16: The True Temple

If Beatrace en Cynd was a corporate spy, then finding her should have been a simple matter of getting inside Vivdauro Headquarters and searching, either for the woman herself, or for evidence of her location. But as Jon had learned more about her, he had begun to doubt that she was a corporate spy. Espionage no longer seemed a sufficient (or even plausible) explanation for her behavior. But he had found no better explanation to replace it: he could think of no agenda that might motivate all of her actions, of no role that could encompass all of her associations. The more he learned about Beatrace, the more enigmatic she became.

Jon’s beliefs about Beatrace had been based on his beliefs about Vivdauro. Those beliefs had been merely the obvious: Vivdauro was a corporation that created technological blueprints and sold them for profit. But he had begun to doubt even that. Whatever work was done in the Headquarters above, it was clearly subordinate to the work done below, and the work below was something arcane. Jon no longer understood what Vivdauro was, and so he no longer understood what Beatrace was. His impressions had become contradictory, his goals vague. For all the lies he had told Varence, what he told her now was ironically true: they were descending the spiral stairs simply to see what was down there.

The stairs were wide enough for four to walk abreast, but it seemed that no one had used them for some time. A thin coat of dust covered the treads and the handrail. Several of the overhead lamps had burned out, and they had not been replaced.

“Where is everybody?” Varence asked.

Jon had formed no theory as to the purpose of the underground complex. The first level was large enough to accommodate hundreds of people, but most of the rooms had been abandoned, their furniture and equipment removed. Enough remained to show that some of the rooms had been workshops, and some bedrooms, and some had housed those strange “output” machines (of which only Output Four was still operational). Jon had seen only six people working there: the three monks in Output Four, and three others in the turbine caverns.

“Everybody went downstairs,” Jon answered, stating his guess as fact. “They built the top level first, and everyone worked up there while they built something else under it. When they finished that, they moved down to it. All that’s left up top is things they couldn’t move.”

“They built it? Who are they?”

“The people who dress like this,” Jon said, patting his robe.

After descending for perhaps two hundred feet, they came to a door. The stairs flattened into a landing before it, then resumed, curving down out of sight. Jon debated following the stairs all the way to the bottom, but he turned to the door instead. It was stuck. He jerked it several times, and it yielded on creaking hinges.

They passed through and walked down a short tunnel, then came out into a large room of irregular shape. Some parts of its walls and ceiling were evidently natural, with surfaces rough from cleavage, smooth from erosion, or lustrous from calcification. Other parts were obviously excavated, marked where tools had been used to increase the cavern’s width and height. Stalactites hung from the highest ceiling. There was a light above the door they had entered through, and more lights were set above other doors around the room’s perimeter. The lights were too sparse and dim for the large space, and it was dark.

Jon produced two battery-powered handlamps from his backpack and gave one to Varence. By their light, they saw that the room was filled with rubbish. Some of this was simply garbage — scraps of wood, metal, and paper, and bits of desiccated food here and there — but most of it was tables and chairs, dishes, pots, and silverware. Everything was smashed and overturned, jumbled and shoved together into a low mound.

“This was a cafeteria,” Varence said, perplexed. “This was big enough for… Where is everybody?”

“They were a workforce,” Jon said. “They must have left when the work was finished.”

“But why would the cafeteria be underground? That doesn’t make sense.”

“It does if… The workers never went to the surface. They must have lived down here.”

“Why?”

“To keep whatever they were doing secret.”

“I don’t like this place.”

There were many doors around the perimeter of the cafeteria. Several led to a vast kitchen. Most led to dormitories, hallways with bunk rooms on either side and communal bathrooms at the ends. Jon estimated that there were beds for three or four thousand people. The dormitories appeared to have been abandoned hastily. Tables were littered with books, games, pencils, combs, and other personal objects. Closets were stocked with clothing.

These abandoned spaces were all unlit, and Jon surveyed them only briefly, partly because there was little to see, and partly because they frightened Varence. She clung to his arm, or to a strap of his backpack, shining her handlamp at every creak and echo. “Where is everybody?” she murmured.

