There was only one sound in the dark tunnel: a slow, steady crunching. Like footsteps on dried leaves, only there were no leaves that far underground, or anywhere in that spirit forsaken desert. The sound came and went, as regular as her breath and as inevitable as her own, silent footfalls. And each time it pissed her off more than the last.
“Do you mind?” Aurellia snarled through gritted teeth, her pupil-less pale yellow eyes turning up at the source of the sound like tiny lanterns, brows furrowed.
The big man beside her shrugged, taking one last bite before stuffing what was left of the stale loaf of bread into his pocket. “Darkness makes me hungry,” he said between slow, grinding chomps.
“Everything makes you hungry.” Aurellia frowned in disdain. Her partner's chewing was always too loud, especially for her unusually long and sensitive ears, but in that cramped tunnel the sound echoed and amplified until it was unbearable. And he was always eating. She could only wonder how he never gained any weight.
Aurellia and Rex were exact opposites of one another. He was like a boulder, tall and broad-shouldered, while she was a twig. His body was covered in muscles as hard as rock, hers with feminine curves. She liked to take control, to lead, and he was content to follow. Of course she knew he was only pretending to be stupid and obedient, but she liked him better when he didn't talk anyway.
“Did it have to be so far down?” she complained, frustrated by the silence in the wake of Rex's chewing. All signs of the sun had long since vanished behind them as they walked deeper into the gut of the earth. Aurellia didn't need the light anyway, not with her eyes, and Rex could get along by following her. People had once made fun of her for her inhuman eyes, but they were all long dead now. And she didn't think about the past anymore.
“I didn't bring enough food,” Rex said, not quite in reply. Even his whisper made the walls of the tunnel around them tremble. The half-finished loaf had reappeared, like a pebble in his massive palm. He threw the whole thing in his mouth and swallowed, without chewing to Aurellia's great relief.
“I'll buy you some meat when we're finished if you don't mention food again,” she promised, and Rex didn't say anything until nearly five minutes later.
“It's not here.”
And she could see that he was right, although she wasn't sure how since unlike hers his eyes didn't work in the darkness of the mining shaft. The tunnel ended just half a minute's walk ahead of them, cut off by a wall of stone. She examined the dead end, running her fingers along the cold and jagged rock. She could see the outline of where the object had rested that they had come so far to retrieve, but it was gone now. Rough gouges ran alongside its imprint in the wall, identical to the ones found higher up in the shaft.
“The miners must have taken it,” she said. Her face was a mask of frozen calm but her fingers dug furrows in the rock like it was clay. “We'll have to thank them for that.”
“We kill them?” Rex asked, sounding almost bored.
Aurellia allowed the corners of her lips to turn up in a cold smile. “Naturally.”
“And then I get my meat?”
Aurellia turned and started the long climb back up to the surface, with Rex following silently despite being twice her size.
“Yes. As much as you can eat.”
* * *
After his stirring introductory speech, Captain Shaw led all of the mage-knight applicants down to the training fields that lay just outside of the city's marble steps. There were people waiting for them there, all wearing the same gray uniforms as the people at the registration tables. Trace asked Simon what it meant.
“White uniforms are for field knights,” Simon explained in a whisper as the crowd reassembled, “Gray uniforms are for headquarters and support staff.”
Before Trace could ask anything else, Shaw spoke again. His voice rang out over the chatter of the applicants loud and clear. “Before we start, report your magic classes at the desk to your left. We will be testing your abilities, so it won't do any good to lie. If you're not sure about your class, we have a mephis orb available to test you. Line up neatly.”
The applicants heeded his warning and pooled into a more or less straight line with Trace and Simon somewhere in the middle. “What's a mephis orb?” Trace asked through the ripples of conversation in the line.
“It's a stone that can read how much magic a person has inside him. All you do is put your hands on it and the surface changes colors to represent your class. The brighter the color, the higher the class.”
Trace nodded, and as he kept his eyes on the front of the line he saw the mephis orb in action. Most of the applicants had already been tested before they arrived, but a few were like Trace and had never heard about magic classes. Most of the people who got tested however had been tested before and were only hoping their class had somehow gone up since then. Of course they hadn’t. Magic class was a measurement of a person’s latent ability, not something that could be increased through practice.
