CHAPTER TWO

  The Terms of Being Stuck

  The stream was exactly where she said it would be.

  Marcus crouched at its bank and drank carefully, the way she’d instructed — small amounts, slowly, the body is in shock and you don’t want to compound the problem — and tried to organize what he knew into something that resembled a coherent picture.

  What he knew: He was dead. Or had been. He was now occupying a body that belonged to someone named Ian, who was fifteen years old and a mage and had been running from hunters when Marcus’s soul or consciousness or whatever the correct terminology was had apparently taken up residence in the vacancy left by Ian’s departure from it. The body came with memories that were not his own, which was profoundly disorienting in the specific way of reaching for a familiar object and finding something shaped differently than expected. Every time he tried to access his own mental geography he found Ian’s instead — the cottage, the valley, his mother’s face, his father’s hands, the specific smell of cut grass in the morning.

  He let those memories sit. They weren’t his and they weren’t something he could afford to process right now, but he could feel the weight of them and he understood instinctively that they were going to demand his attention eventually whether he invited them or not.

  What else he knew: There was a voice in his head that was not his voice, attached to something called the Magistrate’s Sphere that had merged with his body in an irreversible process that neither of them had consented to. The voice was female, ancient in a way that went beyond age into something more structural, and deeply unimpressed with him personally.

  What he didn’t know: Nearly everything else.

  "Tell me about this world," he said.

  "Which aspect would you like to start with? The political geography, the magical infrastructure, the institutional power structures, the immediate threats to your survival, or the rather significant history that explains why all of those things are the way they are?"

  "Start with immediate threats and work backward."

  "Logical. The immediate threats are the Covenant hunters who believe they killed a fugitive mage named Ian this evening and may return to confirm when their patrol schedule permits. They are part of an institution called the Covenant, which controls and restricts mages throughout the territories you are currently in. Ian was registered with them and escaped. In their records he is now dead, which is advantageous, but that advantage disappears if they encounter you and realize the body is moving around."

  "What do they do with mages."

  "Register them. Restrict them. Limit how much power they can accumulate, how much freedom they’re permitted, which places they can go and which they can’t. The stated justification is protection of the common population from uncontrolled magic. The actual function is—"

  "Institutional self-perpetuation," Marcus said.

  A pause.

  "Yes. Exactly that."

  "It’s a very common pattern. An institution forms around a genuine problem, solves it reasonably well for a generation or two, and then the solving becomes less important than the institution’s continued existence." He leaned back on his heels, watching the water move over stones in the dark. "What was the genuine problem."

  "Uncontrolled mages caused significant harm to common people during a period of historical collapse. The Covenant was founded to prevent recurrence. They were, for a time, genuinely effective."

  "And now they take fifteen-year-old farm boys from their families."

  "Ian was identified as a mage at a young age. The Covenant requires registration and control of all mages within their territory regardless of age, social position, or the wishes of their families."

  Marcus was quiet for a moment. Ian’s memories pressed at the edges of his attention. His father’s hands on the ground. His mother’s voice.

  "He was running toward somewhere," Marcus said. "He died believing he was almost there."

  "Arcanis. A kingdom east of here, past the mountains. It operates as a refuge for mages — or presents itself as one. Ian had heard rumors that mages there live freely."

  "Do they."

  "The mages of Arcanis live freely. The common people of Arcanis live in service to those mages. It is the Covenant’s arrangement with the power distribution inverted. Same architecture, different beneficiaries."

  Marcus absorbed this.

  "So Ian died running toward a different version of the same problem."

  "Yes."

  "And that’s where we’re going."

  "You’re taking his goal."

  "I’m in his body. I have his memories. His family thinks he’s—" He stopped. Started again. "The hunters think he’s dead, which means his family will think he’s dead, and there is currently nothing I can do about that. What I can do is get somewhere functional and build enough of a position that I can eventually do something about the larger problems. Going to Arcanis is the most logical next step given the available information."

  He could feel her assessment of this. Not the content of her thoughts — the bond didn’t work that way, apparently — but the quality of her attention, which was sharp and evaluating.

  "You’re not distressed," she said. It was almost a question."

  The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  "I’m extremely distressed. I’m just not letting it run the decision-making process."

  "Most people in your situation would be significantly less functional."

  "Most people haven’t spent ten years processing large quantities of human suffering at analytical distance while trying to figure out what to do about it." He paused. "That came out more bleak than intended."

  "It came out accurately, I think."

  He looked at his hands. Ian’s hands. Young and calloused in the specific way of someone who had done farm work and then, later, the controlled careful work of a mage learning to keep themselves small. He flexed them and felt the familiar slight lag.

  "You said I’m a mage now," he said. "Ian was a mage. The body comes with that."

  "The body comes with the capacity, yes. Ian’s mana channels and his baseline affinity. What it does not come with is any particular skill in using them beyond what he’d learned under Covenant instruction, which is — and I want to be precise here — approximately the magical equivalent of being taught to read using only three letters of the alphabet."

  "And you can teach me the rest."

  "I can teach you a system of magic that makes what you’ve inherited look like a footnote. Ian’s training operated on the principle of internal willpower directing mana. What I teach operates on geometric external construction. It is an entirely different philosophy with entirely different applications and entirely different possibilities."

  "Why is it different."

  "Because it comes from a different source than the tradition that developed here. The particulars are not important right now."

  Marcus noted the deflection and filed it for later. A voice that was otherwise relentlessly precise becoming vague about a specific thing was data.