There was one door that was much larger than the others. They went through it into a broad tunnel that was dark, empty, and featureless except for a matching door at its far end. They walked to this and pushed it open, and came out into a space unlike anything Jon had ever seen.

They were in a vast cavern, but it felt like the outdoors on a summer night. A cone of cool light shone down from a lamp so large and high that it was like a bright moon, illuminating a circle of floor a thousand feet across. Within that circle was what Jon could only describe as a village. A few large and dozens of small wooden structures were built on a stone hill whose sides sloped up toward a flat crown. Most of the structures were single-story, but some were taller, and one near the middle rose to five stories. The roofs were flat. Many of the buildings on the outskirts of the village, near the edge of the circle of light, seemed abandoned, but those near the middle were conspicuously occupied. Warm light glowed in their windows and spilled out from the alleys between them. Muted mechanical noises came from them, sounds like bellows and typewriters and rubber mallets falling. There was music: someone was playing a flute.

“Look confident,” Jon commanded. “Act like we belong here.” He began walking up one of several broad alleys that radiated from the crest of the hill, toward the inhabited buildings, Varence following a step behind.

As they passed a two-story structure, a door in its side opened and a monk stepped out. He was looking down at a clipboard and did not acknowledge them. Through the open door, Jon heard the noise of an output machine: a din of clicks and whirs so numerous that they merged into humming and rustling. A thick cable emerged from the wall near the door and snaked across the ground, toward the center of the village. They passed several such structures, each with a similar cable, and other buildings that seemed to be more conventional workshops. One large structure seemed to be a dormitory, and one was obviously a kitchen, with tables and chairs arranged on the ground near it. Several monks were seated there, eating and conversing. They noticed Jon and Varence, but they did not call out to them, and they did not rise to pursue.

Jon made for the tall building near the top of the hill. As he approached it, he noticed more of the snaking cables; dozens of them came from all parts of the village and converged on the hilltop. Soon he saw their destination: at the top of the hill there was a circular hole — or what had once been a hole: it was now covered with a dense metal grille that made the hole into a floor. All of the cables went down through gaps in this grille into the space below. Jon wanted to see where they went, but he feared that peering into the hole would look suspicious, so he refrained.

The door of the tall building was marked with a symbol that Jon did not recognize: a row of seven vertical lines above a double circle. The double circle was the letter “dal” in the Imperial alphabet, and in the Antua language it was the glyph for the Hollow Moon. Neither meaning seemed applicable here.

John pointed at the symbol. “Does that mean anything to you?” he asked Varence.

“No,” she answered.

The door was not locked. Jon opened it, and they entered.

The building’s first floor appeared to be all one room, open except for pillars supporting the ceiling. It was an armory. All manner of armor and weapons were stowed in racks and on shelves: knives and swords, pistols and rifles, bombs and grenades, plate armor and bulletproof garments, and — Jon walked over to gawk at them — several of Volkan’s gigantic armored suits, disassembled and hung on racks made to hold the pieces. But what most arrested Jon’s attention were the dams: a hundred dams in padded boxes sat on shelves near the room’s center. They were of all kinds, from foot-wide cuboids to… Jon picked up a shiny metal bean, barely an inch long. It was a hyperbolic dam: a quarter the size of a spheroid dam, but holding twice as much kao. Jon had only heard of these, never seen one. There were twenty on the shelves.

“This is the assassins’ base,” Jon said. “They must all come here, so their commander must come here. This is where he orders them to attack me.”

“Assassins?” Varence exclaimed, alarmed. “What do you mean? Why are all these weapons here? Why are there assassins?”

Jon looked at her in surprise for a moment, then shook his head and chuckled.

“I don’t like this,” Varence said. “I want to go back.”

“Keep quiet,” Jon replied. He took one of the hyperbolic dams in his left hand, making a fist around it, then led Varence to a stairwell near the door.

The second floor was open like the first. It was a gymnasium, filled with weights and mats and wooden dummies, and some equipment Jon did not recognize. The equipment was worn from use, but impeccably clean and orderly. No one was using it now, so Jon did not linger. The thought that the assassins’ commander might be in the building pushed in his chest, and he rushed up to the third floor as soon as he saw that the second was unoccupied.

