MAGUS INFINITE

Dara watched us go from her crate. I felt her eyes on my back for the first twenty meters and then heard, behind me, the sound of her setting down her bowl and standing up.

I did not turn around and kept walking, and was not too surprised when she fell into step on my left side, her staff across her back, with her satchel already organized for the day’s work.

She said nothing. I said nothing. Bari, to my right, also said nothing, which for Bari was a significant investment of effort.

We walked to the south face of the camp in comfortable silence.

The survey markers were where I remembered them, a line of small iron stakes driven into the ground at three-meter intervals, running parallel to the pyramid’s south face at a distance of approximately twelve meters.

Beyond the markers, the ground sloped slightly inward, the long-settled aftermath of the impact, and the pyramid’s surface rose from it at its perfect angle, black and absolute.

I stopped at the markers and looked at the ground, trying to piece together the fragments of what I had observed before my death.

The crack would run east to west, approximately here, beginning about four meters past the markers. The ground above it looked the same as any other ground: compacted earth, fine dust, a few stones.

Nothing to indicate that beneath it, something had been sealed for ten thousand years and was approximately fifty minutes from deciding it was done being sealed, or maybe the awakening of the pyramid simply disturbed something that was always there.

I crouched and pressed my palm flat against the earth.

Nothing. Or, not quite nothing. Something at the very edge of my Anima Sensitivity, which was not high enough to be reliable, and I knew it.

A faint wrongness, the way a room feels wrong when a window has been open and closed, and the air has not quite settled. Not a sound, not a vibration. Just the particular quality of a ground that had something underneath it.

Or maybe I was wrong, and my tense nerves were finding a connection where there was none. The mind was a funny thing, and even Acolytes with greater soul capacities could not entirely control it.

”What are you doing?” Dara asked, from behind me.

”Checking something.”

”Checking what?”

I stood up. I looked at the south face of the pyramid and then at the ground between me and it, and then at the markers, and then at the forty-meter stretch of camp that lay between this point and my tent.

Forty meters. The first demon had covered it in the time it took me to register that I should move. Approximately two seconds at full speed, though it had slowed briefly for Pell, which meant that without Pell in its path, it would be faster.

Call it two seconds from the crack to me.

Two seconds was nothing. Two seconds was less than one Spark cast.

I needed to be closer to the crack when it happened.

Not at the markers, that was too close, I would have no room to maneuver, but closer than my tent. Twenty meters, perhaps. Close enough that the demon’s path to me was shorter than its path to anyone else in camp, close enough that I had a chance to land the first Spark before it reached full speed.

I needed to be standing here, in roughly this position, at the moment the ground split.

Which meant I needed a reason to be standing here that would not alarm the camp or result in Commander Rel sending me back to my tent.

”Bari,” I said.

”Hm.”

”How do you feel about being a distraction?”

He considered this. ”I feel that it is one of my natural talents and that the Academy has consistently failed to recognize it as a formal skill category.”

”I need twenty minutes near the south face without being moved on. I need to look like I am supposed to be here.”

”Doing what?”

I looked at Dara, and she looked back at me with the expression she had when she had already worked out more of a situation than she had been told and was deciding how much of that to reveal.

It also surprised me to see the glow of interest in her eyes that was greater than I thought. Oh, I never knew there was a wild personality under her calm demeanor.

”Cartography measurements,” she finally said after she looked deep into my eyes. ”The south face hasn’t been formally mapped at ground level yet. It would be a reasonable thing for Acolytes to begin before their researchers arrived.” She paused. ”It would also be the kind of initiative that Master Seravyn would consider favorably in a field report.”

I looked at her again in surprise at how quickly she could think on her feet.

”I notice things,” she said, without inflection.

”The notebook,” Bari said, pointing at the outline of it under my robe. ”She saw you writing in it this morning. And you always have it out when you are doing Cartography work.”

I blinked. I had underestimated both of them, which was a mistake I noted carefully and intended not to repeat.

”Cartography measurements,” I said. ”Yes. That is what we are doing.”

Dara produced her own notebook from her satchel, of course she had a notebook, Dara had everything, and uncapped a measuring line and handed one end to Bari, who accepted it with the cheerful compliance of someone who had been waiting to be useful and was glad the moment had arrived.

I opened my own notebook to the page with the three objectives and added a fourth:

Position: south markers, twenty meters from the predicted crack. Maintain until the ground splits.

Then I began measuring, and I began waiting, and the hour ran.

For nineteen minutes, we worked the south face and the ground, and the pyramid was quiet as the camp went about its business behind us.

Mage Torvin passed once, glanced at our measuring line, nodded with the approval of a man who respected initiative, and moved on.

Commander Rel emerged from her tent, swept the camp with her flat assessing gaze, found nothing requiring immediate intervention, and went to speak with Scholar Orath at the east face.

Bari talked, because Bari always talked, a low comfortable murmur about nothing consequential, the journey to the pyramid, the quality of the food and if the Mages had a hidden pantry so they did not share the same slop with others, a story about a cousin who had once attempted to negotiate with a goat and lost, and Dara contributed occasional precise corrections to his measurements when he drifted, and I measured and waited and kept one part of my attention always on the ground four metres ahead of me.

At the nineteenth minute, Dara stopped writing, and I looked at her.

She was looking at the ground, not the same patch I was watching, but a different section, three meters to my left. Her head was slightly tilted, the way it tilted when she was listening to something.

”Do you feel that?” she said quietly.

My Anima Sensitivity prickled.

”Yes,” I said.

”What is it?”

”I don’t know,” I said, which was the truest thing I had said all morning.