Matabar

Book II. Chapter 41 - The lone shot

In the morning, Ardan found that he had no choice but to visit the stage station, where he encountered a pair of gentlemen who were colorful in the way that old, stained wood is colorful. The first was a cowboy who was old and as tough as last year’s leather, and who perpetually chewed tobacco leaves. He kept spitting a rust-colored slurry into a tin urn with a practiced flick of his jaw. The second was a boy who was perhaps twelve years old, an apprentice by the look of him, with hair the exact same shade as the spittle of the man who was, in all likelihood, his grandfather.

“What do you need?” The old cowboy asked, his voice all sharp edges and raspy gravel.

“I need a hoss,” Ardi said, calling upon cowboy slang as he placed four and a half exes on the counter. He figured that would be enough to rent a decent mount for two weeks.

At the familiar word, the old man’s gaze changed. When Ardan had first entered the stuffy, wooden building, the cowboy’s tired eyes had merely slid over his staff and his regalia of a Star Mage. But now he properly appraised his hat, his scuffed boots, and his worn pants.

“Delpas?” The cowboy guessed, his tone shifting.

“Evergale,” Ardi corrected him. “Polskih’s farm.”

“Don’t know the name,” the cowboy said with a shrug, then smacked his cracked lips together. “Ah… that ornery old miser. I’ve heard tales about him from the cattle auctions… For the money you’re offering, I’ve got a few good options, son. A young plains-runner with a cold back. An older one, glass-eyed, but with a gentler temper. And some barn sour stock, but I don’t reckon you’d be interested in that.”

Ardi offered a silent thanks to the Sleeping Spirits that a year away had not erased the terms of the trade from his memory. A “cold back” meant that the horse had a habit of resisting the saddle the first time it was put on. It would keep fighting even after being broken and ridden. Sometimes, it would do so every morning, sometimes it’d happen once a week. It was a gamble with one’s time and temper.

“Glass-eyed” was the name for the unusually bright blue or green eyes that the breeds of the northern steppes were famous for. Here in the south, such colors could be found only in half-bloods or rejected northern stock that had been bought up for cheap at an auction.

And “barn sour” was the common term for a lazy horse, one that would find far more joy in a few days spent in a stall than a single hour saddled.

Ardi had no intention of wrestling with his mount, and a barn sour horse was useless for a long journey, so…

“I’ll take the eyes.”

“Excellent choice,” the old man nodded and, with a rattling cough, waved a hand at his grandson. The boy, who was wearing a wide-brimmed cowboy hat of his own that looked a touch absurd on his small head, vanished through a door on the far side of the room. It led to a narrow corridor connecting the station to the stables.

That explained the familiar, pungent scent hanging in the air.

“Where you headed, young man?” The old cowboy asked with that same rasp in his throat. He pulled a heavy ledger from beneath the counter, opened it somewhere in the middle, and began to fill it in, scratching down the date, the horse’s number, and a few other notes.

“To Larand.”

“Ah, off to Bright Lake?” The old man asked, using the common name for the lake. “If you’re one of those fools looking to find trouble for your backside in the Dead Lands, you can pay the non-return fee right now. And let me remind you: if you don’t come back by the due date, I’ll pass all your details to the marshals, and they’ll hunt you down as a horse thief.”

In some provinces, including the Foothills and the Dancing Peninsula, horse thievery was punished far more severely than in the more “civilized” parts of the empire. Here, a horse was not just a means of travel—it was a means of survival.

In the larger cities and provincial capitals, people were slowly growing accustomed to trams, motorways and Ley-generators. But in places like Evergale and Nigrad and their ilk, where few residents had ever even seen a car in person, let alone ridden in one, the back of a horse remained the only way to travel farther than your own two feet could carry you.

“No, sir, I’ve got no plans for the Dead Lands,” Ardan answered honestly.

The gray-haired cowboy eyed him pensively. He didn’t possess the Witch’s Gaze, of course, but he had lived long enough to know when a man was telling a lie and when he was not. With a soft click of his tongue, he scrawled his sprawling signature in several columns and turned the book toward Ardi.

“Sign here to confirm that you’ve been made aware of the rules and your responsibility for the property,” the old man’s voice had lost its earlier warmth.

Ardan knew all the rules and instructions well enough, so he didn’t ask to see the documents. After providing his signature, he stepped out into the street, where the young boy had just finished saddling the horse. It was no longer young and, judging by the marks on its croup, had seen its share of scrapes. A large white patch marked its back, and its eyes were a startling, bright green.

Ardi approached it and, setting his satchel on the dusty road, laid a hand on its neck. The horse snorted nervously, its freshly-shod hoof tapping the ground. It clearly had no desire to make another acquaintance only to part ways again soon after.

“You and I, plains-runner,” Ardan whispered in the tongue of beasts, his eyes fixed on those green saucers. “Help me for a little while, and I will care for you as long as I am able.”

