Matabar

Book II. Chapter 60 - “Maybe I really am losing my mind”

Landing back on solid ground, Ardan bent his knees to absorb the impact, his boots sinking ankle-deep into the soft earth. He narrowed his eyes. His breathing came quick and shallow, each exhalation turning into a cloud of vapor under the glow of the streetlamps. He felt his gums stretch as his canines lengthened, and inside his boots, he sensed claws scraping against the leather, straining to emerge—the same kind of claws that even now were scratching at the wooden shaft of his staff.

The mountain hunter within him was clawing his way to the surface. He was battering against the walls of his chest with a churning heart and glinting through his eyes with slit pupils that cut across the night. The hunter didn’t fear the monster that was sprinting away down the street, heading toward the avenue. The creature’s hair—tougher than steel and more supple than silk—lashed out like long, tentacular limbs, carrying off a strange type of prey that spewed black smoke and left a trail of black blood behind as it was borne away from the lair…

Ardan shook his head vigorously.

No—this wasn’t a lair. Behind him stood cold stone, but not the crags of the far-off Alcade; it was the masonry of a grand palace. Ahead of him, raking the cobblestones and asphalt with her hair and mangling lampposts and shattering fences as she went, that was no prey—it was a Tazidahian mutant. And the hunter roaring inside Ardan’s mind was not some mysterious spirit, but his own Matabar instincts. If he surrendered to them again, it was far from certain that he would come back. That Ardan Egobar would come back.

“Enough,” he growled. By sheer force of will, Ardan compelled his fangs and claws to withdraw, and forced his frenzied heart to slow its wild pounding. There may come a day when he would have to unleash the mountain hunter once again, but it would not be today.

Straightening up, Ardan struck his staff against the ground. A seal formed beneath his feet as droplets of evening moisture lifted from the grass and the surfaces of nearby glass. They swirled into a wild vortex, spinning faster and faster until they coalesced into the shape of an artillery shell. Rippling at a high frequency, and accompanied by a sharp clap that whipped Ardan’s hair and coat about, the Ice Artillery blasted off toward the retreating target. He didn’t wait to see if it would hit.

Ardan harbored no illusions that he could overtake the mutant on foot—the physical capabilities of a Matabar half-blood versus a Tazidahian War Mutant were simply incomparable. There was no point in hoping that his muscles and tendons alone could close that gap.

Instead, while the spell hurtled after the monster, tearing up asphalt as it went, Ardan sprinted toward Peter’s car. Thankfully, the keys were still in his pocket.

In a few bounding strides, and after leaping over the wrought-iron fence, Ardan yanked the driver’s side door handle so hard he nearly ripped it off, mechanism and all. The door bent at an unnatural angle with a plaintive screech of metal. But its whine was immediately drowned out by the mutant’s shriek. Ardan tossed his staff onto the passenger seat and turned the ignition, already twisting around to keep his eyes on the mutant.

She was hovering a few meters above the ground, supported on steely limbs woven from the streaming hair that poured out from her head. The mutant writhed and screamed. Within her mane, new tendrils kept forming, wriggling around to ensnare the shards of the shattered magical shell lodged in her body. It would seem that she had managed to halt and break the projectile, but the spray of icy shrapnel had hit its mark… and then some. Behind the mutant, a portion of the street had been ripped open with long furrows, and fallen lampposts were showering sparks onto the weary pavement.

“Of course,” Ardan sighed ruefully. The only consolation was that here on St. Vasily’s Island, the stationary shields of the mansions could likely withstand a real artillery barrage… or at least the first salvo.

Praying silently to the Sleeping Spirits, the Eternal Angels, the Old Gods, and anyone else who might be listening that the engine wouldn’t sputter out and that he himself wouldn’t bungle anything, Ardan floored the accelerator to chase after the mutant. Having plucked out the last fragment of ice, she lashed out with one arm. A strand of hair as thick as the trunk of a birch tree whipped out and ensnared one of the toppled lampposts.

The wrought iron mass went up so easily that it appeared as if a crane had lifted it, rather than a tendril of hair.

“How much Ley is she generating?!” Ard roared, spinning the steering wheel as if his life depended on it.

