Chapter 9

  Gray light filtered gently into the sky, though Vale still sat deep in the shadows of the mountain.

  Torches and lanterns stood around the city, lighting it up more than any city I’d ever seen. I shuddered involuntarily. I couldn’t quite believe I was standing here.

  For so many years, I’d thought of this place as the center of persecution for my kind?—?they’d murdered or imprisoned so many of my friends over decades. I’d come to think of Vale as evil. But real people lived here, good people trying to build their businesses and feed their families.

  Despite what it represented, Vale possessed a peculiar beauty, I thought, before turning back to Dirk.

  “If I don’t come back by evening, you should assume I’m dead and go about your business,” I said. “I’ll do my best to try to find Bend and get him out if he’s still alive. Keep yourselves hidden and safe until nightfall. Understand?”

  Dirk nodded, his face somber.

  When the door of the shop closed behind me, I took up my walking stick and put on my long, black duster, which was now heavy. I’d stored as many pieces of rare matter as I could fit in a variety of small, hidden pockets of this coat.

  I took a few steps and felt the wound in my side. The pain felt dull enough that I thought I could get into the prison and determine whether Bend was alive. But after that? We would see what happened.

  Standing in an alcove out of sight of the main road, I placed a single piece of ivory on the ground before me. Ivory required a more complex draining spell, so I took my time weaving it. If I made a mistake weaving a complex spell such as this one, I risked losing the ivory’s matter entirely and letting it dissipate into nothing.

  Gold was much more stable, but I didn’t have much of that left.

  The small chunk of white stone vanished before me. The hum of its matter hovered in the air, threatening to dissipate. I only had a few moments to enact the spell, which was why mages always practiced hard to complete their spells fast.

  I looked around once again to be sure no one watched.

  Then, I swept my hands over my body weaving a complex spell around myself that would render me invisible to the eye for about an hour. Unless that is, someone else had died in the last few years since I’d shared this particular spell?—?then perhaps it would last longer.

  There was a reason for this: In the same way that rare matter made a spell of The Way more powerful, the fewer mages that knew a particular spell the more powerful it would be when cast. When I was a young mage first learning, most of the beginner spells were widely known by many in The Way, and therefore quite weak.

  So much so that some of these became throw-away spells: widely known but rarely used. Good for learning, and not much else.

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  Finishing the spell with a sweep of my arms, it locked into place over me. I looked down at my legs and arms, and they were gone. Even my walking stick had disappeared. I checked the window of the shop and saw nothing in reflection. Certainly, there were few who knew this spell any longer. While this fact broke my heart even more, I appreciated the added power of the spell in this moment, standing on the street in Vale.

  I stepped out of the alcove and began running down the street toward the prison on the other side of the city.

  I could’ve created a sound-defeating spell to mask the passing “slap” of my footsteps on cobblestones, but I didn’t want to waste the matter or the time. So I ran on the balls of my feet, trying to minimize the sound as best I could.

  But I wasn’t twenty years old anymore. Some shopkeepers looked up at the slap of my footsteps on the stones, confusion playing over their faces.

  The first part of my journey was downhill toward the main thoroughfare through the center of the city. As I ran, I saw motorized thugs patrolling with steam-powered rifles and pistols, or blunt-nosed crossbows, each weapon different from the one before?—?the uniqueness of each weapon making me think the motorized tools were also somehow connected to the elements of The Way. We’d speculated about this before, but never learned the true connection.

  As I spotted these thugs, I made sure to give them a wide berth and avoid any confrontations.

  The wound in my side started to burn hot after a few minutes. It hurt so much I forgot about trying to run quietly, and I just ran toward my destination. Confused looks played across the faces of the few people I passed. It was still early, so there weren’t many people out.

  I reached the midway point with no trouble, stopping on the wide road running directly up to Uof’s Keep, plunging all the way through the heart of the city. I looked left to Uof’s imposing Keep above me, and knew that if this continued, I would have to make my way there eventually.

  I turned to face the prison structure sitting directly in front of me, another mile or so ahead. From here to the prison along the Northern slopes, the run would be uphill.

  Now I moved more slowly, keeping the prison building before me as sweat fell from my long graying hair into my eyes. I hated wasting moisture, knowing it would evaporate well before it hit the ground. But I had to keep moving.

  Suddenly, something in front of me caught my eye. A strange red light flickered on a street ahead of me, and then brightly flared to life. I continued to run, and noticed that the closer I came to it, the brighter it grew.

  My nerves spiked. Not now!I thought. I’d seen one of these beacon lights once before.

  What looked like an innocent lantern carried on the head of a staff, was something else entirely. The bright red-amber glow came from a glass orb, and suddenly I recognized it?—?I should have known what this was and expected to see them here. This was a magical beacon light, sitting atop a staff about a block ahead of me.

  Years before, I’d faced down a well-known motorized general leading an army outside of a village hundreds of miles from Vale. The general owned a detector of magic?—?a device he called a “Mage Beacon”?—?a mysteriously-powered orb that lit up when it detected spell use in its vicinity.

  The general mounted that particular beacon on his own wagon, and it had been set into a large casing, much different from the one on the street before me now. Our mages had defeated the general who died in battle, then imprisoned his army and destroyed the beacon, and I’d naively hoped the technology had died with him.

  It obviously hadn’t.

  Standing before me now, as I ran toward him, a soldier of Vale held a staff in his right hand with a Mage Beacon on top of the staff.

  This orb, though it was carried by a single man, operated on the same principle as the general’s beacon?—?with every step I took toward the solider, the beacon’s light brightened more?—?keying off of my invisibility spell.

  The soldier’s head flicked up, looking at the light.

  He’d just noticed the gleaming from his staff, and his face looked bewildered. Knowing the scarcity of mages in Vale or anywhere within a couple day’s walk, I guessed that he’d rarely if ever seen the light he held brighten up like this.

  I hoped his moment of surprise would help me now.