Aren spent three days getting ready, and he spent most of them thinking about how he would get caught.
In his old life, he had always written down every way a trade could go wrong before he made it.
He did the same thing now, at night, on the back of an old ledger page.
She sees me.
She hears me.
Someone sees me leave.
Someone sees me come back.
A monster gets to her before I do.
I get killed.
The list got longer each night.
The first problem was the worst one.
Vivienne had already seen the Rag once.
She was clever and she was looking for him.
If she saw the same shape again, the same height, the same way of moving, she might start comparing it to every boy in the Academy.
Sooner or later, she would compare it to the Servant who carried her books.
On the second night, he stood in front of the cracked window of his room with a new strip of cloth tied over his nose and mouth, looking at his own reflection in the dark glass and trying to see himself the way she would.
The System answered before he could finish the thought.
[False Face: Concealment active.]
[While the Host’s face is covered, observers cannot retain the Host’s physical details.]
[Height, voice, scent and build will be remembered only as vague impressions.]
[Concealment breaks if the covering is removed, or if an observer touches the Host’s skin.]
He read it three times.
Then he looked at his reflection again.
It was strange.
He could see himself perfectly well in the glass, his own face, his own shoulders, the strip of grey cloth.
But when he looked away and tried to remember what he had just seen, the details slid off his memory like water off oiled leather.
A shape.
Grey.
A man, probably.
That was all.
So that’s why she only saw a man, he thought.
Even after looking straight at me.
It was a good tool, not a perfect one.
If an observer touches the Host’s skin.
He wrote that at the top of his list and underlined it twice.
He kept the rag anyway.
Half the Academy was laughing about the Rag now, and people who were laughing at a ghost with a dishcloth were not looking for a real person.
The best place to hide was inside a joke.
On Saturday evening, the moon came up huge and white over the eastern hills.
Aren left the Academy through the kitchen yard, where the night porter’s keys opened a gate that the cooks used for deliveries.
He walked down through the city in an old grey cloak he had bought for two silver in the lower market, with the rag in his pocket and a stick in his hand, like any poor boy going home late.
Nobody looked at him twice.
The north gate of Highcrest closed at sundown, but the wall beside the old tannery had a crack that every child in the lower city knew about.
He squeezed through it and walked up the dark road toward the hills.
The Old Quarry had been a real quarry once, a hundred years ago, before a Rift had opened in the deepest part of it and the stone cutters had run away and never come back.
Now it was a huge pit in the side of the hill, with steep walls of pale stone cut into steps, and old ropes and broken ladders still hanging from the edges.
At the bottom, far below, something shimmered like heat over a road.
The Rift.
It was much bigger than the one in the Training garden.
Its edges were not silver but faintly red, and the wind that came up out of the pit smelled of wet stone and something sour.
He had come an hour before Vivienne would.
He had heard her tell Corwin she would go when the moon reached the top of the sky.
He tied the rag over his face, felt the strange, slippery feeling of the System settling over him like a second skin, and climbed down into the pit.
The other side of this Rift was not a forest.
It was more quarry.
It looked like the same pit, but endless, a maze of pale stone canyons and terraces going down and down under a black sky.
The full moon hung above it, enormous, three times bigger than it looked in the real world.
Its light was so bright that every stone threw a sharp black shadow.
Beneath the moon, Aren thought.
She chose well.
He heard the first monsters before he saw them.
Something scraped on stone.
Something else answered it.
[Quarry Hound.
Rank F: Level 8.]
There were three of them, coming up out of a side canyon.
They looked like dogs made of pale rock, with cracks running all over their bodies where a red glow leaked through.
They were bigger than the Ash Wolves.
They moved like they were heavier too.
Aren had one use of his skill for the day, and he was not going to waste it on dogs.
He had a stick, a knife, and a technique he could not control.
He went to the narrowest part of the canyon, where the hounds would have to come at him one at a time, and lifted the stick.
Wrist, breath, weight.
He had practiced it every night for four nights.
His mastery had climbed to nine percent, one slow percent at a time.
A crescent formed at the end of the stick.
