays, and then I can pass the information from one section to another. The window will be small. No more than a sixteenth of a second, but a window will appear. Yes. Mathematically speaking, that is a working alternative to the additional spaces of transmutational runic links. A secondary conclusion…”
Aloaeiol didn’t understand a single word the corporal was muttering. And even if she’d been able to comprehend any of this, she still couldn’t have spoken. Another’s Will held her own bound.
“Three minutes and fifty-eight seconds,” the corporal mumbled, glancing at his watch from time to time. “I must calculate the load. I must account for the exponential growth that will occur at every 32nd fraction of a second the construct is in use. And I have to direct the progression of the object’s intake of Ley from the Paarlax field for the sake of regeneration. Eight red rays, nine green ones, and… ten blue rays… No. That’s nonsense. Recalculate. I must recalculate. Three minutes and forty-three seconds…”
The corporal turned the page again and yet again drove his fangs into his own flesh, where, beneath the scraps of dangling skin, the white phalanx bones of his index finger had begun to show.
“Increase the angle of the incidence of the vector and recalculate… no… It’s ten again… Then replace the array linkage and switch to… Ahgrat! Ten! Ten! Always ten! Bloody ten!”
The pencil dropped from his bloody hand and Ard absently glanced at his own wrist.
“Three minutes and thirty-seven seconds…” The corporal closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them and looked at Aloaeiol. “Give me your Yellow Star accumulator.”
The young man held out his bloodied hand.
The captain flinched and shook her head.
“Don’t lie to me!” he barked, and to Aloaeiol, it seemed like something akin to a wolf’s growl was lurking in his tone. “Even if you were a Listener thrice over, you are still only a mutant! Mutants are not capable of tricks like yours! Something must feed your veil, and you promised me a Yellow Star accumulator for my help! Where did you get one? Military accumulators of the Yellow Star are worth a fortune!”
Because Aloaeiol couldn’t speak, Ard had misread her refusal. She wasn’t trying to deceive him. There was no sense in denying the obvious.
No, another concern had stayed her hand. She knew that, if she gave him the accumulator, she might have to deliver not one, but two death notices. The mad fire that burned in the young man’s eyes made it clear that he had decided to do something insane. Something worthy of his family name. And so, she could not grant his requ-
“Aloaeiol!” The tolling of his voice in her head reached deep into her mind. “Give me the yellow accumulator!”
That wasn’t even her True Name. And she had taken care to avoid eye contact. But even so—even with her being uninjured, and with Corporal Egobar plainly wounded and unsteady—the icy wave of his Will swept every defense she had out of its way.
It is one thing to silence someone and quite another to subjugate them completely. Aloaeiol fought back with all her strength. And her strength held out for only an instant. After that, all the captain could do was watch silently as her own hand undid a hidden flap at her belt and placed the Yellow Star military accumulator into the corporal’s palm. It wasn’t even the one she had been using lately, but a perfectly fresh one issued to her right before the Congress.
Ard tossed it into his left hand and, grabbing his staff, rose to his feet and stepped a few paces back. Drawing in a few deep breaths, he stood in silence for a time, his head bowed. And then he looked at the accumulator gripped in his hand. He was holding it so tightly that the sharp edges of the crystal had pierced his skin.
“It’s enough for a ninth ray, and even a tenth…” The young man murmured, and lifted his gaze toward the sky. “Ergar, you taught me…” Ard whispered almost soundlessly, scarcely moving his lips. “…not to hunt those stronger than myself. Why is it that all I do is break that rule of yours?”
With these final words, he lowered his staff to the ground. The smell of ozone filled the air, and a moment later, a bolt of icy lightning came down from the sky. Crackling and spitting snowy sparks, it struck the very head of Ard’s staff, and after streaming into the wood, it surged toward his bloody hand.
*
Once again, Ardan didn’t know where he was. In fact, he wasn’t even sure that he was anywhere at all. Among the snowy Alcade peaks, he had kindled his first, his Red Star, by hunting for the right threads among the many shades of the Ley. For his second, he had walked through illusory lands and woven patterns out of green threads, but now… he was simply walking.
