Chương 180: Chapter 175. Two Weeks In The Life Of

Between holding a magus's seat, teaching at Xerkes, and giving over his quieter hours to the unhurried planning of an emperor's downfall, busy was a generous word for the shape of Adom Sylla's life. For the better part of the next two weeks, it ran something like this. His mornings, more often than not, began in the dark. He'd wake before dawn, slip out of a sleeping house, and walk across the waking city to Beth's. He went more often than the lessons strictly called for, if he was honest.

And somewhere in the middle of all that frustration the two of them had become, improbably, friends. She was prickly and cryptic and enjoyed his bafflement far too much. He was impatient and proud and asked too many questions she had no intention of answering. But they laughed at the same things, and that, it turned out, was enough to build something real on. He'd come to like her a great deal. She'd sit him on a cushion in her front room and set him to finding the door into the Halls on his own.

To help him along she'd brewed a thing he came to privately hate: a small bitter draught that shut off every one of his senses for the space of a minute — no sight, no sound, not even the weight of his own body, nothing left but his mind in the dark. The theory was sound. Strip the world away, and nothing remained to drown out the threads. But the theory did not translate into a single success across two solid weeks, He reached the threshold twice and lost it both times.

Once he got a foot across and came back shaking. But not once, in all those dawns, did he cross into the Halls under his own power. Draught or no draught. Each time he failed she pronounced it excellent progress, in a tone that left him no way to know whether she meant it, then fed him tea and turned the talk to her flag, or the weather, or the wrongness of how the young dressed these days. But his time with Beth was training, and training didn't count as rest. Adom counted the hours among the good ones anyway.

There were his magus duties besides. Postings to approve, reports to countersign, requisitions to initial: the quiet endless machinery of the Magisterium, grinding along and wanting his name on it at regular intervals. Dull work, most of it. But the staff who actually kept the place running had warmed to him over the months in a way the Council never quite had, and a dull afternoon went easier among people who waved him through and saved him the good chair. Then Xerkes.

Adom lectured three days a week to a hall that was always full — fuller, he suspected, than the material strictly earned. A third of them had enrolled to watch the Ghost of Arkhos write on a chalkboard, and were visibly crushed to find he mostly assigned reading. The ones who stayed past the novelty were worth the trouble, and one or two were even good.

It was exam season besides, which meant evenings lost to a leaning tower of papers and the particular despair of reading the same wrong answer forty times to a question he'd been so sure he'd asked clearly. Two afternoons a week he sat with Professor Kim, over runework on paper, and over everything else in practice: the wars waged by Sundar, the Emperor's accounts, the slow labour of mapping a man's weak points from a long way off. The rest of his training he fit in where he could.

Elementalism fought him hardest of all. Seeing the elementals had never been the trouble; Arkhos was actually thick with them, and [Revealer's Eyes] showed them to him plainly, drifting down the streets and pooling in the corners of old buildings, bright little knots of living wind and water and flame that most people walked straight through and never knew it. So Adom could see them fine, but getting one to talk to him was the problem. He tried.

He'd find one idling near the practice yard and strike up a conversation, and most of the time it ignored him. Now and then one would deign to answer — and then, almost at once, grow bored of him and wander off mid-sentence in search of better company. Cyrel, who could get a sulking fire-spirit eating out of her palm inside a minute, told him not to take it personally. Elementals were proud, and old, and had no particular reason to care about him yet. Give it time, she said. Be patient. They come around.

So he gave it time. And then there was the [Resonance], which he trained with Bennu, who took to the role of instructor with insufferable relish, on the grounds that it was his fire, after all. Our fire, Adom kept correcting, to no effect whatsoever. It was working. He could tell, because it had begun to leak. Small things first. When his focus slipped — mid-sentence, mid-thought, once memorably mid-bite at dinner — a curl of flame would lick up off his knuckles and gutter out before anyone but Bennu caught it.

The white in his hair had crept a shade further than it used to sit. The blue of his eyes had shifted too, just slightly: a touch brighter and warmer, with the faint flicker of fire behind them now that a month ago hadn't been there. And he also felt lighter, in a way he couldn't quite put words to, as though some small share of his own weight had quietly decided it was optional. He wrote to Morgana, too.