In truth, if one considered the fact that he couldn’t simultaneously focus on driving and casting magic, his life did depend on it. The mutant, who appeared to be a frail-looking girl, had just flung a piece of steel weighing nearly a ton at him. She’d hurled it like a javelin, and it flew past the car’s side barely a meter away from the door.

Ardan tried to downshift… and the engine stalled. The motor croaked like an offended goose and died. The car bucked, shuddered, and came to a halt sideways in the middle of the street.

The mutant’s face twisted into a satisfied grin. She turned and once more sprinted down the street on those hair limbs of hers.

“Come on…,” Ard muttered through gritted teeth, turning the ignition key again. “Come on, start…”

He didn’t take his eyes off the rapidly fleeing girl, but the engine refused to cooperate. Perhaps Ardan had damaged something in the vehicle with his wild driving? Damn it, he understood nothing about these wheeled contraptions!

Realizing that he couldn’t resurrect this machine, Ardan nearly tore the metal door off its hinges as he jumped out, snatching up his staff. He hadn’t even managed two hundred meters of driving. So much for his meager driving skills…

“When Milar or Arkar are at the wheel, it all looks so easy…” Ardan grumbled under his breath, kicking off his boots.

Feeling the sun-warmed stone under his bare feet, Ardan bolted forward. He ran as fast as he dared to, pushing his speed, but not so much as to lose control and let his inner hunter break loose again. That hunter was snarling and rending at Ardan’s consciousness as Ard fought both his own instincts and the barrage of flying boulders hurtling his way.

The mutant seemed to have eyes on the back of her head. She kept flinging her arms backward, smashing the cobblestones (which had replaced the asphalt in this part of the street) and ripping out entire chunks of earth and stone. She would then hurl them like boulders from a catapult toward her pursuer. Thankfully, her aim was far from good, so dodging them wasn’t too difficult.

On either side of the street, stationary shields flared to life, deflecting this sudden assault. Even so, a hail of stone fragments pelted the area, shattering flowerbeds, shearing off decorative trees, wrecking benches and the roofs of tram stops.

Ardan noticed all of this out of the corner of his eye. His main focus was on the mutant’s fleeing form, which was inexorably pulling away from him. The only thing Ardi could hope for was that the Ley reserve fueling the stranger’s mutation would run dry and send her crashing to the ground—but that wasn’t happening anytime soon, apparently.

Nearly three hundred meters now yawned between them, a gap even magic couldn’t readily bridge. At that range, even an Ice Bullet would have lost almost all of its kinetic charge by the time it reached her, to say nothing of the way a spell’s energy dissipated over distances as readily as it did through wiring. In other words, his magic was effectively useless for now.

Suddenly, coming from behind him, Ardan heard the familiar screeching of ancient brakes and the groan of overtaxed tires. A drawn-out horn blared, and coming in from the side—nearly clipping Ardan in the process—a battered old “Derks” swerved to a stop with a squeal.

“Get in!” Milar shouted, half-hanging out of the car as he flung the passenger door open.

Ardan pivoted so sharply that he nearly slipped on the pavement, but he managed to dive into the car. Unfortunately, he didn’t manage to close the door behind him in time. Another chunk of cobblestone clattered against the car’s metal flank like grapeshot, and a jagged piece of the door frame sliced into Ardi’s leg as it was torn away. With a crunch of glass and a shriek of rent metal, the passenger door broke off and skidded across the asphalt.

Milar silently glanced from the missing door back to the mutant, then to Ardan. His jaw clenched, and he took a deep drag on the cigarette clamped between his teeth.

“She is one tough bi-” he began, but the rest of his remark was drowned out by the roar of the engine. Milar, both feet working the pedals in some arcane rhythm and one hand shifting gears, sent the old “Derks” lunging forward in pursuit.

Their poor, wounded partner growled like an angry beast and charged after their quarry, which had already passed the intersection with Tsar’s Army Avenue and was now racing down the Guild Embankment.

“This feels familiar,” Ardan murmured, unable to stop himself from remembering how, a few months ago, he and Milar had barreled through a similar situation while chasing a fleeing vampire out of the exploded Archive.

“Hold on tight, Magister, unless you want to be thrown out!” Milar bellowed, his voice a gravelly roar that rivaled his own engine.