He was talking through a dense barrier filled with every shade of blue the human eye can discern and tell apart. It was as though Ardi had stepped into the midst of a morning mist—one that hadn’t risen over a lake or a river, but somewhere amid the colors themselves. This felt like the blue of young ice, bitingly cold and deceptively clear; of summer’s midday azure, the kind you watch with eyes half-shut and a hand raised to your brow, finding familiar shapes among the unhurried, fluffy clouds; of thick, clinging paint freshly mixed on a palette.
Ardan walked on. He used legs he no longer had, gazed with eyes that saw nothing, and doubted the very fact of his own being. Memories drifted past him.
Ardi froze in place. Clammy fingers—whose exactly, he couldn’t say—pressed at his heart again and again, twisting it and kneading it the way his mother had used to knead dough before baking his favorite pie…
The first drops of blood; the bleating of the mountain goat thrashing beneath Ergar’s weight; the sight of bare flesh showing through torn hide. The way the does and kids panicked and scattered, the bleating bucks at their backs; the way the snow leopard tore greedily at his prey and crushed it—all of it turned the world around him red.
The fingers, broken and stripped of their dreadful bones, were lost amid a single feeling that had seized the boy’s mind. It was a feeling he’d thought he knew, but in truth had only encountered in passing every now and again, never trying—nor wishing—to become familiar with it.
And now he could pick out its every detail, feel all of its colors, and grasp the full horror of one single word: hunger.
The boy sprang forward. He didn’t know what it was he gripped the ledges with—feet or hands. He smashed against stones, tore his skin, tumbled down the slope, and, passing Ergar who was tearing into his catch, he ran on. His quick legs carried him after the herd, his hurried breaths turned to steam, and his mad heart strove to overtake its owner and reach the prey first.
The world around Ardi turned orange at first, then fiery, and then it became a deep crimson. All he could see was the doubling, weaving path of a young goat. All he could feel was the lash that drove him—hunger.
And when his goal was a hand’s breadth away, something struck him in the chest with such force that he forgot how to breathe. After flying backwards, his back ploughing through the sharp stones and leaving a deep, bloody trail in the snow, Ardi stilled. Unable to move, the boy watched as a living mountainside came toward him. It approached him with a heavy tread that shook the ground; sheets of snow followed it on the currents of a wind that had become tame.
Standing to the side, Ardan watched the small, half-frozen boy who was facing one of the Guardian Spirits of the Matabar people. In the past, he’d thought of Lenos as a gigantic, mighty beast of flesh. But now he saw him as a living hill of flowers, his horns reaching out like spring streams.
This was Lenos, the Warden of the Southern Gate, as he truly was. He was spring—its first, timid, but already-gentle warmth; its flowers, which were as bright as they were eager to live. Lenos was its wind, its rustle in the branches newly-dressed in green, and everything that hunter and prey alike greeted in the lands of the Alcade.
Ardan walked through this memory and left behind the blurry outline of a boy who hadn’t even managed to catch a small mountain goat.
Even there, the road did not end. Ardan walked on, feeling the wall of blue color grow three times denser.
And before him, a new memory unfurled:
“I need your word, Cassara,” Grandfather said, coughing and wiping the blood from his mouth, but his tone was firm all the same.
The vampire watched her companion in silence, and only after a few moments did she dip her head a little.
“Just like before, my friend… My word is always with you.”
Grandfather nodded, then straightened with a groan. It was obviously costing him a great deal to do so. He was very nearly trembling, but he held his back straight, and his gaze turned north—toward his native mountains. For one brief moment, with another twist of the shadows, he no longer looked like a weakened, withered old man, but like a mighty hunter who was two and a half meters tall, with shoulders as broad as a cart axle, strong claws, and fangs of steel. This was a Master of True Names, one who spoke the tongue of mysteries and magic. He wielded a staff that resembled a young tree, and a sword that more resembled a railway track than a blade.
But then the vision dissolved and left behind only the artifacts Ardi remembered. The ones he had once found in that shed on the mountain. A rusted sword and a staff that had all but rotted through. Somehow, they had ended up in his grandfather’s hands.
