The Chief Mage of Monolith’s office was on the top floor of the Alnar, and Lelya climbed on foot—the elevator seemed too fast; she needed time to collect her thoughts. Thirty-five floors. Nine hundred twenty steps. She counted to avoid thinking about what awaited her at the top.

  The secretary—a man with an inscrutable face—nodded and opened the door.

  “The Chief Mage is waiting.”

  Varvara the Northern was not what Lelya had imagined.

  She had expected someone majestic and frightening—mages from paintings who look through you. Instead, behind the desk sat a woman who looked about forty-five, beautiful, with long straight chestnut hair and attentive gray eyes. She was dressed simply—a dark pantsuit, no jewelry—and looked at Lelya the way a scientist looks at an interesting specimen.

  “Sit,” she said, indicating a chair. Her voice was calm, with no hint of command, but Lelya sat instantly.

  “You wrote the speech for Radimir.”

  It wasn’t a question.

  “Yes,” said Lelya.

  “Good speech. The argument from eighty-seven—unexpected. The Citadel clearly wasn’t prepared.”

  “Thank you.”

  Varvara tilted her head slightly.

  “Don’t thank me. I’m not praising you. I’m stating a fact.”

  She stood and walked to the window—the same gesture Lelya had seen from Radimir, but on Varvara it looked different. Not nervous, but thoughtful.

  “You’ve been a mage for two years. Before that you were human. Studied international law at a human university. Correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you think you understand how our world works?”

  Lelya paused. A trap, she thought. But what kind?

  “No,” she said finally. “I don’t think I understand. But I think I learn quickly.”

  Varvara turned, and a shadow of a smile appeared on her lips—the first in the entire conversation.

  “An honest answer. That’s rare.”

  She returned to the desk, sat down, and looked at Lelya in silence for several seconds. Her gaze was heavy, appraising, and Lelya forced herself not to look away.

  “Monolith has a problem,” Varvara said at last. “We’re stronger than the Citadel. We’re richer. But we lose to them in Councils because they know how to speak and we don’t. Radimir is a brilliant strategist and a hopeless orator. Svarog could tear any opponent apart in battle, but he barely speaks at all. To anyone. Even Roslava, with all her experience, prefers to act rather than talk.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” Lelya asked quietly.

  “Because you’re the first person in two hundred years who understands how words work.” Varvara leaned forward. “The question is what you’re going to do about it.”

  Lelya swallowed.

  “I’m… not sure I understand the question.”

  “Oh, you understand,” Varvara leaned back. “You understand perfectly. You can stay a junior assistant and write speeches for Radimir for the rest of your very long life. Or you can want more. But ‘more’ means responsibility. It means enemies. It means decisions that affect lives. Are you ready for that?”

  Lelya thought about the past year. About sleepless nights over documents. About the rescue of the child. About the Council recordings she had watched again and again. About Radimir’s face when he lost. About how she felt words—their weight, their shape, their power.

  “I don’t know if I’m ready,” she said. “But I want to try.”

  Varvara looked at her for several long seconds. Then nodded.

  “Good. Keep working with Radimir. But now you’ll also report to me. Directly.”

  She returned to the papers on her desk—a gesture that clearly said: meeting over.

  Lelya stood and walked to the door. Already on the threshold, Varvara’s voice caught up with her:

  “And Lelya?”

  She turned.

  “Don’t disappoint me.”

  The door closed behind her, and Lelya leaned against the corridor wall, feeling her heart pounding. She didn’t know exactly what had just happened. But she knew one thing: her life had just changed.

  Downstairs, in the ministry office, unfinished letters and unread documents awaited her. The ordinary work of an ordinary junior assistant.

  But now she knew it wouldn’t be for long.

  Radimir called at half past two in the morning.

  Lelya wasn’t sleeping—she was sorting through another stack of precedents for tomorrow’s meeting. When his name lit up on the phone screen, she felt something cold slide down her spine. Ministers don’t call assistants in the middle of the night to discuss formulations.

  “Lelya,” Radimir’s voice was unusually soft, which made it even more alarming. “I just got word from the Defense Ministry. Two border guards died on the frontier. One of them was Borimir.”

