Like That Day

I put my hand out to the side, at the level of my ribs, and turn two fingers in the shape of a key.
There's a place I put things. I'm not going to explain it. It's four hours of work to build one and about nine years of work to be able to build one, and the only useful thing to know is that it is not here, and that nothing in it ages, and that I have not opened mine since the night I walked out of a palace with a bag I could carry in one hand.
It opens.
The staff comes out first because the staff is nearer. Black wood, two silver bands, a head that isn't decoration, and it comes into my hand the way a hand goes into a glove that was made for it.
The mask comes out second.
Bone-white. Full-face, no mouth, two eye-slits and a hairline seam across the left cheek that has been there since the eleventh of Ashen three years ago, and it hangs in the air in front of me for a moment, turning very slowly, the way it always did.
Mia makes a small noise.
Behind me, across the hall, Perrivale says: "My lord."
"What?"
"My lord."

Here is what a mask is.
They'll tell you it's an insignia. That's what the kingdom is told and it's not exactly a lie: you only wear it on a mission, it marks you, everybody knows what it means when one comes off a hip.
What it actually is, is permission.
Every mage in the world has a ceiling. Not the circles — the body. Your channels are graded for a certain load and past that load you get ill, and past that you die, and every single thing in the syllabus is written to keep you underneath it. That's what technique is. That's what forms are for. A spell is a way of doing the most possible damage with the least possible mana, because the mana is the part that kills you.
A Guard mask takes the ceiling off.
Not the cost. The ceiling. While it's on, you may push as much through yourself as you like, at any rate you like, and your body will simply do it, and there is no limit whatsoever except your own judgement.
And then you take it off, and the bill arrives.
Gordwin's gives him eleven seconds and three days of not lifting his arms. Mine doesn't have a time on it. Mine was built for a boy who could already do the difficult part, and what it gives him is permission, and the bill is calculated afterwards on the basis of what he was stupid enough to do with it.
"Irrathril," I say.
It comes to my face. The seam seats against the cheekbones with a double click I have heard ten thousand times and have not heard in three years.
"Deploy."

Oh.
That's all. That's the whole of it. There's no rush, no surge, no glory. It's the feeling of having had a hand around your throat for three years and not knowing, and then the hand comes off.
I can breathe.
The room is quiet. Not silent — I can hear everything, I can hear Verena's breathing and Mia's heartbeat and Perrivale's fingers working and the tiny dry click of chalk dust settling eleven feet away — but the noise in my own chest, the clenched wrong grinding thing that has been there since I was seventeen and which I stopped noticing somewhere in the first winter, is gone.
Four circles turning. Two ruined and turning anyway, badly, painfully, and it doesn't matter, because the ceiling is off and I do not need them to be intact, I only need them to be mine.
"That's not two circles," Perrivale says.
He's on his knees with a hand clamped over his shoulder and his other hand still up, still working, still holding a collar on something that does not want to be held. He's looking straight at me.
"My lord, that is not two circles. That is not four." His voice has gone somewhere very strange. "My lord, I would like to leave."
"Stand up, Perrivale."
"I would like to leave."

"Iori."
She's on my right. Not behind my ear. Beside me, where you'd stand if you were going to put your hand on somebody's arm.
"Now," she says, "listen to me, because we are going to do this properly, and we are going to do it my way, and you are going to do exactly what I say."
Yes.
"Don't panic."
I'm not panicking.
"You are," she says. "I can feel it. You've got the ceiling off and there's a girl on the floor and every part of you wants to reach for the biggest thing in the world, because that is what you did last time, and last time it worked."
...Yes.
"Smaller," she says. "Smaller, and tighter, and more precise. You are not trying to break the sky. You are trying to remove one thing from one room without touching two children who are four feet away from it."
I know.
"You don't know. You've never done small. You were seventeen and everybody kept telling you to do the largest thing you could reach and you kept doing it and they kept giving you medals for it." Her hand is on the staff. I can feel it on the staff, over mine, small and certain. "Bind it first. Box it. All six sides, nothing gets out. Then put something very narrow through the middle of it."
And if it gets away—
"It won't be like that day," she says.
The whole room stops.
"Look at me. It will not be like that day. I'm not on a roof four hundred miles away hoping. I'm right here and I have my hand on it and I am telling you: I will not let you lose control."