“Don’t be a fool, old man!” A stranger cried out, and at the same time, he drew his revolver from its holster and clenched a medallion at his chest.
The others did likewise. They drew their revolvers, levelled them at Ardi’s family, and gripped their medallions.
But Grandfather was not troubled.
He turned to Ardan and smiled. It was the same smile he had given him in his childhood, back when he had told him tales of great wizards and knights of the past. Of Ectassus. The land where their kind—those who were not human—could live freely and openly. He smiled with only his eyes. Eyes full of warmth and care. His dry lips, which were bleeding, moved, speaking words in the tongue of the Fae. His left hand rose, and the rusted sword, encountering no resistance at all, sank up to the hilt into the chest of the last of the Matabar, piercing his heart. His body began to fall, but before it had even touched the grass, a winter wind blew past. It put out the burning shed in an instant, and forced the strangers to wrap their cloaks around themselves to ward off the blizzard that followed, breaking into the night of an early summer. When everything stilled, a shriveled body was lying upon the ground. The bones seemed like they’d been stripped of their flesh and were barely covered in places by translucent skin. Beside them lay the rusted shards of a broken sword and the hundreds of splinters of a shattered staff.
Ardan was looking at himself from barely two years ago. He’d been pitiful, crushed beneath another’s Will, helpless to interfere with what was happening amid the fire that took the most peaceful years of his life with it.
Had it all happened now, instead of back then, would he have had the strength to stop the voice of Aror and throw off the bonds of his words? Would he have had enough strength to overcome Yonatan’s unit, Cassara included?
Most likely not.
But Ardi knew, with absolute certainty, that today, he would not stand meekly by. He would have tried. With all his strength, he would’ve tried to overcome the Will of Aror. He had already refused to bend to the mark of Allane’Eari, and he’d also refused to bend to the Dark Aean’Hane.
And so he passed through this mirage as well.
The blue mist thickened around him so completely that he could no longer see the flares of memories from bygone days, nor anything else, only the endless blue haze.
He wandered at random. Blindly. He couldn’t say where he was going or why, and could hardly remember why he had come here in the first place. Perhaps he should turn back? While he still remembered the way back…
He…
Who was he?
Did he have a name?
Probably… he probably did—he remembered how to get it back. All he had to do was turn back. While there was still time. While he still remembered how. Why should he go on? Why should he strain so hard and risk losing himself in the middle of the blue haze, where he no longer knew himself?
And then a voice rang out:
“No, Ardi,” she turned away. “I grew up in a family of soldiers, and I can always recognize the eyes of a soldier.”
“I am no soldier,” Ardan said.
“Live in the Metropolis a little longer, and you, too, will be able to pick out the automobiles of the Second Chancery at a glance,” she answered a little sadly. “I saw how my mother suffered every time my father or my brothers went away to do their duty. And so did I. I don’t want to feel that way anymore, Ardi.”
Ardan stood as if rooted to the spot. His heart was hammering madly again, trying to break through his chest, and damp, cold fingers—just like in his childhood—were closing on his throat.
“You are an Imperial Mage, and I only sing in a gangster bar…” Her voice wavered slightly. “And I am almost two years older than you…” She took a step toward the stairs that led down from the snowy podium to the square.
“Let’s go home, Ardi,” Tess called out, her voice breaking. “We aren’t living in a fairy tale after all, and the Metropolis is no wizard’s shop…”
She let go of his hand and was soon standing at the edge of the podium. And in that moment, Ardan suddenly realized something: if Tess left the podium, they would never again take a walk through the city together. And one night in the future, while he was bent over his schematics and glancing periodically toward the window, an expensive automobile would pull up outside “Bruce’s,” a chauffeur would open the door, and Tess, casting one final, faintly sad look toward the bay window, would step inside and never return.
And Ardan also understood that it would be better that way. It would be better if this cold winter evening became a fleeting memory for both of them.
The same kind of memory as magical candy floss and a dance along the icy boards on the bank of the frozen black river. It would indeed be better for them both.
Ardan came up, took her by the shoulders, turned her around, and looked her in the eyes. Tess said nothing. She only looked into his eyes in turn.