He downshifted, driving the tachometer’s needle into the red—far beyond what the engineers had ever intended—and simultaneously yanked up the handbrake. What he did next made Ardan’s internal organs nearly trade places: the car spun into a controlled skid, almost drifting sideways into an adjacent alley. Without missing a beat, Milar slammed the car into reverse, twisting them halfway around, and… he began driving backwards.

Threading deftly around various obstacles, he shouted over the cacophony of the wind whipping into the car and the wailing of sirens throughout the district. “I told you to wait for me, Magister!” Milar yelled, eyes flicking between the rearview mirror and the road behind them, which was now in front of them, given that the car was being driven in reverse.

“When?!” Ardan shouted back, frantically flipping through his grimoire in order to find a spell he felt confident enough to cast on the move.

“I sent a courier to you this morning!”

“What time?!”

“Around seven in the morning! I wanted to catch you before your lectures started!”

At that moment, a startled butler in a servant’s doorway up ahead of them nearly stumbled straight into their path. Milar cursed as the terrified old man plastered himself against a wall to avoid being hit.

“I left earlier than that!” Ardan snapped.

“Why the hell—by the Eternal Angels, why?!” Milar barked while still focusing on maneuvering the car’s rear end down the street at breakneck speeds.

“I wanted to stop by the library before class!”

“Bloody hell!” Milar swore emphatically, then immediately added: “Brace yourself!”

Ardan let his grimoire dangle on its chains and clutched the dashboard with both hands. He did so just in time because, a moment later, Captain Pnev’s car went airborne off a small hill that stood where the side alley met the embankment road. The “Derks” leaped into the air, its wheels leaving the ground, and soared right out onto the embankment.

For a heartbeat, time seemed to lag behind the car’s impossible leap, stretching into a syrupy sort of slow motion. Ard watched the scene before him unfold like a series of photographs in an old album, one after another.

The mutant, clearly startled, had been skittering along on her hair tendrils. At the sight of the car hurtling through the air, she instinctively raised her arms to shield her head. Obeying her command, her gleaming locks surged upwards in front of her. Milar, for his part, wore a stony expression, as though he were not in a flying car, but sitting in his living room with a cup of tea and the morning paper. In one fluid motion, he drew his revolver from its holster.

Through his windshield, the captain took aim. Before the wheels touched the ground again, he thumbed back the hammer and squeezed the trigger. Twice. The thunder of the gunshots left Ardan’s ears ringing, and the windshield exploded outwards, glass shards cascading over the hood and trailing in the wake of the two whistling bullets.

Slowly, lazily, the bullets drilled through the space between them and the mutant. The first buried itself somewhere in the mutant’s chest; the second flattened itself into a hot little pancake against the wall of hair that stood between them.

At last, time snapped back to its normal flow. The car’s wheels slammed onto the ground, and Milar spun the steering wheel, fighting to keep the “Derks” from doing an unplanned impression of a boat—the parapet separating the Guild Embankment from the Niewa was only a few meters away now. As the tires screeched and the car righted itself, Ardan’s hearing and vision returned.

Up ahead, the mutant kept whirling like a dervish for a second, then she toppled to the ground. Momentum sent her tumbling across the cobbles, leaving a bloody trail where inertia and the rough stones flayed her flesh. The cobblestones had grated her like a giant washboard, peeling off strips of her skin, flesh and clothing, reducing the latter to tatters. Milar, after wrestling the car back under control, straightened out their course and shifted into forward gear.

Sleeping Spirits… If this chase had taken place anywhere other than the Guild Embankment—a place that, at this hour, had virtually no pedestrians or traffic—then everything that had just happened either couldn’t have happened at all, or it would have ended in a bloodbath. As it was, somewhere far behind them, a car horn blared in irate protest. It was likely some wealthy person’s chauffeur who was unable to see what was unfolding ahead and venting at the delay.

Ardan was already gathering himself to jump out of the car when Milar’s revolver handle pressed against his chest. The captain still had one hand on the wheel.

“If you value your life, stay put, Ard. It’s not over yet,” Milar warned him.

As if to confirm he was right, the mutant convulsed and flipped over onto her back. The captain immediately snapped up his right arm, bracing his wrist on the steering wheel, and cocked his revolver again. Milar didn’t hesitate for even an instant—he emptied the rest of the cylinder straight into the mutant’s prone body. The captain’s aim was steady. It was perhaps not quite as unerring as that of Yonatan Kornosskiy and his squad, and certainly not at the level of Alexander Ursky, but it was enough that he wouldn’t miss a target lying about thirty meters away.