Domesticated animals had a poor grasp of the speech of their free brethren, but they understood the general sense of it. The horse snorted again, but this time, it did not paw at the ground, and it obediently lowered its head.

“Run. Water. Feed. Sleep,” the horse said, the words clipped and clear.

“As you say, plains-runner,” Ardi agreed.

All the while, the boy had been watching them, his eyes wide and his mouth equally agape.

“You… you know the language of beasts?” He asked, pointing a slightly trembling hand at Ardi. “You were twitching… and blinking… and it was like you were growling or something… I’ve only heard about things like that in the Hunters’ tales!”

Ardan fastened his satchel to the saddle, secured his staff in its special straps, and swung himself easily onto the horse’s back. With a flick, he tossed the boy a ten-kso coin.

“Then perhaps not everything they say is just a tale,” Ardan winked. He shifted his hips slightly, avoiding the need for spurs, turned his body to the left, and the horse moved obediently, following the direction of its rider’s body.

***

A group of riders, trailed by a few onlookers who were perhaps not yet sober from the night before, or had more likely never ended their loud revels at all, hid from the searing sun in the shade of buildings that sweltered under the punishing heat.

Ardan counted four Hunters. There was the colorful Nathan Balitsky, a distinct red mark visible on his neck—likely not a result of the caresses of the young woman whose husband had led her away. Beside Nathan sat a lean man wearing spectacles. He was perhaps twenty-seven years old and had a strikingly sharp goatee. An old military rifle, a spare bayonet, and a saber swung in their loops on his saddle. No fewer than three revolvers gleamed at his belt.

“Bakket,” a young man with short hair but very thick eyebrows addressed the rifleman. He was likely a recent recruit as he was even younger than Ard himself. The boy sat on his horse with confidence, but aside from his revolvers and a slightly crooked saber that had surely been begging for an honorable retirement for years now, he carried no other weapons.

“Ladmir,” Bakket’s voice was unexpectedly deep and resonant, a stark contrast to his modest appearance. “If you’ve forgotten to buy something from the list again, you’d best just smack yourself on the back of the head right now. Save me the trouble. My shoulder still itches from that run-in with the Faceless.”

In Ardan’s mind, the pages of a book on chimerology rustled to life. “Faceless” was the name given to hideous creatures that had five human arms growing out of a lumpy, toad-like body instead of legs. Each arm had seven scab-covered fingers tipped with a claw. Four of the arms had two elbows each and could reach up to three meters when straightened.

As for the fifth limb, it acted as a neck and head. It only looked like an arm at first glance; in actuality, it was a neck and a head shaped like a palm, and instead of clawed fingers, it had flexible, serrated tendrils that the Faceless used to tear its prey apart.

They were rather unpleasant beasts that had a habit of hypnotizing their victims and turning them into docile dolls of flesh. Without a mage skilled in defensive magic, it was not recommended to confront these echoes of the war between Ectassus and Gales.

And speaking of which…

“I checked everything,” came a voice that was melodious, a little teasing, and most of all, calm. “Ladmir didn’t miss a thing.”

“Thank you, Anita,” Bakket said with genuine gratitude. “I really don’t want to find out we’re out of rubber boots after we’ve already started wading through some swamp.”

“That was one time!” Ladmir exclaimed, startling his own young mare, which had been snorting irritably at the onlookers who’d found the courage to inch closer.

“And I don’t need a second,” Bakket snapped back, giving a slight nod of his wide-brimmed hat to Anita, the Blue Star Mage.

The woman, who was somewhere between twenty and thirty years old, was sitting on the driver’s seat of a stagecoach that had seen better days and weathered more than one overland storm. The wagon itself had been frequently scrubbed of mildew, mud and, apparently, blood. In several places, the wooden planks were mismatched in both the kind of wood used and the color of the varnish that had been applied in an attempt to protect it from the damp.

The iron springs of the wagon looked as if they had spent more time in a workshop for repairs than on the road, and the canvas covering the coach was a patchwork of mends that rivaled the variety of scarves in Mrs. Okladov’s shop window.

And while the coach looked old and battered, Anita herself seemed young and stately. But that was only what she “seemed” like. Nestled within her large, perky chest, right in the opening of her linen shirt, a river stone with a carved rune swayed gently—similar to the one Nathan Balitsky wore. Only instead of indicating when someone was lying, this amulet worked differently.

Much like the one worn by the friend, right hand and loyal servant of the current Empress-Consort, Atura Davenport, this amulet slightly distorted the perception of those around her. It made it so that Anita appeared to be far more beautiful, graceful and desirable than she truly was.

It had been one of the most popular enchantments sold by the Speakers during the Ectassus war. It had come straight from the City on the Hill, where it was considered improper to appear before others without this “veil of the kindly eye.”

