PART TWO: CHAMPION

PROLOGUE 2: A MORBID PORTENT

“All such impositions flounder at the last, and are replaced. All symbols warp into unforeseen forms. All names change. Learn to read the road ahead, and leave behind what you’ve left behind. There is more to distance in space and time than you can conceive because the conceiving mind is trapped by cause and effect.”

– from ‘The Syth Codex’, 39:108-113

“Thank you so much for doing this,” the young mage said, hurrying to keep up with the older woman’s strides as they left the barracks-building. “You don’t know how much it means to me.” She shrugged her shoulders, trying to resettle the black-and-white pauldrons in a more-comfortable position – the metallic contraptions were just awful.

“I think you’d find I can imagine well-enough, Tialya,” Najraine replied, the tall mage looking straight ahead of them as she spoke, at the iron-wrought bridge spanning the moat. “Or do you go by Tia?”

“Tialya, please!” The girl was almost forced to gasp.

“That’s fine.” Najraine’s tone seemed to soften, and she slowed her pace ever-so-slightly. “I thought as much – Rellie always calls you Tialya. She stopped going by her full name years ago; it wasn’t cool enough… Anyway, if we get you some hands-on experience, it’ll really help when you get to the interview stage. You’ve never done this before?”

“I’m afraid not…”

“You never tested someone’s time-lines for their identity? For danger?”

“Not like this. Not with the seeing-rod. But I know how it’s done – in theory, at least…”

“And it has to beat the Lounges of Seercraft, right?” Najraine finished the thought for her; Tialya shot her a startled glance, but the older mage just laughed, and not in a mocking way. She finally broke her forwards-fixed stare and looked down at the shorter girl racing to stay by her side. “Oh no, my dear, I merely ask because I too once worked in the Lounges. How long did you last? Did you join the Magisterium after your results, in Belara, or…?”

Tialya could hardly lie, or fail to respond. “L-Lynara. I guess I lasted, oh, seven weeks, altogether –“

“Oh, ho-ho! And back in my day they called me a quitter! Six years, I gave them! Six years of ‘so-and-so ties his shoelaces wrong’ and ‘so-and-so owns prize-winning snails’…”

So it’s not just me, Tialya realised. I’ve done the right thing, then, getting out of that department early.

“I wanted to last six months, at least,” she explained. “When I went to the interview –“

“Let me guess – they told you that they’d consider you for promotion. I was there six years, Tialya. Have a guess how many times I was promoted.”

The girl raised her eyebrows. “Really? Never?”

Najraine graced her with a smug grin. “Not once. And I was their best workhorse, trust me. I proved time and again I could handle more responsibility… Being a waywatcher, it’s more fulfilling. You have a job, a real job to do. You’ll find out, when you get to the apprenticeship stage. You’ll probably get to experience your first sneak, then.”

Tialya felt her face crease in concern. “How often does that actually happen, though? I mean, we’re safe, aren’t we? Because no one mentioned anything about field-training –“

Najraine scoffed. “Of course you’ll be safe – you can just retreat across the bridge and nothing’s going to get you. You can go for the training, if you want to apply for one of the magicrux positions at some point – not that I’d recommend it.” She rolled her green eyes. “But the darkmages don’t attack us, not here. That would truly be the height of folly. Even the Chaos-Makers only tried it the one time, and they got stopped before they reached the grounds. No, unfortunately most sneaks are usually little more than ex-students pilfering research-texts… sometimes banned individuals who want to start riots… Nothing too dangerous. A quick arrest and it’s all over… Hmm – that is something you’ll be expected to do yourself. You’d be comfortable with arresting someone?”

Was she? She’d never thought about actually having to confront someone. The way it’d been described to her, the way it’d always seemed to her, waywatchers were glorified doormats. They were there to let people in, not turn them away. She’d never once seen them stop someone from proceeding, in all her years at the Maginox as one of the pupils.

Not that this was a problem for Tialya. Being a doormat was safe – so long as the doormat was glorified, she was fine with it. Arresting people, though…?

Najraine clearly took her silence for the self-doubt it was, and continued, “It really isn’t difficult at all, you know. Do I look like the combative kind? Oh no no.” Then the veteran looked down at her archly. “You are aware of the Chronom Codex, aren’t you?”

Tialya nodded quickly, eagerly. Rellie had told her to revise that particular tome because Najraine, her mother, was always quoting from it like it was the Book of Kultemeren or something. It had cost Tialya a fair chunk of her savings merely buying the reagents but, finally, something had paid off.

“The Grace of the Fountain-Dancer; I love that section,” the girl gushed.

“A sublime working,” Najraine replied in an approving tone. “’Shall we Dance as they Danced the night the world was born aflame, the night the fire was the Dance and the Dance was all that was?’ Are you practised with it?”

“The heightened reactions?” Tialya thought back to her poor execution of some of the techniques, and gave a hesitant nod.

