Experience Cannot Be Applied

The saltback’s claw came down where Adam Kowal had been standing and split the crust in a white spray of salt.

By then Adam was ten yards to its left. Stepping, the short blink every battlemage got at Awakening, never felt like moving. One moment the claw filled his view; the next he stood somewhere else, boots skidding on the crust, his stomach still back where he’d left it. Most battlemages spent years learning not to throw up after one.

The seam had no light of its own. Its one trait, listed in the Seam Authority’s register and repeated by the System at the door, was Lamps fail. Headlamps died within a minute in here; flares lasted ten seconds. The salt glowed a faint, sick green where it had cracked. Otherwise the only light under the black sky came from Adam’s sword.

Most storm casters said a word to Sefa the Tempest, the storm goddess among the Nine, before they cast. Adam saved his breath, since the gods answered nobody below Tier VI.

He let the storm run down the blade. Lightning crawled off the guard with a sound like tearing canvas and lit the whole flat for half a second. He saw the white plain, the snapped stumps of towers somebody had built before their world died, the saltback swinging its head toward him. It was the size of a delivery truck, a crab that had decided to stand up, with a shell of layered salt-glass and two claws that could each close around a man. The register put it at level 297, a Tier III keystone rated for a party of five.

Adam had brought a party of three. They were sitting at the entrance.

The saltback charged. Adam waited until he could smell it, brine and hot stone, before he stepped again. This time he went in instead of away and landed under the shelf of its shell with the blade already moving. The edge went into the joint where the left claw met the body. Against salt-glass, steel alone did very little. The spell did the rest.

That was the whole trick of a battlemage. Thrown across a room, a mage’s spell lost force on the way. A battlemage put the spell into the blade and let it ride the strike, so the lightning went in with the steel and came out the far side of the joint. The claw dropped in a shower of molten salt. The saltback screamed, a high grinding note that Adam felt in his back teeth.

The other claw found him before he could step. He had known it would; that was the price of the first cut. His ward took the blow, a skin of mana over his whole body that flared blue-white where the claw struck, but the force still threw him fifteen feet across the crust. He rolled to his feet and checked the damage. The ward had cracked across his ribs and was knitting slowly, drinking mana as it went. Two more hits like that and he would be fighting in his jacket.

He did not intend to take two more hits.

The saltback came on with one claw. Adam ran straight at it and, at the last moment, stepped onto the ridge of its shell. No runner in their right mind went there. The ridge was where it vented its spray. He felt the vents open under his boots and had about a second before the brine came up scalding. He drove the sword down through the gap behind its eyes and emptied the storm into it.

For a second the whole seam was white.

When his eyes cleared, the saltback lay with its legs folded under it, smoking, in a ring of salt that had fused to glass. Far off across the flat, the rest of its brood went quiet. The System’s lines came up in the small, flat voice it used for everyone.

Adam pulled the sword out of the skull and wiped it on his sleeve. He had seen that second line some four thousand times. It no longer made him angry. It made him tired, and that was worse.

The ground shifted under his feet. With its keystone dead, nothing held the seam open. He had about half an hour before it folded shut. It would be back. The Smallman seam broke into the same cellar every few months, always onto the same dead salt flat.

He cut the core out first. It sat behind the brain plate, a crystal the size of a grapefruit and the color of weak tea, still warm. One core like that was worth more than most people in Pittsburgh made in a month. He bagged it with the small cores from the brood he had killed on the way in. The clear board came up while he was tying the bag.

Where the body had fallen, the keystone’s cache pushed up out of the salt: a squat box of black stone that opened at his touch. Inside were two Uncommon Tier III rings and a knife he would sell before he got home. The claw he had let through had cost him the S grade. An S would have made the rings Rare. He enjoyed the hundred percent more than he should have.

The mouth of the seam hung half a mile back, a tall doorway of gray light standing over the salt. His crew had set up a folding table beside it, with three dead headlamps lined up on it like empty bottles. Marcus Reyes, whom everyone called Moss, was a Tier III Bulwark with forearms like bridge cable and a wedding ring he wore on a chain inside his armor. He was eating a sandwich.

“That was quick,” Moss said.

“Twenty-two minutes.”

“You could have let us help.”

“Then you’d want a share.”

“We’d want a share,” Moss agreed. He folded the sandwich paper into a neat square. “Instead we get the day rate for sitting in the dark. I’m not complaining. I just want it on the record.”

The two haulers were already loading the cores. Moss shouldered the heaviest bag himself. He had a mortgage in Greenfield and a wife who preferred him home by dinner.

“Walt was asking about you,” he said as they carried the bags out through the mouth. “He says you haven’t been by the hall since August.”

“I’ve been busy.”

“Doing this.” Moss lifted the bag of cores an inch. “Running the same seam you ran in June, only faster. For experience you can’t use.”

Adam did not answer for a few paces. “Tell him I’ll come by,” he said. Behind them the mouth narrowed to a line of light and closed with a flat pop he felt in his ears.

