The Trial

The next window opened before he had sat up.

Nobody had to take a Trial the moment it was offered. Runners who had been through one, buying the round at Wexler’s, all gave the same advice: wait, train, stock up on potions and sleep well the night before. Adam had one potion, a burned arm, an empty pool and no idea whether a path found in here would still be open once he was back in the quarry. He was not going to walk a quarter mile under that ceiling to find out.

He got to his knees, crawled to his sword and used it to stand. His right hand would close on the hilt if he made it. That was as much as he could ask of it.

“If I walk out,” he told the window, “you might change your mind.”

The window did not answer. It never did.

“Now,” he said.

The chamber was gone. He was standing on a floor of gray stone a hundred yards across, flat as a table, under a sky of the same gray. There was no sun in it and no shadow under his boots. At the edges the stone simply stopped, with nothing beyond it but more gray. It was the place every runner who had taken a Trial described.

His pool came back as the floor took shape, full to the last drop. For one wild second he thought the rest of him had come back with it. It had not. This place was not part of the seam, so the seam’s trait had stayed behind, but his wounds had come with him: the burns from knuckles to elbow, the blood in his left eye and the catch in his heart.

Every Trial he had heard described had a par time, set by whoever had passed it fastest on any world. Beating it or coming through unhurt earned something extra. His had a dash. No battlemage on any world had ever stood here to set one. He was hurt already and had not come for style.

The lock slid over his pool like a pane of glass, leaving the storm visible beyond his reach. Thirty yards off, the air parted to let a woman through.

She wore plain gray runner’s gear, carried a light, straight sword and had a face that belonged to nobody he knew. She stood side-on with her weight back and her point low, her free hand resting on her hip with the fingers spread. For a moment the hand made him think of the Toronto Duelist at the bottom of the Ladder.

Her first thrust came at his throat before he saw her feet move. He got his blade across it with nothing to spare, and the point went past his ear close enough to hear. Out of nine years’ habit his body tried to step clear and found nothing to step with. The lurch nearly put him back on her point.

He appraised her between one burst and the next.

He hardly needed the System, since only one class stood like that. Once, when they were both Tier III, he had beaten a Duelist in under a minute by stepping behind her on her first lunge. An Ascension doubled a body, though, and he had never met the difference without his arcana. He was meeting it now.

She came after him in short, exact bursts, never more than two attacks at a time. Each pair ended a little closer to him than the last. On the third he felt the point pluck at his collar. On the fourth it parted the hair over his left ear. She was measuring him. Duelists won on distance: they found yours to the inch and then put their point at the end of it.

Without the step he had only his feet, which were slower than hers. He could still choose where they went, which meant choosing where she thought he would be.

So he gave her a distance to find. Three times he gave ground in a straight line, the same length each time and always a beat late, letting her see how tired he was. None of it was acting. On the fourth attack she lunged long and low, measured perfectly for a man who would give ground again.

Adam went forward instead, off her line to the left.

It almost worked. A Tier III Duelist would have gone past him and been open. This one was Tier IV. Her point came back across to find him faster than he would have believed possible. With his left arm up across his body to cover his face, he took the point two inches above the wrist. It went in and out the other side.

He felt the steel grate between the bones. Instead of pulling away, he turned the arm with her blade still in it. For half a second her sword was caught in him, leaving her right side open from the armpit to the hip. He cut into it with everything his right arm had.

She went out like a closed window. Her sword went with her, out of his arm, leaving a hole that began at once to bleed.

When he made a fist with his left hand, it still made one, just. From then on that hand was only there to steady the hilt.

Before he could catch his breath, the air parted farther off to let through a man with a spear.

He was big and square, in the same plain gray. The spear stood a hand taller than he did, with a long, leaf-shaped head. He held it low at the hip with the point at Adam’s belt. Lancer. For years Adam had watched Lancers work beside him on contracts. The full thrust began at the hip and could punch through a keystone’s breastbone. Getting inside it was the problem. This man’s leading hand sat well back on the shaft, with room to shorten his grip.

To get inside it, Adam slipped the thrust and tried to race the spear before it could come back. The Lancer slid his hand forward, shortened the weapon and met him with the butt. Adam caught the wood on his blade, but the blow drove him back to the point. As he threw himself clear, a second thrust took a strip of leather off his hip.

The third was a feint at his face. He refused it, showing the left side of his chest instead. The point settled toward the opening. To take it, the Lancer set his rear heel and brought the shaft all the way to his hip.

