House Ariloch was once again the scene of debauchery that would make the Sun Queen turn her eyes away. If she knew everything going on in the realm then she knew six arcanists were attempting something deeply unwise and probably painful in room 302 and Declan hoped they had fun.

  He’d retreated to his apartmend and rested. It wasn’t a warm sunshine blanket bath but it was real and that was enough. A mound of shards lay on one side, his mana bearing on the other and right now, he fought to puzzle out why it wouldn’t obey his will.

  It would wobble and rock and roll on the ground and choke him with a gush of mana he had to channel down or Deflect but it simply wouldn’t rise. The manape blood splattered on one side said it wasn’t his imagination, his greatest effort could only raise it a finger-width off the ground and even then it bounced once or twice in the orbit.

  The runes came in three flavors. The first he called Festering Wound, even though it was Claw combined with Heal with an inversion modifier. The second was Speed Screech, which did exactly what it sounded like making a terrible noise and sending him forward faster. The third was probably derived from the scale apes, he called it Hurl and it was the most complex rune of the bunch, more complex than the Destroy counter-shield by an order of magnitude. It took three hours to empower and then splintered a shard from his apartment door and drove his favorite plate clean through the apartment door, installing a mail slot.

  He had enough to raise it to tier three and yet couldn’t use it at tier one, but it would make one hell of a weapon in time. He had theories about how runes combined and was willing to burn the stack to test it. Combining shards worked exactly as he expected. Two pieces of rock that had no business fitting together became softer and by the time they touched, looked like they had always been that way. Unlike full runes, shards didn’t fight combining. He was near certain he could put his hand into a bag, shake it, and pull out full rune-stones.

  Pinned to the apartment door had been the sealed golden notice, that he was expected at House Domine at two in the afternoon and failing to attend would constitute an act of House War. They just had to add the last part. Rather than sink in silence, he slipped out into the commons, bathing in the conversations that ran like the rivers of rain outside, until at last he was forced to sleep the sleep a man only found safe at home.

  ###

  Rohan Taylor was waiting for Declan before sunrise. He still wore the ArCore white with gray edge but carried only a simple sword and stood barefoot in the snow. “Mana channel alignment is critical once you start using runes. You’ve probably got a ton of impurities built up just from Deflect. Let’s start there.”

  Declan did, and was disappointed to find that in fact, the poses did hurt more than they should have. When he was done, he was ready for a break and a beat down. But they remained alone except for a team of arcanists hunting deep in the World Wound. “You can run along. Anthony is coaching me.”

  “Run where?” Rohan asked. “All the new arrows are in flight. I’ve got two weeks of leave. I plan to sleep most of it, get laid when I’m not asleep and eat when I’m not doing either of the others. I like simple pleasures.”

  “You were serious?” Declan asked. “304 is open. 302 will be once it’s cleaned, you don’t want to go in there yet. Alister coming?”

  “Lord Rush has invited his son to come home for a brief visit,” Rohan said. “In the mean time, let’s see how you do with a sword. Tegan said your footwork nearly gave her a heart attack and twice you literally cut some of her hair killing a scale monkey.”

  “Tegan can go—Ouch!” he winced as a light blow landed on his still-tender arm. “So that’s how it is? Fine. I’d like to see you do that—ouch!”

  Anthony would probably call it a fine morning.

  He didn’t make it to lunch without a summons and a message from Instructor Brieze, who was currently holding class and still dragged him in. “I’m sick of hearing how it won’t work, and I refuse to accept less than the best effort. How many years have you been enrolled at Ariloch, Declan?”

  “Less than one day.” he said.

  “Tier?” they asked.’

  “Zero or one, depending on how you measure. I can use a tier one rune but no arcsoul and I’ve bound two mana stones at once.”

  Instructor Brieze wasn’t looking at him. She was looking to the class. “So, why do you fail and he succeeds? It’s not a matter of talent or you’d outclass him. It can’t be mana, each of you has ten times as much, or money, your boots cost more than he owns. What you’re lacking is effort. Declan, would you be so kind?”

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  With so many eyes on him it took six tries and two breaks before he managed to activate Deflect, but this time it hung in the air for long seconds before fading to mere mana motes.

  “Not Strike, I’ll note. Deflect. Now, what went wrong the first five times? What nearly went wrong the sixth time?” Brieze moved through the class. “Yes, failure to outline the rune. Flooding without matching direction, not matching both branches, allowing the mana to dictate the flow and brute force. But he succeeds.”

  She drew a rune from her pocket. “If you will, instead of flooding this, picture the outline being traced from the top to the bottom. Once it’s traced, mana flows downward even, smooth, in a thin layer and only after the rune imprint is active do we flood with mana.”

  Declan took it, studying the line as it glowed.

  “I want you to soul-cast it,” Brieze said gently. “Just do the steps as I said. It’s fine if you can’t at first, we spend weeks learning proper visualization.”