The third floor was a library. There were no interior walls, but high shelves and cabinets divided the space like walls. It was furnished with chairs and couches made of suede and velvet.

Livak was seated in one of the velvet chairs, reading a book. Two sheathed swords lay on a table in front of him. He looked up. “Who are you?” he asked.

“Who are you?” Jon retorted. “Why do you and your weird friends live in a clubhouse in a cave under the world’s ugliest building?”

“If you don’t know that, then you shouldn’t be here,” Livak said, dryly. Then he hurled his book at Jon’s face.

Jon blocked the book with his left first. Livak surged to his feet and snatched up his swords, casting the sheathes away with a broad sweep of his arms. He leapt over the table and came down at Jon like a diving hawk, bared blades outstretched. With his right hand Jon drew and raised a pistol, but he saw that even if he killed Livak in one shot, the swordsman’s momentum would carry his blades through into Jon’s torso. Jon squeezed the hyperbolic dam in his fist and teleported himself sideways, away from the stairwell.

Livak landed in a graceful crouch on the spot where Jon had been. His attention turned immediately to Jon’s new location, and he raised a blade to block Jon’s counterattack even before Jon had oriented himself to make it.

With his second blade, Livak made a backward jab at Varence. It was so quick that Jon did not realize she had been stabbed until blood began to soak the front of her robe. She gasped and stumbled, pawing uselessly at the hole in her chest, then tripped into the stairwell and fell out of sight.

Jon fired. Livak blocked the bullet, then dashed forward, stabbing with one blade while holding the other in a vertical guard. Jon leaped back out of reach.

“Where’s Forloga?” Jon taunted. “Can you fight without her?”

Without an allied magician to thwart Jon’s magic, Livak should be helpless against him. Jon fired again, aiming at Livak’s leg, and as he did so he channeled kao into an intention that Livak’s block would fail.

Livak’s sword flashed down, and blocked the bullet.

Jon gaped in astonishment. Kao had left the dam. His intention had been unambiguous. How had–

Livak sliced off Jon’s head. For a moment Jon had a view from the floor looking up at his own decapitated body, still standing. His vision went black as the body fell.

7 Pluvo 712, 5:58 a.m. (XXV)

Jon gestured for Varence to stay close and be quiet. He drew two pistols, one in each hand, and ascended the stairs with soft steps. When he saw Livak, he opened fire immediately. But the swordsman somehow saw him first. Livak kicked the table over, obstructing Jon’s aim. He snatched one of his swords off the table’s top as it fell forward. Jon’s shots slammed through the table. Livak was hit, but the bullets had been robbed of their lethal velocity, and his wounds were superficial.

Livak vaulted the table and advanced quickly, keeping low to make a small target. Jon fired both pistols, trying to overwhelm Livak with the quantity of his attacks. Livak did not block every shot, but he seemed to know which would be deadly, and those that hit him were all grazes. Blood streaked him as he lost an ear, the tip of an elbow, and a bite from his shoulder. Then he had closed the distance between them, and he was slashing at Jon’s belly.

Jon touched a dam and teleported backwards, out of range. But the space he appeared in was already occupied by Varence. There was a horrible squelching pop as the impossible intersection rectified itself, and Jon was again treated to a view of his own dismembered body before his sight faded.

7 Pluvo 712, 5:58 a.m. (XXVI)

Jon slid two of the hyperbolic dams under a leather bracer on his left arm, in contact with his skin, but leaving his hands free. He jogged up the stairs, leaving Varance behind, unconcerned with the intruder alarm for the moment. His speed was calculated: he moved about half as fast as he might have moved, so when he reached the top of the stairs he was able to immediately teleport five yards to the side, giving himself distance from Livak. He began firing a machine gun, at the same time channeling kao into an intention that Livak’s blocks would fail.

They did not fail. Jon emptied an entire dam willing that one of his shots would strike Livak, and he squeezed the trigger until the gun clicked empty, but no bullet did more than scratch the swordsman. His blades were a blur of light and sparks, and his lithe body twisted away from any shot that passed his guard.

