The Road

Three days on the road with the Royal Mage Guard, and nobody asks me anything.
Not properly, at least. They want to. You can see it going round the fire at night, the shape of the question, five men trying to work out why a twenty-year-old in a nice coat from a town none of them had heard of is walking to the capital road with them and staying with them. The cart sets the pace, the cart is slow, and slow roads make people curious.
But Gordwin said “He’s a friend of mine,” once, on the first morning, without elaborating, and that’s apparently the end of it. That’s what twenty-two years buys you. He says a thing and men stop needing it explained.
So they’re polite instead. Baffled, but polite.

The youngest one is called Ellery and he’s got about as much sense of self-preservation as a flightless bird. He falls in next to me on the second day and asks where I’m from. I say Bellhollow, and he says no, before that, and I say around, and he accepts that like it’s a real answer.
“Are you a mage?” he asks.
“Two circles.”
“Oh.” He nods, thinking about it, then, generously: “That’s still more than most.”
“It is.”
“My mum’s got one. She can keep bread warm with it.” He says this with the enormous pride of a man who fires lightning out of his hands for a living and still thinks his mother’s trick is better. “For hours. Nobody else can do it that long.”
“Actually, that is pretty impressive.”
“Thank you.” He beams like I’ve knighted him.
He tells me about the mattress in the end room again. He tells me about the swamp, which turns out to be a different swamp to Gordwin’s swamp, and worse. He does not ask me one single useful question, and by the third day I’ve worked out that this is not stupidity, it’s instruction. Somebody told him to talk to me and not at me. I can guess who.
The rest keep their distance in a friendly sort of way. They notice I can walk further than a two-circle lodger ought to be able to, and they don’t say anything about that either.

We stop while there’s still light, which surprises me until I watch them work.
The Guard makes camp like it’s a drill, because it is one. Canvas up, cart secured and covered, a fire pit dug down deep enough that it won’t show from the road. Ellery does the perimeter wards, walking a slow circle with his hand out and his lips moving, and they’re neat, actually, better than neat. Somebody’s taught him properly.

I’m laying out my own bedroll on the other side of the fire when the wards go off.
Not a sound. A feeling, a silent warning, and every man in that camp is on his feet before I’ve finished turning around.
“East,” Ellery says. His voice is completely different from the one chatting to me earlier. “Multiple. Twenty yards, moving.”
“Mana beasts?” someone asks.
“Feels like it.”
Nobody reaches for a mask. That tells me more about what’s coming than the wards did.
They come out of the bushes at the treeline.
There are five of them, scorpion-shaped, each about the size of a large dog and standing far too tall on legs like black needles, nothing resembling feet, just points going into the dirt and out again, a thousand tiny stab wounds in the ground behind them.
Mana beasts always look like something that got copied wrong. This one’s been left too long in a place with too much magic in it and the magic went through it like water through a mould. The shell’s gone all glassy, the tail’s too long, and where the eyes ought to be there’s nothing but a smooth plate with light moving under it.

“Regular formation,” says the one they call Brask, and he sounds bored. “Iori, stay behind the cart.”
Reasonable. Sensible. Exactly what you’d tell a two-circle lodger in a nice coat.
So of course one of them comes straight for me.
It doesn’t charge. It skitters, sideways, fast, those needle legs taking it across the ground in bursts like someone flicking a stone, and it’s between me and the cart before I’ve properly understood that it’s chosen me.
Fine.
I have done this before. I have done this a thousand times, against things that would have eaten this thing, and my hands know what to do without even a thought. Two circles is plenty. It’s a beast with a hard shell and soft joints and I don’t even need to be clever about it, one bolt through the front leg and it’s finished.
“Mana, gather.”
The circles turn.
“Lesser Shock Bolt.”
And my throat closes.
It’s not pain. I could work with pain. It’s something else. The mana comes up out of my chest the way it’s supposed to and somewhere around my collarbone it turns, it sours, and instead of mana, all I can taste is bile in my throat and the ground tilting below me, and there’s no bolt. There was never going to be a bolt. My body took the spell out of my hands and threw it away and left me standing here with my arms up and nothing in them and the smell of burnt stone in my nose that isn’t real, that hasn’t been real for three years.
The scorpion hits me in the chest and I go down on my back in the dirt.
“Oh, wow.”
There she is.
She’s sitting on the cart. Of course she’s sitting on the cart. Legs crossed at the ankle, hands in her lap, small and perfectly upright and entirely made of nothing, looking down at me with an expression of such profound delight that I want to put my head through a rock.
“That was the worst thing I’ve ever seen anyone do,” she says. “And I’ve watched you attempt to sleep.”
Not now.
“Three years! Three years of sitting on a wet stone thinking about your feelings and that’s what came out? A gagging noise?” She tilts her head. “Is it going to be a gagging noise every time? Because I want to be there. Every time.”
The beast is on top of me. Legs on either side of my ribs, punching holes in the ground, narrowly missing my coat, and the tail comes up and back like a loaded bow.
“Block it, idiot.”
“Raised Bulwark.”
That one works.
It always works. Shields work, wards work, walls work. Anything that puts something between, anything whose whole job is to stop rather than start. A slab of earth comes up out of the ground at an angle and the tail goes into it instead of into me, and the beast’s own weight shears it sideways off my chest, and I roll out from under it with both hands already moving.