  Lelya froze. Borimir. Tall, awkward guy with perpetually disheveled hair and a habit of chewing on pencils during lectures. A battle mage—one of the few in their class who had chosen service in defense instead of a warm spot in some ministry. “Someone has to stand at the border,” he had said, shrugging.

  “How?” Her voice came out hoarse.

  “Thakenaks. Ambush on the northeastern sector.” A pause. “We need identification. You’re the only one in the Alnar who knew him personally. You can refuse—I’ll understand.”

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  “No. I’ll… I’ll come.”

  The drive to the Alnar took twenty minutes. Lelya drove on autopilot, trying not to think about what she would see below. At the Academy they had told them about thakenaki—the ancient weapon, lethal to mages. She remembered the lecture: the instructor’s monotone voice, slides with images of curved blades, dry facts about how even a scratch drains all of a mage’s power. Theoretical knowledge, neatly packaged in notes and forgotten after the exam.

  Theory is one thing. A former classmate’s body in a morgue is something else entirely.

  The Alnar’s lower level greeted her with cold light and the smell of antiseptic. Radimir was waiting at the entrance—apparently he had arrived earlier. He nodded silently and led her down the corridor.

  In the small room stood two metal tables. The duty healer looked up from his tablet, glanced at Lelya, then at Radimir.

  “Identification?”

  “Yes.”

  The healer walked to the first table and pulled back the sheet to the waist.

  Lelya saw Borimir’s face—calm, almost peaceful, as if he were simply sleeping. No signs of violence, no wounds. Only a thin pink line on his left forearm—a scratch you might get from carelessly brushing a branch.

  “That’s him,” she said. Her voice didn’t waver, and she surprised herself.

  “That’s all?” She pointed at the scratch. “One scratch?”

  The healer nodded.

  “Thakenaks don’t kill the body. They kill the magic. The Gifts of Alma leave instantly, and the mage becomes empty. The body simply doesn’t understand how to exist without what had been part of it since birth.”

  Lelya stared at the scratch. So small. So insignificant. She herself had gotten dozens of similar injuries in childhood and youth—bruises, scrapes, cuts. And Borimir had died. From a scratch.

  Lelya stepped away from the table and leaned against the wall, feeling the cold concrete pressing against her back. The healer covered the body with the sheet and returned to his tablet, giving them space.

  “At the Academy they told us thakenaks were ancient weapons not owned by Citadel,” she said slowly. “But no one explained where the Citadel got them. Why only them?”

  Radimir leaned against the wall beside her and crossed his arms.

  “Have you heard of the Phili?”

  Lelya shook her head.

  “A nomadic tribe. Split off from the Sand People about six thousand years ago. They didn’t build cities, didn’t cultivate the land—they just moved. Through deserts, over mountains, through forests. All of Alma was their home and their road.”

  He paused, gathering his thoughts.

  “The Phili were masters of metal. They knew alloys we can still only guess at. And at some point they created thakenaks—weapons capable of killing mages. Why?” He shrugged. “Maybe for protection against us. Maybe for trade. Maybe simply because they could. We don’t know. They took that secret with them.”

  “What happened to them?”

  “What happens to all nomads sooner or later. They dissolved. Mixed with other peoples, settled down, forgot their language and their secrets. By the time mages started keeping records, the Phili were already legend. And thakenaks were museum pieces, if anyone was lucky enough to find one.”

  Lelya nodded. That much she remembered from lectures—rare blades in private collections, one or two in the Kiudar-Muna museum.

  “And then the Citadel got lucky,” Radimir continued. “Five hundred years ago they annexed a group of islands in the Southern Sea. Officially—for mineral extraction. On one island they started digging a mine and stumbled upon a Phili burial mound.”

  “A burial mound?”

  “A storage-city. Apparently the Phili had left this island in a hurry but hoped to return. So they left their most valuable things—jewels, gold, weapons. And a whole arsenal of thakenaks. Several hundred blades.”

  Lelya felt a chill run down her spine.

  “Several hundred?”