Najraine smiled. “And how many?”

“How many what?”

“My dear, the dandelion seeds of course…” She said it like it was obvious.

“Oh.” Tialya felt her face flush and she lowered her head, setting her eyes on the path in front of her feet. The first exercise in the assessment section bade candidates blow the seeds into the wind and try to catch them all. “Over thirty of them, but –“

“Well, that’s a good start. We have the bindlaces –” the older mage reached into a fold of her robes and pulled a thin cord from a pocket; it looked like a black, twelve-inch shoelace, but something about the way it hung in the light breeze without swaying made it appear heavy “– which will fix their hands together when applied correctly. Don’t worry – no one moves as fast as a hundred seeds on a windy day.”

Tialya made herself laugh.

It didn’t look so bad. She could arrest someone, she decided. She could do it. She would do it.

Her future-lines would actualise, damn it…

They reached the bridge, and Najraine introduced Tialya to Hinnefer, or Nefie as she preferred – a tall girl just a few years older than her with straight, long red hair and a bit of a bored sound to her voice. Najraine and Nefie relieved the current guards on duty of their seeing-rods and took over the watch, Tialya hanging around, keeping an eye on what they were doing.

Which amounted to pretty much nothing. A few visitors came and went, and she got to watch the three-stage ritual: the identity, authorisation and behaviour scryings that were charged into the rods. It all looked simple-enough. She wondered idly how boring it must’ve been in the workshops where they recharged the staves.

Between the rituals they discussed the Incursion, of course, and Nefie mentioned something about vampires murdering a group of magisters. Tialya had little to contribute on either score – she didn’t know any proper, licensed magisters to ‘accidentally overhear’, and she’d spent the Incursion under her bed with her quilt and pillows around her as makeshift defences. Instead of joining in the conversation she passed the time padding from one foot to the other, keeping her arms folded to help fend off the worsening evening chill.

She stared up at the Maginox. The vast structure in which she still longed to spend her days, surrounded by her friends.

Why didn’t I try harder?

Instead of studying advanced magic, she’d spent the previous night worried about the anti-enchantments she’d have to undergo, wondering what it would be like to be subjected to a spell like that. But it’d been over in thirty seconds, thanks to a very handsome half-elf-looking fellow back in the arched building that served as the Maginox’s magister-barracks. Najraine had said it was compulsory before starting a shift when she’d tried to wheedle out of it, and she understood the reasons why, but that hadn’t stopped her trying. To her immeasurable relief she had barely felt anything when he did it, and couldn’t feel anything at all straight-away afterwards.

No, it was the rest of the night stretching out before her, an inestimable landscape of time, that she should have feared.

She liked to stand, but it was boring, standing around all the time like this. Was this all waywatching had to offer? It was more money than the seer-work, and the rotas apparently permitted day-shifts, but where was the free cheese? The comfy chairs?

The added responsibilities… was it even worth it, changing her role like this?

Maybe I should go back… Stick it out to the six-month-marker… See if Najraine’s even right, I mean, she could be full of drop for all I know, couldn’t she…?

Tialya was unconsciously shrugging her shoulders a couple of times a minute and the material of the armour rustled whenever she did, a little metallic zing sound. Clearly she was making a nuisance of herself because after the hundredth time or so, Nefie turned to her. “You’ll get used to the shoulder-things after a few years,” the redhead said with a pointed look at Najraine, “so I’m told.” She rolled her own shoulders just as pointedly.

Najraine just chuckled humourlessly, “Ha-ha-ha.”

“Sorry,” Tialya said, slumping somewhat – the damned things didn’t seem to sit quite right, perpetually feeling like they were threatening to slip off forwards or backwards. She was half-convinced they’d deliberately strapped them up loose or given her a man’s pauldrons instead as a test of her resolve. She just looked down at the ground, doing her best to keep from moving her shoulders again, doing her best to keep from sighing…

“Greetings, champion,” Najraine said, tapping her rod on the ground.

Tialya raised her head, startled out of her reverie.

The champion – the markings upon the robe, the mask – she knew this archmage. It was one of her favourites!

A champion! And one of the truly famous ones at that. This wasn’t some newcomer; this was one of the greatest magic-users in the world. The pattern on the robe – the iconic mask…

This champion… Popular, well-loved amongst the people. They’d earned their place, this one. A person to look up to, emulate. The stitching on the robe was recognised by children across the city, who begged their mummies and daddies for the same logos on their own clothing. The wholesome mask, surely hiding nothing but a benevolent expression, kindly and charming.

Tialya looked into the archmage’s eyes, shadowed through the slits, and she froze in shock.

This was an aspect to waywatching she hadn’t considered. Checking the future-lines of teachers and students, magisters and suspects, that was one thing.

Getting to meet champions up close, speak to them… Checking the future-lines of a champion… That was something else entirely.