“Seeping Flood.”
There’s a fire somewhere behind me and Ellery shouting and the flat hard crack of a shock bolt going through a shell. Not my problem. My problem is four yards away and coming back round and standing on six points of contact with the ground, which means my problem has a problem.
Water into the soil. Not a lot. I’m supposed to have two circles and I’d like to keep being supposed to have two circles. Just enough to turn a small patch of packed dirt into something sodden.
“Rising Draught.”
And then air up through the water from underneath, which is the trick, which is a thing I worked out when I was fourteen and got told off for because it wasn’t in any book.
The ground under it starts to boil.
Not hot. Just churning, bubbling, thick brown froth turning over itself, and those beautiful needle legs, which are perfect for rock, perfect for scrub, perfect for skittering across hard ground faster than a man can turn, go straight down into it like a hot knife into butter. It thrashes. It tries to skitter away. The skittering makes it worse. In four seconds it’s in past the joints and sinking, and it heaves that tail around trying to find something solid to lever off and there isn’t any.
“Cute,” she says. “Absolute waste of a six-circle mage, but cute.”
I’m not a six-circle mage.
“No,” she agrees, sweetly. “You’re not.”
“Move.”
I move. Brask puts a bolt through the beast’s spine from five yards away, one hand, not even breaking stride, and the light goes out under the eye-plate.
“Nice hole,” he says.
“Thanks.”
“You always carry water for that?”
“It’s the only trick I’ve got.”
He gives me a look that lasts slightly too long, then goes back to work.

Four down. They’re mopping up, it’s genuinely that. Brask and two others are walking the treeline putting bolts through shells at a pace that suggests they’ve done this on worse ground in worse weather, and Ellery’s thrown up a wall of ice across the gap to funnel the last one back into the open, and somebody’s already complaining that the fire pit’s ruined.
Then the ground shakes.
“Ooh,” she coos.
It comes through the treeline rather than out of it. Four times the size of the others, the shell gone from glassy to almost clear, white light rolling around inside it like something breathing, legs the width of my arm and still needles at the tip, still punching into the earth, but now each hole is a foot deep. The trees it walks through don’t get pushed aside. They come apart.
Behind me, very calmly, Gordwin says: “Back.”
I hear the strap.
I’ve heard that strap a hundred times, and I haven’t heard it in three years, and my whole body knows what’s coming before my head does. There’s a specific double click as it seats against the cheekbones. Then two words.
“Rainmaker. Deploy.”
The air goes heavy.
I don’t turn around. I hear him go past me instead, and the sound of it is wrong, too fast, too much weight moving too quickly, and there’s mana coming off him in sheets, not being shaped into anything, just poured into a middle-aged man’s arms and legs and spine until they stop having ordinary limits.
He doesn’t cast a single spell.
Gordwin Bringer covers about twenty yards in about a second and a half and hits that thing in the side of the head with his fist, and the shell doesn’t crack so much as it just leaves. It rears up on two legs. He’s already under it. The second punch comes up through the joint where the tail meets the body and the tail stops being attached, and the third one puts the whole thing on its back in the dirt with its remaining legs flailing in the air, and then he’s standing on its chest with both hands around the base of that clear white shell and he tears the front of it open like a man opening a sack.
The light inside goes out.
Eleven seconds, maybe. I counted the first time I ever saw it. I don’t count anymore.

Gordwin stands there a moment with his hands on his knees. Then the mask comes off and he hangs it back on his hip, and I watch him put his shoulders through a very slow, very careful roll.
“Ow,” he says.
“How long?” Ellery asks from a distance.
“Eleven seconds.” He straightens up in stages. “That’s three days of not being able to lift my own arms over my head. Worth it. Ellery, put the fire back where I left it.”
“Sir.”
He walks back and looks down at the hole I made, the froth already settling, the dead thing half-swallowed in it.
“That’s new,” he says.
“It’s not new.”
“No,” he agrees. “It’s not.” He rubs his shoulder. “Big one like that doesn’t come from nothing. That’s dungeon mana, and there’s no dungeon on the map for two days, which means either the maps are wrong or something’s opened up. I’ll file it at Fennmark and let the guild go take a look, and they’ll thank me and do nothing for eight months.”
“You seem fine about that.”
“I’m fifty, kid. I’ve made peace with the guild.” He claps me on the shoulder, a slight wince on his face, because it hurts. “You alright? You went down.”
“I tripped.”
“Mm,” he says.
And he leaves it there, and goes to see about the fire.

I sit on the wrong side of the fire for a long time after everyone else is asleep, looking at my hands.
“You could just tell him,” she says, from somewhere behind my ear, probably still sitting on the cart.
I could.
“You won’t, though.”
No. I won’t.
“Because you’re a coward.”
Because I’m a coward.
“Good,” she says, pleased. “As long as we’re agreed.”