The Seam Authority’s checkpoint was a trestle table in the old cold-storage cellar under the produce terminal on Smallman Street. Once Adam’s phone found a signal, he paid the crew while the clerk weighed the cores: the day rate he had quoted, which was a good rate for sitting down, plus a small bonus for the speed. Moss looked at the number on his screen and put the phone away without comment. In six years of crews he had never been offered a share of a keystone and had never expected one. He kept taking the work anyway.

The clerk scanned Adam’s license and logged the clear without looking up. On a monitor bolted to the pillar behind her, the Ladder scrolled past in white text on blue.

The clerk put a power-company tag on the bag. By tonight the saltback would be helping to keep the lights on somewhere in Pittsburgh. Fourteen years after the nine gods arrived, nobody at the table found that worth remarking on.

On the monitor, the world’s thousand strongest Classed scrolled past his shoulder. The System put people and seams on the same scale: nine tiers, a hundred levels each. At 99, 199, 299 and every threshold after that, an Ascension Trial opened the way into the next tier. Nobody below Tier IV had made the Ladder for years. Most runners failed the trial that would take them there.

Battlemages stopped there because they had no trial to fail.

Out on Smallman the noon sun hit him like a slap. The Strip was doing its usual Saturday: produce stalls under awnings, a line outside the coffee roaster, a man selling Steelers jerseys out of a van. Adam stood on the curb with his sword across his back and did not open his status. There was no need: it had said the same thing for two years.

He opened it anyway.

The cruel part was that the System was honest about it. Nothing was thrown away. Every point from every kill of the last two years sat in that one figure, which rose every time he did his job well. Whenever he liked, he could look at it. What he could not do was spend a single point.

Most mornings he checked the bottom of the Ladder too. Today the thousandth name had been a Tier IV Duelist from Toronto at level 341, a woman Adam had beaten in under a minute at an Authority exhibition, back when both of them were Tier III. The Duelist was on the list. Adam was not, and as long as he was stuck at 299 he never would be.

Every battlemage anyone had ever heard of, on Earth or on the older worlds, had stopped at 299. Runners called it the Wall. Adam had tried to get over it anyway, and every big payday since had gone into trying. He had taken every Tier III elixir the System allowed, up to its lifetime cap. A Montreal guild had watched him fight for a week at his own expense and told him nothing was wrong with his technique. A cap specialist in Seoul had turned out to be a fraud with a very good website. Meanwhile three runners he had trained alongside had gone through to Tier IV. One of them now made more in a month than Adam had made in his best year.

At nineteen, with the Awakening prompt in front of him, he had known about the ceiling. Everyone had. He had picked the class anyway, sure he would be the one to go through it. He was twenty-eight now and two years stuck at 299. He was still sure.

He closed the window and went to get a drink.

Wexler’s sat on Penn Avenue between a fish market and a shop that sold nothing but hot sauce. It had been a runners’ bar since the Bad Years. Lou, who owned it, had been a Tier II Ranger once and still wore the bracer. The photographs over the bar showed regulars holding up cores as big as their heads. Some of the people in the photographs were dead.

Adam took a stool at the end and ordered a beer. The TV over the taps was showing Ladder Watch, the Saturday show where two retired runners argued about rankings like old men arguing about batting averages. Today they had a guest.

Elliot Shaw was Tier V at twenty-six, an Ice Mage graded Epic. Meridian, the biggest guild in America, put him in front of every camera it could find. He sat very straight in a gray suit, with frost on his cufflinks that never melted under the studio lights.

“People ask me about battlemages all the time,” he was saying. “I understand why. They look incredible on video. But the numbers are the numbers. It’s a trap class. It’s the best class in the world for three tiers, and after that it’s a teaching job for the rest of your life. If you’re eighteen and the prompt offers it, take something else.”

Adam had heard some version of that speech for as long as he had held the class, mostly from lecturers of the Archonate, the network of mage academies that had written the textbooks calling battlemages a trap. Shaw delivered it better than any of them because he believed it.

Lou glanced down the bar and reached for the remote. “Want me to turn this jagoff off, hon?”

Adam shook his head. “Leave it. He’s right about the trap. He’s wrong about the teaching job. I’d be a terrible teacher.”

Lou left it. Two stools down, a man laughed into his drink, saw who had spoken and stopped.

Adam was halfway down the beer when Trent Whitaker took the stool beside him. Trent ran contracts for Ironbridge, the biggest guild in Pittsburgh. He dressed for it in a quarter-zip with the company’s bridge-and-hammer logo on the chest and smelled of good cologne and expense accounts.

“Heard you did Smallman solo,” Trent said. “Twenty-some minutes.”

“Twenty-two.”

“That’s good work.” Trent said it like a man praising a used car he did not mean to buy. “We’ve got a four-day sweep of the Mon’s upper levels starting Thursday. Tier III work, escort and utility. Our boys are Tier IV, but they could use someone who knows how to hold a line. Flat eight thousand.”