Jon dropped the machine gun and whipped out a pistol. “Block this!” he shouted, and he formed a new intention. Instead of willing for Livak’s sword to miss, he willed for it to shatter. It did: at the first blow from the pistol it cracked. The crack forked in both directions, from the sword’s hilt to its tip, breaking it into a dozen jagged shards. Jon grinned. But before he could press his new advantage, Livak swept his remaining blade horizontally, flat forward, through the falling shards, and sent them flying into Jon’s face.

Jon flinched as the shards cut him. Then something much larger cut him, and he was back in his room at the Albrook.

7 Pluvo 712, 5:58 a.m. (XXIX)

Jon knew that continuing to confront Livak was irrational. He had only been able to prevail over any of the assassins in an environment that gave him a decisive advantage, and the swordsman’s home was certainly not that. But defeat made him feel ashamed, and shame drew him to fight twice more. These fights only reinforced what Jon already knew: he could not inflict a crippling wound on Livak without receiving one himself, and Livak’s abilities were somehow immune to magical interference.

After his fifth loss, Jon decided to ignore Livak and descend further down the spiral stairs. Jon had privately given names to the first two levels of the underground complex: the first was “the facade,” because of its deceptive entrance, and the second was “the village,” because the current and former denizens of this place seemed to live there. Both of these levels had obvious purposes, but they, like the building on the surface, were clearly subordinate to something deeper. Whatever was below the village, the turbines sent their power down to it, and the cables that fed the output machines came up from it. And the assassins were guarding it.

Jon led Verance past the door to the village level. “What’s in there?” she asked, pointing at it.

“A fight I can’t win,” Jon replied, and he was surprised at the bitterness in his own voice.

The stairs spiralled down for another hundred yards, then ended abruptly at a third door. Jon opened it. They passed through into a short tunnel, and then into a cavern that was truly enormous.

The floor of this cavern had been leveled to a general flatness by grinding up its higher parts and tossing the rubble into the lower. It was lit by hundreds of lamps that shone like scattered stars, casting bright light on the areas near to them, and filling the entire space with a dim ambiance. Most of these lamps were set atop posts flanking railroad tracks. The tracks stretched from the edges of the cavern, where they disappeared into tunnels going in all directions, to the middle, where they wove and combined into a depot. Parallel tracks delimited flat stockyards where great quantities of materials and supplies must once have been piled, but which were now empty except for a few clusters of crates, some intact, some opened.  Short, open-topped cars were parked on sidings nearby. In the center of the depot was a turntable with twin tracks, large enough to hold two box cars. A crane that could swing out over the turntable was positioned nearby.

The first two levels of the underground complex had astonished Jon with their strangeness. This astonished him because he understood exactly what he was seeing, but not why he was seeing it. On the surface, this would have been a perfectly ordinary rail depot, but it was more than a thousand feet below the surface.

“Where is everybody?” Varence asked. “Where are the workers? The trains? There’s nobody here.”

This was not literally true. Jon and Varence were standing on the highest of several terraces cut into a sloping wall, and they had a good view of the cavern. Jon could see monks moving about in ones and twos here and there, and a faint rumbling told him that a train was rolling in one of the tunnels. But the depot was obviously operating at a tiny fraction of its capacity.

“They finished something,” Jon said, “something huge. There were thousands of workers building it, and these tracks brought materials for it. Whatever it is, they finished it, so the builders left, and the shipments stopped. Now they only keep people and supplies to maintain it, and guard it.”

“How can this be here? How can something this big be under the city, and no one knows about it?”

“It has to be an Imperial project. No one except the Emperor could keep this hidden. But if this is an Imperial project, that means Vivdauro is an Imperial project, and that means Vivdauro is a front for the Emperor. But that doesn’t make sense. Why would the Emperor need a front? Who could he be hiding from? And if Vivdauro is a front for the Emperor, that means Beatrace works for the Emperor, and why in the deep hells would the Emperor send an elite agent to infiltrate Cynd Ceramics? None of this follows.”

“Who’s Beatrace?”