Ardi closed his eyes and pictured the snowy peaks of his native Alcade. The “kindly eye” worked on the same principle as the Witch’s Gaze, only far more lightly and subtly. And so, shrugging off its influence was no great trouble either.

When Ardan opened his eyes again, he saw not a tall woman, but one of quite average height. Her build was average as well—wide in the hips, lacking a defined waist, with a slightly puffy face that bore the clear marks of old injuries, not all of which had been treated by professionals. She wore men’s cowboy attire, a worn blue cloak, and her epaulettes displayed four, two and three rays respectively.

She was clearly a little less than thirty years old. And besides a wooden staff bearing several seals of military magic and the healing arts, a hunter’s lever-action carbine rested in a scabbard next to her right leg, positioned for a quick and easy draw. The belt that held her thick grimoire on a chain also had a supplementary cartridge pouch.

For some reason, Ardi was immediately reminded of Mart Borskov’s words: no matter what kind of mage you were, bullets were cheaper than accumulators, and you wouldn’t forget how to shoot when it truly mattered. Ardan, who was constantly in the company of far-from-ordinary representatives of the Star Science community, sometimes forgot that the life of an average Star Mage was vastly different from that of those from the Grand, or even the Black House.

“And there he is,” Nathan said, flipping his watch to face the inside of his wrist and waving a hand.

Ardi rode closer and exchanged the traditional greeting with all of them—a nod while holding his hat. Handshakes were rare on horseback; it wasn’t always convenient, and besides, he didn’t know any of them. Perhaps at their second, or even third meeting, they would shake hands and maybe even remember each other’s names.

“The Grand?” Anita asked after her eyes had barely skimmed over Ardan’s regalia.

Bakket and Ladmir exchanged a look and, with wide eyes, shared a silent, clearly off-color joke. Thank the Sleeping Spirits it was silent.

“Idiots,” Anita said, though without any real malice.

“Yes, I’m from the Grand,” Ardi nodded. “Faculty of General Knowledge.”

Anita let out a low whistle.

“You must really enjoy studying theory,” she said, her gaze once again flicking to his epaulettes, “to graduate from General with a rank like that.”

Ardan was about to correct her and say that he was only moving on to his second year soon, but he caught himself just in time. Why point out that Anita, and likely the other Hunters as well, had misjudged his age due to his not-quite-human appearance? His height and the shape of his face often confused those who didn’t know him personally.

“Don’t you worry…”

“Ard. Ard Egobar,” Ardan introduced himself.

“Ah, right,” Anita nodded. “I think Nathan mentioned it… Anyway, don’t you worry, Ard. We don’t care which of your ancestors shared a bed with which Firstborn.”

Apparently, she had misunderstood the source of his fleeting anxiety. But again, Ardi had no intention of correcting anyone about anything. Besides, they wouldn’t be spending that much time together.

“You two can chatter about your mage business on the road,” Nathan interrupted, looking Ardan in the eye. The recklessness of the previous evening was slowly draining from him, replaced by an attentiveness sharpened by cynicism and a casual acceptance of pain and loss. In other words, he was a typical seasoned Anomaly Hunter. “We’re not a transport company, so you’ll be responsible for your own safety, Ard.”

“Understood,” Ardan agreed with the perfectly reasonable remark without any argument.

“And if we need something from you, you’ll do exactly as Anita says,” the now-serious Bakket continued. “Is that clear?”

“Of course,” Ardan nodded, ignoring the childish, entirely unfitting snickers from the Hunters. Ladmir was one thing; he looked as if he’d only just left the school bench. But Bakket…

Then again, Ardan knew nothing of the inner workings of Anomaly Hunters, so perhaps this was normal for them. Or maybe the Metropolis, over the past year, had changed its new resident’s perceptions so much that Ardi now saw things through the prism of the capital, and not Evergale.

Either way…

“Let’s head out,” Nathan said, wasting no more words as he spurred his horse toward the town’s exit.

His subordinates followed, the clip-clop of their horses’ hooves soon joined by the creaking of the coach’s springs.

***

Ardi, who’d settled on the grass, was stirring the rich soup with a wooden spoon as it slowly reached the right consistency. The pot hung from a hook, which in turn was suspended from a tripod. This was not a makeshift bit of gear made from branches and sticks, like they often fashioned at the sawmills in the Alcade foothills, but a proper piece of equipment. It was stainless steel and nearly the thickness of his little finger.

Judging by the number of ash stains and its slightly bent condition, the tripod had seen almost as many things as the coach from which it had been taken.

From what Ardi had gathered over the past day and a half on the road, Nathan’s hunting party had been working together for a long time. And, once upon a time, Ladmir’s uncle had ridden with them, but after an injury that had cost him a leg and an arm, he had retired. His nephew, who had run away from home last summer, had taken his place.

