ChaoticArmcandy

  Roxa took the stairs two at a time. Even after hurrying across campus, she was uncomfortably te. The surprise encounter with Ellie had completely made her forget today’s pns to meet up with her sorcery practice buddy. Roxa didn’t think there would be any hard feelings, but she really hoped that Crissa hadn’t felt stood up and left already.

  She got to the uppermost nding, and turned down the corridor, breathing hard. The empty cssroom they usually met up in was the perfect space for it, high above any interference from people on the ground, lots of daylight streaming in from a row of windows that ran the entire length of the room. Light was important, where they were going. Roxa shoved open the doors.

  “Hi Crissa,” she panted. “Sorry I’m te.”

  The willowy, light-haired girl was sitting on a window sill, reading a book, absently kicking her boots. She looked up and waved, unfazed. Crissa was Ursilian, and she looked quite fetching in the traditional long, bck skirt and jacket, colorfully embroidered with geometric patterns. Sitting jauntily atop her wavy, sunlit hair was a bck bowler hat.

  “Oh, that’s all right,” she breezed. “I’m gd you made it! Come look at this, Roxa.” Crissa beckoned excitedly.

  Roxa mouth quirked up at the corners and she came over. She stole a gnce at the spine. “Signa Rerum Carta,” she read. “What’s that?”

  Crissa’s eyes sparkled. “Well, that’s a good question. It’s a transtion into Gemic from Gel, a much older root nguage. I found it in the Esoterics catalogue of the Avrora Remnant, but I think that was a misfile. It should have been in the Antiquity section of Arcanities.”

  She looked at Roxa expectantly. Roxa snorted. “I’ll need a little more.”

  “It might predate the Geln Empire!” Crissa burst out excitedly. “The transtor says the original was half-burned, and attributes the work to Paracelus, but I’m not sure the timing for that makes sense, especially if it survived the Burning of Avrora.”

  “Wait, you read Gemic?” Roxa looked at her curiously.

  “Barely,” said Crissa dismissively, “but my father has a pretty good dictionary that I’ve been using to cross-reference the glyphs I don’t know. He works as a clerk in the Archives. Anyway, look at this!”

  Roxa stared at the page of indecipherable script. “Hmm.”

  Crissa stabbed the page. “Look, here, and here, and here. That one means ‘tides’ or ‘current’ or ‘deep’, this one means ‘stars’ or ‘spirit’ and this one means ‘to use’ or ‘to eat’!”

  “You think it’s talking about—” Roxa murmured, intrigued.

  “Yes,” said Crissa impatiently. “And here is what’s really interesting, this section I’ve been puzzling out keeps alluding to something called the Nine and One Songs. And this verb keeps cropping up, chayim, which can mean to summon, to sing, or ‘to desire nothing’, depending on the context. I think?” She closed the book with a snap. “In every tense in which it’s used, it always occurs with a plural referent. Remember the sounds we hear, down there?”

  Roxa shivered. The sounds were eery, there was no denying that. “Yes?”

  “Well, I don’t know about you, but Reserved Liminal Osciltion Theory has always felt a little shoddy to me, as an expnation for thanopegic acoustics. It doesn’t do anything else, besides patch a little bit of the gaping hole in our understanding of the River.” Crissa sounded exasperated. “No matter what our professors say.”

  Roxa nodded slowly. “So? You suspect there’s more going on?”

  Crissa smiled conspiratorially. “Do you sing, Roxa?”

  Roxa shrugged. “Back home. But it’s been a while. You?”

  “It’s part of being Ursilian, we sing a lot.” She rolled her eyes. “That’s one thing that’s true about the stereotypes, at least. Anyway, over the st few days, I’ve been dabbling with vocals, down there, just by myself. It’s been...interesting. Even pying around with it, I’ve noticed slight differences in casting wards, in drawing, and in harnessing. Nothing dramatic.” Crissa’s blue eyes glittered. “But what I can’t stop thinking about, Roxa, is harmonizing.”