Cyrel had agreed to lend Kalithras to the task — her wind-elemental could cross the veil where no ordinary courier could — so letters passed back and forth between Arkhos and Ithrenaar a few pages at a time. Morgana wrote back warmly, and often. She'd taken the Archmage's decision in stride: the waiting made sense to her, she said, since she was still building her own strength, and these things were never won in a single season. There were letters of a stiffer sort, too.

He kept up with Veyslav, newly and uneasily a king, who still wrote as though startled to find a crown on his own head and signed everything with a formality Adom suspected was half armour. The alliance was young and wanted tending. So he tended it. Not all of it was pleasure. Most of it, in honesty, was work: lessons, lectures, papers, and the long quiet machinery of the thing he was building underneath the rest. But when an hour came free — and now and then one did — Adom always knew exactly where it went.

It went home. To dinners with his parents, who had stopped asking what he did with his days and simply seemed glad he turned up for the food. To Ada, who'd decided that having a famous brother was deeply unjust, since none of it excused her from practising her letters. To Bennu, who counted every spare minute of Adom's as his by right. To Zuni, who counted nothing and asked for nothing — bar the occasional sugar — yet somehow ended up curled in Adom's lap most evenings regardless. And it went to his friends.

Not that there were so few; but the four he was closest to, the four who were actually around, were Eren, Sam, Damus, and Karion. Naia was off Arkhos entirely just now; Gus likewise; and Mia, somehow busier than any of them, turned up so rarely these days she might as well have been on the far side of the archipelago, which — last he'd heard — she more or less was. Eren was Gaius's apprentice and, to Adom, half student and half little brother, and still lit up whenever Adom had an evening to spare him.

The other three were home from Ithrenaar and folded straight back into ordinary life, as though they hadn't, between them, just promised three great houses to a war no one had yet declared. They played Krozball badly, argued about nothing, and wasted whole evenings, though the evenings were the better for being wasted. He wore his pointy hat everywhere these days, for fear of getting the Kazimir treatment again. He'd learned that particular lesson well enough. There was business to mind, too.

Wangara ran itself well enough most days, but Adom still met with Cass when the guild needed a steadier hand than coin alone could give, and she kept the parts of it he had no patience for moving smoothly without him, always protected by the golem Adom assigned to her. Valiant ran the quieter work. The mouse had also, somewhere in all this, acquired a dog: the scraggly little part-sunhound that had sniffed out the changeling for them.

Valiant insisted on calling him Reaper, but the dog answered only to Otis — though if there was food involved, Hey would do just as well. Speaking of the changeling: the brothers were free now, both of them, and had been told to do the hardest thing Adom could ask of anyone in their position. Live normally. Stay quiet. Wait, while better heads than his worked out what was to be done with two people the world wasn't built to account for. And he made time, often, for Kern & Filli's Forge.

Partly for the company, and partly for something closer to wonder. Filli was barely older than Adom and already the youngest master smith anyone could remember, and every visit there was a new marvel cooling on the bench: an alloy that shouldn't have held, a folding pattern no one had tried, some property of a metal he'd simply felt with his hands and then proven on the anvil.

Adom knew where the boy was going, even if no one else did yet; that he was watching the early, soot-streaked work of a name the world would one day speak with reverence. It still caught at him, every time and Filli, for his part, had taken to selling Wangara the rights to a discovery here and there, which made them both happy: the guild got something genuinely new, and Filli got to keep buying better steel to ruin in more interesting ways.

Kern, his old master, still dropped in to make sure he hadn't burned the place down. It was a full life. A good one, even. Fuller and warmer by a wide margin than the life he'd had the first time around, when there'd been only survival, and no room in it for any of this. Adom was busy past all reason, and most days he didn't mind in the least. Then, some fourteen days after the business in the street, a letter came from Biggins. It reached him in the middle of an exam, which was a very Biggins sort of timing.

He stood at the front of the hall, watching a room of students labour over their papers, when a small bird of folded blue paper sailed in through a high window. It circled the hall once and came to rest on his desk, where it unfolded itself. Come by the shop when you've a moment, it read, in Biggins's looping hand. I've paid a call on our two sleeping friends. There are things you'll want to hear. Adom refolded it before any curious eye could get a proper look. Our two sleeping friends.

