11th of Darkfall, 412 AH
Vael walked me into the training hall.
The room was bright, high windows, morning coming in hard off the glass. Sera was already there, far side of the floor, working through a slow form with both arms, sweat at her hairline. Her eyes went to me once and back, then she brought her wooden sword down with a short whizz of air.
I got the message. Stay on your side, I'll stay on mine.
"We'll start with how your body works before we put any mana through it. Stand there." Vael tipped her chin at a square of floor in front of her. "Feet about shoulder-width. Arms by your side."
What followed was fifteen minutes of being read like a specimen, which, under other circumstances, I'd have enjoyed enormously, except this time I was the specimen.
She walked me through positions, squat, rise, bend over straight legs, a low stance held until my thighs ached, and corrected me by hand, hand at a hip or a shoulder, moving the part that was wrong.
By the eighth position my legs had gone unreliable and my back had filed a formal complaint. I'd thought, walking in, that magic would be the hard part. The magic hadn't even started.
I'd come up damp already from the mana-chamber. By the time she released me from the last stance my shirt was stuck to my back, and I shrugged out of the jacket, dropping it over the rack at the wall's edge.
Off my arms, the jacket stopped doing me the favor of holding the smell in. I turned my head from my own armpit and lost.
Vael's eyes went over me, my face, and decided none of it changed the plan. Stripping a sweat-soaked jacket after fifteen minutes of held squats wasn't, I hoped, a thing that needed asking.
"Water," she said, and nodded me toward a stoppered jug on a side bench. "You'll learn nothing dehydrated and lightheaded. Drink. Sit if you want it."
Sitting down. A profoundly underrated technology. A minute on the bench was enough. My legs steadied, and my back quieted.
"Now watch." She walked to the edge of the training hall and lifted a rock one-handed.
It was a big rock. Grey, rough, the size of a large melon, the kind of weight that takes two people and grunts. She picked it up like an apple, her arm coming up level at her shoulder on a wrist that didn't so much as tremble.
No gesture or word. She didn't need it.
"Enhancement," she said, and turned the rock so I could see the size of it. "Mana into the muscle, you become superhuman. This stone is heavier than you are and my arm is sixty years old." She smirked. "Easy."
Easy, she'd said. I'd spent the better part of a week failing at the no-trick.
"And now..."
She tossed the rock up gently, a foot off her palm. As it hung there, she held her free fist beneath it, and the air moved.
I felt it before I understood it. A whizz went past my cheek toward her as the room's air gathered in front of her fist, folding tighter into the same small space. The pressure climbed. The rock dropped into line with her knuckles, and she released the pressure: a flat, hard shove with the whole weight of a gale packed into the space of a fist. The rock came apart. It sprayed outward in a wide cone, fist-sized chunks flung the length of the hall, rattling off the far wall.
A fragment had reached the wall behind her at head height and clipped the light stone bracketed there. I heard the tck of it. A hairline crack ran up through the lamp's facet.
"Wind," she said into the settling dust. "My best element. You compress it and you release the pressure where you want it. Press, and release."
First elemental magic I'd seen with my own eyes, and the word my head landed on caught me off guard. Powerful, yes. But... crude. A Master-tier practitioner had just turned a rock to gravel with a fistful of wind, and the first thing my mind did was look for the fault in it.
It was crude in the physics. She'd thrown all that pressure at the rock as an undifferentiated shove, a wall of force with nothing aiming it past the first thing it touched.
My mind was already three steps down the road. Contain it. If you wrapped the pressure instead of releasing it flat, packed it into one fast small mass, put a spin on it to hold its line, it wouldn't dissipate on contact. It would go through, make a single clean puncture and still be travelling when it came out the far side.
Nobody in this world thought about wind that way. They thought press and release, and they got a shattered rock and a spray of gravel. That was a perfectly good way to ruin a rock and leave most of the power on the floor.
"Sixty years on, and it still does that," Vael said. "Most practitioners three times your age can't cast a spell like that."
I had, by then, privately demoted the whole technique to a draft I'd want to revise. I lifted my hands and gave her three small, even pats of applause anyway. "That was very impressive."
She took it without comment.
The light stone gave out a few seconds later. A soft tk, and the facet let go, the crystal dropped off the bracket and broke on the floor behind her.
She didn't glance back, but the twitch in her ear gave it away.
Thick-faced, I thought, almost admiring it.
"Stance," she said. "You watched me use none because I no longer need one. You will." She set her own feet, square, knees soft, and held it for me to read. "When you plant your weight, it's easier to imagine the muscles hardening. A beginner needs that." She came up out of the stance. "And then you'll shed it. A planted stance is useless in a real fight. The ground you're rooted to is the same that gets you killed if you don't move."
I had perhaps forty questions that I couldn't ask most of. Half were about her, the ears, the eyes, where the human and feline systems shared a bloodstream. Not over a first lesson though. Maybe second or third.
"That's enough talk," she said. "Give me your hand."
I gave her my right. She closed long fingers around it, two pale scars crossing the back of her hand, then turned my palm up and laid two fingers of her other hand flat against the center.
