Blood and Mud

Chapter 58: Chapter 58

The Academy’s first real test came during the midday recess.

The four of us, Nia, Luckas, Kaelen and I, were crossing the Grand Quadrangle toward the cafeteria. The crisp autumn air was full of the chatter of hundreds of students.

”I’m telling you, the Ember Manipulation syllabus is all wrong,” Luckas said, waving his hands as he talked. ”They want us practicing thermal control on candle wicks. It’s childish. A real Swelled Bud should be working forge-fires by the end of the week.”

”You want to burn the citadel down, Vance,” Nia shot back.

”How childish of you, Valerius,” Luckas said, grinning.

I wasn’t listening. Something near the eastern service gates had caught my eye, and the vanguard had taught me never to ignore that.

Three heavy wooden wagons pulled by draft horses were being waved through the security checkpoint by the Academy guards. A local vineyard’s crest was painted on their sides.

I stopped walking and studied the way the wagons sat on their wheels.

”Elvit?” Luckas paused and followed my gaze. ”What is it? Are you thirsty?”

”The axles,” Kaelen murmured.

I glanced to my right. Kaelen had stopped too, his storm-grey eyes fixed on the same wagons. It was the first time he had spoken unprompted all day.

”Exactly,” I said, and my respect for the silent boy went up a notch.

”What about them?” Nia asked, squinting at the service gates.

”The wagons are marked for wine,” I said, keeping my voice low. ”Wine barrels are bulky, but liquid spreads its weight evenly. Look at the wheels. Look at the springs. The wood is groaning and the wheels are sinking half an inch into the cobblestones. Whatever is in those wagons is far too dense to be wine. It’s solid iron.”

”Elvit, what? how can you even notice something like that? What do you think it is?Smuggled weapons?” Luckas frowned, the charm gone from his face, and I saw the sharp mind of a nobleman’s heir at work. ”Inside the Academy? Why would the guards wave them through without checking the cargo?”

”Because they were paid,” Kaelen said, cold and quiet. ”Or because they aren’t real guards.”

Before we could look into it, the crowd in the quadrangle drew back on both sides. The noise of the courtyard died into a tense, waiting silence.

A young man in the charcoal-grey uniform of a third-year cadet was marching straight toward us. He was tall, with white hair and eyes as pale as ice. The air around him had turned freezing, his Ember drawing the heat out of it, and frost crept across the cobblestones under his boots.

He stopped ten paces away, his gaze fixed on my silver Lieutenant’s insignia.

”Cadet Elvit,” he called, his voice carrying across the courtyard. ”I am Gael of the Winter Marches. Until yesterday morning I was Rank Three in this citadel. I spent two years mastering the deep cold to earn that position.”

He pulled his collar aside and bared his neck. Etched into the pale skin were the sharp geometric lines of an Ancestral Rune, the Rune of Frost, pulsing with a harsh cyan light.

”You embarrassed Corin,” Gael went on, drawing a finely forged rapier from his hip. The thin blade frosted over at once and gave off a cloud of freezing vapor. ”But Corin was a brute. I am challenging you for my rank back. Officially. The scholars are watching.”

I looked up at the arched walkways above the quadrangle. Several Grand Scholars in dark robes were indeed looking down at us with clipboards in their hands, waiting to see whether the controversial first-year could hold her impossible ranking.

I sighed. I had wanted my lunch. I had wanted to find out what was in those wagons.

”Hold my books,” I said to Nia, handing her my leather satchel.

I stepped forward until we were five paces apart. My hand stayed away from the bastard sword on my back.

Gael’s eyes narrowed. ”Draw your weapon.”

”You don’t need to see my sword to lose this fight, Gael,” I said evenly.

”Arrogant,” Gael hissed.

Gael moved with fluid speed. He swept his rapier through the air and poured the power of his Ancestral Rune into the motion. A wave of jagged ice spikes burst from the cobblestones and surged at my legs.

I stayed where I was. The Rune of Antiquity on my right arm pulsed, and astral precognition flooded my vision. I could see where the approaching ice was weakest.

I brought my boot down on the leading edge of the wave, and all the weight and density of a Swelled Bud’s muscle went into it. The magical ice shattered. A cloud of pulverized frost blew outward and blinded Gael for an instant.

Before he could clear his eyes I went through the falling snow in a blur and stepped inside his reach. Gael panicked and thrust his frozen rapier at my chest.

I raised my right hand and caught the blade in my leather gauntlet. The magical cold bit through the thick leather, but the iron weave underneath held.

Gael’s eyes went wide as his weapon stopped dead.

I twisted my wrist hard. The rapier snapped with a sharp, ringing crack and left him holding a broken hilt. Before he could call up more ice, I drove my left fist upward into his solar plexus. I pulled the punch at the last instant, so it only bruised his organs instead of liquefying them.

Gael dropped to his knees, gasping for air, and the frost melted off the cobblestones as his concentration broke.