Ladmir had never known his father, and his mother… she didn’t care. She was far more concerned with trying to marry every visiting dignitary from the capital, but they only ever left behind a few pleasant memories of warm evenings and some crisp banknotes.

Ardan didn’t delve into the nuances of what those banknotes had to do with it, nor did he dwell on how the young man had run away because his current situation didn’t seem like much of an escape at all.

“Did you remember the salt?” Anita asked. She was sitting next to him and reading a rather outdated—by the standards of modern scientific circles, at least—alchemical text.

Ardan, instead of answering verbally, showed her the closed traveling salt shaker and continued to stir the soup.

Cooking duties were rotated in the group, which meant… Which meant that for all four of the previous stops, including the night and morning ones, it was Ardan who had been spending his time by the fire. But he didn’t argue or complain. After all, they had taken him along as a fellow traveler without any unnecessary questions, so he didn’t mind earning his keep, even if it was as the cook.

Anita turned a page, studied a diagram on processing the leaves of Fetid Cinnamon, and, with a curse, closed the book. From what Ardan had gathered during their conversations, Anita had been expelled during her first year at the Grand University. She’d been a student of the Faculty of Alchemy, which had not yet been combined with the Faculty of Biology back then. After that, she’d continued her studies at one of the Institutes. He was pretty sure it had been the Aurelius Mursky Institute. It was in the New City and was considered a decent place to get a degree in history or sociology.

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And, of course, like all Institutes, the Aurelius Mursky Institute had its own Star Faculty. That was where Anita had studied. She’d graduated with two Stars and had ignited her Blue one relatively recently, after five years of expeditions into the Dead Lands.

“How did you get so decent at cooking?” The woman asked, her gaze fixed on Ardi’s work with a bored expression.

“I worked on a farm as a hired hand,” Ardan said simply. “And, of course, due to a certain degree of hazing, I was often tasked with cooking. That’s how I got the hang of it.”

Ardi didn’t specify that he had actually learned to cook from his mother, whom he’d often helped in the kitchen. He’d done so partly because he’d wanted to acquire such a useful skill, but far more because he had missed Shaia during his six years in the mountains of the Alcade, even if he hadn’t remembered her until he had shed his beast’s skin.

But Anita hadn’t asked him about where he’d learned it, she had asked him about how he’d honed the skill…

“From a farm to the Grand?” The mage raised her eyebrows slightly. “That’s quite a winding path, Ard.”

It might have seemed like Anita was trying to pry something out of him, but she wasn’t. Ardan, who’d spent five years in the company of cowboys, understood perfectly well why they were talking. It was for the simple, mundane reason that, to Anita, he was a new person.

Only those who have never spent time in a close-knit, somewhat isolated group would think that you can talk about many things with a stranger. At first, you even can. But on the first day, you’ll share your funniest stories; on the second, you’ll talk about family; on the third, you’ll discuss the weather, politics, or religion; and on the fourth, there will be nothing left to talk about.

And so it was every time, with every new person who was merely a traveler in your life, and not someone who had come to stay.

And so, Anita was simply enjoying the opportunity to talk to someone she didn’t know better than the back of her own hand, like Nathan, Bakket and Ladmir.

And since today was the second day of their acquaintance, they were no longer telling each other amusing tales. In Ardan’s case, the Hunters had vied with each other to tell him stories, delighting in not hearing a sharp “I know that one, you’ve told it a dozen times already” in response. He himself had had no such opportunity, nor any great desire to share much about himself. And now, they were sharing quiet memories. And, at times, worries.

That was how Ardan had learned Ladmir’s story. He, along with Nathan, was currently studying a map, the two of them choosing a route. Bakket was lying in the grass, snoring softly.

“I’ve loved stories about wizards ever since I was a child,” Ardi replied, using Skusty’s teachings. “Then I met a traveling mage, a scholar of Star Archeology, and he told me about the Grand. And that’s how it all came together.”

Anita didn’t wear an amulet like Nathan’s that could sense a lie, but she was still a woman. And, judging by the piercing and perceptive look in her eyes, she was the kind of woman who’d know you’re lying before the words have even fully left your mouth.

Shaia, when she’d taught Ardi things, had explained to him that in the human pack, men and women had different ways of surviving. And this kind of perceptiveness was a way to avoid becoming someone’s victim.

“I’ve never seen a student from the General Faculty with as many rays as you have,” Anita said, for some reason flicking a finger at his epaulettes, as if to check if they were real. “Though, to be fair, I wasn’t there for very long… Have you heard anything about Professor Ovnersky?”

“Perhaps you mean Kovertsky?” Ardan asked. “Though I’m not sure he’s been at the Grand for long.”

“Ah, right, Kovertsky,” Anita nodded, a smile on her face and in her eyes. “He had just started lecturing back then, and we didn’t get along from the start. He was picky on the exam, and I didn’t get enough points to continue my studies on the Treasury’s expense. I didn’t want to take out a loan, so… that’s how it all turned out. And you, I take it, are one of those smart ones who studied at the taxpayers’ expense?”

