Overchannel

Adam read the line twice.

A seal was something shut on purpose. The Archonate’s textbooks called the top of every tier a threshold: the third was 299, where he had been standing for two years. Bound needed no explaining. The word after it, in parentheses, was all.

On the day he reached 299, the System had told him that no Ascension path existed for his class. He had taken it the way everybody took it, as a law of the world, like gravity or the weather. Nobody wound the weather in chains, though, or tied gravity to a man’s chest with a thread he could hold in his hand. A law of the world could not be broken. A lock could.

Thousands of threads crossed the chamber around him. The appraisal said plainly enough whose they were, but he did not look at any of them except his own. He had not gone twenty-nine thousand dollars into debt on anybody else’s behalf. There was nobody in the chamber to pretend for, so he said it out loud.

“I’m here for mine.”

In a room that size his voice did not come back to him. It went out into the white light and stopped.

To see where the thread went in, he unzipped his jacket and pulled up his shirt. It entered him just below the breastbone and did not come out of his back. There was no wound where it went in, no redness and no scar; his skin closed around it as it would have closed around a hair. He did not know what cutting it would do to him. It went in a hand’s width from his heart, close enough that it might be tied to that.

First he tried the obvious thing. He took the thread in his fist and pulled on it, as he would have pulled out a splinter. It did not move a hair. Behind his ribs something pulled back, low and hard, rooted somewhere in him that he could not reach. He let go before it could do any harm.

From his chest the thread ran straight to the pillar, tighter than any guitar string he had ever tuned. It came out of a single link at the height of his heart without any knot or fastening that he could see, as if the link had grown it.

Anything pulled that tight was halfway to breaking already. In his first summer after Awakening he had worked on hauling crews in the Mon, cutting cargo loose whenever a sled jammed in the tunnels. Every loaded rope he had ever cut had parted before the blade was all the way through.

Plain steel came next, since it cost nothing. He laid the edge of his sword across the thread an arm’s length from his chest and drew it along hard. The blade stopped dead, as it would have on a bridge cable, without leaving so much as a dent.

So he let a little of the storm into the blade.

It was the smallest cast he knew, the flicker he used to light a dark seam for half a second. Lightning ran down the groove to the edge and into the thread, which took it. He felt it go. Where the steel touched, the thread flared white. The brightness ran away from him along the thread to the pillar, where the link it came from flared once and settled. When he lifted the blade, there was a notch in the thread no deeper than the edge of a fingernail.

He watched the notch. Light came down the thread from the link and filled it in from the bottom up. In the time it took him to breathe twice, the notch was gone.

To be sure, he spent a little more. A harder cast cut a deeper notch, which the thread mended in five breaths. That was mana he would not get back, so he stopped there.

The thread could be cut, but the pillar would mend any wound he left alone. He would have to keep the edge in it and the storm running, faster than the light could fill the cut. He might not need to get all the way through. A thread pulled that tight could finish the job for him.

What he had to cut with was less than half a pool, in a seam where none of it came back.

The sensible course was easy to see. Walt would have laid it out in the lecture voice: walk out, borrow money for mana potions and come back next week with a full pool and a pack full of bottles. Adam looked back through the arch at the dark hall. Getting out under that ceiling would cost most of what he had left. Coming back in, he would spend most of a full pool before he had cut anything.

He put his back to the arch. Next week was what he had been telling himself for two years.

If the pool ran out before the thread did, he knew what would happen. Every caster heard about it in the first month. When a pool ran dry, the System did not stop a caster from pulling on it. It let him go on casting and took the difference out of his body. Instructors called it overchanneling. They all told the same stories about it, mostly from the Bad Years. Walt’s was about a Frost caster in Cleveland who had held a surge on a bridge for an hour by himself. When it was over, they found him sitting against the rail, dead, without a wound on him that anyone could find. Most people fainted long before it came to that. The ones who stayed awake were the ones in the stories.

He moved one of the healing potions to the breast pocket of his jacket, where his left hand could find it without looking. Then he took the sword in both hands, laid the edge across the thread and set his feet.

This time he held nothing back.

The storm came down the blade with a crack that filled the chamber and went into the thread under the edge. From his chest to the pillar the whole length of it lit white as the steel began to sink. He felt it go in a hair at a time, as a saw finds its line in hard oak.

Up the pillar, as far as he could see, the chains brightened. A steady stream of light came down his thread from the link to fill the cut from the far side as fast as he could open it. For three or four seconds the edge sat in the thread and went nowhere. When he pushed more of the storm into it, the cut began slowly to deepen again.

The hard part was keeping the edge in the cut. A joint in a shell stayed where it was when he cut it, but the thread hummed under the steel and tried to shrug the blade off. Whenever the edge slid a fraction out of true, the light from the pillar rushed into the part of the cut he had left behind. He set his elbows against his ribs and held the sword as he held one in a bind, with his whole body behind it.