Meaning the man and the woman from the street. Meaning the Order. He checked the clock. The exam had the better part of two hours left in it, and he was not, dragon or no dragon, about to become the professor who walked out on a hall mid-paper. So he stayed. He saw it through to the last scratch of the last pen, gathered the papers, fended off the small delegation that wanted to relitigate question six, and locked the hall behind him.

Only then did he pull his hat down low and set off across Arkhos, toward the Weird Stuff Store. The bell over the door gave its bright cascade. Thessarian took one look at his face and waved him straight through to the back. Biggins was waiting with no tea laid out, which told Adom more than anything he could have said. The dragon didn't skip the tea for small news. Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

"Ah, young Adom! Sit, sit." Biggins didn't look up from the teacup he was polishing.

"Tea?"

"You don't have any—""There's no tea! I was being polite." The stranger he got, the worse the news. Adom had learned that much. Biggins set the cup down in the exact centre of a saucer that didn't match it.

"I had a conversation with your two sleepers. A thorough one. If you take my meaning." He chuckled to himself, pleased, as though at a small private joke. Interrogation, then. Adom decided not to ask what it had involved.

"They're alive, mind," Biggins added, raising a finger.

"Both of them. I didn't kill the poor dears."

"I didn't think you had."

"No?" He looked faintly delighted.

"Ah. Good, good." These past two weeks, the dragon had been odd with him. Worried, almost, in a way Adom hadn't been able to place at the time — fussing over his state of mind, of all the things to fuss about, and forever steering the talk back round to how important it was that he keep himself level and whole. Was that what this was, then? Was Biggins afraid of tipping something over in him that wouldn't right itself again?

"Mr. Biggins," Adom said at last, deciding to be direct about it.

"Whatever it is, you can tell me. I can take i—""Anyway! No sense chewing yesterday's bread. On we go."" Okay…" This did not look okay. Biggins folded his hands.

"I came away with a name. Someone named Mephtilem." Oh boy. Oooh boy. Adom went still.

"... The Chancellor."

"You're looking a touch grey, young Adom. Tea?" He reached for the pot to pour, then peered into it, mildly astonished.

"Oh. No tea. Whoever drank all the tea." Ignoring him, Adom's mouth had gone dry.

"He's the man behind the massacre, Biggins. Morgana's family. He's the reason for Castle White. He's the one I'm going to bring down."

"Ah." Biggins nodded slowly.

"Then you'll want to know he's planning the very same for you. You've been ever so quietly arranging his downfall. And he, by everything I prised loose from those two, has been just as quietly arranging yours. Isn't that neat? I do love it when a thing is neat." Adom said nothing.

"Also, he isn't a man. Whatever chair he keeps, under the face, he's a demon. Your sleepers were certain of it, and badly frightened to be, which is the most reliable certainty there is." He picked the cup back up, not because it needed it.

"They've been taking the rotted branches of your Order for their own these last years. Wearing them. Your Chancellor's one of theirs." He gave Adom a glance.

"I did say. Nearer the hearth than the door."

"You think he suspects our coup?"

"I think they suspect what you are. The Architect, come round again. Not certain, but suspicious enough to want you gone before you ripen into the thing they're afraid of." He set the cup down.

"That's the whole of why I called you. They know you now. They're watching. And they'll move on you before long, one way or another. Soon."

"Then we should—""Do very little. Not yet, anyway." Biggins set the cup down.

"And put the world back down off your shoulders while you're at it. I can see you hauling it up there. Doesn't suit you."

"Biggins—""Listen first, my boy. Worry after." He held up a finger.

"They won't come at you in the open. Not here, not soon. To do that, they'd need to be sure of two things at once." A second finger.

"One — that you really are the thing they're afraid of. Two — that they can get past me to reach you." He folded both down.

"They're not sure of either."

"Past you, huh?"

"Why, yes." For a breath, as he leaned forward, the whimsy suddenly went out of him.

"Demons don't go near a dragon if they can help it. We hunted them, a long time ago, and we were very good at it." He held Adom's gaze as he said it, and for that moment he didn't look like the daft old shopkeep at all. Just very old, and very certain.

"Bah!" he said, leaning back, bright again in an instant.