  “The Citadel still hasn’t disclosed the exact number. But over five hundred years they’ve used enough for us to know: they have a stockpile. And it can’t be replenished—the technology is lost. No one knows what alloy the Phili used. Our best metallurgists have been trying to reproduce it for centuaries. Unsuccessfully.”

  Lelya turned to look at the table where Borimir lay. The scratch on his arm no longer seemed small to her. Now she saw in it six thousand years of history, the accident of an archaeological find, and the cold calculation of a state that had turned ancient weapons into an instrument of political pressure.

  “Why at the Academy did they tell us about thakenaks as museum exhibits?” she asked. “Why didn’t they explain that the Citadel is sitting on a whole arsenal?”

  “What difference would it have made?” Radimir walked over and stood beside her, also looking at the body. “Would you have chosen a different profession? Left for Kiudar-Muna? Every mage in Monolith knows thakenaks exist and that they’re dangerous. The details…” he shrugged, “details don’t change much when it comes to fear.”

  “But there’s protection,” Lelya frowned, remembering fragments of lectures. “Vampires. Thakenaks work differently on them.”

  “True. For vampires, a thakenaks remain just a knife. Painful, but not lethal. The problem is there aren’t many vampires. And most prefer to stay away from politics and wars.”

  Lelya was silent, processing the information. A picture was forming in her mind—incomplete, with gaps, but already clear enough.

  The Citadel possessed a weapon that could kill any mage with a single touch. The technology was lost, the supply finite—but large enough to use for precision operations. For intimidation. For ensuring the whole world remembered: the Citadel has an ace against which there is no defense.

  And two border guards—Borimir and his partner—had become just another reminder.

  “This was a message,” she said aloud. “The ambush at the border. They weren’t trying to take territory or gather intelligence. They just showed they could.”

  Radimir gave her a long look.

  “Yes. The question is who it’s addressed to and what they want.”

  They left the morgue at four in the morning. Took the elevator up, walked through the empty lobby, and stopped at the Alnar exit.

  The sky to the east was beginning to gray. In a few hours the city would wake up, people would go to work, drink coffee, and complain about traffic. None of them would know that tonight, in the Alnar basement, two bodies lay with scratches that had cost them their lives.

  “Are you alright?” asked Radimir.

  Lelya thought about Borimir. About his awkward figure and disheveled hair. About how at graduation he had told her: “See you around, Lel. Small world.” She had laughed then and answered something like “of course, we’ll see each other.”

  “No,” she said honestly. “Not alright. But I will be.”

  Radimir nodded.

  “Go home. Sleep at least a couple of hours. Meeting at ten.”

  Lelya didn’t move.

  “Radimir… why did you come with me? Identification is a formality; you could have just sent me alone.”

  He was silent for a long time, looking at the lightening sky.

  “Because you needed to see this. And because you shouldn’t have seen it alone.” He turned to her. “Diplomacy is words, Lelya. But behind words there’s always something real. The treaties we draft, the speeches we give—they don’t exist in a vacuum. Behind every argument, every precedent, there are people. Living or…” he nodded toward the building, “dead.”

  Lelya remembered her sleepless nights over documents. The careful phrasings, the calibrated arguments, the elegant rhetorical turns. She had been proud of her ability to turn words into weapons.

  Now she knew what real weapons looked like. And what they did to those who couldn’t protect themselves in time.

  “I understand,” she said.

  Radimir put his hand on her shoulder—a brief, almost awkward gesture.

  “Go home. And try not to forget what you saw tonight. But don’t let it break you either.”

  She nodded and walked to her car. Already opening the door, she turned back.

  “Radimir? The meeting at ten—what’s it about?”

  He smiled without humor.

  “Trade quotas with the Citadel.”

  He didn’t finish the sentence, but Lelya understood. Trade quotas. Concessions. A tacit agreement to look the other way at what was happening on the borders—in exchange for it not happening too often.

  She got in the car and started the engine. Her hands weren’t shaking—yet. But somewhere inside, in the place where two years ago her magic had settled, something had tightened into a hard knot.

  Borimir had died from a scratch.

  And in a few hours she would be discussing trade quotas with those who had killed him.

  Diplomacy is war, Radimir had said once. Just with different weapons.

  Now Lelya knew exactly which ones.