No One Comes Back from Those

Brenner’s Hall had been a bowling alley until the Bad Years. Walt had pulled up the lanes and laid mats over the boards, but he had kept the scoring monitors that hung above them. Each one showed a member’s name and level in white block letters, though fewer than half of them were lit these days. The monitor over lane one said BRENNER 299. Under it, beside the word HELD, was 4,071,539.

When Adam came in a little after six, Walt was on the mats with his evening students, putting one of them on her back. Priya was a Flame battlemage of twenty-three, Tier I, who had come at him with a burning blade and a great deal of confidence. Walt left his own sword on the rack. He stepped inside her swing, laid two fingers on her wrist and pushed. Walt was a Force battlemage, the plainest of the schools: no fire, no lightning, only a shove of mana in whatever direction the caster chose. Priya left the mat, turned over once in the air and came down flat.

“Your hips turned before the blade,” Walt told her. “I had time to choose a hand. On Tuesday we’ll start with your feet. Go home.”

He was fifty-eight, thick through the chest, with a gray crew cut and a nose that had been broken in a boxing gym long before he had a class. He saw Adam by the door and did not smile.

“Moss said you’d come by,” he said. “I didn’t believe him.”

Walt had awakened at forty-four, on the day the gods arrived, and had been the first battlemage in Pittsburgh to reach 299. That was in year three, when the Bad Years gave anyone with a class more fighting than they could use, and it was the same month the records from the older worlds came through and told everyone what 299 meant. Two years later a nineteen-year-old with a new class and no money had walked into the hall and asked to be taught. Walt had taught him to step without throwing up, to ward before he cut and never to fight above his tier. The first two had stuck.

Once the students had gone, Walt poured bourbon into two coffee mugs in the office, which had been the shoe-rental counter. Adam told him about Stosh’s seam. He kept the location to himself and left out nothing else: the scout, the two partners, the gray windows, the forty thousand dollars. Walt listened without interrupting.

“An orphan,” Walt said when he was done.

“An orphan.”

“No one comes back from those.”

“That’s the point. No one’s come back to say what’s in there.”

“That isn’t a point, Adam. That’s the first line of your obituary.” This was Walt’s lecture voice, the one Adam had last heard at nineteen. “An orphan isn’t a seam. It’s a hole the System can’t account for. It has no tier, so nobody can tell you what’s in it. It doesn’t fold, either. The Authority has watched them stay open for months, so whatever holds it open, nobody’s killed it. Nobody has ever posted a clear from one. The only thing you can do in an orphan is leave, and the people who go in don’t.”

“That’s why I’m going,” Adam said. “Everywhere the System can see, it tells me no.”

“Maybe it can’t see in there because nothing inside lives long enough to be counted.” Across the desk, Walt turned his mug in a slow circle. “I looked for a way past that Wall for longer than you’ve had the class. You think nobody thought of orphans before you? People did. I’ve been to their funerals. It’s suicide, and you paid forty thousand dollars for it.”

“You stopped looking,” Adam said.

It came out harder than he had meant it to. Walt looked past him, through the office window, at the dark lanes and the monitors over them.

“I stopped trying to get myself killed,” he said. “There’s a difference. I hope you live long enough to learn it.”

Adam finished the bourbon. Walt had barely touched his. When Adam stood, Walt stayed behind the desk, looking out at the dark lanes.

“If I don’t come out,” Adam said, “you can have the sword.”

“Is it paid off?”

“As of today.”

That took Walt a moment. “Then I’ll sell it,” he said, “and buy something for a student who listens.”

He drove out at first light on Sunday in a pickup he had bought used in year ten, with a heater he had never fixed. Route 28 ran north beside the Allegheny, the river flat and brown below the guardrail. Past Sharpsburg he turned up into the hills on roads that narrowed until they were gravel. He had not slept much and had not expected to.

The quarry was where Stosh had said, a sandstone cut in the side of a hill with a chain across the access road. By the chain, a rusted sign named a company that no longer existed. A gray Subaru with Ohio plates sat beside it with a month of leaves on its windshield.

Adam parked next to it and did not look inside.

The scout had tied orange tape to the trees, a strip every fifty yards or so, around the rim of the quarry and down into the woods behind it. For half a mile Adam followed the tape through oak and hemlock. Nothing moved in the wet leaves under the trees but him. He had his sword, his headlamp, a bottle of water and two healing potions. He had no mana potions. Mana potions cost money.