This time it was bigger, the length of his arm, and brighter than the moon.
He had not meant to make it that big.
It flew down the canyon before he could decide where to aim it.
It went through the first hound, then the second, then the third, and then it went into the canyon wall behind them and kept going.
The sound of stone splitting echoed through the maze for a long time.
The three hounds lay in pieces on the ground.
Their red glow went out.
Aren froze, his heart pounding, listening to the echo fade.
Too loud, he thought.
Much too loud.
If Vivienne had been inside the Rift already, she would have heard that across half the quarry.
He cut the three cores out of the broken hounds quickly.
They were the size of walnuts and warm to the touch, glowing faintly red.
He absorbed them one after another, the way he had seen others do in class, pressing them against his chest until they melted into his skin like ice into warm water.
[Rank F: Level 4 → Level 6.]
Heat rushed through his body.
His tired legs felt light.
He kept moving.
For the next hour, he went ahead of her path and cleared it.
He did not know exactly which way she would go, but he knew how she thought.
She would go down.
She would take the straightest road toward the bottom, where the guardian slept, because she did not like wasting time and she did not like looking lost.
So he went down too, choosing the widest canyons, the ones she would choose.
He found two more packs of hounds and a nest of something that looked like giant pale beetles.
He did not use the crescent again unless he had to.
Instead, he used the narrow places and the shadows and his knife.
He used loose stones to start small slides that crushed one hound against a wall.
He led a group of beetles into a dead end and dropped an old broken ladder on top of them from above.
He had never been strong, in either life.
He had always won by being in the right place before anyone else got there.
By the time the moon was at the very top of the black sky, he was Level 8, he had six cores in his pocket that he had not absorbed yet, and his body was covered in scratches and stone dust.
Then he heard footsteps above him.
He pressed himself flat into a crack in the canyon wall and held his breath.
A shape passed along the edge of the terrace above, silver hair shining in the moonlight, sword in her hand.
Vivienne walked quickly and carefully, looking left and right, her face pale and set.
She did not look down.
She passed.
Aren let out his breath very slowly.
She was walking down the road he had cleared, and she had no idea anyone had cleared it.
[Investment recorded.]
[Type: Hidden aid.
Anchor unaware.]
Good, he thought.
Let’s keep it that way.
He followed her from far behind and far above, moving along the higher terraces where the shadows were deepest.
The canyons ended at a great round pit at the very bottom of the quarry, open to the sky, with steep walls on every side.
The moon shone straight down into it like a lamp.
In the center of the pit, half buried in the pale stone, lay something huge.
At first, Aren thought it was a pile of boulders.
Then the boulders moved.
[Quarry Warden.
Rank E: Level 7.]
It stood up slowly.
It was a giant made of stone, three times the height of a man, with arms like broken pillars and a head that was only a rough block with two red lights for eyes.
Cracks ran all over its body, glowing red like the hounds.
When it moved, the whole pit shook.
Vivienne stepped down into the pit, alone, into the white light of the moon.
She drew her silver sword and waited.
Above her, Aren crouched on a high ledge in the shadows and watched.
This part was not his.
This part was hers, and if he so much as threw a stone, her Trial would fail.
He only had to stay still and make sure nothing else interfered.
He was looking down at her when he saw the movement on the opposite side of the pit.
It was on a terrace halfway up the far wall, hidden behind a fallen block of stone.
Three figures were crouching there in dark coats.
Moonlight caught on something metal in their hands.
Crossbows.
And on the collar of the nearest coat, a small silver hawk.
Behind them, standing back where he thought the shadows would hide him, was a tall boy with a long sword on his back and his arms crossed, watching Vivienne with a strange, hungry expression.
Darius Holt had followed her.
Aren understood all at once.
Darius did not want Vivienne to die.
He wanted her one breath from losing.
Then his men would shoot the guardian, and he would step down into the moonlight and be the one who saved her.
Her Trial would fail, and she would always know she had needed a Holt.
Down in the pit, the Quarry Warden lifted one enormous fist.
On the far terrace, the three crossbows lifted with it.