  Declan swallowed and took a deep breath. “The problem is, I don’t know the rune yet. I can’t feel the edges of the lines. I don’t know the imperfections. How am I supposed to activate it without knowing?”

  Brieze swapped one Strike for another. “Better?”

  “No, you just change the problem. Every one of these is the same rune but all of them are different. Look, this one’s so jagged I’m shocked it works. That’s got the tiniest tail at the bottom. Feel it even if you can’t see it. That one—that’s perfect. You should absolutely be able to do this one.” Declan held one Strike, smiling as he mentally traced the lines he saw when it glowed. “Nice and fat, ready to absorb mana. I like this one. I want it. You can use the awful jagged one.”

  He saw the rune, felt the smooth sweep of the line—

  “That’s backwards,” Brieze said. But she held a note of surprise in her voice. “Top down, I do right, bottom, left.”

  “That’s because that’s the right way.” Declan began again, this time ensuring his imprint began at the top. A fat drool of blue mana dripped down the outside and then oozed across to form the bottom of the slash. He urged the mana to climb and cling.

  It collapsed.

  “Too much. The imprint is the idea of a rune that forms the frame for mana to coat and then fill. Too much mana, and you don’t even have an arcsoul, you poor thing.” She clapped. “Again. Class, just sense. Strike has so few components. Feel how it happens.”

  Declan tried three more times before declaring it a failure. “I need more time to practice. It’s so much easier to do it my way.”

  “It’s so much easier to do it wrong, he says!” She called her students up. “Try. You know it can be done. You’ve seen it. You’ve felt it come close and you have the sensitivity he doesn’t through your arcsoul. Repeat that feeling. Good, good, Lars. One side’s too thick but that will activate if you don’t over-fill. No! Too much!”

  She rushed to pat the student’s back. “See? See how close you were?”

  Then Brieze turned to Declan. “When you start classes with me—and you’d better—I want to see the thinnest line of mana you can for your imprint. When we talk about runes with multiple angles, mulitple shapes, modifying lines, and yes, even multi-rune arrays can be soul cast. But they can only be done if one is efficient.”

  “I have a question. What makes monsters more effective at converting mana? I lose so much when I charge a rune.” Declan waited for an answer.

  “Lars?” she asked.

  Lars was the bald man at the back. “They don’t have souls. Their runes are inately wired to their being, tied by their life force. When you kill them it collapses back. Sometimes the energy shatters and we only get a shard. They don’t have to go through an arcsoul—or whatever you’re doing.”

  “He’s casting from mana channels directly,” Brieze said. “When you take my fifth year class, I don’t want to hear about how it can’t be done. Thank you, Declan, that will be all.”

  He practically skipped to lunch.

  ###

  Harris was the most excited, wanting only to talk about the relationship between inscription and soul-casting. “The problem is, ‘fixing’ a rune stroke could corrupt it or change the meaning and we wouldn’t know.”

  “I would know. I have a lot of runes and I could trade them for strikes.” Declan loved this plan.

  “Not until we understand what they’re worth!” Eden objected. “There are rune collectors! They maintain private archives and even the worst rune might be valuable if it’s a missing expression of a rune set.”

  “Words words words more words, I love Roland,” Roland said. “That’s all I hear you saying. Rune sets are bullshit and there’s no proof of any kind of bonus for only using one kind of rune. The smart thing to do is use them like a toolbox. You want tools for every situation and you store the one you use the most—your hammer—in your arcsoul.”

  “That’s another problem,” Declan said.

  Roland nodded. “I know a guy. He can’t help but I know him. Sorry. So, you not going to talk about it?”

  “About this afternoon? How do you know?” Declan asked.

  “There’s a house war between Rogers and Hammerstein,” Eden said. “Lots of discussion about what doesn’t constitute supporting either and one is arrangements for a negotiation with Lady Domine today.”

  “It’s not a negotiation. Not exactly. We know what they’ll demand.” Declan had researched oath-stones and found them not common, but common in certain areas. “I’m after money. My schooling has to be different. I don’t want to be as good as the others, I want to be better and that’s going to cost. Private lessons just to patch the gaps.”

  “I…saw the demand list,” Eden said. “We loaned a negotiator to Instructor Skinner. You can pay for seven years at Ariloch.”

  “Three,” Declan said. “Maybe three, three done the way I need to do them and I might need more than seven. I want the peak of power, not the passing point.”

  Harris grinned and sat back. “Good. Just keep feeding me runes and shards. By which I mean start feeding me runes and shards. I’ll be your inscriptionist as long as you keep your standards low and your runes simple.”

  It was a start. Declan stood and took Eden’s tray as well. Roland could get his own. “I have to go. I don’t want to be late and start a house war.”

  “Me, too.” Eden put an arm around him as they descended. “I volunteered to help. You’re not going in alone. You’ve got a team. You’ve got an army.”