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Adam was already moving when it landed.

He could not parry, since a parry would have put his bare steel against a blade full of storm. With no ward on him, the lightning would have come through the bind, down his own sword and into his hands. Instead of trying, he dropped his left shoulder out of the way and turned. The copy’s edge passed over the joint it had been sent at and took a strip of leather off the top of his jacket. Lightning cracked past his ear close enough that he smelled his own hair burning.

When he turned to face it, four paces clear, it turned with him in exactly his time. He appraised it.

It came again before he had finished reading.

Over the next minute he learned how good he had been. It fought exactly as he did, without a wasted blink. It kept its ward thin and let it flare only where an edge was about to land, which was how he had stretched a pool through seam after seam without mana potions. It cut in short, hard runs of three and four and stepped out of them before he could answer. Every step put it on his left, where the eye was full of blood and the forearm had a hole in it. He would have done the same. He had done the same, to a great many things in a great many seams.

Halfway through the minute it tried one of his own on him. It stepped straight up, a yard over his head, to come down edge first with the storm behind it. He had worked that one out two winters ago on a keystone in the upper levels of the Mon. He knew the only answer to it: not to be there. When the edge came down, it found bare stone and threw sparks across the floor.

What kept him alive was knowing what it would do half a second before it did it. That was the whole of his advantage. On footwork alone he went under its cuts and away from its steps. Twice he got his edge onto it, and twice the ward flared and drank the blow without leaving a scratch on the copy. Steel alone did almost nothing to a ward; Walt had told him that at nineteen. Every cut he landed cost the copy a little mana. It had a full pool of it, while he had none at all.

He tried his own tricks in return, feinting high and coming in low, a move that had worked on a hundred opponents who had never seen it before. The copy was waiting for him. He gave ground and turned it into an attack, a thing he had first done against a brood in the Hill District the year before last. The copy remembered the Hill District as well as he did. Everything he had, it had. It also had a pool.

Once he was slow by a hair. The flat of the copy’s blade touched his left forearm, no more than that, but the storm in it went up the arm like a hammer blow. For several seconds afterward he could not feel his left hand. He fought one-handed until the feeling came back, slowly. He could not keep this up for long.

The third time it stepped after that, he saw it.

Just before the blink, its left shoulder dropped. It was a small thing, an inch or less, the shoulder dipping a moment ahead of the step like a man about to shoulder open a door. It happened again on the next step and on the one after that, every time.

Nine years, and nobody had told him. Or Walt had, years ago, and he had stopped listening.

He tested it once. When the shoulder dipped, he went right before the copy had moved at all. It landed where his left side had been, cutting nothing but air.

Now he knew when the copy would step. He knew where, too, since he knew where he would go himself: to an opponent’s blind side every time. Adam’s was the left. He could be waiting for it when it landed. That would do him no good unless he had something to hit it with when it got there. Steel would not do it. What he needed was the storm, and his pool was empty.

There was one thing he had that it did not. He had done it for the first time that morning, on his knees in a room full of threads. The copy had every habit he had brought into the seam. It fought like a man who had never spent anything but his pool. Until this morning he never had.

He knew exactly what it would cost; his arm reminded him every time he moved it. He waited for the shoulder.

When it dropped, he was already turning to his left. As the copy stepped, he reached down past the empty place where his pool had been and pulled.

It came up out of him the same way as before. Knowing where it came from made it hurt worse. The red forks on his right arm caught fire again. He felt them climb past the elbow and over the shoulder and up the side of his neck, like a hot wire being drawn under the skin. A filling in one of his back teeth went hot enough to taste. Something in his chest stuttered, caught and stuttered again. The storm came down the blade anyway, more of it than his pool had ever held.

The copy landed exactly where he had known it would, a yard to his left. It saw the storm on his blade a fraction late and did what he would have done: it threw its whole pool into its ward.

His cut met the ward at the height of its collarbone. For an instant the ward held, blue-white and blazing, everything a full pool at 299 could build. A ward like that could stop anything a pool at 299 could pay for. This cut had cost more. It went through the ward, through the jacket underneath and through the copy.

It went out like everything else on that floor. For a second its sword hung in the air where its hand had been, until that went out too.

Adam stood where the cut had left him, with the blade out to his side and the storm still crawling off it. He stayed on his feet, though he was not sure he could have sat down without falling.

For a moment nothing else happened.

Then everything in him was suddenly twice what it had been. It did not feel like gaining anything so much as finding out that he had been half his size all his life without noticing. The strength in his legs doubled, along with the speed in his hands. The pool behind his breastbone, empty a breath before, was full now and deeper than it had ever been. None of the wounds went anywhere, but the body around them was simply bigger now, so that they weighed less in it.