“When Larisa left this place, she started calling herself ‘Beatrace.’ She picked that name because it sounds like ‘Bernice,’ which is the name of the dead wife of Lowdous de Cynd. She seduced Lowdous and convinced him to marry her. Then a few weeks after the wedding she ran away in the middle of the night and came back here. Does that make any sense?”

Varence gaped at him.

“No, it doesn’t,” Jon said. “Come on.”

He tugged her along to a wooden stairway that connected the terrace on which they stood to the terraces below it, and then to the floor of the cavern. He made for the center of the depot, where the turntable was. As he neared it, he saw that–

7 Pluvo 712, 5:58 a.m. (XXX)

The turntable was also an elevator. Like any railroad turntable, it was composed of two stacked disks, a fixed disk beneath, and an upper disk that could rotate to receive cars from various directions. But instead of resting on the cavern floor, the lower disk was suspended over a vertical shaft, like a lid covering a jar. Large gears around the edge of the disk meshed with toothed tracks in the sides of the shaft. These gears prevented the turntable from falling, and they would lower it into the shaft if they rotated.

Jon saw also, now, that dozens of prohibition wards were set around the perimeter of the lower disk, far too many to disable with the dams he was carrying. He shrugged off his backpack, dropped it on the ground, and put his dams into it, then continued up onto the turntable. It was well-lit; they would be plainly visible from many points in the cavern, but curiosity made Jon heedless. The cargo elevator was the obvious logistical center of the depot, and that meant that the ultimate purpose of the depot was to send materials down the shaft. Whatever they — the Emperor, Vivdauro, Larisa — whoever they were — whatever they had built was down there.

Looking up, he saw that the ceiling directly above the cargo elevator was a circular grille, the same grille that was the floor in the middle of the village. The cables that descended through it dangled to near the floor, where they were collected by an iron trellis and then bound into a single thick bundle. The bundle went down the shaft though a groove that had been cut for it in the shaft’s side.

On the turntable, near its edge, stood a pedestal enclosed by a wire cage. Jon went to the pedestal and saw that it was a control panel. The cage was open on one side to allow access to the panel, and it had a solid roof to protect the panel’s operator from falling debris. The controls were simple: two levers — one vertical to raise and lower the platform, one horizontal to rotate it — and a bank of switches regulating power to various clamps and motors. Dark indicator lights beneath the switches showed that they were all turned off. In the corner of the panel, an indicator labeled “Main Power” glowed green.

Jon flipped some of the switches up. Their indicators turned red, but nothing else happened. His eyes settled on the control panel’s final element: a combination lock. The lock had eight tumblers, bold black numbers painted on white decagons.

Jon stared at the lock for a full minute. Then he screamed. He slammed his fist into the tumblers, splitting his knuckles and smearing blood across their white faces.

“What are you doing?” Varence squeaked.

“Shut up, you stupid bitch,” Jon snarled, and he struck her across the face. She crumpled to the ground and stared up at him in terror. Blood trickled from her temple where an arm of her glasses had cut her.

From somewhere in the cave, Jon heard a shouted alarm. He drew his guns and sprinted toward the sound, eager to kill whoever was making it.

7 Pluvo 712, 5:58 a.m. (XLV)

For two iterations, Jon did not return to Vivdauro. When he tried to recruit Varence, he was unable to conceal his boiling frustration, and she did not trust him. Her reticence stoked his anger, and he pushed her down and left her crying on the street outside the cafe.

He tried to relax. He tried to divert himself with dining, with theatre, with music, with alcohol, with brothels. He tried robbing a bank. But none of these distractions was enough to drive away the feeling of defeat that settled upon him. He had learned so much, and yet learned nothing he could use. This seemed unfair, and he felt vengeful, but there was no one to be revenged upon, and that also seemed unfair.

On the third iteration he mastered himself. He put on the mask of the Great Detective and guided his body through the necessary motions to get it back into the depot. To get down the shaft, he needed either the combination to the control panel, or some way to bypass it. He explored the later possibility first.