"Spirits of a forgotten empire," I say. "Hear my plea."
There is no whole version of that phrase.
To me is the leash and give me sight is a request and hear my plea is what you say when you are not asking for anything at all, you are informing something very old that you intend to use it and that it may take whatever it likes from you afterwards.
Everything opens. All of it. The four and the two and the whole reservoir behind them with no ceiling on it and no technique between me and the door, and the air in the Ashveil reception hall goes so thick that the dust stops falling.
Across the room, Perrivale starts to scream.
"TEN — my lord, that's a ten-circle draw, that is a — nobody has ever — MY LORD, GET OUT OF THE ROOM—"
It isn't ten circles. There aren't ten circles. There has only ever been one person with ten circles and they are still writing books about her.
What it is, is a ten-circle draw, which is a different thing and which nothing alive is supposed to be able to survive, and which a boy in a white mask can do for as long as he is willing to pay for it afterwards.
"Imprison my enemy," I say.

It doesn't get a chance.
Six planes come up around the thing in the chalk — above, below, four sides, all at once, grey and old and absolutely silent, snapped into place with about as much ceremony as closing a book.
It hits them.
Not with force. It hits them the way water hits a jar, in every direction at once, and this time there is no going through, because the whole principle of that thing is that it is only half-arrived and a boundary is the one thing a half-arrived creature must obey. It is the lesson Verena found by herself in under a second with three weeks of practice.
She held it for four seconds with two circles.
I'm not going to need four seconds.
The box is nine feet by eleven and there is an eleven-foot thing inside it and there is absolutely nowhere for it to go, and I can see it understand that, in whatever it has instead of understanding.
"Now, small," she says. "Narrow. Like a needle. Put your wrist through it."
Her hand turns on the staff, and mine turns with it, and the head comes down and levels off at a point about four feet above the floor and dead centre.
"Heaven's spear," I say.

Last time I did this it was six hundred feet long.
Last time it came down out of a night sky onto the parade ground of the royal palace and it was so bright that people in Fennmark saw the light on the underside of the clouds and thought the world had ended, and it worked, it worked perfectly, it killed a god.
And then it reverberated, because it was six hundred feet long and there was nothing in it that was precise, and it went back up the way it had come and it took two of my circles and both of hers, and it took her legs, and it took four people I had eaten breakfast with.
This one is about as thick as my wrist.
It is eleven feet long. It exists for slightly less than a quarter of a second. It goes from the head of the staff, through the top plane of the box, through the centre of the thing in the chalk, through the bottom plane, and stops three inches into the flagstone floor of a four-hundred-year-old reception hall.
There's a sound like a bell being struck underwater.
And the creature goes.
Not in pieces. Not burning. It simply stops being a thing that is present, all at once, from the middle outwards, and where it was there is a great deal of nothing and then there is the fireplace, and then a fine white ash begins to come down through the air very slowly, like the first of the snow.
The boxes come down.
Nothing else in the room is touched. Not the chalk. Not the chairs. Not the two girls on the floor four feet from the edge of it.
Twenty-one inches of scorched stone, and a hole in the floor the width of my wrist.
"There," she says.
Her hand is still on the staff, over mine.
"That's how you do it," she says quietly. "That's how you always could have done it."
Perrivale comes apart.
I've never seen it from the outside. When a working that size is destroyed while you're still holding the collar, the whole structure comes back up the channel into whoever's carrying it, and there is nothing at all you can do about it.
He gets about half a word out. Then he goes over backwards with both hands still up and his back arched off the flagstones, and his fingers keep working for another two seconds after he's stopped being able to see, which is the most horrible thing I have ever watched a man's body do.
He lands. He doesn't move again
Alive. I can feel him breathing from here. He'll wake up in a fortnight if he's lucky and he will never cast anything more than a light again, and there is a part of me, small and cold and wearing a white mask, that is entirely satisfied with that.