All the while the pool was going. In the hall it had gone a little at a time, a blink here and a crack in the ward there. Now it ran out of him in one long pull that did not stop.

A quarter of the way through, the thread began to sing. It was a thin, high note, the note of a string wound past where it wanted to go, climbing as the edge went deeper.

Somewhere past that point he went by the last place where he could have stopped and still walked out. He had been keeping count of what the hall would cost him, as he kept count of the clock in every seam he ran. He felt the moment go by. After that, if the thread held, he was not walking out at all.

A third of the way through, the pool ran out all at once. A window opened in front of his face.

In nine years the System had never lied to him. He read the line, knew it for the truth and kept pulling. No second warning came. The System had told him once, and once was all it owed him.

Cold came first. It began in his hands and went up both arms into his shoulders, a deep, wet cold, as if the heat of his body were going down the blade with everything else. The storm did not weaken. If anything it came harder, until the thread under the edge burned so white that he had to narrow his eyes against it.

Then his right hand began to burn.

When he looked down, a red line had come up on the back of it, forking as it went. As he watched, the line crossed his wrist and began to climb the inside of his forearm in fine branches, like the scars lightning left on people it struck and failed to kill. He had seen photographs of those, but he had never watched one grow.

His nose began to bleed. He felt it run warm over his lip and did not take a hand off the hilt to wipe it. The cut on his shoulder had nearly stopped bleeding. Now it opened again and soaked his sleeve. Every tooth in his head ached at the root. In both ears a high, thin whine began, and under it the chamber went strangely quiet.

Halfway through, the note of the thread rose too high to hear. He felt it in his breastbone instead, where the thread went in, a fine hard buzz under the skin. The chains had stopped brightening. Whatever the pillar was sending down to mend the cut, it was sending as fast as it could. It was not quite fast enough.

The left half of the room turned red.

It took him a moment to understand that the light had not changed. A vessel had burst inside his left eye. Through the blood, everything on that side of the chamber stood behind red glass.

His heart missed a beat. A few seconds later it missed two, and his legs went out from under him.

He went down hard on both knees. The jolt threw the edge out of true. Before he could find the line again, light from the pillar had rushed into the cut and taken back a finger’s width of it, the work of several seconds gone in one. He found the line and put his weight over the hilt to keep it there. If he stopped now, the pillar would fill the cut in a few breaths, with nothing left in him to start again. By now the red forks had reached his elbow. He could smell scorched meat, the smell of a seam after a lightning kill. It was a moment before he understood that it came from his own arm.

He thought about the Frost caster against the rail in Cleveland. Walt had never said whether the man held the bridge.

Two-thirds of the way through, the thread began to give.

He felt it before he saw it. Under the edge, something that had been rigid went slack. The cut opened a little wider on its own, without his pushing. The pillar had never stopped pulling on its end of the thread. Now that pull was cutting for him.

His sight had narrowed to a tunnel with the thread at the end of it, white on one side and red on the other. Somewhere a long way off, his heart was doing something he did not like. He did not stop to think about it. He leaned his weight on the hilt and pulled the storm up out of himself, from somewhere deeper than he had known there was anything to pull from.

The thread broke.

It went with a crack like a rifle shot in a stairwell, and both ends flew. Faster than he could follow, the far end whipped back into the pillar and was gone. The near end struck him just below the breastbone, where it had been fastened. It hit like a kick from a horse and threw him backward off his knees. By the time he came down on his back, with his sword skidding away across the stone, neither end was anywhere to be seen.

For a long time he lay where he had fallen.

The chains gave the same light as before, steady and white and silent. Above him the threads still crossed the air in their thousands, but his was not among them. When he turned his head, he found the link it had come from, at the height of a man’s heart on the pillar. It had gone dark. Of all the chain wound on that pillar, as far up as he could see, it was the only link that gave no light.

Behind his ribs, where something had been pulling on him without his knowing, there was nothing. He had not known it was there until it stopped.

His heart found its rhythm, lost it and found it again. He lay still and let it settle. When it had held steady for a while, he reached into his breast pocket with his left hand, since the right would barely close, and found the potion. It took him three tries to get the cap off with his teeth.

The potion did what potions did. It closed the cut on his shoulder and stopped his nose. It put enough back into his legs that he could think about standing, though he did not try yet. For the burns it did nothing that he could see. Red forks ran from his knuckles to above his right elbow, raised and hot to the touch. When he moved his fingers, the whole arm answered. His left eye still saw the chamber in red, and in his ears the whine had faded only to a hiss.

He waited for the System.

It said nothing. He lay on the stone and looked at the dark link and went over what he had done. As the silence went on, it seemed more and more possible that he had done all of it for nothing. A seal might hold a man in a thousand ways. He might have cut the least of them, at a price he would be paying off for months. Twice he thought about opening his status, and twice he left it shut. He was not ready to read 299 again.

For two years nearly every window the System opened without being asked had said Experience cannot be applied.

It opened one now.