And he didn’t. All four of his bullets thudded into the mutant’s left side, but none of them reached her heart. Scarcely a second later, with a trembling hand, the Tazidahian mutant pulled out a standard medical syringe. However, instead of a glass one, this syringe’s needle was attached to a metal cylinder. It was aluminum, a bit dented, but still mostly intact.

“Ard!” Milar shouted, a note of panic in his voice. Clearly, he knew what sort of danger was coming. “Cast something!”

Ardan, who until then had been holding on to the glovebox, reacted a fraction too late. On top of that, his staff—which was stretched out across the entire cabin—was not exactly in an ideal position for quick use.

Before Ard could even grab his staff’s familiar wood and complete a Ley-circuit, the mutant plunged the ten-centimeter needle into the center of her own torso. With her thumb, she slammed down the plunger, injecting some unknown alchemical concoction into her body.

By the time Ardan managed to slam his staff against the car’s doorframe, its crystal head thumping out and releasing a cone-shaped Armor-Piercing Ice Bullet that decorated the car and embankment with a sudden layer of rime, it was too late.

The mutant arched upwards, her body bending into a bow with only the back of her head and her heels touching the ground, her spine lifting a good half a meter off the street. For a second, it looked as if she might start levitating.

The puddles of blood around her suddenly began to boil, then turned into black vapor and streamed back into her body, sealing up her many wounds (albeit with ugly, scar-like tissue that looked ancient) in the process. And her hair… her hair transformed into a seething, furious pit of snakes. Growing thicker and denser, the infinitely long, steely locks writhed and coiled, then struck the ground like the roots of an ancient tree, rending the earth apart.

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Wave after wave, the steel tendrils sliced across the embankment, tearing up the pavement and ripping out sections of the concrete parapet, caps and all. They also surged toward Milar’s car. Milar slammed the pedals and threw the car into reverse, speeding backwards. But even before that, Ardan managed to bang his staff against the doorframe once more.

A cone of frost blasted out from their hood, spreading outward in broad sheets. These sheets thickened and solidified, forming four massive—albeit low—walls of ice in quick succession. One after another, the walls rose to interpose themselves between the speeding steel tendrils and their intended prey. They were far from an impenetrable defense, of course—the hair limbs smashed through the first ice wall, then the second, shattering them like spun glass. But each wall slowed the onslaught marginally. Only when Milar had reversed nearly a hundred meters did the final strand of hair, pulled taut like a straining cable, finally halt, freezing in mid-air an outstretched hand’s breadth from the car’s front grille.

By now, the mutant’s eyes had snapped open. Her many hair tendrils began retracting—not slithering back into her exactly, but rather seeming to coil up under her body somehow. The girl was lifted higher and higher into the air, until she hovered at a height equal to the rooftops of the surrounding houses. All around her, countless strands writhed and squirmed, some coiling tightly, others unfurling like sails in the wind.

“And where’s the rest of our backup?” Ardan asked, swallowing hard.

He had a dreadful hunch that, in this situation, they needed… if not Mshisty himself, then at least Din and Alexander.

“Did you call for any? Because I did, when I swung by to pick you up. They haven’t had time to get here yet,” Milar replied grimly.

Ardan almost snapped back a harsh retort, but then he and Milar locked eyes as the same realization hit them. Not so long ago, the Spiders had been trying (and even succeeded once) to hack Aversky’s invention, which he’d created in an attempt to solve the “puzzle of the millennium:” a method of transmitting data over great distances. In other words, a secure long-range communication device.

And that meant that the mutant was connected to the Puppeteers…

“Then how did you even end up here?!” Ardan yelled over the noise.

“That’s what you care about right now, Magister?!” Milar shouted back.

Their shouts mingled with each other, and the “Derks’” roaring engine became a third voice in their panic. The mutant clearly had no intention of wasting time on speeches or threats. She whipped her arms through the air, and following her motions, the tendrils of hair sprang to life once more. They wove themselves into two enormous hammers, each the size of a small truck. Like some deadly carnival game, these two great bludgeons began taking turns smashing down onto every spot where the car had just been.