"So if they ever do come knocking here, they'll find me home. Bad luck for them. I wouldn't lose sleep over anything that has to come through a dragon just to get started." That part, at least, was real. It steadied Adom.

"And I'm not leaving you to handle it alone," Biggins added, waving the idea off like a fly.

"Out of your head with that!"

"Then what do you want me to do?"

"Almost nothing, for now. Just understand one thing before you go." He leaned in again.

"You're visible now. That's what's changed." Adom waited.

"For years you were a clever boy who climbed fast, and the world's crawling with clever boys who climb fast, so nobody who mattered looked twice, but they're looking now. To them you're a possible Architect. Possible, not proven. But that's enough to earn you a watcher or three."

"You keep circling the Order," Adom said.

"Why?"

"Because it's about to matter. A great deal, and soon." Biggins shrugged.

"It's been a distant thing in your life so far. A story, mostly. Now that's ending. Better you hear it from me now than learn it the hard way later."

"... So what's the plan?"

"We prepare, I suppose. The two of us." He plucked an invisible thread from the air and flicked it away.

"We look at where a knife could come from, and we see to it that it can't. No running about, no alarms. Because the Chancellor will try something before long; his sort can't leave a loose thread alone. But trying and managing it are two different things. He's far less sure of you than you are of him." He tapped the saucer, pleased with himself.

"Which is the one good thing in this whole business. They suspect you, but they don't know." This time, it was Adom who leaned forward.

"Suspect on what grounds? What are they matching me against?" Biggins counted them off on his fingers.

"A boy who rose too young. Made magus before he'd any right to. Which implies he knew things he shouldn't. Did things grown men die failing at, and made all of it look easy." He counted back over his fingers, just to be sure he'd left none out, then nodded to himself, satisfied.

"Those are a regressor's marks, young Adom. You've got the whole set."

"That's not proof."

"No. And that's exactly the good news." Biggins said.

"There's a second half, and you're missing it, as far as anyone watching can see. The Architect always comes with a phoenix. Always. And to every eye on you, you haven't got one." Adom went still as it came together.

"The two in the street," he said slowly.

"They weren't sent to kill me."

"No. To push you." Biggins nodded, almost approving.

"Back you into a corner hard enough that, if there were a phoenix hiding somewhere in you, it might come out where they could watch it happen." Then his head tipped.

"Which makes me wonder. You don't still catch fire at odd moments, do you? Little flames. When your mind wanders off without you?" Adom said nothing to that, but it was answer enough.

"... Ah." Biggins sighed.

"Well. Stop that. Or at the very least keep it indoors, not in a lecture hall with three hundred people watching you do it."

"I can't control it. That's the problem."

"No." Not comforted.

"No, I don't suppose you can." A quiet settled between them.

"…Mr. Biggins… you keep talking like you already know how this ends" Adom said.

"That they won't move yet. That you'll still be here when they do, and that none of it will be enough to kill you." He hesitated.

"Don't… don't take this the wrong way, but why are you so certain?"

"I don't know how it ends." Biggins looked off at nothing a moment, the cup back in his hand.

"I only know that it does end. And that it ends well. The road there I can't draw you a map of, but the ending I'm sure of."

"That's not much to go on."

"No." Then the lightness went out of him all at once, like a lamp turned low.

"Listen to me a moment, will you?" He set the cup aside.

"Put the weight down, young Adom. I mean it, and not as a joke this time. You walk about as if you've got the whole world on those shoulders." He paused. Then, with a small tilt of his head, he reconsidered.

"Well. In fairness, I suppose you rather do." A small shrug.

"But still." This got an involuntary chuckle out of Adom.

"You've always been this way. Heavy and braced for the worst before it's even through the door, certain the floor's about to drop out from under you any second." Biggins' eyes stayed on Adom, steady but not unkind.

"That habit will cost you more than any demon ever will, if you let it run you. So here's the one thing I'll ask of you, and I'll say it plain. When you can't see how a thing ends — and most of the time you won't — keep walking anyway. When the road goes black ahead and there's not a scrap of good in sight, keep walking. And believe, the whole way down it, that it ends well." He could fight as long as he saw a path. Even a thin one. What he could not understand was believing there would be one before it appeared.

So he asked, "Why?"