  "What’s the first thing you’d teach me."

  "A wind shield. Defensive. Simple enough for your current ability, practical enough to keep you alive in situations where you would otherwise not remain alive. You are going to travel through terrain that contains creatures who are significantly less impressed by your determination than I am grudgingly beginning to be."

  "Grudgingly beginning to be," he repeated.

  "Don’t read into it."

  "I wouldn’t dream of it."

  "The wind shield requires you to stop thinking of magic as something that happens inside you and start thinking of it as something you construct in the space around you. Ian’s training would have you push mana outward from your core. I am asking you to do something fundamentally different — to perceive the air around you as a material you can work with, the way a craftsperson perceives wood or stone."

  Marcus sat with this for a moment.

  "Show me."

  "I can’t show you. I don’t have a body, as we’ve established. I can describe it with precision and I can tell you when you’re doing it wrong, which based on available evidence will be frequently."

  "That’s fine. Describe it with precision."

  She did. It took twenty minutes and three failures and one moment where he created something that she described, flatly, as a minor air disturbance rather than anything resembling a shield. The fourth attempt produced something she assessed as technically a shield in the same way that a child’s drawing is technically a portrait — structurally correct, practically inadequate, but a foundation to build from.

  "Better," she said, which he was learning was significant praise from this particular source.

  "It held for about four seconds."

  "It held. That’s the relevant data point. Duration is a function of practice and we have, regrettably, a great deal of time in which to practice."

  He let the shield dissolve and looked up at the sky, which was fully dark now, a thick scatter of stars he didn’t recognize. No light pollution. Whatever else this world was, it was not a world that had gotten to industrial levels of electricity yet.

  "I need to understand the bond," he said. "What it is. What it means. What I can and can’t—" He stopped, choosing words carefully. "What the constraints are."

  "The sphere has merged with your body at a level that is not separable. I am present in your bond whether you find my presence convenient or not. I can perceive what you perceive. I cannot act independently of you. I can teach you and advise you and tell you when you are making decisions I consider inadvisable, but I cannot compel you to follow my advice, as the sphere apparently did not design me with that capacity, which I find I have mixed feelings about."

  "You didn’t choose this either."

  "No."

  It was a very simple word. She said it simply. But there was something in the simplicity that wasn’t simple at all.

  "How long were you dormant," Marcus asked.

  "A very long time."

  "Can you be more specific."

  "Several thousand years. I don’t have access to a precise count. Time passes differently when you’re not experiencing it."

  Several thousand years. Waiting in ancient ruins in a world she apparently remembered from before it became what it currently was, for a compatible soul that apparently required very specific characteristics to qualify and had not come along until tonight.

  "I’m sorry," Marcus said.

  A pause. Longer than the others.

  "That’s an unusual response."

  "Is it."

  "Most people in your situation are focused on their own circumstances. The apology implies you’ve dedicated processing capacity to mine."

  "Your circumstances are objectively worse. You’ve been alone in a ruin for millennia. I’ve been dead for about an hour."

  Another pause.

  "You are not what I expected," she said finally. "The compatibility criteria I established were functional in nature. They were not designed to select for—" A brief silence. "This."

  "What’s this."

  "I’m not certain yet. I’ll tell you when I’ve gathered sufficient data."

  Marcus almost smiled. He was fairly sure she would hate that he almost smiled, so he didn’t let it become an actual smile.

  "The route to Arcanis," he said instead. "What do I need to know."

  She told him. The terrain, the Covenant patrol patterns as best she understood them from what she’d observed before her dormancy, the wildlife he’d encounter and the hierarchy it operated on — she described this with particular emphasis, listing things that lived in the transitional zones with the tone of someone who expected him to take the information seriously — and the passes through the mountains that would eventually get him to Arcanis’s territory.

  It was a great deal of information delivered with the brisk efficiency of someone who considered not-knowing to be a personal failing in others. Marcus listened and filed and asked clarifying questions and noted the places where her information was old enough to be potentially unreliable. She acknowledged these gaps with something that sounded like irritation at her own limitations, which he found unexpectedly humanizing.

  "One more thing," he said, when she had finished.

  "Yes."

  "Ian’s family. His mother, his father, his siblings. When I have the capacity to do something about their situation without making it worse, I’m going to do it."

  A pause.

  "That’s not the most strategically optimal priority."

  "I know. I’m doing it anyway."

  "I see."

  "Is that a problem."

  "No," she said. "It is consistent with the compatibility criteria, as it turns out, in ways I find I’m still processing." A beat. "Get some sleep. Your body needs it more than you think. We start the wind shield properly at first light, and I want to be clear that my standards are significantly higher than what you produced tonight."

  "I know," Marcus said.

  He found a section of wall that still stood high enough to block the wind and sat with his back against it and looked at the stars he didn’t recognize. He thought about Ian, whose body he was borrowing and whose life he had inherited without applying for it. He thought about a valley with morning mist and a cottage that smelled like rain and cut grass. He thought about a fifteen-year-old boy who had not been trying to be more than a farmer’s son and who had been taken anyway and who had died believing he was almost somewhere better.

  He was going to get there. Not for himself. He didn’t have a self in this world yet.

  He was going to get there because someone had almost made it, and almost didn’t count, and the least he could do with an extra life was finish what had been started with the first one.

  "Sleep," said the voice in his head, somewhat more gently than her usual register.

  "Working on it," Marcus said.

  He closed his eyes, and somewhere in the ruins, something old and patient settled in to wait for morning.