  Roxa snorted. Crissa might be a wingnut, but it made her a more interesting practice partner, and Roxa always learned something valuable. Plus, she was an excellent sorcerer. Still…

  “Okay. But what if we get down there, try out some harmonies, and it—I don’t know, like, draws some hunking huge revenant barreling up from the Ninth Abyss?”

  “That’s what wards are for, silly!” Crissa hopped off the sill and strode to the center of the room. She turned and winked. “Come on in, the water’s fine.”

  Roxa followed, rolling her neck. When she’d first been learning sorcery, the plunge had been a hesitant, terrifying affair, but her mother had insisted on total sublimation of that fear, and had trained it out of her mercilessly, until Roxa could do it reflexively, in a split instant.

  “Let’s start where we were st time, in the First.”

  Roxa reached for the spirit current, felt herself herself skim, then catch, and in the blink of an eye, the phantom waters of the River rose over her head and she was in.

  The empty cssroom was unchanged, but now there were shimmers and blurs and streaks in the air around her, the faint chill and sluggish pull of the unseen current on her limbs. There was a faint pressure in her ears, and strange echoes and sounds drifted and washed over her perception, as if arriving from far away. Her hair began to lift and form a cloud around her head, as if she were underwater. She could feel colder, faster depths yawning beneath her, extending far beyond the limits of her perception.

  She knew that, with a flexing of her will, she could drop forever into that vast, bottomless abyss. Even with the calluses that long experience had given her, she shivered, thinking of the unstirred things slowly adrift, hanging suspended in the deep dark below.

  Crissa was still right alongside her, but now Roxa could feel the field cast by her presence in the River, as well. A shiver in the current, a shadow that shed ripples, a pulsing cloud of vender smoke she could see not with her eyes but with her thanopegic perception.

  Thanopegics was the Harmine term for the study of what Imperiat sorcerers called thanopegic current and everyone else just called the River.

  Roxa felt the gentle, unduting brush of Crissa’s field on hers, and could tell with her River sense that they were hovering at around the same depth.

  Roxa swept her sorcerous perception around and could sense nothing else nearby. They were safe, for now. The First Layer had its tricks, but it was gentle, almost balmy, compared to the looming, lonesome deeps below. Another low, haunting echo washed over them. It could have been a cry, or a howl, or a drawn scream.

  Crissa held out her hands. “Wards?”

  Roxa’s mother had taught her that everyone could learn to sense the River, but only sorcerers could shape its current into spells, using the the of their wills and, with tongue and gesture, direct its surging flow of spirit power into the tangible world.

  Countess Sasha Monir paced the creneted battlements of the turret top, the wind flow whipping her long red hair around her face. The handful of young trainees, Roxa among them, who’d demonstrated some sorcerous talent, stood braced against the buffeting air, chancing an occasional gnce down at the valley floor, far below. The first lessons of sorcery were traditionally taught in high pces. It was safer.

  All sorcery incurred a cost, Countess Monir warned them. For a given sorcerer to channel the River’s spirit current into the visible spectrum as magic carried risks that escated in proportion to how much power that sorcerer drew. Roxa’s mother had paused and twisted her mouth grimly, before expining that sorcerers in the River attracted…attention. From below.

  Sorcerers needed wards, expined the Countess, not just for countering the spellcraft of other sorcerers, but because the River had revenants.

  This was articuted by the Thanopegic Research department as Stagbrawn’s Law. Encounters with ‘hostile fields’ advanced exponentially and reciprocally along a curve delineated by a sorcerer’s generation of adverse entropy, or something mouthy like that.

  Thanopegic perception wasn’t sight, but Roxa got fshes of images, in her mind’s eye—as if, in the absence of any visual information, her brain were trying to fill in what it knew was there. All the revenants ‘looked’ different. They ranged from flocks of smallish orbs that all seemed to swivel and blink like countless eyes, to coiling loops and knots that never ceased slithering, to lean, jagged coursers the size of sharks, to sinuous, contorting hulks almost a mile long. They were finned and armored, toothed and winged, hollow and hungry. In the old stories they were called Eaters.