And then the room goes soft at the edges.
It arrives all at once, the way it does. The staff is suddenly extremely heavy. There's a rushing sound that isn't in the hall and a taste in my mouth like a handful of coins and the light coming through the broken window has developed a texture, a sort of grain to it, like looking at the world through wet cloth.
I get down onto one knee. It isn't a decision.
"Iori."
I know.
"Take it off."
In a minute.
"Take it off now."
There's a crack running out from the seam on the left cheek. I can feel it from the inside — a fine hot line opening across the bone-white, and something coming out of it that ought to be staying in, leaking away into the air in a thin bright thread. Three years in a box didn't mend what happened on that roof, and a ten-circle draw has finished what a god started.
It's still holding the ceiling off. That's the trouble. I can feel how much I've put through myself in the last eleven seconds and I can feel that my body has not yet been told about it.
The bill has not arrived. The bill is enormous.
"Mia," I say.
My voice comes out of the mask wrong.
"Sir." She's on her knees beside Verena with her one good hand on the girl's forehead. "Sir, you're—"
"There's a crack on the left side," I say. "If I can't take it off—"

"Well," says Halvard Ashveil.
He's standing up.
Six feet from the wall, holding his forearm where she opened it, white-faced, plaster in his hair, and he looks around his brother's reception hall — at four dead men and a mage in a heap and a hole in the floor and a great deal of white ash coming down — and something in him decides.
"Well," he says again.
He's breathing hard. He's got that dreadful brightness men get.
"That was extraordinary. Genuinely. I've never seen anything like it and I don't expect I ever shall." He takes a step. "Whatever you are. Whoever you are. My brother hired a legend to teach his daughter arithmetic and none of us noticed, and I'd laugh if I had the wind for it."
Mia's hand goes to a knife that isn't there.
"But here we are," Halvard says.
He takes another step, and picks up something off the floor as he comes, without looking at it. The thin end of an ash staff. Five foot four, plain iron ferrule, broken about a third of the way along.
"Two girls on the floor and a mage on his knee and a man standing up," he says. "That's the whole of it. That's all it's ever been, Iori. Whoever's standing up at the end."
"Don't," I say.
It comes out of the mask as almost nothing.
"You can't, can you." He's four feet away. "You've spent it all. I watched you spend it. You put a hole in my floor and there's nothing left in you at all and you are twenty years old and I am so very sorry about this, I truly am—"
He lifts his dead sister-in-law's staff over a kneeling boy in a white mask.
And the window comes in for the second time.

He comes through it at about the height of a man's chest and he does not slow down.
There's a mask on his face. Grey, blunt, a great brutal slab of a thing with no eye-slits at all, and I have seen it perhaps forty times and I have never once seen it come through a window.
Rainmaker.
Halvard Ashveil gets to turn about halfway round.
Gordwin Bringer hits him at the hip and the shoulder and takes him off his feet and into the flagstones, and the sound it makes is not one I want to hear again, and he is already kneeling on the man's back with one enormous hand on the back of his skull and the staff spinning away across the floor.
"Halvard Ashveil." His voice comes out of that mask like something falling downstairs. "Royal Mage Guard. You are under warrant."
"You—"
Gordwin puts him out.
One hit. Precisely placed, absolutely dispassionate, and Lord Halvard Ashveil stops making any noise at all.
And then there are six more coming through the window and the doorway and over the broken doors, and somebody is shouting about the garden end, and somebody is shouting clear, and somebody very young whose voice cracks in the middle is saying "Sir — sir, there's a body—"
And Gordwin gets up off a man's back and turns round and sees me.
I watch him stop.
I watch the captain of the Royal Mage Guard look at a boy on one knee in the middle of a hall full of ash, in a bone-white mask with a crack running out of the left cheek and light coming out of it, holding a black staff with two silver bands.
For about a second and a half, he doesn't move at all.
Then his own mask is off and in his hand and he is coming across that floor faster than a man his size has any right to, and he is bellowing, and it is the loudest thing I have ever heard in my life.
"GET IT OFF HIM."
The floor comes up.
"GET THAT MASK OFF HIM — BRASK, ELLERY, HIS FACE, GET IT OFF HIS—"