That thrust nearly beat Adam’s blade aside. He turned with the blow, letting the point pass his ribs while the hole in his forearm tore wider. His own edge stayed against the wood. When the Lancer drew back, Adam followed the shaft in, close enough to keep the butt outside his body. The man began to shorten his grip again. Adam cut across the moving hand before it could close, then through the side of his neck. The Lancer went out, spear and all.

Adam was breathing hard by now. Blood from his forearm had soaked the sleeve to the elbow and was running down over the back of his hand into the grip.

The third fighter came out of the air at the far edge of the floor. She was short and very wide, with a tower shield on her left arm that came up to her chin and a flanged mace in her right hand. Setting the foot of the shield on the stone, she looked at him over the top of it and began to walk.

Bulwark. He saw the pattern now. Duelist, Lancer, Bulwark: they were the plainest classes there were, the ones that went through the trial at 299 every week. For two years he had watched people like these walk past him at Wexler’s on their way to better contracts.

He had also spent six years of crews beside a Bulwark. Moss could hold a doorway against a whole brood for ten minutes while the rest of the crew worked. He could advance behind the shield as slowly as he liked. Once he committed to a drive, though, the force that kept him moving needed three paces to shed. Adam had seen him put a foot through a cellar wall finding the third.

To see how fast she turned, Adam tried her flank first. She turned faster than he could run around her, pivoting on the foot of the shield with the mace already swinging. The flange missed his head by a hand’s width. His edge would not go through a Tier IV shield, so he did not try. Instead he began to back toward the edge of the floor, twenty yards behind him.

She came after him at a walk, then faster, her boots striking the stone in a steady beat that quickened as she came. He kept his own pace slow and even. Her shield filled more and more of his view. Once more the mace came over the top of it, testing. Under his heels he felt the edge of the floor, with a couple of feet of stone left.

She saw that too. Instead of driving straight at him, she swept the mace low across his right, closing the space where he could turn along the edge. Adam brought his sword down to meet it. The mace caught the blade and held it against the stone. Only then did she drive.

He waited until the shield was a single pace away with all her weight behind it. Then he let the sword fall, dropped under the mace and rolled to his right along the edge. The shield’s rim caught his jacket and tore him half around before the cloth gave.

The shield went past him as the woman behind it tried to stop. He heard her boots scrape once and then again, but she needed a third pace that the floor did not have. Off the edge she went, the shield still raised in front of her. She went out before she had fallen her own height.

By the time the line appeared, Adam had crawled back to his sword and closed both hands around the hilt.

The sword pulled at his hand.

It had not grown heavier, exactly, but its point went down to the stone by itself and stayed there. When he heaved on the hilt with both hands, it would not rise a hair, so he let go of it. The pane of glass over his pool was gone; the storm was his again.

Nobody knew better than Adam that without the blade he was a poor caster, and the Trial knew it as well as he did. A battlemage put the spell into the steel and let the strike carry it in. Thrown across a room, his lightning lost most of its force on the way and most of its aim with it. What he had left was a ward, a step and two bare hands.

At the far side of the floor a man in a long gray coat came out of the air, pulling off his gloves. Frost was already climbing his cuffs. He looked at Adam across the whole width of the stone without any expression at all and lifted one bare hand.

There was no need to appraise him. Bare hands and frost meant an Ice Mage, the class Elliot Shaw held.

The first lance of ice crossed the floor faster than a thrown punch. It burst on the ward Adam threw up over his chest, where the ward flared blue-white and drank. Two more came after it. He took one on the ward and stepped out from under the other, ten yards to his right. For the first time in years he nearly threw up after one.

He landed on white stone, and his boots went out from under him.

While he was busy with the lances, a sheet of frost had spread across the floor from the mage’s feet as far as where he landed. Adam came down on his hip and slid. A lance went through the place where his head had been. He stepped again from where he lay, off the ice, coming up on dry stone with his hip gone numb. Frost came after him across the dry stone in a thin white sheet, climbed his boots to the ankles and held them fast. He stepped out of it, boots and all. As he landed, the ward drank again.

Next he tried a cast. He threw the storm off his right hand, splitting the burned skin on the back of it as the lightning left. It crossed half the distance in a white fork before it frayed out to nothing, well short of the mage, who did not even ward against it.