  Harmine researchers had noted that lesser denizens of the River tended to gather with each other, while greater ones seemed to lurk alone, like drifting behemoths.

  Roxa csped Crissa’s outstretched hands and met her sparkling blue gaze. Together they began to cast. Roxa poured her will clean and clear, as if from a jug with a fluted spout. There was a sizzle as the ancient patterns of liquid vowels and consonants left her mouth and met the current, setting her lips numbly abuzz.

  A huge fre of golden, fractal ce blossomed around them both. Roxa felt Crissa deftly pulse a little more current into it, and it began to slowly spin. This was what they had been practicing tely—cooperative warding. It was a delicate bancing act, but what it cost in trickyness was made up for in spades by its effectiveness. Roxa only had to devote a tenth or so of her will to maintaining the ward, as did Crissa, with the rest of her concentration freed up to do as she pleased. Far more common was for a cadre of sorcerers to specialize into combat roles, with one or two warders guarding themselves and several brutes.

  Crissa gasped. “Our wards are getting so pretty!”

  “And strong,” Roxa smiled at her. “This is far beyond what I can do by myself.”

  “Shall we go deeper? I want to try harmonizing. Will you do it with me, Roxa? Please?”

  Roxa nodded, her smile broadening. She couldn’t help it. Her eager-eyed practice partner was too cute.

  Crissa cocked her head, as if listening. “All right, follow me.”

  They dropped together, their wards keeping pace. The tug of the current began to feel choppier, and Roxa knew they were crossing into the Second Layer. There were split currents here, and more eddies and sinkholes that could unbance or trap the unwary sorcerer.

  Crissa expertly led the way to the edge of what, to Roxa, seemed like a vast, curving wall of accelerated current, spiraling downwards into the fathomless deep—a gyre.

  Gyres were dangerous shortcuts, portals that could be used to navigate between multiple Layers in the blink of an eye. They could also be so strong and tricky that many sorcerers avoided them as a rule.

  “I’ve been using this one a lot,” called Crissa to Roxa, though they were standing right next to each other. This close to the gyre, there was a roaring that had nothing to do with their ears. “Lately it only goes down to Sixth, but I’ve been getting off at Fourth. Want to try?” Her eyes were aglow with excitement.

  Roxa felt a matching bubble of exhiration in her chest. She waggled her eyebrows. “Three, two—”

  Together they surged forward, and Roxa whooped as the gyre caught them with a force that she felt in her lungs, and hurtled them down, and down, and down…

  She felt the temperature drop as the pressure rose. After only a few seconds, she felt Crissa tap her wrist rapidly, and Roxa narrowed her will and projected herself sideways. Crissa did the same and with an enormous squeeze, they popped out the other side of the gyre’s wall together, and found themselves in the Fourth Layer, in the middle of a swarm of revenants.

  Roxa glimpsed a shattering flurry of cold, white eyes, barbed whiskers, low slung jaws, needle-sharp teeth, and whipping tails. Then their wards sparked and burned golden, scattering the River denizens.

  Crissa ughed, a little wildly. “Whoops!”

  Roxa shook her head, unable to repress a grin. She watched the cluster of revenants reform, a healthy distance away. Had they been waiting at this particur bend of the gyre, to catch an unwary sorcerer? Maybe they had noticed a pattern to Crissa’s forays down here. She could feel their watchful, hungry attention, like icy prickles on her skin. Roxa beckoned Crissa further away from the gyre’s roar.

  Here, the waters of the River were deceptively calm, but that wouldn’t st long. The Fourth Layer had periodic, powerful undertows. If they didn’t want to get caught by a pummeling crush of current, and driven much too deep, sorcerers venturing this deep needed to anchor themselves with spellcraft.

  “So,” Crissa hummed, unfazed. “I was thinking we could try singing the anchor? I could start, and then you could try harmonizing with me.”

  “Just be patient with me? It might take me a minute to find the harmony.”

  “You got it, girl! Also, don’t worry if the singing part doesn’t work or do…anything,” Crissa rolled her eyes. “I know how I sound. Anyway, here goes nothing.”