Mart Borskov had also told Ardi stories about how mages who’d been expelled from the Grand harbored a slight resentment, grown from the seeds of envy, toward those who’d managed to avoid debt while graduating from one of the most prestigious, if not the most prestigious, universities in the world. Anita, over the past day and a half, had become a living confirmation of these tales. Not an hour passed without her trying to needle Ardan on the subject.

“After I submit my final thesis, I’ll have to work for eight years for the Crown, Anita. I’m not sure there’s much to envy here.”

“And who said I was envious?” Anita retorted, a little taken aback. But the sound of her heart told Ardan he hadn’t been mistaken. “Eight years? Wasn’t it less?”

“It used to be less,” Ardi nodded. “But starting with the next calendar year, the term of service for those studying on the Treasury’s coin is eight years.”

The decree had been issued, quite predictably, at the end of the first month of summer. It had surely been done this way to ensure that the students would only truly learn about it once they returned to resume their studies and not before.

“And what’s the subject of your thesis?” Anita continued to chat.

She leaned back against a birch tree and stretched her legs out in front of her. Her pants were made of a thick material.

Ardi exhaled and, setting aside the spoon, also leaned against the tree. For a moment, he forgot that he was on the Dancing Peninsula, just seven hours’ journey from Larand and about ten from the Dead Lands.

He was back there again, in the slightly stuffy lecture halls of the Grand, discussing magic and sharing his thoughts on research.

Maybe it was for that reason, or maybe because his gaze kept straying to the amulet hanging around Anita’s neck, that his mind slipped further than he had intended.

The forest around them felt nothing like the one in the Alcade. This was the sort of forest that remembered more than stone; a forest whose roots went down into the very soul of the earth, deep and dark. And it breathed almost as steadily and evenly as Anita herself.

However, its breathing was slow, almost imperceptible. It could be felt in the way the leaves of the old birches trembled even when the wind grew tired of its games and fell silent. It could be heard in the barely-discernible creaking of trunks rubbing against each other, like old men sharing secret stories. The sunlight here did not pour down in a flood but was sifted through the dense canopy like golden dust, settling on the ferns and damp moss. The air tasted thick and cool; it smelled of decaying earth, of mushrooms, and of something else—something ancient, like a forgotten lullaby.

Even the play of light and shadow here seemed like more than just nature amusing itself. It was weighty; it pressed on one’s shoulders like the burden of other, unlived lives. It was like a play in three acts. The first was the echoing emptiness between the trees, where the sound of footsteps would drown, finding no response from the audience. The second was a barely-perceptible whisper that could have been the wind, the babbling of a stream, or the voices of those long gone. It furtively shared old myths, stories about the birth of the stars, and tales of heroes whose names had been erased from human memory, but still remained in the heartwood of the oaks.

And the third act of the play of light and shadow stretched out like a fallen ball of thread toward the very horizon. It seemed like if one were to stand still for just a moment and stop breathing, the thin veil between the world of humans and those who lived on the other side of the trunks, among the hills and mirages, would grow thin. Then, from behind the white trunk of a birch, a dryad would peek out, slender and pale as moonlight. Her eyes would be two emeralds full of unspoken sorrow. And from a thorny thicket, where the shadows would suddenly thicken to a viscous blackness, a heavy sigh would be heard, and it would seem like a pair of yellow eyes was watching you from behind the gnarled branches. This was the Leshy, the master of the forest, jealously guarding his secrets and in no hurry to show them to every passing traveler.

But in reality, there was only silence and the rustling of the treetops. The forest kept its legends to itself, and its play of light and shadow knew how to wait. Wait for those who knew how to Listen.

Ardi knew how to do so. Or so it seemed to him at times. Or perhaps he wished he was mistaken. But maybe, just today, he was lucky enough to hear, among the elusive steps of the wind, among the creaking of the trunks, among the songs of those who lived on only in fairy tales, an insinuating whisper:

“Wake up.”

Ardan shook his head and found himself in the coach. He was sitting on a chest, staring blindly at a point in front of him. He was clutching his staff, and at his belt… his grimoire was gone. It, along with his father’s watch, lay on Anita’s lap.

She was frantically flipping through the pages, glancing at the watch from time to time. Ardan, for his part, couldn’t shake the smell of… cinnamon.

Sleeping Spirits.

Fetid Cinnamon… Ardi had assumed that Anita was passing the time with her research, or perhaps preparing for the expedition. Well, it seemed like he hadn’t been far off in his assumptions. And apparently, in addition to working with seals and everything related to the direct use of Star Magic, he would now have to at least superficially understand Biology and Alchemy as well.

Professor Kovertsky would perhaps be pleased with his student’s newfound zeal. Although, knowing the professor’s character, he would most likely not give a damn.