He read it and did not move.

He had been a Storm Battlemage since he was nineteen. For two years he had read everything anyone had written about what a battlemage might become at Tier IV. None of it had been worth reading, since nobody had ever seen one. He had never seen this name anywhere. Nobody had.

“What does that mean?” he asked.

The System did not answer.

“Unwalled,” he said. “This wall, or all of them?”

It did not answer that either.

He read the second line again. Here was what he had done on his knees that morning, written down as a skill. Every story about overchanneling ended with a caster fainting or dead. The System had made it something he could do on purpose, at a fixed rate, with the price stated in the same flat voice as everything else. It had never cheated him on a price. It was not starting now.

After that he waited for the world to hear about it.

The System kept its world announcements for true world firsts: a single line with a name in it, put in front of every Classed person on Earth at once. Such lines were rare. He had been stopped at a light on Butler Street for the last one, when two Classed drivers ahead of him rear-ended each other reading it. A battlemage through the Wall was a world first if anything was. He waited a full minute, but no line went out.

That suited him. A line like that would have put his name in front of every Classed person on the planet. The next thing every one of them would have wanted to know was how.

Around him the gray went out all at once. He was standing in the chamber of chains a yard from the foot of the pillar, closer than he had ever let himself come.

It came in through his chest, just below the breastbone, where the thread had been.

Almost three hundred times in his life he had felt a level arrive: a brief, warm fullness that spread out from the middle of him like the first mouthful of whiskey on an empty stomach. He had not felt one since the Wall.

The second arrived before the first had finished, and the third before the second. After that he could not tell where one ended. They came in on top of each other, each one going through him to the ends of his fingers and pushing the last one further out, until the heat of them was in his teeth and the soles of his feet. When his knees went, he sat down hard on the stone at the foot of the pillar and let them come.

For some time there was nothing in the world but that. He could hear his own breathing, ragged and loud in the quiet chamber. Somewhere under it was a sound that he took a moment to recognize as his own laugh.

He could not have told one kill from another, but he knew what they were. They were the Smallman flat in June and again yesterday. They were every brood he had cleared alone while a crew ate sandwiches by the mouth, every saltback and every contract. They were every kill the System had answered with Experience cannot be applied, some four thousand of them, two years of doing the job well for nothing. None of it had been thrown away. The System had held every point, just as the counter had always said. Now it was paying them out all at once, through the place where the thread had been.

It stopped.

Twenty-two levels had come and gone in about the time it took to tie a boot. He sat with his back to the light and his hands open on his knees and breathed. When he could, he opened his status. This time the System showed him what had changed.

The slot numbers were capacities, not nine skills newly waiting for him. Appraisal, Bladecast and Ward still held their Expert ranks. Stormstep had replaced the old blink; Overchannel occupied one more slot. Five active skills in nine places. His two passives, Blade Conduction and Mana Recovery, had carried over unchanged. The first kept a cast from scattering as steel carried it into the target. The second had been suppressed from the moment he entered this seam.

An empty slot gave him room to earn something, not a choice of powers he could claim by filling it. He closed the skill panel and went to the bottom of the sheet, where he had read the same refusal every morning since he was twenty-six.

Every threshold. He read it again with his burned hand resting on his knee, to be sure it meant more than this one. The System had not promised he could pass another Trial, but it would let him take one. At 399, at 499, beyond anything he could yet picture himself fighting, there would be a way to try.

Nothing on the sheet said anything about experience held beyond a cap. Under it the bar was no longer full. For the first time in two years, there was room in it.

The ring was lying beside his left boot.

From twenty feet, the closest he had ever come to the pillar, he would not have seen it. Even from a yard away it was hard to see. It looked less like a ring than like the outline of one, a ring-shaped place where the light from the chains did not quite fall, as if it had been cut out of the air with scissors. Loot from the dead worlds came like that sometimes, sealed. In nine years he had seen two sealed pieces, both through the glass of an Authority auction case. He appraised it.

A sealed Legendary of any tier would have paid off Stosh several times over at auction. He thought about that for as long as it took to pick the ring up. It weighed no more than a ring ought to. His right hand was in no state to wear anything, so he put it on the middle finger of his left. Once it had tightened to fit, the outline filled in while he watched, leaving him wearing a plain band of dark gray metal with a single narrow groove cut around the middle.