"Feel where I send it. I'll name the route as I go. Try to learn what it feels like to move mana correctly."
And she pushed mana into my hand.
The mana entered at my palm as a single drawn thread moving toward the wrist.
"Up the forearm." The line climbed the inside, favoring the muscle, tracking toward the elbow. "Elbow." She held the mana there for a moment. "And back."
The thread reversed and came down the same route. I very nearly forgot to breathe, because she just did exactly what I'd been trying the past few days.
She let my hand go. "That's the feeling. You'll spend a while failing to make your own arm do that. Now take the stance."
I took the stance for enhancement, knees dropped to a half-squat, elbows bent in at my sides, fists closed.
"Close your eyes if it helps. Find the mana. Then push it outward evenly. Don't aim it yet, just move it and hold it there."
I closed my eyes and found the mana, which was the one part of all this that came easy. It was there the moment I reached, trivial to locate and impossible to do anything useful with. I pushed it outward toward the hands.
It actually went this time. It reached my fingertips, and stayed for about as long as it takes to think there. Then it scattered. Coherence drained out from the edges first.
"Again," Vael said.
I lost count somewhere after the fourth or fifth. The drill found a rhythm and I went into it. Push, and as the mana started to move she'd give me a single word, hold. It would hold a beat, two, the count creeping up rep by rep, and then scatter, from the edges in. Reset. Breathe. Push. Hold. Scatter.
Between reps she'd put a small exact observation into the gap. Your shoulders came up that time, drop them. Good, that one held longer. You're forcing it. Let it leave, don't shove it.
A frame started building itself behind my eyes, assembling out of the repetition. The mana wanted to scatter; that was its rest state. Pushing it into a shape was pushing it uphill, and the moment I stopped it would go back.
And one more thing, which I noticed around the eighth rep. My right hand felt no different than my left anymore.
I never once managed to actualize the enhancement. The mana reached the fingertips, delivered, sat, and the spell would not work. Delivery without activation. That was the new wall then.
Each rep was more interesting than the one before it. I was failing exactly as hard as I'd failed alone in the dark all week, and I'd never enjoyed failing this much in my life.
Which was, I supposed, the moment I stopped being able to leave the better question alone. I needed her arm for comparison.
"Do the enhancement again," I said. "I want to compare."
She held my eyes a moment. "Go ahead."
I crossed the floor and grabbed her forearm. I probably should have asked. Whatever.
I turned it palm-up in both hands and pressed my thumb along the flexor group, working up from the wrist, and the muscle under the skin was denser than a sixty-year-old's arm had any business being, packed and quiet, like a cured length of rope. There was a layer of give over the top, ordinary aging tissue, and then under it the part that mattered. The mana sat deeper along the tissue, a faint pressure-sense I could barely feel through my own fingertips.
There it is.
"When you hold enhancement," I said, "is the mana in the muscle, or is it routing along something next to it? Because this doesn't feel like it's only in the muscle. It feels like it's tracing a line the tissue learned."
Nothing came back.
I went back to the tissue. The gradient got clearer the longer I held it. I dragged my thumb past the wrist, lightly over a long-healed scar that ridged the muscle, and the fine hairs along her forearm stood up under my hand, a whole band of them lifting where the skin went tight. It wasn't cold, and I hadn't pressed hard enough to hurt, so something else had raised them.
Under the lifted hairs, in the slanted light, were the faintest stripes I'd missed until now, banding the skin itself, so washed-out they were nearly not there. A tiger wore its stripes on the hide under the coat, she had a ghost of the same.
The answer still didn't come. I looked up at her.
Vael was staring at me. Across the hall Sera had stopped her own form halfway through, watching me with her brows pulled down. When my eyes found hers she turned back to her drill.
I tilted my head and looked back at Vael, waiting to hear the answer.
Her brows drew together and then climbed, her lips parted around a word that didn't come, her face flickered through three or four expressions too fast for any to land. For a woman who'd spent the last hour narrating my failures in the same even voice she'd use to read a shopping list, it was a great deal of emotion at once.
"To answer it," she said, and there was a dryness in it now, "the conventional account is that mana moves through the channels." The silver eyes held mine. "Whether that account is exactly right is a question for the scholars, not me. You can stop touching my arm now, Klaus."
Vael drew her forearm out of my hands and turned it over.
I stepped back. Took the stance again. "That was a useful thing to feel," I said, which was true, and sounded a bit weird said out loud, even to me.
She pointed me back to my place without further comment, and we ran the drill out to the end of the hour. No enhancement ever lit. By every measure that mattered, I'd failed the entire lesson.
"That's enough," Vael said at last. "You got to four seconds today. That's the best you'll get for now." She didn't say well done, which I respected. I hadn't done well, and she didn't insult me by saying I had. "Go on. Drink the rest of that water before you leave."
I collected the jacket off the rack, drank, and went to the door. Sera was still working her own form on the far side. I didn't look at her, and the line we'd drawn at the start held all the way out the door.
I had the feel of it now, and the whole night ahead to teach myself.