Milar, by some miracle—or by the grace of the Eternal Angels—managed to keep the car out of every impact zone. Each massive hammer blow landed on empty pavement, cratering the embankment stones, sending up clouds of dust, and showering the car’s roof with chunks of gravel. And with every attempt, the hammers drew closer and closer to hitting their target.

“We have to do something! Now!”

“I’m thinking, Milar!” Ardan bellowed back, his voice raw with strain.

“Think faster!” The captain snarled, cigarette still somehow dangling from his lips as he wrenched the steering wheel. The battered “Derks” executed a series of maneuvers that were almost balletic in their complexity, pirouetting away from each devastating hammer strike.

At times, it seemed like the car would tip onto two wheels, or the engine would choke, or some belt or piston might finally snap under the stress. But the captain’s trusty steed fought on till the bitter end. However, as they drew nearer to the mutant hovering in the sky, each hammer blow landed closer and closer, and the car’s frame was trembling as badly as its two occupants.

“Arrrrd!” Milar’s voice came out as an urgent growl.

“I’m… making a new seal on the fly, Milar! Shut up and let me-”

Ardan never finished that sentence; the car jolted and he bit his tongue, snarling in pain. Nevertheless, he continued scribbling with the stub of a pencil in his grimoire, sketching something beside the basic Ice Artillery seal.

“You’ve got two seconds!” Milar warned. He exhaled a cloud of smoke, not even flinching as his revolver tumbled out of the car. The captain devoted all his focus to the road, the car, and the titanic hammers pounding the earth around them.

Whatever had been in that syringe, it had restored the mutant’s strength, but only her physical strength. Even to an untrained eye, it was obvious that her hair tendrils were not responding as precisely to her will as they had before.

How did that help Ard? It didn’t, really. He forced himself to consider another approach. The structure of the mutant’s hair gave it the ability to change not just its density, but the fundamental properties of its tiny composite particles—the exact scientific term escaped Ardan—which meant that penetration type spells were unlikely to breach her defenses.

And if that wouldn’t work, then, as Edward had taught him, he’d switch to overwhelming force. Perhaps he could, even for just a moment, slow her down and disrupt her already weakened control over her own mutation. This meant that he had to alter just a few parameters of his spell, even if they were the fundamental ones.

“Milar!”

“What?!”

“We need to get under her!”

“Bloody hell, Ard! This is no time for dirty jokes, I’m a little stressed here!” Milar shouted back, misinterpreting Ardan’s phrasing but not slowing in the slightest.

Ardan, barely managing to stay in his seat, fumbled to swap out the accumulator crystals in his rings. By now, Milar was demonstrating truly unparalleled driving skills. The captain might not have been the best swordsman, nor a marksman extraordinaire, but as a driver—and an investigator—Captain Pnev was proving to be one of the best in the entire Black House.

Keeping the hammer blows mere centimeters away from the car at all times, the captain—chewing on the butt of his cigarette the entire time—steadily closed the distance to their target. Finally, with one more sharp turn of the wheel, Milar slammed the brakes, skidding them to a stop directly below the mutant who was hanging above the rooftops.

As Ardan had hoped, the girl couldn’t adjust immediately—her massive hammers, along with the rest of her hair, hesitated in confusion. Attacking directly beneath yourself, even with magic, was no simple task. And that single second of confusion was exactly what Ardan had been waiting for.

Thrusting his staff through what remained of the windshield, he struck it against the ruined cobblestones. The water from the Niewa, crashing against the granite embankment nearby, swirled up around the tip of Ardan’s staff. Then it shot upwards as a vibrating ice sphere. This projectile was slower than the first, but it was nearly three times the diameter—more like a schoolroom globe than a bullet.

The mutant, recognizing the spell that had wounded her before, stretched her thin lips into a broad, triumphant smile. She swept her arms outward, and her unfurled tendrils once again wove themselves into a steel barrier before her. Had all of this occurred ten minutes earlier, when the girl’s control over her mutation had still been intact, the heavy hammers made of hair would’ve likely slammed down on Ardan and Milar’s heads a moment later. But that didn’t happen.