She, too, understood all of this. That it would be better for them if they were apart. Each of them staying in their own world.
“Then that’s how it’ll be,” was all Ardan said, and bending down, he met her lips in a soft, sweet kiss.
Tess let her purse fall and wound her arms around his neck, drawing him lower. And so they stood, holding one another, while around them, a ghostly, snowy storm danced.
One-two-three. One-two-three.
The lamps, despite being cut off from their wiring, blinked like stars. And from a distant building hidden behind the square, a light melody was playing again.
Yes.
Yes…
His name was Ardi. To his friends.
He was Ard to most others.
And only those nearest and dearest to him called him Ardan. Ardan Egobar.
Ardan stood and watched as Tess spun among the ice and snow in the blue haze. His Tess. And he was dancing with her.
One-two-three. One-two-three.
“Thank you,” Ardan whispered, or perhaps he only thought it, and stepped forward. Because he did, after all, have a reason not to stop. A reason to keep going.
However, the haze fought back. By the time the third memory was lying behind him, all the shades of blue had finally vanished. There remained only an unbroken, endless azure. Ardan couldn’t move. He couldn’t so much as budge. Something invisible, but no less impassable for it, would not let him go further.
It was just like the mark of Allane’Eari; just like the unbreakable pact he’d made with the Sidhe of Winter; just like the words of Aror; just like the chasm that divided his and Tess’ worlds.
But…
They’d built a bridge across it, had they not? And each of them, from their own side, day and night, was sparing neither their strength nor their hearts to keep that bridge whole.
Ardan took a step forward. A small one, barely a step at all. And in that instant, the haze fell upon him not even like an avalanche, but like a cracked sky that felt offended that one born to crawl had dared to imagine that he had the right to cross its majesty.
Memories crumbled beneath the pressure of that blue. They vanished in flares of his own self, which could not endure the weight of that primal color. If only… If only he had something that might keep his memories safe so he could go on. If only…
His fingers caught on something warm. Something familiar. Something that remembered him, and his father, and his father’s father, and so on all the way back to the very first moment, back when the Sleeping Spirits had blown away the last clay from their failed creation that had been saved by the daughter of the Queen of Winter.
Old friend… Ardan thought.
Unable to speak so much as a word, he gripped in his hand a bright ray the color of old oak, and within it were hidden all those memories the blue had so desperately torn at and ripped to pieces. And so, Ardan kept going. He pushed the things that had taken the place of his feet forward, clinging desperately to his own staff. He knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that if he let go—if he stumbled for even the briefest moment—he would vanish in the middle of the blue. And then, somewhere out there, on the bloodied snow where his friend lay dying, only an empty husk that had once been Ardan Egobar would remain.
The voices…
The voices clung to him. They caught hold of what served as his hair, his legs, his arms, his eyes and ears. They clung in desperate, fruitless attempts to stop him. To slow him even just a little.
“You did it, Ard? The experiment has been stopped? The apparatus destroyed?”
“Yes, Mr. Aversky.”
“I did ask you… to call me by my given name, Ard. I would very much like a smoke…”
…
“Got a light?”
…
“What rotten luck. It’s probably for the best, my dear Ard, that I will not live to see you outdo me. Though it is a pity… Perhaps… I would… still… have liked… to one day… congratulate you… on doing so…”
But Ardan didn’t stop. Stooping as one does beneath the blows of a storm-whip that knocks them off their feet, he walked. He kept going.
“Take them with you, my little friend. Bring them here, to the homeland of your forefathers. Where your winds blow, where your earth sleeps.”
“I cannot. Grandfather is already old—he will not survive the journey, and Mother and Erti… this is not their land, Ergar.”
“Don’t, Ardi. I cannot help you, nor protect you. There is still so much you do not know, and this body of yours, the one you will walk in—it is weak and brittle.”
“Don’t worry, Teacher. Even when I can no longer run among the snow leopards, see with the eyes of an eagle, move like a lynx, and when my hide loses the strength of a bear—the lessons of Skusty and Atta’nha will be with me always.”
The voices did not end. They came one after another in an endless succession of memories that were trying to tell him something. Warn him of something.
