Vol 7, Chapter 4

◆ Commonwealth, Academy Port, King Dastan the First's POV. ◆
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​The ship under black sails entered the port near the Academy without hurry or commotion. Taking its place at the pier, it settled in and patiently awaited the port inspection.

Dockworkers cast uneasy glances at it, as if already foreseeing misfortune. Muttering Merlin's name, they tried to avoid passing near its berth.

Black was not a favored color at sea. Perhaps because items painted in it absorbed heat more strongly, and in these latitudes, that was wholly unnecessary. Or perhaps because of ridiculous maritime superstitions.

Whatever the case, Dastan had ordered the sails painted not for the sake of instilling fear. The reason was simpler.

It was a means of concealing runes: on a black background, drawn in alchemical ink, they were completely invisible.

All that any observer would see was merely a heightened magical aura radiating from the sails, but they would have no way of studying their workings simply by glancing at the fabric.

Dastan did not want enemies to glean anything from his unique knowledge.

The mage-inspectors ascended on board with due decorum. Behind them followed adepts and laborers, laden with numerous instruments. A brief exchange, a casket of magical cores to dissuade them from excessive diligence; and half an hour later they departed, having not even used half their devices.

Of course, they discovered nothing suspicious.

The mages gave the green light: unloading was permitted.

The King adjusted his false beard, touched the skin etched with alchemical treatments, and checked his bleached hair. Why attempt to alter his appearance with magic when cosmetics could achieve no less?

From the hold they led out the griffins. Formally, their sale was prohibited by the Kingdom, but if you were the King, you yourself set the rules.

Both beasts were powerful, stately, beautiful… and fatally ill.

Dastan had infected them the moment the shores of the Commonwealth appeared on the horizon. He did not know how much time would pass before his little chimeras devoured them from within and, in desperation, began teleporting out of the dying bodies.

Therefore everything had to be done swiftly. Extremely swiftly.

First order of business: to contact the Menagerie of the Academy. Their greed would never permit them to refuse griffins, especially at half price. As soon as the griffins died, or even suffered wounds, the infection would seize the entire collection of cages. Then the staff. And afterward, the whole Academy.

He gave his assistant a sign to head for the meeting, taking the griffins along. The crew disembarked: sailors to the tavern, handlers to the menagerie, loyal servants would tend to their tasks. And he… he would go straight toward his true goal.

In ten years, the Arena had not changed. A majestic amphitheater where, beneath the gaze of judges, the best were chosen.

Even now he heard the crackle of lightning and the cries of the spectators: a tournament was underway.

"Old man, entry is free only for members of the Academy," a guard stopped him.

Casting him a gold coin without a word, Dastan tried to pass, but the guard suddenly barred his way.

"For foreigners, payment is only in magical cores."

Curling his lip, the King drew from his pouch the smallest core he had managed to find and handed it over. The guard, smiling politely, stepped aside and extended the gold back to him.

With a contemptuous flick, Dastan knocked the coin from his hand.

"Keep it," he ground out through his teeth, and while the guard bent to retrieve the coin, he loosened a flask from his belt.

Inside sloshed far from wine.

With a flick of his hand, the lid flew off. The insulation was broken.

A drop of blood fell onto the guard's armor. Beneath the bright rays of the sun, the violet smoke rising from it was nearly imperceptible.

The guard straightened, tucked the coin into his purse. He felt nothing, for the moment.

Snorting, Dastan strode to the spectators' rows and took an empty seat. His gaze immediately fixed not on the duel, but on the sword hidden beneath velvet cloth: his sword.

The sounds of battle pulled him back into reality. His ears ached from the thunderous crack of lightning and the low rumble of fire.

Two junior mages had gone so far that it scarcely resembled a practice match. Waves of fire rolled across the entire arena; the fire mage spared no strength. In response, bolts struck from every side, striving to circumvent his viscous, fiery shields fused from molten sand.

The opponents were well matched. The fire mage had a respectable reserve of strength; the air mage, who had delved deep enough into his gift to imitate heavenly lightning, could be considered highly talented.