Nor did the outcome the mutant had expected come to pass. The ice sphere never reached its target. Instead, it suddenly cracked apart and then shattered completely. A cloud of shimmering frost billowed out, enveloping the steel barricade like a gauzy veil. A white layer of rime coated the steely locks, and a cold claw squeezed her hair, transforming what had been an impenetrable wall into something brittle and yielding.

The mutant, who had effectively blinded herself behind her own shield, suddenly screamed in pain and panic as a conical ice bullet punched through her weakened defense and ripped off her left arm, tearing it from her shoulder in a spray of flesh.

The mutant howled, drenching the ground below her in black blood as smoke puffed from her mouth with each scream. But not even a second passed before the wound closed up, leaving only a grotesque, scarred stump behind. However, the volume of hair on her head instantly diminished by nearly half, and the mutant herself plummeted from rooftop height down to roughly the level of a first-story window.

“You cocky idiot!” Milar’s shout cut through Ardan’s moment of triumph at having improvised a new spell on the fly. “You should have killed her when you had the chance!”

“But what about questioning her-” Ardi began, perplexed.

“There’s nothing to even find out! It’s all obvious already…” Milar snarled, slamming the pedals once more. “Finish her now, or we’ll regret it!”

The mutant recovered while he was saying this. With a wail that could rival a banshee, she resumed her flight down the embankment. This time, she didn’t bother hurling pieces of the embankment back at them; she simply scuttled on her hair limbs like an octopus fleeing a predator.

Milar, still muttering curses under his breath, tore off in pursuit. And despite the fact that the “Derks’” speedometer needle was nearly touching its top mark of fifty kilometers per hour, the mutant managed to maintain the distance between them.

“Where the hell is she running to?” Ardi wondered aloud, not very familiar with the island’s northern layout.

“To the Brotherhood’s embassy,” Milar growled through clenched teeth.

“What?!”

“Exactly that, Ard!” The captain snapped. “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree—the daughter takes after her father… Navalov was working with Tazidah! Looks like his greed wasn’t limited to just the Dandy!”

“What are you talking about?”

Milar shot a quick glare at his partner, but then refocused on the fleeing mutant.

“She won’t make it…” The captain whispered to himself, clearly noticing how, every hundred meters or so, the girl’s tendrils were shrinking, losing their steel sheen, and how the ghastly wound where her left arm had been was beginning to reopen, once more wet with fresh blood. “Veligrad was on the list of those charity galas, Ard—the very same galas we’ve been investigating. I did some digging and found out that the man was always seen talking with the Tazidahian Brotherhood’s ambassador whenever he attended one of them. They were even spotted exchanging documents a few times.”

“That’s why you wanted me to wait for you…”

“No, damn it, Ard, I wanted to have tea with you… you idiot!” Milar retorted, then he honked angrily at a red guard corps truck that had suddenly darted out of a side street, nearly clipping them. The captain made an extremely rude hand gesture at the truck as it swerved behind them. “And to talk about your upcoming wedding… Hmph, the shrimps are late as usual.”

In street slang, “shrimps” was the term used for the city guards, on account of their red uniforms. Ardi had only heard the Cloaks and Arkar use it.

“I only confirmed all of this last night,” Milar continued, spitting out what was left of his cigarette. “Damn it… I haven’t slept in over a day, and now this…”

Up ahead, the mutant stumbled again; her body slumped to the ground and rolled along the embankment. Her hair abruptly retracted into her head, what remained of it spreading over the cobblestones in tangled clumps.

The wound on her shoulder burst open, releasing a new stream of red blood.

“Well, that’s the end of her sprint,” Milar said with grim satisfaction, pushing the “Derks” to its absolute limits to reach their fallen foe before she could recover.

But the mutant was already pulling a second syringe from the tatters of her ripped dress, fishing it out from somewhere under her corset and shredded undergarments. Despite the distance between them, Ardan could see that her cheeks were now sunken, her skin had turned ashen, and the light in her eyes had dimmed. Whatever mixture was in those syringes exacted a steep price from the body in exchange for explosive power.

“How many of those does she have… Ard!”

“I’m on it!”

Even before Ardan finished replying, an Ice Bullet shot out from the tip of his staff. Hitting a small target with such a spell was no simple task. There were too many parameters to calculate, and casting magic on the move added another layer of complexity: the spell’s array had to account for the fact that the caster’s position was changing between the start of the casting and its release.