The mouth stood in a hollow at the bottom of the slope, below the last strip of tape. Every mouth Adam had ever seen was a doorway of gray light with a low hum to it and an Authority marker planted beside it. This one was white and silent, with no marker anywhere. Leaves had drifted into the hollow from every side, but none of them lay within a yard of it.

His phone still had one bar down in the hollow. He thought about texting Walt, decided there was nothing to say that Walt would want to read and put it away. Walt would have told him to sit on the slope for an hour and watch the mouth first. Adam had been sitting and watching for two years. He checked his ward, loosened the sword in its scabbard and walked in.

Every entry line Adam had ever seen gave a tier. This one had a dash where the tier belonged.

The trait took him a moment longer, until he felt it as an absence. In nine years he had never once had to think about his mana coming back. It came back as steadily as his breath. Here it did not come back at all. Whatever he spent inside would stay spent until he walked out again. Stosh had not mentioned that line. Either the scout had not thought to pass it on, or Stosh had known what it would do to the price.

He stood at one end of a hall big enough to park a train in. His headlamp worked, which after Smallman felt like a luxury. Far ahead, a quarter mile off, white light came through a high arch and lit the floor in front of it. Between him and that light the hall was dark.

The walls were set with swords. They had been driven into the stone point first, row above row from the floor up into the dark, each one sunk to the middle of the blade so that the hilt and half the steel stood out from the wall. There were thousands of them, straight and double-edged and longer than his own. None had rusted, though nothing on them shone. Down the middle of every blade ran a single narrow groove, from the guard to the place where the steel went into the stone.

Adam stopped to look at that. His own sword had the same groove. Smiths cut it for battlemages alone, to give the spell a path down the steel. Every sword in these walls had been made for a battlemage.

He counted his paces without meaning to. At ten he passed the place where Stosh’s scout had turned around. At sixty he found what the partners had left.

A helmet lay on its side in the middle of the floor. Beyond it one of the partners lay face down beside a pack with its straps snapped. He had been a big man in good boots. The dry air had kept him better than a month should have. Three holes had been punched through the back of his jacket, each the width of a finger. His short sword was still in its scabbard. Of the second partner there was no sign. Adam stood very still and tilted his lamp up.

The ceiling was fifty feet above him, set with swords like the walls, their hilts hanging down. A second pack hung among them, turning slowly on a torn strap. There was no wind in the hall.

Dust fell through his beam.

He stepped. The blink took him five yards to the right. Something landed where he had been standing, with a sound like a fistful of dropped pencils, and unfolded off the floor. It was a dusty, colorless gray, with a body no bigger than a large dog’s slung between six legs. Each leg was longer than Adam was tall, jointed in three places and ending in a point. It had no face that he could find.

It came at him with four of the legs at once.

He let the storm into the blade and cut. Lightning cracked off the steel and took two of the legs off at the second joint. The flash lit the whole hall for half a second, long enough for Adam to see the ceiling. Dozens more hung up there among the hilts, legs folded tight under their bodies, everywhere his lamp had not been pointing.

He put the sword through the one in front of him. Above him the others began to drop.

The mouth was sixty yards behind him and the arch most of a quarter mile ahead. If he went back now, he would walk out with nothing and come in again tomorrow under the same ceiling. He went forward.

They came down around him in ones and twos. He kept the blade dark and his ward thin, calling the storm only when a point was already on its way. When one landed in front of him, he went under its legs and opened it up as he passed. Two dropped together on his left. He warded, felt a point skid across the ward over his ribs and stepped clear before the second one struck. Both of them went straight back up the wall. The ward cracked where the point had skidded, and he left the crack open rather than pay to knit it. Every blink cost him mana and every flare of the ward cost more. None of it came back.

By the fifth drop he had seen the pattern. They did not fall on him. They fell on the place he was going to be, a stride or two ahead, the way a quarterback leads a receiver. So he stopped giving them a stride to lead. He walked, stopped short, walked on at a different pace and let the next one land a yard in front of him on empty stone. For a second after it hit the floor it was only a bundle of folded legs, with nothing pointed at him yet. He cut it in half before it could stand. He took the one after it the same way. Neither had cost him anything but the cut.