“Greetings,” the archmage replied to Najraine, tone predictably pleasant, jovial. The voice was marked with the expected accent, a soft (and altogether becoming) lilt to the cadence that emanated from the partially-hidden lips. “I’m here to see Mistress Henthae, and that Zakimel bloke. Prearranged appointment.”

She did her best to prevent her eyes from widening.

“Very well.” Najraine raised the butt of her seeing-rod off the ground and tapped it once more, then shifted it in her hands, turning her half-smiling face to Tialya. “Would you want to have a try?”

There was a moment of consternation, in which Tialya admitted to herself that she did want to, desperately wanted to – but that she was afraid, the pressure of doing it for the first time, in front of a champion… What if she made a mess of things? What if the first impression she made was a terrible one? She might have to see this champion a dozen times a month, and, never mind that, they could tell, tell their friends about her, about the waywatcher who screwed up…

But her body seemed to know what she wanted better than she did. Despite her terrified inner monologue, she found herself eagerly reaching out to take, almost wrest, the rod from Najraine’s hand.

The champion smiled – she could see that much around the mask.

A few deep, reassuring breaths later, Tialya had successfully entered the trance, the staff levelled in the champion’s direction and spinning. Unravelling lines, one by one.

While Najraine and Nefie continued to exchange pleasantries with the archmage, Tialya stared into the depths of a nightmare.

There was no explaining what she saw. There was nothing that could put right the way it broke Tialya’s mind. She would have to live with it for the rest of her life.

The future. It was coming, unavoidable.

She was supposed to be checking for the champion causing trouble. She was supposed to be ensuring no harm came of the champion’s visit to Mistress Henthae.

How to explain, what she saw, when all she saw was bodies burning, when all she heard was the scrape of metal against the walls and floors and ceilings – the stench of barbecued flesh filling her nostrils, the dread of the vision squirting bile into her throat. How to explain… to the others…

She lowered the rod, gaping at the archmage.

Words shuddered free of her tongue, shrill sounds leaping of their own mad volition into the air.

“What are you?”

The champion smiled again, looking a little abashed.

“My, you have a keen eye, don’t you, newbie?” The champion turned the apologetic smile on the others, even blushing appropriately. “I’m sorry – this happens sometimes. The anti-glamourings you’ve each undergone will make the process slightly painful, but please don’t be alarmed – I’m not going to destroy the Maginox today. Rest assured, you won’t remember a thing. We’ll link it to the diviners who look at you.” The eyes behind the mask moved back to Tialya, lips twitching, giving now the vaguest suggestion of a smirk. “Except you. You will remember how you inconvenienced me. The feeling of this encounter. Nothing more. You shan’t speak of it.”

It was like when she thought she’d seen someone in the mirror behind her – when she’d spotted some humanoid shape, squatting in the shadows in the corner as she entered her room –

The fear rose, peaked, and crashed, vanishing all inside the same instant or two, leaving nothing but a cold emptiness behind as she resolved the confusion.

It was just the curtains moving in the wind that had caught the mirror’s reflection – the clothes she threw on the chair in the corner. Phantoms and killers were rare and she’d just fallen prey to a self-prank, a joke on nobody but her, with only herself as a witness –

Memories and agonies peaked and troughed, coming and going through her head as they wished. They had all the keys; all her doors were open…

Before a handful of seconds had passed she came back to herself.

There was nothing that could put right the way it broke Tialya’s mind, but it had.

She would have to live with it for the rest of her life, but she wouldn’t.

The past. It was gone, never to be recovered.

She came back to herself and all she was left with was the feeling – the feeling that…

She felt smaller, like someone had torn away her ego’s legs at the knees, left it wobbling on the pebbles with stones cutting into raw stumps. She felt the spluttering helplessness that comes of inhaling icy vapour deep into unprepared lungs.

She had somehow done wrong, broken some unspoken, unspeakable Truth.

“But – I’m – I’m so –“

She looked up at Najraine and Nefie, looked at the champion, feeling all over her skin that she’d messed up.

“The rod,” Najraine prompted, her voice cold. “The third…”

Hurriedly, Tialya thumped the butt of the staff into the ground.

“Thanks, guys,” said the archmage airily, moving between them to cross the bridge at a leisurely pace.

Najraine retrieved her rod, and she and Nefie resumed their conversation, but Tialya turned to follow the masked figure with her eyes as it crossed the moat.

I’m so – so sorry…

The girl longed to throw the thought at the champion, beg forgiveness for what she’d done. But the moment was gone to speak up, and her chance was past.

Waywatching was hard, and she’d put both feet wrong already. By this point, Tialya had already decided: it wasn’t for her.

Her destiny was still out there, somewhere, waiting for her. She’d go back to the Lounge of Seercraft – that was what she would do. Six months wasn’t so long to wait. After all, Najraine probably didn’t know what she was talking about.