As a result, the projectile, after covering the distance, smashed not into the mutant’s hand, but into her legs, shearing them off just above the knees. Even so, Ardan achieved his goal.

The mutant shrieked in agony and reflexively depressed the syringe’s plunger before she even managed to stab it into her body.

“Excellent!” Milar crowed. “Another second, and she’d have reached the embassy. Good work, Magister.”

A glutinous, dark-gray liquid splattered across the girl’s face… then slowly began to seep into her skin. She began licking up the portion that had spilled onto the stones like a dog dying of thirst, desperate to ingest every drop. And by the time Ardan and Milar had pulled up almost alongside her, the mutant was able to push off from the ground with her hair and spring away in a frog-like leap. Her tendrils were now only a couple of meters long and had lost their gloss and steely luster, but even so…

“Son of a-” Milar slapped the “Derks’” steering wheel as the weary engine coughed in protest. “Will this woman just die already?!”

“Stop the car!” Ardan shouted.

Only a few dozen meters separated them now. That was close enough that, if he eliminated all extraneous parameters, Ardan could end this chase with one final spell. The mutant seemed to have come to the same conclusion, and so she was rushing to exploit the most absurd twist of fate Ardan could recall happening in recent times.

In the evenings, St. Vasily’s Island all but turned into a ghost town, deserted and silent. Not even all the windows in the mansions would be lit. Ardan knew this from back when he’d used to come here for lessons at Edward’s house. The wealthy residents spent their evenings in exclusive gentlemen’s clubs, or fine restaurants and salons, not strolling about.

That was why, after six in the evening, you’d find almost no pedestrians or vehicles here. There was simply no one taking walks, aside from perhaps a nanny or tutor pushing a pram for the infant heirs of the capital’s elite.

And indeed, from a narrow alleyway situated between two mansions (each of them was a small palace with a facade facing the embankment), a somewhat flustered, middle-aged woman emerged. Wrapped in a warm overcoat and wearing a stylish hat, she was holding the earpiece of a brass hearing apparatus—essentially an ornate, miniaturized phonograph horn— in one hand.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Milar exhaled in disbelief.

With her other hand, the woman—looking around in confusion all the while—was pushing an elegant baby carriage with large gleaming wheels and a bassinet upholstered in expensive fabric. Inside, under layers of blankets and quilts, a baby slumbered peacefully.

The mutant’s gaze flicked from Milar and Ardan to the unsuspecting nanny and back. Then the mutant’s lips pulled into a bloody smile. Her hair tendrils lashed out. One coil seized the waist of the now-screaming governess, while another easily snatched up the pram from the ground. Effortlessly, the mutant flung the carriage, along with its occupant, clear across the roadway, over the sidewalk, over the embankment rail, and straight into the cold, black waters of the river.

What happened next might not reflect perfectly on Milar as a Cloak, a Captain of the Second Chancery, and an Investigator of the First Rank… but Ardan had already respected this strange, perpetually joking man before, and now…

Without a glance at the mutant, nor even a moment of hesitation, Captain Milar Pnev leaped out of the car. He turned his back to the enemy (inviting an attack he might not see coming), tearing off his jacket and kicking away his boots as he rushed in. He flung his warm body straight into the teeth of the frigid autumn wind, sprinting toward what was left of the wrought-iron railing. Milar did not pause, did not deliberate for even a second. Ignoring the lethal threat behind him and the fact that the Niewa’s waters were surely ice cold, he charged in to save two complete strangers: a woman and a child he’d never met… even knowing his own loved ones were waiting for him at home.

“Galessian filth,” the mutant hissed, the victorious grin on her blood-smeared lips fading as she turned toward the next intersection—beyond which, behind a high black fence, riflemen and people in strange uniforms were clustered. These were clearly the Brotherhood’s embassy security.

“…Father… get up, Father,” a boy whispered. “Stop pretending… Father.”

Once upon a time, Ardan had heard a fragment of the Name of an ancient river—a river that remembered a time before the first settlers had even appeared on its banks. It had once been called by a completely different name. “Niewa” was just the name the Galessian people had given it.