“You should have… made… an adjustment,” Ardan’s tongue still moved with great difficulty, but with each passing second, the shackles of the magical sleep receded further and further. “All Ley-medicine, as well as Ley-fauna and flora, affects the Firstborn and their half-blood descendants somewhat differently.”

Ardan reached up to rub his neck but froze as a revolver was pointed right at his face. It was a short lady’s revolver, which Anita had been, as she’d thought, discreetly hiding in the shaft of her boot all this time. Ardi had occasionally seen its glint but had never thought that he would find himself on the other end of its sights.

It wasn’t that he suffered from a profound naivety; it was just that Hunters were, after all, state employees. Moreover, during wartime, they were considered to be in the same category of citizens as Star Mages and were subject to priority mobilization.

The times when one could find more misfits and criminals in the Anomaly Hunters’ Guild than on some streets of the Metropolis had ended long ago—more than a century and a half ago, in fact. And so Ardan, who’d never parted with his staff for even a second, had felt, if not completely safe, then safe enough to calmly cook some soup. He had been distracted from it for only a few seconds, which, apparently, had been enough time to toss a bit of Fetid Cinnamon into the pot. After inhaling the steam, Ardi had sunk into a deep sleep.

“I told you I was expelled because of alchemy, smart guy,” Anita whispered, her voice devoid of its former friendliness and warmth.

She’d whispered… And it was also rather strange that they were now in the coach.

“It wasn’t just Fetid Cinnamon, was it?” Ardan had long ago, to his chagrin, stopped feeling fear or awkwardness when a weapon was pointed at him. It was unpleasant, of course, but not enough to make him particularly nervous. “There was something else that made me come up here on my own.”

Anita kept her angry gaze fixed on him, a look filled not so much with envy as with a sense of some injustice. What kind? Ardi had no intention of prying into her mind to sort through the thickets of another’s soul.

“All you had to do was sleep for another ten minutes, you big city fool,” she hissed, not lowering the barrel. “I would have copied everything, and in the evening, you could have proudly told everyone about how hard we fucked in here.”

Ardan shook his head. Fragmented scenes of Anita leading him into the stagecoach accompanied by general hooting and her requests not to eavesdrop surfaced in his mind.

“They can’t hear anything but silence anyway,” Ardi shrugged.

“That’s what you think, smart guy,” Anita pronounced those last words with a special, sensual mockery in her voice.

Without any hesitation, she showed him her grimoire, in which Ardan saw a sloppy, far-from-perfect seal. A very simple one. It was the kind of spell they covered in the first year at the Grand. Ardi even remembered someone approaching him with a request to figure out a seal whose task was to copy animal sounds.

“Even now…”

“What?”

“Even now, I can see disdain in your eyes, smart guy,” Anita hissed.

Ardan didn’t deny it. Maybe she was right. In any case, what he could see on the pages of her book wouldn’t have earned her even a minimum score on a Star Engineering exam. Everything was crooked, skewed, and even calculated incorrectly.

“Your volume is messed up here. They’re hearing something right now that I would never believe was real-”

“Shut up!” Anita shouted in frustration, clearly overriding the sound illusion.

He wondered what that sounded like from the outside. In any case, to avoid being distracted by her own spell, Anita had managed to create an effect of silence inside the coach itself. And for these two rather mediocre effects, she had wastefully spent two Red and one Green Star ray.

Such a waste…

“What is this cipher?” The mage asked directly, shaking Ardi’s new grimoire. At least she hadn’t torn it… “I’ve never seen anything like it. What is this gibberish?!”

In truth, his cipher was unusual simply because it drew on his experiences, nothing more. Ardi wrote his private notes using the language of the high elves, but expressed through the alphabet of the steppe orcs. The thing was, the high elves had copied their language from the Fae, so the Fae runes and the high elven letters had repeating sounds. But for every Fae rune, there were two high elven symbols. And Ardi also wrote them using the letters of the steppe orcs, so…

Alright. Perhaps the cipher was, to some extent, unique.

But Ardi’s mind had latched onto a completely different slip of the tongue.

“I’m not the first, am I?” He asked.

Anita’s face broke out into a sort of half-mad, predatory smile.

“Oh, I’m sorry to have wounded your fragile male ego, darling, but you’re not even in my top ten.”

Ardan flinched for a second as if he’d been slapped. Anita laughed, not understanding at all that Ardi had reacted not to her words. Or rather, not to their actual meaning. No. He’d reacted to “darling.” From a stranger’s lips, it sounded far more unpleasant than any insult or insinuation.

“If any of them were hurt, then-”

“Everyone left satisfied,” Anita interrupted him. “Some of them really did manage to brighten up a couple of my evenings… They probably even reminisced back in the capital about their adventure in the Dead Lands… But you,” Anita gave him a critical look, “are not my type. I don’t like pretty boys. There’s always something wrong with you handsome ones. Either your dick is small, or you come in a second, or it’s like you’re fucking yourself.”