That settled it. Whatever he did to the mage, he would have to do with his hands on him.

He did the math as he moved, since a full pool was not a large one at Tier III. A step cost what it cost. A ward cost more the harder it was hit. The lances hit very hard. If he spent the pool on getting there, he would arrive with nothing to put into the man. If he saved it, he would not arrive.

He went in the hard way: step, ward, step again, never in a straight line and never onto the white. Every lance that burst on the ward took something with it. One came through where the ward had cracked and laid his cheek open. Without letting Adam close the distance, the mage retreated across the growing sheet of frost. Halfway there, Adam met a wall of ice rising in front of him, clear and thick as plate glass. Another went up on his left as a third began to close behind him. Before the pen was finished, he stepped around the first wall. Over the next one he stepped high, landing on the far side close enough to see the frost in the man’s eyebrows.

He got both hands on the coat.

The mage’s ward came up at once, a shell of hard cold over his whole body. Adam’s palms froze to it, but he did not let go. He let the storm go instead, straight out of his hands into the shell. With no blade to give it a path, it went through his own skin first. His palms blistered and split, and the hole in his forearm opened and bled down over the ice. Under his hands the shell began to crack, while frost climbed his arms to the elbows. He kept pouring.

The mage hit him in the face with a fist like a block of ice, then again. Adam put his head down and held on. He could feel the bottom of his pool coming and did not slow down. At last the shell gave way in a rush of cold air, letting the storm into the man underneath. The mage went rigid between his hands. A moment later there was nothing between his hands at all.

Adam stood on the frost with his empty hands held out in front of him and his breath smoking. There was nothing left in his pool, since there had been no way to save any of it.

The sword let go of the floor. He picked it up with hands that barely closed. Nothing came back into his pool. The Trial had given it back once, at the start, and would not do it twice.

What came out of the air this time was not a person. It had the shape of one, his height and build, but it was made of the same flat gray as the sky, with no face. In its right hand it held a gray blade. A small fire burned in its left, steady and bright, with nothing in the hand to burn.

He had no ward and no step. He had the sword and nine years of knowing what to do with it.

The thing came at him with both. Its blade came first, a plain overhand cut that he could have parried in his sleep. He parried it. Half a second later the fire came from the other hand, a gout of it at his face, with nothing he could put in front of it. He went under it, then under the next cut, opening a line across its gray ribs as he passed. Behind his edge the gray closed up like smoke.

Inside a few seconds he understood the exchange. The thing was clumsy. It used its steel and its fire one after the other, never together, like two people taking turns in the same body. With a storm on his blade he could have taken it apart in a minute. He had no storm. Every time he hit it, the cut cost it something; he could see the gray thin where his edge had been and the fire burn a little lower. Every time it hit him, it cost him blood. He had more skill than it did. It had more of everything else.

Twice in the next half minute it caught him. First the gray blade opened his thigh above the knee, not deep. Then the fire took him along the left side of his ribs as he ducked. He smelled his jacket burning before he felt the skin go under it. He gave it nothing for either. Each time, he got his edge back into it a little higher and a little nearer the middle, where the gray was wearing thinnest.

He let it see him slowing. That took no effort at all. When it threw the fire low, at his legs, he took the burn and went in over it. He turned its blade with his own, set his feet and cut through the middle of it.

The edge went all the way through. The thing came apart in two halves. The halves came apart into flakes of gray that drifted in the still air like ash over a fire.

For a moment he thought it was over.

The flakes did not fall. They hung in the air a yard in front of him and began to draw together, faster and faster, into a shape that was not gray.

It was a man of his height, standing in Adam’s stance: left foot forward and weight back, the sword low and to the right, the stance Walt had drilled into him at nineteen. He wore Adam’s jacket with no hole at the shoulder. He had Adam’s face, with two clear eyes in it. In hands that were whole he held Adam’s sword, or its twin, with the groove bright and clean from the guard to the point. A ward covered all of him, an unbroken skin of blue-white light. Behind it Adam could feel the pool that fed it. It was full.

He had watched himself on clear videos often enough. He had never had to stand in front of himself.

The copy let the storm run down its blade.

Lightning crawled off the guard with a sound like tearing canvas. Adam had opened with that move under the Strip District yesterday morning, against a keystone he had killed in twenty-two minutes, so he knew what came after it. It would step, in instead of away, and land inside his guard with the edge already moving at the joint of his left shoulder.

It stepped.