  Roxa blinked as a high, clear voice erupted from her practice partner, burning like silver in the dull River gloaming. Crissa looked at her after the first few sylbles, and Roxa pointed down. There was no way she was going to be able to get that high. Crissa had the good grace to blush a little, and her voice dropped a few octaves.

  There we go, thought Roxa, and she raised her own voice to meet her friend. The wards around them glowed even brighter as their voices twined and spun, like two hawks circling in courting flight. Roxa winced internally as she fumbled the harmony a few times, but for the most part she was able to keep up. As they reached the end of the spell together, and their anchor began to burrow down like a giant taproot, Roxa noticed something odd.

  Anchors served another function, besides fixing a sorcerer in pce, in the River. They also fed that sorcerer more power than she would otherwise be able to pull from the current. In thanopegic terms, the drawing-to-harnessing ratio of an anchored sorcerer was normally about twice as good, compared to an unanchored one of equivalent skill. Except that Roxa could immediately tell, as the echoes of their voices rippled and expanded out in all directions, that this anchor was doing significantly better than that.

  She whistled, and gnced at Crissa, who looked as if she were fairly vibrating with excitement.

  “What. This. Is. So. Awesome!”

  Roxa cocked her head. Her thanopegic perception had just twinged. There was...something moving out there.

  She narrowed her eyes, as if that would help her see further. Their harmony still hung softly mingling in the blur of the current.

  Whatever it was, it was circling at the very edges of her senses. Weird. She didn’t think it was any kind of denizen she’d come across before.

  It was coming closer, honing onto the lurking pack of revenants nearby. She felt Crissa stiffen beside her, and then there was a sunburst shock of reverberation, a soundless bre of resonance.

  The revenants were diving, fleeing, scattering. Roxa blinked, trying to get her dazed sorcerer’s senses to focus, to grasp what—

  She glimpsed a vivid cloudburst of gigantic, beating moth wings, spreading out from a core that ached with silver-fming intensity. Washing out from that core in ripples, and rushing towards her was a ringing, overpping ache of recognition, almost a greeting. And around her in the River, there were other silver fres, popping up like distant stars, in fact it almost reminded her of the aching expanse of the night sky, there were so many—

  There was a scuffle of boots in the corridor, along with a snatch of loud chatter, and then the double doors of the cssroom were abruptly yanked open, swinging and banging. Roxa felt Crissa quickly pulse another bump of power into the golden ttice of their wards, which flickered and went transparent, hidden from view.

  Three boys strolled in and stopped just inside the doorway when they saw Crissa and Roxa. There was no hiding the smell of sorcery, thought Roxa sourly. She scanned the River again, quickly, but it was dark and empty. There was no denizens about—whatever had come was gone.

  “Well, well, look what we found,” brayed one boy loudly. “It’s the heretical Ursilian bitch that always abuses symbolic meanings in css. See, Thomilt? I told you someone else was using this space for practice.”

  “So you did, Regis, so you did.” His friend sneered at Crissa. “Revolting insect. This must be my lucky day.”

  Roxa had already heard enough. She had one hand surreptitiously working behind her back, artfully channeling the River’s flow and coaxing it into the form of a spinning disk of molten darkness.

  The pack of revenants had regrouped by the gyre—and there were more of them than before, swirling hungrily. Perhaps the intentional ripples of these boys’ fields was why they had first gathered here, in anticipation.

  “Nobody will hear you, and nobody will come to help,” the second boy spat venomously. “The fates are kind, delivering you here to suffer my justice. You scum have guided the decline of our society’s moral fabric for too long.”

  She noticed the third boy seemed pale. He was edging closer to the first two, looking directly at her and whispering urgently to his friends. Where had she seen that straw thatch of hair before?

  “What?” blurted the first. “That’s the girl who beat the shit out of you and Linta?”

  There was a split second pause, where they all stared at each other tensely, and then everyone dropped as deep as they could as fast as they could into the River.

  ChaoticArmcandy