By the standards of this world, of course.

To his eyes, it was the brawl of kindergarteners. Both used their power so foolishly and wastefully that it amused the King and reminded him yet again of a simple truth.

This degenerate parody of magi deserved no right to exist.

Dastan closed his eyes and sank into meditation. The barriers surrounding the arena were crude and primitive, yet the magical distortions caused by the battling mages interfered with properly discerning their structure.

Irritating.

Several barely perceptible pulses of general magic disrupted the structure of the fire shield. A lightning bolt slipped through it, bypassed the protective amulet, and began its journey through the body, burning everything in its path: lungs, heart, brain. Had the mage been more experienced, he could have at least partially restrained a force akin to his own, or at the very least prevented some of his organs from being reduced to charcoal.

But the fire mage met Dastan's expectations. An appalling mediocrity, unable to control even his own body.

His body had not yet convulsed its way down onto the sand of the arena before Dastan struck again. The air mage's spell faltered. The wind that should have hurled him away from the oncoming wave of fire instead treacherously knocked him off his feet. The protective amulet that should have saved him in case of danger suddenly decided that a temperature of several thousand degrees was normal for a human body. Flames overtook the unlucky mage, hiding from the audience the fact that the amulet's storage was already adjusting his body's temperature… to a new normal.

The screams died before they began. The fire mage twitched in convulsions, his dying brain unable to govern his body. His opponent lay ten meters away, a baked heap of charcoal.

The spectators fell silent.

Silence. At last.

Dastan sank once more into meditation. The healers who rushed onto the arena no longer interfered with his vision of the whole picture. Their healing pulses were too weak, too insignificant, too useless.

His hearing sharpened. He heard the disbelief of the healers, astonished at how both protective amulets had failed at once. He heard from the stands the desperate cries of the dead men's friends. Not that.

Deeper.

He heard the hum of the protective wards. He saw how the vortices of energy coiled, obeying strict formulas. He sensed the fine threads of signal triggers and felt how the sword slowly awakened from its long sleep, recognizing its master.

Dastan broke the contact. Too soon. Wait a little longer.

He would return at night.

The King rose from his seat and departed. Until nightfall, he had to infect as many people as possible.

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◆ Commonwealth, Magister Igni's POV. ◆

Disease was a norm among the ungifted human stock of the Commonwealth. The cramped, confined conditions of the labor camps often led to outbreaks, which mages simply burned out at the root to eradicate. A circle was drawn, the strike prepared, and that was that. No more problem.

Numerous experiments had likewise conditioned the mages to expect that sometimes things could go wrong: escaped specimens, accidents threatening the destruction of several underground levels at once. Swift, merciless action was always required to minimize damage. Again, it was the fire mages who handled such matters.

The martial elite of the Commonwealth burned without hesitation not only commoners and laboratory assistants mutated into monsters, but also those who had gone too far in resisting the established order.

But never before had they faced the choice of destroying their own city.

The strange illness, whose outbreak began in the port, at first seemed a mere coincidence. A couple dozen mages had lost their strength? That was hardly news—mere overexertion. Senior mages always demanded the maximum from their subordinates, and magical burnouts were a widespread norm. People even died of them on occasion.

Only the corpses of those who died from exhaustion did not emit a wavering violet mist... The number of deaths grew, but panic did not seize the mages until one of the senior magi perished in the infirmary.

It was not death itself that sparked panic. The cause lay in the fact that all the surrounding healers, already drained by fruitless efforts to keep the patient alive, suddenly experienced his symptoms themselves.

Within half an hour, the healers' quarter was cordoned off by fire mages. Within another half-hour, a dome covered the port and much of the Academy.

Mages nervously raised their eyes to the half-transparent dome glimmering with red. No one had good premonitions.

An emergency session of the Lodge was already underway.

The specter of the Healers' Guildmaster, woven of light and mist, continually flickered and broke apart, his voice cutting out. The dome made stable communication nearly impossible.