He felt it working before he had finished reading. The fire went out of the burns on his right arm first. After that the forks themselves began to cool, the angriest of them, at his wrist, fading from red to pink as he watched. The red in his left eye began to thin. His forearm went on bleeding where the Duelist had put her sword through it, and so did his cheek, his palms and the cut above his knee. The burns the fire had left on his ribs and legs still hurt. The ring had said what it would do and was doing nothing else, so for the rest he drank the second potion.

He read the last line of the card again. A set of nine was something he had never heard of, since every set he knew of stopped at six. Nor did he know the name. He knew the names of the Nine, as everybody did, and Cael was not one of them.

When his legs would hold him, he stood and looked up at the pillar.

The dark link hung at the height of his heart, among links that all still shone. From every one of them a thread ran out, pulled as tight as his, into the stone and the floor and the dark overhead. If the appraisal meant what it said, every capped battlemage on Earth was tied to one of them, and every one on the older worlds as well. Somewhere among them was the thread that had held a man in a Bloomfield bowling alley at 299 for eleven years.

He began putting prices on the room. A guild would buy it. A nation would buy it. For the only living battlemage who knew how to use it, there might be no end to what it was worth. He was still working out a price when he picked up his sword and walked to the arch.

The hall ran away from the arch into the dark, a quarter mile of it, with the white of the mouth at the far end no bigger than a coin. When he switched on his headlamp and pointed it at the ceiling, they were up there among the hilts, as many as before, with their legs folded under them.

The trait had been waiting for him when the Trial let him go. His pool sat full and still inside him. Nothing he spent from here on would come back. Two hours ago that had nearly killed him. Now it was a cost he could afford.

He stepped.

It was not a blink. A blink had always been a jump from one place to another with nothing in between. This was a line. He went down the hall as lightning and felt every yard of the distance go through him, with the crack of his passing coming back off the swords on both walls. For once his stomach came with him. He came out of it forty yards down the hall when he had meant to go thirty, skidding on landing with sparks coming off his boots. Behind him, two of the things hit the floor where he would have been if he had kept walking.

He stepped again and overshot again. This time a third had leaned out from the ceiling ahead of him to lead him. It came down a stride in front of where he landed. He cut it in half with plain steel. It was not hard.

When the fourth dropped on his left, his ward took the point and turned it with a flare he hardly felt.

He went down the hall in long, crooked lines of light, too far each time, cutting whatever landed near him and leaving the rest. At Tier III every one of these things had been a problem to solve. Now they were weather. The storm ran down his blade harder than the steel had ever carried it. Before long the hilt was warm in his hand, so he eased off and used plain steel where he could.

Halfway down, he stopped long enough to take hold of a hilt at shoulder height. From what he could see of it, it was a better blade than his. He set his feet and pulled with everything a Tier IV body had. It did not move or even rock in the stone, as if the rock had grown around it. He let go and went on.

Past the halfway point, three came down around him at once. He stepped clear of them and, before the first had finished unfolding, tried to step again.

Nothing happened.

His pool was most of the way full, with the storm right there under his hand, but the step simply did not come. The old step had never needed a rest between blinks; this one did. A point came down on his shoulder and broke on his ward, which cracked across his back and knitted shut in a second. He took the leg off the one that had struck. Then the step was there again, as though it had never been gone. He went.

Three seconds, the System had said. He had believed it. Now he knew what three seconds were like with something dropping on him.

He passed the partner sixty paces from the mouth, lying face down by his pack where he had been all month. Adam did not stop.

He walked out into the afternoon. As he crossed the mouth, his pool began to fill again, as steadily as breathing.

The light in the hollow was thin and yellow. The leaves still lay a yard back from the mouth on every side. He stood there for a minute with his eyes shut and let the air move on his face. When he opened them, he looked at his sword closely for the first time in daylight. The groove down the middle of the blade had scorched dark from the guard to the point.

His phone buzzed in his jacket as it found its one bar. The text waiting on it was from Stosh, sent at nine that morning.

still breathing?

Adam stood looking at it. Stosh had torn the page out for him, but Stosh still had the coordinates, and so did his scout. Nothing stopped Stosh from selling them again. Adam could pay him to forget them, at whatever price Stosh cared to name. He could not yet pay the twenty-nine thousand he already owed. Asking would also tell Stosh that there was something in the seam worth paying for. What was in there was nobody’s business. He would not tell Stosh, or the Authority, or anyone else.

He typed yes and sent it.

Then he did what he had done most mornings for two years. He opened the Ladder and went to the bottom. The Toronto Duelist was gone from it; somebody had pushed her off. He scrolled up, past names with higher levels than his.