The mephis orb was a black sphere with a surface so smooth it looked like it was made of liquid rather than stone. It was kept on a velvet cushion and none of the people working behind the desk ever touched it. The second an applicant put his or her hands on the orb the whole thing changed colors, turning different shades of red and yellow. Red corresponded to class three, according to Simon, while the yellows were class four. The vast majority of the people who tested themselves ended up somewhere in the three range. The only class five in the group was the girl who looked too young to be there, named Zephyr, and she didn't bother to be tested when her turn came.
The line moved quickly, with Captain Shaw observing the process from over the shoulders of the gray uniformed men behind the desk. Trace counted down the number of people before it would be his turn, wondering what the orb would say about him. It was true he'd never been able to use magic, but that didn't mean he couldn't. He had to have some magic in him, or else he wouldn't be alive. After all, when he was still ten people away from the head of the line he saw a butterfly dodge the shooing hands of the gray uniforms and land on the mephis orb. If it swelled a deep purple at the gentle touch of a butterfly's feet, it had to react to him.
At last their turns came. Simon didn't bother to be tested. He just reported himself as a class three and stepped out of the way, smiling reassuringly at Trace as he went. Then Trace was on his own. Taking one last deep breath, he stepped up to the desk.
“What's your class?” asked the gray uniform in the middle. He was a frighteningly clerical man without so much as a single strand of his black hair out of place.
“I don't know,” Trace said slowly, nearly choking on the words. He was more nervous than he ever remembered being before.
“Put your hands on the orb,” the uniformed man instructed. Trace hesitated for a few seconds, but eventually he did as the man said, placing his hands on either side of the orb. He wasn't sure what he expected the stone orb to feel like. Maybe he thought it would be warm to the touch, pulsing with something like a heartbeat. It wasn't. It was just a cold, inanimate sphere of rock.
And it didn't react to him at all.
All three of the men sitting behind the desk leaned to take a closer look when the orb didn't immediately light up under his hands. Trace stared into the orb's black and empty surface, thinking, change, change. But the orb couldn't hear him.
“Please touch the orb,” the man in the middle said, scowling like this was some kind of bad joke.
“I am,” Trace said, his voice strained as he tried every way he knew of trying to coax magic into the orb, but nothing happened.
“That's impossible,” the man said, now actually glaring at Trace.
“What's the problem?” Captain Shaw asked, leaning over between two of the gray uniformed men.
“He's doing...something,” the ill-humored man in the middle said, jabbing a finger at Trace. All the while Trace still had his hands pressed to the sides of the pitifully-empty orb.
Shaw's glacier eyes swept from the black orb to Trace. Then he did something no one expected. With Trace's hands still on the sides of the orb, Shaw reached down and put his own hand on the top of it. And once again, nothing happened. The surface of the orb stayed as black as a moonless night.
“It must be broken,” the gray uniform in the middle muttered, more to himself than to anyone else. Trace's arms were starting to get numb from squeezing the orb, so with Shaw's hand still pressed on the top he let go of the mephis orb.
As soon as Trace's hands lifted from its surface the orb lit up like a miniature sun, filling the air with a white light so stunning Trace had to stumble back from it. No one was able to get their hands in front of their eyes in time, and even though Shaw took his hand off the orb, thus extinguishing the light, just a fraction of a second later, the glow remained as a phantom in the eyes of everyone who saw it for much longer.
Once he could see again, Trace looked up to see all three of the gray uniformed men staring at Shaw. But Shaw was staring right at him, his glacial eyes trying to freeze their way into him. At last he looked down at the men at the desk. “Record it,” he commanded.
“Record what?” the man in the middle demanded. “It didn't react to him.”
“Exactly,” Shaw said. “Class zero.”
“Is such a thing even possible?”
Shaw's expression was unreadable as he stepped back from the table. “Apparently it is. Keep going, we don't have all day.”
“Um,” Trace said, bringing all four sets of eyes back to him. “Can I still take the tests?”
Shaw scowled at him. “We don't eliminate people based on class alone. Potential isn't as important as what you can do with it. If you can pass the trials without magic, I have no reason not to accept you.”
“Thank you,” Trace said, nearly sinking in the feeling of relief that washed over him.
“Say that after you've passed the tests.” The frost in Shaw's voice was enough to make Trace shiver even from all the way across the table. “Now get out of the way so we can finish.”
Trace hurried out of the way and the rest of the line started to go through without incident. Simon was waiting for him at the edge of the crowd of finished applicants. “Was that you?” he asked as soon as he saw Trace. “The class five?”