“Believe me, little one, it is easier this way. It’s better to take this moment and get used to it.”
“Used to what?”
“To leaving without goodbyes.”
Ardan covered whatever served as his face with whatever served as his hand. He couldn’t stop. He wouldn’t stop.
“When her time to wear flesh ends, yours will not have reached even half its measure, betrothed. You will live long, wizard. Will you be able to keep this fire so tenderly in your hands when her flesh slips away like water?”
It didn’t matter. None of it mattered. He just had to make it through. A little more. Just a little more…
“Aean’Hane… That means, ‘one who makes magic,’ doesn’t it? In the tongue of the Fae?”
“Yes and no. Magic can be made by men, too, with their Star Magic. Aean’Hane means much more. It is more than just a Speaker who can weave together a few words. It is one who can not only Speak and call upon Names, but who also knows that… One day, you will understand, little Speaker, that the strength given to you by the Sleeping Spirits is, more often than not, a strength that shouldn’t be called into this world. And that the things you can do with it you can also do with your own two hands. That is what it means to be an Aean’Hane. To possess great strength and the even greater wisdom not to use it.”
“And are you an Aean’Hane?”
“Sometimes I forget how little you know, my kind friend.”
“I’ve read almost all of your books and most of the scrolls. I know how to kindle moonlight during the journey of the Spirit of the Day; I know how to hear part of the Name of a storm and call down icy lightning; I know how to make a cloak of darkness that turns the eye away; I know how to whisper the words that open closed passages; I know how to mix a hundred herbs and roots and fruits; I know how to create a star chart from sparks; I know-”
“Not all knowledge, little Speaker, can be drawn from books and scrolls. And the most important knowledge you will ever find will not come from books at all.”
“Then wh-”
“This,” Atta’nha laid her paw over the place where the hunter’s heart was beating. Then she scooped up a little snow and let it melt on his cheek. “And through this,” she added with much greater weight. “Such is the path.”
No. That wasn’t it. He needed strength. For perhaps the first time in his not-so-long life, he truly needed strength. The kind that lay beyond the line. And if he had to, he would tear that line to ribbons. Because he was weary… Weary of taking the path that the she-wolf had laid out for him. He was tired of believing that…
“You have that look in your eye. The look of someone who wants to save everyone. Who wants to help everyone. That’s a bad look, my dear Barov. When they bring me someone who wishes to be a doctor, but they have that look you have—I always turn them away. Do you know why?”
“Why?”
“Because such a look always brings more harm than good.”
The Memory of a Memory
“You read it?!” The she-wolf’s roar silenced all the sounds of the forest. “You read that scroll, Ardan?!”
The beasts went quiet, the birds folded their wings, and even the small beetles and flies hid somewhere amongst the treetops and the grass.
“I-”
“Answer me!” And then the winds spun about Ardi as though reaching out toward him with claws; the grass, wrapping itself into the sharpest of fangs, licked dangerously at his feet; and the tall trees bent down, waving their branches the way the great hunters might wave their tails.
“I read it,” the little hunter whispered.
He was sitting on the Stairs and letting his legs dangle. Beneath his feet, clouds drifted by, covering the forest below. In his paws… in his hands—he still couldn’t get used to that term—was a scroll that had been written by the Sidhe of the Comical Mishap. This was the famed jester of the Summer Court who knew how to keep the happiness of others in enchanted glass. Why? So that, should some person grow sad, he might present them with their own laughter from the past.
Was that why the little hunter was sad? Because he was not a man, and so the Summer Jester couldn’t gift him joy?
Ardi looked at the swallows. Winter was drawing near, and once again, they were gathering to head east, beyond the great water. He wondered what they would see in their wanderings. What lands they would visit. What tongues they would hear…
The she-wolf had told him to never believe the swallows. That the swallows always lied. But for some reason, Ardi thought that Atta’nha was mistaken. And if she was mistaken about one thing—might she not be mistaken about another?
“What are you thinking about, my kind friend?” A snow-white, warm mountain asked, her black nose pressed into the little hunter’s ribs.
The she-wolf, as always, was lying close beside him. Her term she’d agreed upon with Ergar, one where she got to be not only his friend, but his teacher as well, had not yet run out.