The panel was bolted together, not welded, and it was easy to disassemble with a wrench and pliers. But this proved useless, because the elevator’s power was not routed through the panel. Its interior was full of tiny electronic components that Jon did not recognize, but he could tell from the wiring that the panel sent control signals, not power, to the elevator’s motors, and it would not send the correct signals unless the lock was set to the correct combination. Thwarted, Jon turned his attention to the prohibition wards that ringed the elevator. There were too many of these to disable with magic, even if he brought all of his dams, and there were likely more that he could not see. He could simply smash them, but this was loud and quickly attracted the attention of the monks. He tried to steal additional dams from the assassins’ house in the village, but he could not avoid being seen, and he was not able to get back out of the house and down into the depot without an alarm being raised.

Despairing of subverting the lock, he sought its combination. The obvious way to get this was from one of the monks. That had worked before, when he had forced one of the three in the turbine cavern to tell him the code to the black door.

Jon crept up on a monk in the depot, subdued him, and tortured him, using magic to suppress the man’s screams. But the monk claimed that he did not know the combination. Only the Seven Wardens knew it, he said. The “Wardens” were the warriors whom Jon had been calling “assassins.” The Monk claimed, to Jon’s great surprise, that they were the ranking members of the subterranean cult.

“Are you telling me these Wardens are in charge down here?” Jon demanded. “They don’t take orders from the Vivdauro executives? Then who do they take orders from?”

“They obey the Priest!”

“Who is the Priest?”

“He’s the Priest!”

“Where is he?”

“In the Temple!”

Jon tortured several of the monks, but none of them were helpful. They confirmed many things that he had already suspected — they lived fulltime in the underground complex; the elevator from Vivdauro Headquarters was not the main entrance; the Emperor was aware of them; their primary work was tending the output machines — but all of the new information they provided was cryptic. The output machines produced complex diagrams, but the monks did not understand them. The diagrams were sent “upstairs,” to Vivdauro Headquarters, but the monks did not know what was done with them there. The monks insisted that the man in charge of the complex was the “Priest” who lived in the “Temple,” but they were unable to elaborate on the Priest’s identity or role. The Temple, they said, was at the lowest level of the complex, but they said that it had been discovered there, not built.

“If this Temple was already here,” Jon asked, exasperated, “then why did you build a whole railroad to bring materials for it? There used to be thousands of workers down here! What were they all doing?”

But the workers had already been gone when the monks arrived. The monks had all served at Pliigist temples throughout the Empire until about ten years ago, when each of them had been unexpectedly summoned to the Palace. There they had been told that henceforth they would serve the Emperor directly, as monks of the True Temple. None of them had ever heard of the True Temple prior to their summons, and none of them had ever gone down the shaft to see it. Some of them claimed to have met the Priest, but he had descended into the Temple shortly after they arrived, and he had not been seen since.

The only actionable information that Jon learned from these interrogations was that the cargo elevator led to the Temple, and only the Wardens knew the combination to use it.

Jon discovered other entrances to the complex. There were five railroad tunnels that connected the depot to locations throughout Argintarbo. All of them rose as they moved away from the depot, eventually coming to the surface, where their exits were hidden inside buildings that appeared to have other purposes. One tunnel went north, to the harbor. One went west under the Imperial City and came up inside the Outer Palace. Two went south, to the Industrial District. The fifth was much narrower, and its tracks were of a smaller gauge. It went southwest and came up in the Merchant District, in the basement of an unremarkable apartment building about half a mile from the Albrook.

Jon developed a routine: when he fell back to his bed at five fifty-eight, he went to Vivdauro headquarters immediately. He killed the guards and stole the key activator from their desk, then went to the Park where he intercepted Varence returning from her delivery to the Bureau of Forest Management. He told her to meet him at noon at the building that contained the hidden tunnel entrance. Then he went shopping.

There were no guards at the hidden entrance, and only ordinary locks. Varence came with him eagerly, face bright with the thrill of adventure.

* * *

Jon needed to capture one of the Wardens. Now that this goal was settled in his mind, he pursued it methodically. Although the Wardens were on their home turf, they were not together, and they were not expecting attack. He needed to determine which of them was most vulnerable, and find a way to exploit that vulnerability.