"...teleportational in nature... raw mana infusion only prolongs the agony... not contagious until death... but wounds and blood may..." the specter droned. Even through the ritual, fatigue rang in his voice.

"Enough. We are wasting precious time," the magister struck his staff, cutting off the transmission. "I call a vote: to extend the dome over the entire Academy. And also... to cleanse it completely with strategic spells."

In response, silence. No shouting arose. The Lodge's members were above marketplace bickering, yet...

"You must be joking. We cannot afford to lose the Academy!"

"We have already lost it. The disease spreads faster and faster, and we know far too little about it. Can you swear the dome will prove sufficient, that it will not simply... teleport beyond it? Are you prepared to stake the fate of the entire Commonwealth on it?"

"Magister Igni, you presume too much. The loss of the Academy would be a crushing blow. An entire generation of mages will be lost. The consequences of this..." began the representative of the House of Earth evenly.

The magister did not let him finish.

"In the short term it will hardly affect our military strength. We will only lose new recruits. We still have about five years before our might declines critically."

"The Academy is not only young magi! It is the forge of artifacts, the gardens of herbs, the breeding pens for beasts, and above all—the laboratories. Are you ready to sacrifice centuries of research?" the icy voice of an elderly sorceress cut in sharply.

"I have already ordered the steel tower sealed and the laboratory passages collapsed. If we employ the Great Scorching spell, they may yet survive."

"Even if the tower holds, the entire surrounding quarter will be annihilated, including the foundries and storehouses. Our production will shrink by orders of magnitude! I propose a vote against the use of strategic sorceries," the Archmage concluded in a shout.

Noise rose within the Lodge.

"I support it. We cannot afford to lose the herbs. We already have great problems with them!"

"There is a risk of losing the laboratories. We cannot permit it. We simply cannot..."

"Only yesterday we acquired two excellent griffins. Burn them in fire? Never!"

Hands of the Lodge members rose one after another, making Igni tremble with fury. Again. Again and again these slugs dragged them into a dead end. Beneath pious speeches of risks, they waited and waited, until all had gone irreparably wrong. Instead of decisive action—half-measures. Instead of amputating the gangrenous arm—they cut off finger after finger, until the head itself would rot.

The Magister gave a short snap of his fingers to a member of his House. He had expected this outcome. Alas, though strong, he was not strong enough to stand alone against the entire Lodge, which meant he would have to resort to cunning.

"Very well. What do you propose? All of you? Zervan? Kaira? What is your plan?"

"We convened this session to devise a plan, Magister Igni," replied the cold, feminine voice of the senior Archmage of Water.

"Sounds perfect, my dear. The plan is to make a plan. What could possibly go wrong?"

"And your plan? To slaughter the entire young generation? And then what? War? You know we will be forced to attack once we lose hope for the future. You always wanted war!" The woman crossed her arms.

"I see us grow weaker with every passing year! Each year our chance to unite the world again dwindles! We already sat idly until the Theocracy struck first! We may only thank Merlin that they did not think to unleash this filth across the whole country at once. Now we have a chance to stop it here, to tear their plan apart! And instead you… you serve the enemy!"

"No, it is you! You serve the enemy! The healers say the sickness is contagious only through contact with tainted blood or corpses. Under the dome there are tens... hundreds of thousands of healthy Gifted. We must save them. What you propose would be the greatest squandering of magical blood since the Age of Strife!"

"Exactly! Beneath the dome are hundreds of mages, thousands of senior adepts, and tens of thousands of juniors. What will happen when they realize they've been sealed in to die? Even we cannot be certain the healers' predictions are true. Perhaps they are mistaken, and the disease spreads differently! And the students under the dome cannot know this at all! They will try to shatter the dome from within. Will our strength suffice to hold it, considering such vast territory? Then the disease will not even need to teleport beyond the dome—our own pupils will break it and release the plague, with the same speed a lustful youth frees a succubus from a pentagram!"

Magister Igni's shout echoed through the Lodge hall.