“Why did Skusty say I was wrong when I called the bush by its Name and saved the prey from the hunter?” Ardi asked. “I helped them. Now their parents, brothers and sisters will not weep.”
“And perhaps the children of the hunters will weep, or perhaps the hunters themselves will die of Hunger, my kind friend.”
“But the prey were weaker!” The little hunter protested. “They were quite helpless, while those hunters were strong! They could’ve found someone who was their equal on the paths.”
“You cannot know the path of another beast, my friend.” The she-wolf breathed out a cloud of prickling snowflakes. “And so, judge no one save yourself.”
“But-”
“Such is the dream of the Sleeping Spirits, Ardi,” the she-wolf went on. “Learn to accept it as it is.”
“Then should Ergar have let Lenos trample me?” The little hunter asked, surprised. “Because the Warden of the Southern Gate is stronger than I am? Or should I have let the troll feast on the bear cubs?”
Atta’nha didn’t answer him right away.
“Ardi, do you know what happens if you set grass alight during a drought?”
“Of course, she-wolf! There will be a fire!”
“And how do you know that?” She asked.
“Because I have already seen it, in the cycle before,” the little hunter puffed up, not understanding where the she-wolf was leading their conversation.
“Just so, my kind friend.” She ran her wet nose along his cheek once more. “You have walked upon this earth only a few cycles, but you have already seen something upon which you build your thoughts. Now imagine how one who has walked the earth for thousands of cycles builds theirs. Will they see more than you do? Will it seem to you like the gifts of their memory, from which they draw wisdom, look like the gift of foresight from the outside—even though no one is permitted to see the future in the dreams of the Sleeping Spirits?”
Ardi thought about that for a moment.
“I suppose so. If they have seen a thousand times more than I have, then they can foresee a thousand times more,” he answered, not quite sure. “But what do the bush and the prey have to do with it?”
“Everything around us is the dream of the Sleeping Spirits, and we are only their visions, my kind friend. But we are not without the right to choose what kind of dream we shall be,” the she-wolf said, once again not giving him a straight answer. “But beware your own strength, my little friend. Beware of deciding for others what their path through the Sleeping Spirits’ dreams shall be. For you have seen how the grass burned only once, and you do not yet know that cycles will pass, many cycles, and the burning will become a part of the seasons of plenty, when neither hunter nor prey will know Hunger. But if you had stopped it, long cycles of Hunger would have come, and they would have taken many, many lives.”
The little hunter frowned.
He thought that perhaps he was beginning to understand…
“But how, then, am I supposed to know when I should use your lessons and when I shouldn’t?”
“Decide for yourself.”
“But you just told me that I shouldn’t do that?”
The she-wolf shook her head and laid her muzzle on his lap again.
“I have only told you, my kind friend, that your decisions have consequences. And you cannot always see where they lead.”
“And how am I supposed to see that?”
“For that, wisdom is needed.”
“And where am I to find this wisdom, she-wolf?” The boy was suddenly bright with interest. “Does it grow somewhere? Or is it prey that one might catch?”
The she-wolf smiled a little sadly. It was sadder than usual, even.
“Wisdom is not caught, nor learned, nor found, my kind friend.” Another prickly, snowy cloud erupted from her muzzle. “Only by paying a price you did not wish to pay will you find wisdom. And, after finding it, you will pay even more than you paid before. Such is the path.”
“I don’t understand, she-wolf.”
She pressed close and wrapped her soft, fluffy tail around him.
“And I pray to my Mother and the Sleeping Spirits that you never will… But your path through the dreams of the Sleeping Spirits is only beginning, my little friend, and I am afraid of where it may lead you.”
The Here and Now
Ardan looked at the memory frozen before him in the azure haze, which had suddenly become so light, so weightless. Ardan could move freely. He could go forward or back.
In his hand, he held his staff, which had become a plain oak branch once again. His memory was waiting like an obedient hound for his commands—no one was tearing at it anymore, nor harrying it.
Ahead of him were the she-wolf and the child, both of them resting upon the snowy slope of an Alcade peak.