She sounded crude. Far cruder than many men in the Metropolis. But this was probably quite normal for an Anomaly Hunter who also dabbled in stealing other people’s seals. She had been reading about the Fetid Cinnamon so hastily because she had most likely realized that her usual method wouldn’t work on an immediate descendant of the Firstborn.

“And…”

“And my friends think I just have a special thing for young mages from the capital,” Anita shrugged. “Which, on the whole, isn’t that far from the truth.”

Ardi sighed and shook his head.

He recalled another one of Mart Borskov’s pearls of wisdom. He couldn’t remember the exact quote, but Mart had hinted quite clearly that the theft of grimoires and seals was not such a rare occurrence.

“And what’s the revolver for?” Ardan asked.

“You might be good at playing Sevens, smart guy,” Anita clearly remembered how Ardan had played two games with Nathan and Bakket the previous evening, “but I can see that there isn’t a single seal on your staff, so don’t you dare try to play the war mage with me.”

From Anita’s point of view, she was perfectly safe. A mage deprived of his grimoire and with no seals on his staff, and clearly not a military man on top of that, posed no particular threat to her. And to be completely sure of her superiority, she didn’t take the revolver away from his face.

Sleeping Spirits… Larand was only half a day’s journey away, but it seemed like adventure had decided to find him even before he arrived at his destination.

“And what now?” Ardan asked curiously.

“Now you’re going to tell me what’s in your grimoire,” Anita hissed, trying to keep her voice down. “The cipher and every seal. Every single one! Especially this one.”

She showed him the page with the Misty Helper. Despite the cipher for the runic connections, the vectors themselves, the attachments between the arrays, and so on, could not be encrypted, so a mage with a trained eye could, in theory, assess the significance of a particular schematic. And given Anita’s experience with theft, her perceptiveness was not limited to spotting others’ lies.

“And if I refuse?” That same curiosity was still in Ardi’s voice. “You’re not a murderer. You won’t shoot me.”

“I won’t kill you; you’re right about that. But will I shoot you…” She moved the revolver from Ardan’s face and aimed it at his groin. “Let’s say that, during our bit of fun together, some primitive ferocity awoke in you. At first, I even liked it, but then…” Anita made a frightened face and trembled quite naturally, as if in shock. “You started to choke me. I got scared, but you didn’t stop. So I shot you. Right in your balls. What do you think about life as a eunuch, Ard?”

“But we’re clothed,” Ardi reminded her. “The story’s a bit weak.”

Anita showed him another seal in her grimoire. One that would completely silence the sounds directly inside the coach. And why did she think she would have time…

Ah, right.

He didn’t look like a military mage. And on his seemingly simple staff, which was far from the standard military models, there wasn’t a single carved seal.

“And does this bring in much?” Ardi nodded at his grimoire. “The thievery?”

“About fifty exes a season,” Anita answered honestly. “A girl has to live and feed herself, Ard. And if I manage to ignite a Yellow Star, I’m getting out of this shithole. I’ll move to a city somewhere. Far away from the country bumpkins and uncouth cowboys. And a Yellow Star needs money. A lot of money. So, you’ll either make your contribution to my fund, or you’ll be left without your balls. Choose.”

Ardan looked at Anita and saw not even a drop of hesitation in her eyes, and certainly no remorse.

Sighing, the youth propped his chin on his hand with a bored expression.

“There is a third option.”

“And what’s that?”

She did indeed shoot at him. But the bullet only shattered against the instantly-raised Orlovsky’s Shield. Moreover, Anita turned out to be a decent shot and managed to fire a second time, but the result was the same—lead splinters flew to the sides, and a translucent disc faded in the air.

And then the canvas covering the coach fluttered like a falcon’s wings and, torn away by a gust of wind created by Ardan’s third spell, it flew off somewhere to the side.

Why was this his third spell?

Because he had cast the first one during their conversation. All it had taken was a light tap of his staff against his own leg. The heel of his boot had been right between two loosely-nailed floorboards, so the seal itself had visually formed under the coach’s floor. Anita, who’d been busy with the cipher and who’d been certain that she was the one in control of the situation, had noticed nothing until she’d gotten bowled over by the gust of wind.

When the woman clambered out of a pile of crates and other Hunter clutter, she had already raised her staff but never brought it down.

Three revolver barrels were pointed at her.

Ardan hadn’t just been asking the talkative woman questions for no reason. It would have taken him nothing to break and dispel such a simple, even crude, spell at first glance.

Sleeping Spirits… there really was a significant difference between students of the Grand and those of ordinary universities!