Trace shook his head. “That was Captain Shaw.”
Simon looked slightly disappointed, but also puzzled. “Why was he touching the orb?”
“Because it wasn't reacting to me. I guess he was trying to see if it was broken.”
“It didn't react to you? At all?”
Trace shook his head. “Apparently I'm a class zero.”
“That's...” For a second Trace thought he was going to say impossible, but when he finally finished he said, “...unheard of. Unless...”
“Unless what?”
“Forget it,” Simon prompted with a smile. “Just thinking to myself.”
The rest of the applicants finished reporting their classes without incident. Rumors spread through the other recruits, first that Trace was the class five who had practically blinded everyone in the line and then that it had actually been Shaw and that Trace's power was so small the orb couldn't even read it. The tests hadn't even started and already everyone else was looking down on him. He couldn't blame them, but that didn't mean he wasn't going to prove them wrong.
“Listen here,” Shaw commanded once the last of the applicants had been tested. “Don't get overconfident just because you have a certain class. Having power means nothing without the ability to control it. In my time here I've seen class five's fail and class two's pass. The trials have yet to begin, so don't think any of you have an advantage or disadvantage yet. The real test begins now.”
Captain Shaw didn't believe in doing anything halfway. He started the trials with a test of the applicants' physical fitness and endurance. That was the portion of the test Trace was least worried about since that was only a little farther than he ran every morning, but even though he flew through the ten laps around the fields with ease the other applicants weren't as fit as he was. Most of them had focused mostly on their magic, leaving their endurance to suffer. Only half of the applicants finished the run at all, and most of them were doubled over and breathing heavily at the end.
Shaw watched intently, but no hint of what he was thinking ever made it into his expression. Whether he was impressed, disappointed or just bored, there was no way of knowing just by looking at him. He immediately dismissed anyone who couldn't complete the run, but even that he did with a cold and unemotional efficiency.
Trace was the first one to finish the run, followed shortly by Jaden, who even stopped to sneer at him before catching his breath. Simon was among the last to finish, but he did and Trace was glad to see it. Simon was the closest he had to a friend there, and the only one who didn't look down on him for being class zero. He was also surprised that Zephyr, the girl who looked too young to be there in the first place, finished somewhere in the middle of the pack.
After the run, Shaw only gave them a few minutes to rest before sending the remaining applicants through an obstacle course designed to test their strength. Again, this was the kind of training he had prepared himself for back in Withestrop, so once again he excelled. Most of the applicants who had finished the run managed to make their way over the climbing wall, across the pole at the top and then through the several sets of rope webs. When everything was said and done, the original fifty-two candidates had been brought down to just under twenty.
But Shaw wasn't finished yet. No sooner had the final applicants made it to the end of the course (Simon being one of them) than Shaw lifted his hand and hundreds of ice spikes rose out of the empty field behind him. From amorphous spikes, the ice formed into detailed human shapes, arms outstretched like scarecrows. They were standing in a perfect formation, a frozen army in a nineteen-by-twenty rectangle.
“All remaining candidates take a row of dummies,” he commanded, and whether or they were still trying to catch their breath from the obstacle course all nineteen of the applicants obeyed without hesitation. “Your objective in this exercise is simple: using any means necessary destroy all of the ice statues in front of you. You have ten minutes, anyone with a single dummy still standing at that time will be asked to leave. And in case you thought this was normal ice...” One of the men in gray uniforms standing next to him handed Shaw a sword, which he swung as hard as he could at the nearest ice sculpture.
A howl rang out that made all of the applicants shrink back, but none of them closed their eyes. Because while the ice sculpture was completely unharmed, the blade of the sword had shattered into more pieces than any of them could count. “...They're not,” he finished. Trace imagined Shaw was looking directly at him after that demonstration, but the captain just had the kind of eyes that seemed to focus on everyone at once. Even so, everyone else was looking right at Trace, the boy with no magic and nothing but the sword on his belt. “If you're not careful, they'll fight back. Your ten minutes begin now.”