I stood over him and dropped the broken half of his rapier into his lap.

”Your rune is powerful, but leaning on it makes you predictable,” I told him calmly, my pulse barely raised. ”You expected the ice to keep me at a distance. You never planned for an enemy who would just walk through it.”

I turned away, left him gasping on the ground, and walked back to my friends. Luckas was grinning like a madman. Kaelen gave me a slow, respectful nod.

”Challenge concluded,” a magically amplified voice called from the walkways above. ”Rank Three is upheld.”

As the crowd broke up, buzzing with the news that a first-year had just shattered a Rune-bearer’s rapier with her bare hands, a new figure stepped into our path.

He wore a tailored coat of deep crimson and gold in place of the charcoal-grey uniform, with a badge of office pinned to his chest. He was strikingly handsome, with golden-blond hair and amber eyes. He moved with a grace that made even Luckas look rough around the edges, and the Swelled Bud Ember coming off him was so dense that being near him felt like standing beside an open furnace.

”A clean display of control, Lieutenant,” the young man said, his voice rich and melodic. He gave a slight, courteous bow.

”And you are?” I asked, keeping my guard up.

”Aurio Gentrimio,” he said, smiling. ”Fourth-year. Rank One of the Imperial Academy. And your Student Representative.”

Luckas stiffened at once and gave a sharp, formal bow, pulling Nia down with him. Even Kaelen dipped his head. In the Academy’s hierarchy Aurio Gentrimio was as good as a king.

”At ease, Lord Vance,” Aurio said with a warm chuckle, waving a hand. He turned back to me, his amber eyes calculating. ”You are causing quite a stir, Elvit. Commander Erula rarely sponsors students straight out of the mud. They say you carry an Ancestral Rune, though you plainly had no need of it to break poor Gael.”

”I prefer to keep my magic sheathed,” I said carefully.

”A wise philosophy,” Aurio said, nodding his approval. ”We will speak again, Lieutenant. The Academy is changing. There are... political currents shifting in the capital. The Republic grows bold, and the citadel needs strong pillars. See that you do not crumble.”

With that cryptic warning he walked away, and the crowd drew back to let him through, half in awe and half in fear.

”The Republic,” Kaelen murmured. His eyes had drifted back toward the eastern service gates, where the wagons had already disappeared into the Academy’s lower cellars.

The weight of Kaelen’s suspicion only hit me the next morning, in our first lesson on Ancient Runes.

The lecture was held in the Spire of Antiquity. Our professor was a hunched old Scholar named Master Vane, a leading expert on the magical geometry that lets humans get past their biological limits.

”The Ancestral Runes are blueprints,” Master Vane lectured, his chalk squeaking against the blackboard. ”Mathematical equations carved into the flesh, built to trick the ambient Ember of the world into resonating with the human soul. To create a new rune is to invent a new law of physics.”

He turned to the class, and his eyes found me in the third row.

”Cadet Elvit,” Master Vane called. ”Commander Erula’s report says you acquired an undocumented brand in the southern ruins. Would you be so kind as to demonstrate?”

I stifled a sigh, stood, unbuttoned the cuff of my uniform tunic and rolled the sleeve up to my shoulder.

The Rune of Antiquity answered the ambient magic of the Spire at once. Its pale geometric scars, sharp and angular, like a cross between draconic script and ancient Dwarvish, lit up with a blinding, freezing white light.

A gasp went through the lecture hall.

Master Vane dropped his chalk, and it shattered on the stone floor. He scrambled up the wooden steps of the amphitheater to my desk, his hands trembling. He stopped short of touching my arm but leaned in close, his eyes wide with something like religious awe.

”The geometry...” Vane whispered, his voice shaking. ”It is flawless. A closed-loop sequence. It absorbs ambient light and converts it into temporal spatial mapping. Precognition.” He looked up at my face, and tears were forming in his old eyes. ”Who drafted this? Which Grand Scholar achieved this Pioneer mark?”

”No Scholar did,” I said quietly, rolling my sleeve back down and plunging the rune into darkness. ”An exiled Shaman of the Lizard Tribe. He lived in a mud cave.”

The room went very quiet. The aristocratic students looked sick. A barbarian from the mud had reached the pinnacle of magical physics, something their greatest minds had failed to do for centuries, and it was an insult to everything they believed.

As I sat back down, Kaelen leaned toward me from the next desk.

”The wagons,” Kaelen whispered, so softly that only my augmented hearing caught it. ”I slipped into the lower cellars last night. The barrels are packed with black-powder alchemical explosives, Elvit. And the guards who brought them in spoke with western accents. Republic accents.”

My blood ran cold. The old paranoia of the vanguard rushed back and collided with the clean, arrogant safety of the Imperial Academy.

Aurio Gentrimio’s warning echoed in my head. Political currents were shifting, he had said, and the Republic grew bold. Now they were inside the walls, and they meant to blow the heart of the Empire straight to hell.