“Your boys took ninety minutes on Smallman in March,” Adam said. “With five people. I read the log.”

“They’re Tier IV.”

“They’re slow. You hire them cheap and you never train them, and now you want me to stand behind them for four days and make them look competent. That’s not utility work, Trent. It’s babysitting. Babysitting costs twenty thousand.”

Trent’s smile stayed exactly where it was. Two of his Tier IV runners sat at a table by the window, close enough to hear. Both had stopped talking.

“You’re a two-ninety-niner, Adam,” Trent said, not loudly. “Everybody in this city knows where you stop. Eight thousand was a favor.” He stood and dropped a business card next to Adam’s glass. “It was also the last one.”

He collected his runners on the way out. Adam watched them go without regretting a word of it, though he had needed the eight thousand. Ironbridge controlled half the contracts on the Pittsburgh board. If Trent wanted him off the decent ones, he could manage it by Monday.

“That was stupid,” said a voice from the back booth.

Stosh Wierzbicki had occupied the last booth at Wexler’s for as long as Adam had been coming there. He was a heavy man in his sixties with reading glasses on a cord and a laptop older than the System. He had been fifty when the gods arrived, too old to awaken. He claimed to be glad of it. He sold seam tips: a contract before it was posted, a surge the Authority had not noticed yet, a keystone that had moved. His tips were good about two times in three. Nobody else in the Strip did better than that, so runners paid him.

Adam took his beer over and sat down across from him.

“Trent’s going to freeze you out,” Stosh said.

“Trent can try.”

“Trent will succeed, because he’s Ironbridge and you’re a man with a sword and a temper.” Stosh closed the laptop. “That’s why you should listen to me. I have a seam Ironbridge doesn’t know about.”

“Everyone has a seam Ironbridge doesn’t know about.”

“Not like this one.” Stosh took off his glasses and let them drop on their cord. “It’s up in the hills above the Allegheny, past Sharpsburg, in the woods behind a quarry nobody works anymore. It isn’t registered. It has no tier.”

Adam put the beer down. Every seam on Earth had a tier. The System assigned one the moment a seam opened, and the tier was the first line you saw when you walked in. Runners told stories about the few that had none, in the tone sailors used for rogue waves. They called them orphans. The Authority called them anomalies and fenced off the ones it found. Nobody Adam knew had ever been inside one.

“How do you know it has no tier?” he asked.

“A man who scouts for me found it last month. He went in with two partners. The System gave them an entry line with no tier on it. He saw a hall in there with old swords driven into the walls by the thousand, nothing like any seam he’d ever run, and after ten paces he turned around.” Stosh turned his glass on the table. “His partners didn’t. He was still in their party when they went on without him, and their windows went gray the minute they were out of sight. They’ve stayed gray. No kills posted, no clears, nothing.”

“And they haven’t come out?”

“Not yet.”

“Why not sell it to the Authority?”

“The Authority pays a finder’s fee of five hundred dollars and puts a fence around it.” Stosh shrugged. “You’ll pay more.”

“Why me?”

“Because you’re the only man in this bar who’s desperate enough and good enough at the same time. Most people are one or the other.”

Adam sat back. He knew what a sensible man would say. Walt would say it at length, in the voice he kept for students who wanted to fight above their tier. A sensible man would finish his beer, call Trent on Monday and apologize, and spend another year as the best capped battlemage in western Pennsylvania.

As far as anyone knew, the Wall was a System rule. On the day he reached 299 the System had told him No Ascension path exists for this class. It had held his experience behind the Wall ever since. A seam the System could not place in a tier was a place it could not properly see. In a place the System could not see, its rules might not hold either.

Two people in and none out. Adam weighed that honestly. Most runners who died in seams died because they were not as good as they believed. He was exactly as good as he believed. His clear times on the Authority board proved it.

It was the only door he had not tried. For two years every other door had given him the same answer.

“How much?” Adam said.

Stosh smiled for the first time. “Forty thousand.”

The Smallman contract and its cores had paid thirty-one thousand. Once the crew, the last payment on his sword and the rent on his second-floor apartment in Lawrenceville came out, Adam had a little over eleven thousand in the bank. He also had a knife and two Uncommon rings to sell. His reputation would be worth less by Monday, once Trent Whitaker had finished with it.

“I don’t have forty,” he said.

“I know what you have. Send me what’s in the account, and I’ll carry the rest till you come out.” Stosh tore a page from the pocket notebook he kept for coordinates and held it under the table, where Adam could not read it.

“And if I don’t come out?”

“Then I’m out twenty-nine thousand dollars, and I’ll be very sad about it.” Stosh did not look sad. “Yes or no?”

Adam thought about the number in his status window: two million experience, two years of work, held behind the Wall. “Yes,” he said.

He sent the whole balance from his phone. Stosh checked his own, nodded and slid the page across the table. Adam read the coordinates once and folded the page into his jacket. He finished his beer, paid for it with money he no longer had and walked out into the afternoon twenty-nine thousand dollars in debt, with somewhere to go for the first time in two years.