From the monks, Jon learned the names of six of the Wardens, five of whom he had already encountered: the magicians Tretij and Forloga, Livak the swordsman, giant Volkan, Cevali the gunfighter, and Kaspar, a marksman. Forloga, Cevali, and Kaspar were not in the complex, and Jon had no easy means of locating them. Volkan and Tretij were together, training in a smaller cave that branched off from the village. Jon thought that he could kill one of them with a surprise attack, but he could think of no way to then capture the survivor. If he killed Tretij, he would not be able to restrain Volkan, and if he killed Volkan, he could not prevent Tretij from escaping.

Livak was the obvious target. He was alone, and he could be subdued by simply shooting his legs. Jon considered what he had learned from his battles with Livak, and he attacked him again to learn more. Jon brought grenades, firebombs, and a scattergun against the swordsman, but even then he was not overwhelmed. He attacked so aggressively that Jon never had more than a few seconds on the offensive, and by dodges and blocks Livak always escaped crippling injury.

Jon did not understand how Livak did what he did. It was not magic: if it were, then physically blocking attacks would be pointless. It was not by superhuman speed: although Livak’s hands were a blur of motion, they were not faster than bullets. And either of those methods could have been cancelled by magic, to which Livak was inexplicably immune.

Jon pondered the problem on the long walks from the Albrook to Vivdauro to the Park. A hypothesis occurred to him, and when he next attacked Livak, he watched closely, and he saw that it was correct: Livak’s motions were anticipatory; he began to move his swords into each bullet’s path before the bullet was fired. He could block any attack because he somehow knew where each attack would hit before it was made. The answer to this first mystery answered the second as well: Jon had believed that Livak was swatting bullets down like flies, and so he had willed for his swordstrokes to be too slow to intercept them; but Livak was actually blocking bullets as he might have blocked the rays of the sun with a parasol, by simply placing an obstacle along a foreknown vector. For Jon’s magic to thwart this, he would have to prevent Livak’s swords from occupying not merely a point at a moment, but a volume for a duration.

Jon tried this, but found it unworkable. He had to form a unique and specific intention for each shot, and he simply could do so fast enough to hit Livak more than once while also defending himself. This new tactic gave him an even chance of killing the swordsman, but no chance of capturing him.

Jon sat in his bed at the Albrook and rubbed his temples, trying to fight off the frustration that was once again growing in his belly. He at last understood what Livak was doing, but this did not suggest any strategy to defeat him.

Jon tried to imagine what using Livak’s ability would be like. He imagined each bullet projecting a line that showed its future path through space. He used the lines to guide his swords, so that they were already blocking each bullet before it emerged from the gunbarrel. So then Livak was not blocking bullets where they existed in the present; he was blocking their future ghosts!

Suddenly Jon laughed. Could it be that simple? Could a mere change of perspective make so much difference? He rushed to get dressed.

When Jon next fought Livak, he did not use magic against Livak’s weapons, but against his own. Channeling kao, he willed for every bullet he carried to be defective. He gave them odd shapes, so they would tumble instead of spin. He made some weak, so they would shatter in the barrel. He gave some too little powder, and some too much, so their speeds would vary. And when he fired, he willed that his shots would miss.

Jon emptied two handgun magazines — twenty-eight bullets — at Livak. Livak blocked them with his usual flowing precision, but six of Jon’s bullets missed the blocks, and four of these struck flesh. Livak sank to one knee, leaning on a sword to keep from collapsing. His other knee had been destroyed, and he was bleeding heavily from wounds in his chest and groin.

“Good enough!” Jon exclaimed. He grinned, then laughed. He turned to Varence, thinking that maybe she would laugh too, but her face was a grimace of terror. Jon thought the expression was funny, and he laughed louder.

Somewhere in the cave outside, an alarm was clanging. Twenty-eight gunshots had not gone unheard. The monks would not enter the Wardens’ dwelling, but they would surround it, and Volkan and Tretij would arrive in a moment. Jon could not escape, but that did not matter; he would prepare more thoroughly in the next iteration. What mattered was that he could defeat Wardens. He could break them, and take from them what he wanted. It was he, not they, who was in control.