He stepped back as they applicants turned to their sculptures and prepared to unleash all the magic they could wield on them. Everyone had their own way of summoning their powers. Some were more common than others, like chanting mantras or drawing complex circles in the air in front of them or in the dirt at their feet. Apparently mages at Shaw's level didn't need to do anything but concentrate, but none of the applicants were anywhere near that skilled. There were a couple of musical instruments (a flute and a drum), and four people swished wands to help them focus. Trace couldn't help but notice that Simon played melodies on something that sounded like a flute but looked like a potato, while Jaden, whom Trace hadn't started to like anymore since he'd given him the nickname 'Zero,' used lightning-quick combinations of hand signs.
As for Zephyr, the girl prodigy, all she used was the leather drawstring pouch tied to her belt. She took it off carefully, not concerned with the ten minute time limit even as the people on either side started hammering away as hard and fast as they could. She gingerly unfolded the pouch, took out a pinch of the silvery powder inside it, and sprinkled it in the air in front of her. The powder just hung there like a screen, invisible but for a few sparkles at first but gradually coalescing as whatever spell she was working gained strength.
Most of the applicants had started by hurling fireballs at their targets, but that didn't last more than a couple seconds. Not only did the fireballs not have any effect on the ice, they just bounced off, some of them rebounding toward their casters if they'd been thrown hard enough. After it was clear that wasn't going to work, everyone started trying to come up with their own approach.
Meanwhile, Trace hadn't done anything. He was still shaken by Shaw's display. He didn't want his sword to end up the same way, not if there was any other option. So he walked up to the first statue in the line and felt it. It didn't feel like normal ice, it felt softer. But the harder he pushed on it, the harder the sculpture became, all the way to the point where pushing on it almost knocked him off his feet backward.
Then the shriek of shattering glass rang out through the field, signifying the first broken sculpture. Everyone looked to see who had done it, most of them expecting it to be Zephyr. It wasn't. Whatever spell she was working on was still brewing in the stormy cloud of powder in front of her. Much to Trace's displeasure, the first one to break one of the sculptures had been Jaden. And as everyone watched, he broke another.
He made a combination of seven different hand signs in just under three seconds to work the spell, a bolt of lightning shooting straight from his hands into the stomach of the next sculpture. The lightning was so concentrated it dug a hole in the center of the sculpture the size of one of Trace's fingers. Once inside, the bolt expanded into a storm of raging electricity, blowing the statue apart from the inside.
The other applicants went back to hammering on their own sculptures with whatever magic was their specialty. Some lifted spikes of rock out of the ground and pummel the statues, other gathered balls of water and launched them over and over at their targets. Others used fire, lightning, and even one beam of pure, concentrated sunlight. All of them were starting to wear on their targets, but their progress was unbearably slow.
And Trace still hadn't done anything to his. His hand clenched down on the hilt of his sword so hard it trembled. He didn't want to lose to Jaden. The thought of that was even worse than the thought of failing the exam. Worse than breaking the sword the blacksmith had made for him. He pulled the blade out of its sheath. He would just have to hit it as fast as he could, so fast it wouldn't have a chance to break his blade.
Just as he was preparing to swing at the first sculpture in front of him, Zephyr's spell finally finished charging and everyone stopped to watch it unfold. First, the roiling cloud of magical powder in front of her sank into the ground, and then, just as it seemed like nothing else was going to happen a massive chasm tore the ground in half in front of her. It was like watching an earthquake form, running in a straight line and only reaching to the end of her line of statues. The gaping abyss swallowed all twenty of the ice statues in front of her before closing up, inevitably crushing all twenty of them at once. With that done, she turned and walked away, finding a shady spot underneath a tree to lie down until the rest of the ten minutes were over.
Jaden was already halfway through his twenty sculptures and going strong, though each new blast of lightning took more energy to create than the last and he was starting to look winded. Most of the other applicants were through either two or three of their own sculptures, and in the wake of Zephyr's stunning performance were trying harder than ever. Simon was even on his fifth, chipping away at them with steady attacks from blades he made out of gusts of wind.
And Trace still hadn't destroyed any. He put both hands on the hilt of his sword. He knew better than to hold back for sentimental reasons. No matter who had given it to him it was a sword, and a sword was useless if it couldn't cut. He wouldn’t let it be useless. He wouldn’t let himself be useless. Even without magic, he could still pass this test. He would.
So he did.
He held tight to his sword as he swung with all his might, expecting enough resistance to break his arms if not his blade. Only there was no resistance. His sword chopped through the sculpture as easily as it would empty air. If he hadn't watched the blade cut through the ice as he cut he would've thought he missed.