And behind him…
Behind him was a man whose path through the dreams of the Sleeping Spirits was meant to be cut short. When? Here and now.
And Ardan… He heard the she-wolf’s voice. She’d taught him to take no more from the world than the world itself gave him. To know neither greed nor excess in any aspect of his life, and least of all in the art of the Aean’Hane. For it was excess that drew those who wielded the art into Darkness. It was excess that stripped the Sidhe of their essence, dooming them to an endless existence in a repulsive form.
“But how,” Ardi clutched at his chest and looked at the she-wolf. “How do I quiet this pain, Atta’nha?”
Only silence answered him, and the held breath of an old memory.
“Why do you say nothing?” Ardi whispered. “Why do you say nothing!? Why did none of you teach me how to bury friends? Why did no one tell me I would see my mother grow old? Why did no one warn me that I would outlive my own wife, and our children, and our children’s children? Why did no one tell me that here…” Ardan stretched out his hand and curled his fingers, “…right here… Right at the tips of my fingers, I would have everything I needed to change that. To change what you call the dream of the Sleeping Spirits. And yet, I am not supposed to touch it? Why? Why, Atta’nha? Why!?”
Ardan grabbed his staff in both hands and leaned upon it with all his weight.
“Why must I bear this? All this pain is too much, she-wolf. If Aror had taught me, my father would still be alive… He didn’t die because such was his path in the dream… He died because of the chieftain of the Shanti’Ra. And because his own son was still very small. Small and weak.”
Ardan shook his head so fiercely that, if he’d had a body, it might have flown from his shoulders.
“This is no fate, Atta’nha. This is no path. Whatever the equations Paarlax created might say, no one knows the future. We live in the present. And in the present, we make our choices. Just as Tess and I made ours,” the young man raised his blazing amber eyes to the she-wolf. “You would say that was a mistake, wouldn’t you? That I was too greedy? That I should’ve let her go? Because such is the dream of the Sleeping Spirits? That they saw our meeting, but did not see its happy ending. Yes? Yes?!”
Ardan was shouting now. As loudly as he could.
“But you yourself altered my path through the dreams of the Sleeping Spirits when you called upon the mountain troll and the storm! You yourself chose to teach me! Why? Just to teach me that I cannot choose for myself?!” Ardan calmed down, drew a breath, and stilled his racing heart. “For thirteen years, I followed your lessons, she-wolf. For most of my life, I looked away from what Aror and Hector had done. I want no one’s suffering, Atta’nha. I don’t want to choose anything for anyone. I need neither power, nor wealth, nor anything Aror and Jacob sought. But I need this strength. And I must alter this dream. Because it is my choice.”
Straightening, Ardan stepped forward, going straight through the memory, which dissolved into mist behind him.
Delpas
Kelly barely managed to catch Shaia. A moment ago, she had been calmly washing a glass, and then she’d suddenly clutched at her chest and folded over.
“Is something wrong with the child?” The former Sheriff of Evergale asked, striving to hide his fear.
He looked at his wife’s pale face and didn’t know what to do. It was a horrid feeling. His own powerlessness was truly foul...
“She…”
“What, dearest?”
Shaia tried to gasp for air and could barely manage it. And for a moment, it seemed to Kelly like patterns appeared along Shaia’s arms. They looked like colorful tattoos depicting rivers and lakes. Birds and fish. Beautiful valleys and the Alcade mountain peaks. But the instant he blinked, the vision was gone.
“It found him.”
“What are you saying, Shaia?”
“The Darkness, Kelly. The Darkness has found Ardi.”
The Metropolis
Aloaeiol shielded her face from the bright flash of lightning, and before the captain could understand what had just happened, everything went still. In the corporal’s hand, her shattered accumulator crumbled away into yellow dust, and he, lifting his staff once more, slammed it against the ground.
The captain had seen Star Magic spells dozens of times. She’d witnessed plenty of mage duels. It wasn’t exactly easy to surprise her with anything that touched upon Star Magic.