Anita, pointing a finger at Ardi, started to sell her little act:

“He tried to rape me-”

“We heard everything, Anita,” Nathan interrupted her. “Damn it… I remember losing my bracelet, the one we got from the Faceless’ Hollow. I thought I dropped it when we were running for our lives. And now…”

“I didn’t take your damn bracelet, Nathan!” Anita shrieked, losing her composure. “I’m not a thief! I’m just sometimes interested in magic! You wouldn’t understand!”

“Maybe so,” Nathan shrugged. “Maybe so, Anita… but how are we supposed to believe a single word you say now? And shooting a fellow traveler in the balls just because he’s not going to be your meal ticket… that’s a bit much, don’t you think?”

“Yeah,” Bakket nodded.

“That’s definitely over the line, Anita,” Ladmir paled.

Ardi didn’t understand the Hunters very well, but it seemed like they were far more concerned with the fact that they themselves could no longer trust Anita and that she could, at some point, do the exact same thing to them. The fact that more than a dozen mages had unwillingly shared their research or seals bought at the Spell Market with her did not seem to matter much to them.

Anita’s gaze shifted from the weapons to Ardi, and then to the weapons again.

Apparently, she was weighing whether it was worth using the remaining rays in her Stars—she hadn’t put on any accumulators—since she hadn’t touched her Blue one. But maybe common sense spoke up, or knowledge of the law, or uncertainty that she could kill all four of them, but she let go of her staff and raised her hands in the air.

“And what now?” Anita asked, her tone icy.

Bakket and Ladmir turned to Nathan. Apparently, they didn’t know what to do next, either.

“I have no idea, Anita,” Nathan answered honestly. “We’ll go back to Nigrad. Hand you over to the Guild. Let them decide.”

Anita cursed.

“We’re friends,” she whispered, barely audible. “We’ve known each other for so many years and-”

“We thought so too, Anita,” Nathan interrupted her again. He didn’t even think of lowering his revolver. “But apparently, we knew some other Anita. A tough woman, a bit obsessed with her looks, but decent. Not the one who drugs city mages and threatens to shoot someone’s balls off.”

“Why are you so fixated on his balls!” The female mage couldn’t take it anymore.

“Because I’m a little shocked, Anita,” Nathan replied after a moment’s pause. “I don’t know how your life will turn out. I doubt any of those mages will be able to give a coherent testimony. But even if they let you keep your Guild membership, remember this. I don’t want to see you on our land again. Ever.”

Anita narrowed her eyes at him and spat:

“And what are you going to do to me, you fucking cowb-”

Bang!

The shot drowned out the rest of her words. Anita didn’t flinch, but not because she possessed some sort of amazing fortitude. She just didn’t immediately understand what had just happened. And when she did, she screamed with pain and indignation. The bullet, which had passed a centimeter from her neck, had severed the lobe of her right ear.

“I warned you, Miss Landi,” Nathan said in a cold tone. “If I see you again, I’ll shoot to kill.”

***

Ardan checked the girth, tightened the cinch, and swung into the saddle. The forced delay had cost him an extra three hours that he could have spent on the road.

“Sorry it turned out this way, kid,” Nathan said, helping him secure his staff, satchel, and a small supply of water and provisions. He didn’t look very happy. But that was understandable…

Ardi glanced toward the coach, where Anita Landi sat, gagged and bound, glaring daggers at him.

“You’ll take her to the guild, right?” Ardan asked.

“Yeah, of course,” Nathan nodded. “Let them deal with her according to the law. But she’ll get off, of course. There are no witnesses, but… You know what the worst part is?”

Ardan remained silent. The question was rhetorical.

“I remember how, about two years ago, another kid from the capital joined our squad. He was as green as they come. Had two Stars. A decent number of rays, too. Five and six… I think…” Nathan’s gaze clouded over slightly. The Hunter was clearly wandering through the fields of his memories. “I don’t remember all the details. But I do remember how he screamed as a Bonelapper was eating him alive. The kid couldn’t find the right page in his grimoire... It seemed to me back then like it had been torn out, but I can’t even say what happened to that grimoire… Strange, isn’t it?”

Ardan remained silent again. This was another rhetorical question.

“You go on,” he slapped Ardi’s horse on the rump. “We’ll pack up here and head back to town. Then to Larand again. Maybe, if we’re lucky, we’ll see each other tomorrow evening at the tavern. There’s a good one there. It’s called ‘The Pine Porridge.’ Tell them I sent you—they’ll give you a decent discount on a room and dinner. We’ll toast the second birthday of your balls.”

“Of course,” Ardan nodded.

“Well, see you around, Ard.”

“See you, Nathan.”

Ardi turned his plains-runner toward the forest path and squeezed his thighs. He rode on and on, remembering the beating of Nathan’s heart.

He had been lying. And not just to Ardi, but to himself as well.

And when the young man had ridden far enough from the clearing that a human ear could no longer catch any sound, a single shot rang out in the distance behind him. Startled birds flew up into the sky.

He truly wasn’t in the Metropolis anymore…