Since he'd braced for an impact that never came, Trace was knocked off balance, falling into the puddle where just an instant before there had been an ice sculpture. He picked himself up, looking around for any clue of what might have happened but there was none. Whatever the reason, the first sculpture was gone so he turned to the seconds.
This time he swung a little lighter, the way he would trying to cut through a bale of grain back home. It had the same effect. He watched his sword cut straight through the ice sculpture but didn't feel any resistance. But since he kept his balance this time, he could see what happened to the statue in the wake of his slash. Not that that helped him much to know what had happened.
Trace didn't know a word to describe what was happening to the statue. It didn't melt, melting was a much more gradual process. In under a second after his blade cut through the sculpture, both halves of it turned completely back into water and fell to the ground in a thick shower. Meanwhile not even a drop of water remained on Trace's blade.
Trace used the next few sculptures to experiment. It didn't matter where or how deep he cut it, the instant his sword touched the ice the entire sculpture turned back into water and dropped in a deluge down on the grass, nothing more than a stain in the dirt. Trace didn't know how or why, but he didn't really care. All that mattered was that now he could pass the test.
From there all he had to do was run alongside the line of ice men, nicking each one with his sword as he passed. By the time he reached the next sculpture, the one behind him had already vanished. It took him less than a minute to reach the end of the line, finishing only a few seconds behind Jaden. Since they were on opposite sides of the field, neither of them said anything.
Simon was the next one to finish. He hardly managed to give Trace a smile and thumbs up before collapsing where the last of his ice sculptures had stood. Apparently using that much magic took a lot out of him. Even Jaden was even more winded than he had been after either the run or obstacle course. Since Trace hadn't actually done anything, he couldn't relate.
There were only five minutes left, and in that time only four more applicants finished. One was the boy standing next to Jaden who used drawings on the ground to form a cannon out of rocks; the second a girl with long white hair who used dance-like movements to control two streams of water with her fingertips; the third a tall girl with short black hair who had followed Zephyr's example, summoning holes in the ground to swallow up the statues (though unlike Zephyr she could only do one at a time); and finally a boy with spiky hair who had chanted to life a long, snake-like dragon made entirely of fire.
Along with Zephyr, Jaden, Trace and Simon, those four all passed the test while everyone was dismissed impassively by Shaw. “Congratulations on making it this far,” he said once everyone else had left the field. His frozen eyes scanned the row of new recruits. “But this is only the beginning. Things will get much harder from here, and you will be expected to constantly prove yourselves. Should I find any of you lacking in any way, I will not hesitate to remove you from the program. Do I make myself clear?”
“Yes Captain,” answered the eight new mage-knights, even if they were only trainees.
“You'll be expected to find your own quarters until you become official mage-knights. Your training starts tomorrow at first light. You don't want to be late. Dismissed.”
* * *
The echo of Shaw's footsteps surrounded him like a chorus of ghosts, one of the many reasons he hated the cavernous inner halls of the headquarters at the peak of Vanadrin's man-made hill. His boots tapped their way along the flawless black floors on their own as his eyes and mind were occupied with the report in his hands. There were plenty of windows to see by, but each one shed light of a different color and the constant change was giving him a headache. He stopped in the glow of the next unpainted window he crossed.
“That's an interesting batch of recruits you've got,” said an old, chuckling voice from over his shoulder.
Shaw hadn't heard anyone come up behind him, but he wasn't the type to be surprised by something so trivial. “I take it you got my message then, Regent Demarcos.” He kept all inflection out of his voice, which disappointed the old man.
“Indeed I did,” he chuckled, stepping in front of Shaw. He wore the same white uniform as Shaw, but with more decorations pinned to the breast. “Class zero. You're certain?”
Shaw looked up from his papers to glare at the old regent, which was like nodding for Shaw.
“You think he's one of them?” the regent asked, dropping the jolly old man's facade he usually wore.
“Most likely. He has the power, as you saw.”
“I did,” the regent agreed. “Most impressive, if that's what it was. Does he know?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
The regent's half-senile grin returned to his bearded face. “Like I said, an interesting bunch. I look forward to seeing how they mature under your guidance. Prepare them well. You know better than most what awaits them away from this city.”
Shaw stared down harder than ever at the papers in his hand. “Count on it.”
“I am.” The old regent patted Shaw on the shoulder before turning and walking away, silently except for his quiet chuckling.
Next week- Chapter 3: The Road to Becoming a Knight