But even so, she’d never seen a seal behave like the one Corporal Egobar conjured. Instead of spreading along the ground as a flat projection, it began to rise. It started to bunch and bubble, as though it were trying to divide not into several parts exactly, but into… something like the pages of a book. Yes—this looked like the pages of a book. It was something that was a single whole and yet divided within itself into many parts.
However, it would not hold. The bubbles, after swelling, collapsed in on themselves, and the bunched edges flattened again into a single projection. The symbols of countless runes danced along snake-like vectors that bound themselves to one another in a dizzying haze of indistinct patterns. And despite all of this—the seal worked.
Right before Aloaeiol’s disbelieving eyes, inside Milar’s gaping wound, bones knitted themselves together, muscle fibers regrew, and veins and arteries crept toward each other like worms. Not ten seconds had passed before, where the bloody hole had once been, there was only a hideous scar now. It looked like a child’s drawing of a sun with many rays.
Captain Aloaeiol didn’t believe in miracles, but this was a miracle—a real one—and she’d borne witness it.
“Come on,” Ardan said through clenched teeth, dropping down beside her and Milar’s body, which was still lying upon Aloaeiol’s lap. “Come on, Captain. You still have to make stupid toasts at my wedding. And we are not letting Fatians attend the ceremony.”
Captain Pnev’s body didn’t stir.
“Ard, we-”
To her surprise, Aloaeiol realized that she could speak again. The young mage, it seemed, didn’t have enough strength to weave his magic and keep her mind under his control at the same time.
However, she stopped speaking for another reason.
The corporal seized Milar’s body by the shoulder, tore him from Aloaeiol’s lap, and clenching his fists, he brought them down in a hammer blow straight over the man’s heart. The captain’s newly-mended ribs cracked.
“Khuhhh-khaa-haaa,” this faint croak came from the lips of one who, only minutes before, had differed little from a corpse.
Milar was breathing. Unevenly. Indistinctly. He wasn’t yet regaining consciousness, but he was breathing.
Aloaeiol, dragging her astonished gaze from captain to corporal, looked toward the Swallow Bay. The mutant was still running across the snow. He had slowed down and was apparently running out of strength.
“Do you have any energy left?” She asked Ard.
“The mole is not my concern right now, Aloaeiol,” the corporal answered her.
He melted snow in his hands and trickled the water over Milar’s lips.
“His body has been pushed to its very limits. I’ve had to spend his own resources on the healing, and if we-”
“Listen, mage!” Aloaeiol barked, drawing that lost amber gaze to herself. “I called for reinforcements the moment we arrived in the South Port. In a few minutes, whole squads from the Black House will be here. And if you are found here with Milar, especially given the fact that you disobeyed a direct order from the Colonel-”
“I don’t give a-”
“Don’t interrupt me, Corporal!” The captain cut him off again. “I shall see to him. Don’t worry. Catch that bastard mole. And when it’s all over… It will be easy enough for the Colonel to find someone to pin all the sins on in front of Parliament. After all,” Aloaeiol’s voice softened a little, and grew a touch sentimental, “I enchanted you both. I deceived you with my talents to use you for the investigation. That’s how it was. At any rate—that is what we’ll tell the Colonel.”
Ard’s eyes lit up with understanding. He squeezed Milar’s lifeless hand, then rose to his feet, drew a cloth sheath from the pocket of his coat, slid his staff into it, and slung it over his shoulder. Then he considered something for a moment, kicked off his boots, and set them down beside Aloaeiol.
“You planned this from the start, didn’t you, Captain?” Ard whispered. “However it turned out, you would end up being the guilty party and sent away. Straight to Lieutenant Kornosskiy.”
Aloaeiol only smiled.
“Investigator,” she said to the corporal with a nod. However, he didn’t stay to hear her answer.
Springing from the quay, barefoot, his staff at his back, he tore off after the traitor.
Perhaps it was only now that Aloaeiol at last came to understand why Yonatan so deeply respected this boy.
***
Feeling his claws biting into the ice, feeling the wind on his sweat-dampened face, feeling his nostrils widen and catch the scent in the air, Ardan was doing what he had been taught to do since his childhood. He was pursuing his prey.
And somewhere within his mind, attending his hunt with its blue light, his third Star shone.
A Star with ten rays.