Chapter 9
Drained
The debrief was short.
Guild leadership, two Crown officials who'd been called in for the
structural incident report, Seff in the corner with her clipboard. They
asked what he'd seen before the collapse. He told them. They asked what
he'd done during the three days. He told them that too — the practical
parts, the assessment, the waiting. They wrote things down.
They did not ask about the mark. He'd kept his right hand in his lap
throughout.
They released him at the fifth bell in the evening. Seff walked him to
the dock.
'Week off,' she said. 'Paid. Guild policy for recovery incidents.'
'I don't need —'
'It's not a negotiation, it's a policy.' She stopped at the dock
entrance and looked at him with that expression that was professional
and something else underneath it. 'You should have been dead, Cyan.
Three days in a collapsed Silver dungeon with no water, no light, no
rank. Nobody comes out of that.'
He didn't say anything.
'I'm not saying it's a problem,' she said. 'I'm saying get some rest.'
He took the long way back to his boarding house, through the outer edge
of the guild district where the streets were quieter. The evening
mana-lights were coming on — small glass spheres set into the building
faces, Iron-grade enchantments that lit at dusk and dimmed at dawn, the
cheapest form of city illumination and so ubiquitous that most people
stopped seeing them.
Cyan saw them.
He saw them clearly in a way he hadn't before. Each one was a small,
distinct source — warm, slightly amber, the mana inside it compact and
specific. As he passed one he felt it register on his marked hand like a
sound in a silent room. Not intrusive. Just present.
He put his hand in his pocket.
He was two streets from the boarding house when the man stepped out of
the alley.
He was maybe thirty, Bronze-rank — Cyan could feel that now, the mana
inside him sitting differently than the mana in a light fixture, denser,
more complex. He had a knife, which was almost insulting. Bronze-rank
mages didn't usually need knives. This one looked like he was between
jobs and past the point of making good decisions about it.
'Purse,' the man said.
Cyan had six coppers and a labor card.
'I have six coppers,' he said.
'Purse,' the man said again, and mana gathered in his free hand — a
threat, not a spell yet, just the visible accumulation that meant I can
do this if I want to.
Cyan looked at the mana gathering in the man's hand.
He raised his right hand without thinking about it.
That was the honest truth of it, afterward: he did not decide to do what
happened next. He raised his hand because his hand raised itself, and
the mark on his palm oriented toward the concentrated mana in front of
it the way a compass needle oriented toward north.
He felt it happen.
The mana in the man's hand — the accumulated Bronze-rank reserves that
represented years of training and natural ability and the Saint-given
gift of generation — moved toward Cyan's palm like water finding a
drain. Not slowly. Not gently. In one complete, total transfer that
lasted maybe two seconds.
The man's legs went out.
He sat down on the cobblestones with the expression of someone who had
just had something fundamental removed without warning. His knife
clattered beside him. He was breathing. His eyes were open. He was
completely empty of anything that had made him dangerous.
Cyan stood over him with the man's mana inside his own hand, which was
warm and slightly painful with the addition, like a cup filled past
capacity.
He stared at what he'd done.
The man stared at the middle distance.
'I didn't —' Cyan started.
The man said nothing.
'Can you hear me?'
A blink. A slow, confused blink. He was fine — Cyan could feel that
somehow, feel the absence of anything permanent, just a deep depletion
that would resolve in hours or days depending on the man's natural
recovery rate. He was unhurt. He was also completely unable to stand up.
Cyan looked at his marked palm.
The seven lines had the faint warmth of something recently used.
He closed his fist, stepped around the man still sitting on the
cobblestones, and walked the last two streets to the boarding house at a
pace he kept careful and even.
He got to his room.
He sat on his bunk.
He looked at his hand for a long time.