The river remembered them. It remembered how they’d drawn sustenance from its depths. How they’d found relief from the heat in its perpetually-icy spray. How they’d carried its water into their homes to slake their thirst. The river remembered how it had given them life. And it remembered how it had taken life back during seasons when it had strained against its banks and sought to enfold everything it could reach in its cold, black embrace.

Not because it hated people or wanted to destroy them. No. It was a river. It has no emotions, no motives, no goals or desires. It simply existed. It was, it is, it will be—always. Well, almost always. Once, it had been a sea; before that, an ocean. And one day, it would vanish when the last flower withers and the world is cloaked in lifeless desert. But that would surely take billions of years. To the river, which remembered the world being born from the fire of slumbering volcanoes, the brief flicker of a human life was a trivial thing.

And yet, it remembered them. It remembered almost each and every one of them. It remembered their words, their songs; it remembered cradling their boats and ships upon its waves. It remembered blood spilling across its icy surface. It remembered cities burning on its shores. It remembered weeping and tears. It remembered laughter and joy. It remembered its people—the people of Gales.

Now, in the splashing of black water closing over the heads of the crying infant and the terrified woman, Ardan heard the rage of the river, the Niewa, as it drifted toward its winter slumber. And he allowed himself to lose his own self in that fury. From the echoing depths of the river’s roar, he discerned a fragment of its Name… and it was much larger than the one he’d heard last time.

It seized Ardan in an iron grip. It pressed, pressed, pressed down on his shoulders until it penetrated so deeply that, for a moment, Ardan could not tell the river’s rage apart from his own. He couldn’t tell the river apart from himself. The fragment of its Name, though just a piece of it, was still bigger than all of Ardan. And he, a mere Speaker, didn’t know how to protect his own Name from another’s. He hadn’t even known he was supposed to. He hadn’t known that, by hearing another’s Name even once, he gave them the chance to hear his Name in return. It was like a door that could be opened from either side.

He hadn’t known any of this a moment ago. But he knew it now. Truth be told, as so often happened, that realization came far too late.

The Niewa called his Name, and Ardan vanished into the alien, boundless power that was the river. He drowned in the black waters, forgetting who he was or what was around him.

***

Milar never made it to the railing. The wind stopped him. The captain had lived in the capital for years and had seen more than one Storm Week. The Metropolis was always beset by prolonged tempests during those…

But what struck the embankment now was an entirely different kind of wind. The storms that occasionally hit the Metropolis might tear off an ill-secured awning, turn an umbrella inside out, or knock over a feeble, tired old man.

This wind, though… It slammed Milar to the ground, forcing him to shield his face with his arms. When the blast relented, the captain suddenly heard a tremendous crash. It sounded at once like a thunderclap and an artillery shell exploding a couple of meters from a trench—a sound that had jolted the captain awake on many a night. He had hoped that he had mostly forgotten that sound by now. But no. The Niewa had just reminded him of it. It had reminded him with waters suddenly rearing up in a foam-white fury. It had reminded him with its dark expanses and with the ground trembling beneath his feet.

A second after the woman and the child vanished beneath the impenetrable black surface, they were suddenly lifted skyward. They were carried up by jets of black water shaped into tender, supporting hands, which gently deposited the drenched and petrified pair onto the embankment’s stones.

Milar would’ve rejoiced if it had ended at that. But the Niewa then surged up in a black wall of water and crashed down in a torrent of thousands of liters of icy river straight at Ard, who was standing as still as a statue.

The water swirled around him and then picked him up like a doll, hoisting him above the embankment. Milar didn’t understand much about magic—truth be told, he understood almost nothing about it—but even he could see that his partner was not in control of what was happening.

Ard’s eyes had flooded with an amber haze. The runes on his staff glowed with pure white light reminiscent of cresting waves, and the young man himself hung suspended, caught in swirling coils of black water.

The mutant, shrieking something in the hissing, whistling tongue of the Tazidahians, was racing toward the embassy gates. And, as if to spite Milar’s surety from that morning that this mission would be simple and quick, the Niewa carried Ard after the mutant. The river seemed utterly indifferent to the fact that a territory that technically belonged to a different nation was up ahead.

“The river doesn’t care. The river… by all the Angels… doesn’t care,” Milar muttered in dull astonishment, a half-crazed grin on his face. “Maybe I really am losing my mind.”