"Because it does. Nearly always, in the end." He said it like the simplest fact in the world.

"The night feels endless when you're standing in the middle of it. That's its great trick. But it isn't endless. Walk long enough, and sooner or later, you will find yourself smiling at the sunrise." He looked at Adom a moment longer.

"People only ever miss it because they gave up a mile short." A quiet settled between them. Then Biggins reached down, and set a steaming cup of tea in front of him. Adom stared at it.

"... Where did that come from?"

"Hm." Biggins peered down at the cup as though it had surprised him too.

"Took its time, didn't it?" he said."I was beginning to think it had lost its way." He nudged the saucer a careful half-inch, apparently satisfied by this.

"And yet, here it is." A small smile touched his mouth.

"Warm and everything." That was all he said about it.

"Drink it, and get along home, my boy. You've a face like a wet funeral, and you're putting me off my work." Adom drank. It was very good. And sitting there with the warmth of it in his hands, he understood the thing the old dragon had just told him, all over again. Without a word this time. He left the shop lighter than he'd walked in and continued through the streets with a warm feeling in his chest.

He was still smiling and considering whether to stop by the Academy early to review his lesson plans or head straight home to check on Ada and Bennu when a flash of familiar red hair caught his attention. Adom looked closer through the crowd and confirmed his suspicion. Sam was walking about fifty feet ahead of him, moving slowly along the main thoroughfare. His head was down, hands shoved deep in his pockets, completely oblivious to the world around him. A grin spread across Adom's face.

Perfect timing for a little scare. Adom activated a minor spell, dampening his footsteps and blending more naturally with the crowd around him. Sam was walking slowly enough that it was easy to keep pace while staying in his blind spots. The red-haired mage seemed lost in thought, barely paying attention to where he was going. That made this almost too easy. Adom crept closer, timing his approach with the natural ebb and flow of foot traffic.

A cart full of vegetables rolled between them, providing perfect cover for his final approach. When the cart passed, Adom was close enough to reach out and touch Sam's shoulders. He waited for the perfect moment as Sam was stepping around a small group of chattering Academy students, and struck.

"BOO!" Sam jumped about three feet straight up, spinning around mid-air with his hands already weaving the opening gestures of what looked like a very dangerous combat spell. His face went through a rapid succession of expressions: shock, fear, recognition, and then annoyance. Adom burst out laughing.

"It's me, it's me! Don't incinerate me."

"Adom?" Sam's hands dropped, the half-formed spell dissipating into harmless sparks.

"You—" He stopped mid-sentence, and some of the tension went out of his shoulders.

"Hey." The laughter died in Adom's throat immediately. Something was wrong. Very wrong. Sam's response had been all off—too quiet and subdued. And now that Adom was looking properly, he could see that his friend's eyes were red. Though, not the red of someone who'd been surprised or startled, but the puffy, irritated red of someone who'd been crying. Recently.

"Were you crying?" Sam turned his face away immediately, wiping at his eyes with the back of his sleeve in a gesture that was both automatic and futile.

"It's nothing. Don't worry about it." But Adom was already worrying about it. Sam rarely cried. In all the years they'd known each other, through Academy stress and failed experiments and romantic disasters and the general chaos of growing up, Adom could count on one hand the number of times he'd seen Sam actually cry. And never in public.

"Sam." Adom stepped closer, his voice dropping to something more serious.

"What's going on?" Sam tried to hide his face further, angling his body away, but his shoulders were trembling slightly. When he spoke, his voice was barely audible over the street noise around them.

"It's my mother." This felt like a physical blow. Sam's mother had been in a coma for years now, ever since the magical accident that had nearly killed her when Sam awakened to magic. She'd been stable for so long that Adom had almost... almost forgotten.

"What..." Adom's mouth felt dry.

"Is she..."

"No. Not yet." Sam's voice cracked on the words. They stood there in the middle of the busy street, people flowing around them. Adom waited, giving his friend the time he needed to find the words. Sam finally took a shuddering breath.

"The healers called me in this morning. They said…" He stopped, swallowed hard, then tried again.

"They said her condition has gotten worse. Her body is shutting down." Another pause. Sam was staring at the ground now, unable or unwilling to meet Adom's eyes.

"They don't think she'll live another month."