Halfway to the arch the pattern broke. Two came down at once, one ahead of him and one behind, and the one behind struck before it touched the floor. A point punched through the ward high on his left shoulder. It went through his jacket and laid the skin open across the top of the shoulder, a shallow cut that burned at once. He turned, took the leg off at the joint and drove the blade into the body behind it. The thing folded up on the floor and stopped moving. When he turned back, the one ahead had already gone up the wall.

The System said nothing.

Thirty yards short of the light, three came down at once in a ring around him. He could have blinked clear and had all three at his back for the last thirty yards. Instead he planted his feet, swung the sword in a flat circle and let the storm go all at once. The lightning left the blade in a single sheet and cut through all three at the height of their bodies. When the glare cleared, they lay in a smoking ring on the floor around him. Adam could feel what that cut had cost him, an emptiness that did not fill.

He covered the last thirty yards with blood running warm inside his sleeve. One more dropped in front of him at the edge of the light. He blinked past it into the white.

It did not follow. When he turned with the sword up, breathing hard, he found it standing on its long legs exactly where the light began. He appraised it.

Walt’s third rule did not apply here, he thought. There was no tier in this place to fight above.

After a moment the thing climbed back up the wall. His lamp followed it as far as the ceiling and lost it among the hilts.

Adam stood in the light and took stock. The cut on his shoulder was shallow and would keep. He had two healing potions and a quarter mile of ceiling between him and the mouth, so he did not drink one for a cut that size. Now that nothing was dropping on him, he let the ward knit and felt it drink what little he had left. Less than half the mana he had walked in with remained. None of it would return until he went back out through that hall.

He had killed eight of them without seeing a single line. For two years every kill had come with the same words, some four thousand times over. To see whether the System had counted these kills without telling him, he opened his status.

It was the figure he had read on the curb in the Strip the day before, to the last digit. Whatever these things were, the System had not counted them. If the partners had killed anything in here before they died, their windows would never have shown it.

In Wexler’s he had told himself that most runners died in seams because they were not as good as they believed. The partner on the floor had died with his sword still in its scabbard. How good they were had never come into it. If they had looked up, they might have lived.

He turned toward the arch.

The arch opened onto a round chamber a hundred feet across. Its walls were bare rock without a single sword in them. Higher up, they were lost in shadow. The light came from the middle of the room.

A pillar rose there from the floor and went up out of sight. It was wound in chains of white light as far up as he could see, each link as long as Adam’s forearm, laid so tightly against the stone that the pillar showed only in the gaps. The chains gave off light without heat. They did not flicker or make any sound. The only sound in the chamber came from Adam’s blood dripping off his fingertips onto the floor.

Threads ran out from the chains.

There were more of them than Adam could count. They left the chains at every height and ran out straight in every direction, thin as fishing line and pulled taut. They went into the walls, into the floor and up into the dark. The stone did not stop them, yet out in the hall he had not seen a single one. The whole chamber was strung with them. Wherever he looked, fine bright lines crossed the air, thousands deep, and every one of them led back to the pillar.

The threads passed through him as he walked toward it. He felt nothing, not even a flicker in his ward. One crossed his face and he flinched, but it went through his eye and out the back of his skull with no more weight than a beam of sunlight.

Twenty feet from the pillar he stopped. There was one thread he had not walked through.

It left a chain at about the height of his heart and ran straight to him. It ended at his chest, just below the breastbone. When he moved to his left, it moved with him and stayed fixed to the same spot.

He did not know how long it had been there. It might have been tied to him on the day he reached 299. It might have been there since the prompt at nineteen, when he had looked at the word Battlemage and chosen it.

Nine years in seams had taught him never to touch anything in a room that glowed. He put his hand on the thread anyway. Every other thread in the room had gone through him like light. This one stopped his fingers. It was cold and hard, thinner than a guitar string and tighter. When he closed his hand on it, he felt the pull all the way inside his chest, somewhere behind the ribs.

He looked at the others again, properly this time. Thousands of them ran out of this room to wherever they went. Every one was as straight as his. Every one was pulled as tight.

He did not go any closer to the pillar. The System had given him nothing but dashes for the hall and the things that lived in it, but it might have something to say about this. Adam looked at the pillar and appraised it.