"We... acknowledge the risk," the Archmage of Earth said slowly. "However, our students are not so foolish. We will prepare instructions, quarantine zones, and bands of volunteers to save whatever we can. This is the only way to lessen our losses from this treacherous blow."

"Fine, I shall wait," Igni returned to his seat. "We," ha. Like abyss they understood anything.

For several minutes the Lodge debated how and with whom to seal the dome, while the Magister meditated, paying no heed to their arguments. He knew soon all his strength would be required.

The magical circle at the center of the chamber flared, mist rose once again, shaping a figure... but this time clad in armor and holding a staff. The phantom was clear, for the speaker, like them, stood outside the dome.

The messenger wasted not a second on formalities.

"Someone is using fire spells inside the dome. Tactical level! Burning down quarter after quarter. The survivors are trying to break through. We need more men, or we won't be able to hold it!"

"As I said, they would attempt to break out. A preemptive strike and eradication of the threat was the only way. But it is not too late," the Magister declared calmly.

"Bastard, this is your doing!"

The Magister only shrugged.

"The platform for strategic sorceries is ready. If we do not wish this plague to spread across the land, we must act quickly."

The sorcerers stormed from their seats with curses. Smiling into his mustache, the Magister followed. Why could they never make the right choice without a push?

The climb up the stairs. In the distance, the reddish dome glimmered. First—expand it. Those close to the edge were at risk of infection as well.

The mages obeyed. The field shifted its configuration.

Before their eyes, the dome flickered, each time extending its diameter by another hundred meters. Barricades and checkpoints were swallowed within. Guards who, just minutes ago, had silently watched fists hammering against the inner walls now found themselves trapped alongside them. Bodies split in half bled out, unlucky enough to be caught neither here nor there.

The Magister took his place in the ritual circle. By right of power, and because his spell would form the foundation into which the other Archmagi would weave their strength.

There were many ways to wipe a city from the face of the earth. But they needed the most economical. And the most... disinfecting.

The air beneath the dome grew searing. The mages sustaining it were forced to draw upon blood magic, or else the strategic spell would tear the dome apart from within.

Fires erupted across the city. Everywhere. All at once. Sails blazed, ships burned, homes and people alike ignited.

Igni did not know what this sickness was. But he knew one thing: everything could burn.

The Archmagi wove their power in. Part of the sea caught within the dome began to boil. Stone melted. The wind raised fire-twisters to ease the pressure and keep the dome from bursting.

No doubt someone screamed, but from here not even the roar of the firestorms could be heard, let alone human cries.

The dome let no sound escape.

The Academy burned in silence. In silence the houses collapsed. In silence the flaming demonic beasts rampaged through the inferno of the preserve. In silence the steel tower sagged and melted. In silence the empty Arena's walls fell. Fire and lava. Smog and steam.

And silence.

The surface smoothed, the city reduced to a flaming, bubbling swamp.

Complete disinfection.

The Magister lowered his hands. The casting was complete.

Minutes later, the dome collapsed. Lava rushed against the sea, water against lava. They met with a thunderous roar.

What had once been homes, people, cobblestones—hardened into jagged stone spikes along a new shoreline. Now the earth mages would have to toil to clear the lava reefs and rebuild a port.

Not that it would matter. From now on the mages would have to build fortresses, not harbors.

Kaira had been right that war was needed. But it was not he who needed it, it was the Commonwealth.

He tightened his grip on his staff and turned toward the Archmagi, who moaned and whined as they gazed upon the hellscape that had been the Academy. Subterranean halls gurgled as they filled with lava. The sagging, glowing steel Tower stood as a lonely mound above the fiery rivers.

The Archmage of Earth clutched his head, lamenting the thousands of artifacts lost. A disgrace.

These slugs... They would not start a war even after this. He was sure it would have ended with one token raid. Monsters sent into Theocracy lands, mercenaries bribed to act in their stead. Vengeance taken with the least risk.

Now they would have no choice. Now they would have to wage real war, and wage it in earnest. He would see to it.