4
Six months later
“I’m sorry, Master Aurelias. There’s nothing I can do.”
Dr. Tyras grimaced at the image of Felix’s arcanic faculties and shook his head.
“Irreparable?” Felix asked levelly. Nine years at war had schooled him well in showing neither pain nor dread.
“I fear so,” said the surgeon. “The channels have shattered end to end. I couldn’t piece them back together in a full week under the instruments.”
“I see.” He came to his feet and began to pace the office.
A lovely office it was, too—designed to calm the patients, he supposed.
The illusion of a woodland scene stretched out on either side, where rivers ran and fir trees rustled in the breeze.
A shame it didn’t work. Restless energy cracked and snapped inside him.
Even sitting there for twenty minutes had tested his endurance to its limits.
He sensed the surgeon eyeing him sidelong, though, and forced himself to stop.
“I’d recommend excision,” said Dr. Tyras. “The field surgeon did a clean job of sealing the wellspring, but you could melt right through those barriers with one hard push.”
“I’m aware,” Felix said, linking his hands behind his back.
He knew, alright, and he hadn’t needed a therical surgeon to tell him.
The urge to motion coiled in him like a spring.
Nature and training had fashioned his arcana to flood him with battle strength all day long—but now, he had no battle.
He was a moth beating its wings against a glass jar.
Sooner or later, he’d turn himself to dust.
“Perhaps you’d like a second opinion,” the surgeon prompted. Felix shook his head. No point in letting slip that he was already on his fifth opinion.
“Is there anything? Anything at all?” he pressed. “I’d heard talk of transplants.”
“I’m afraid not,” said Dr. Tyras, sliding his tools back into their leatherette case.
“It’s therically possible to transplant faculties, but you’d have the devil’s own job getting hold of any.
You might find stolen ones in the black trade, I’m told, but using those carries a death sentence.
Assuming the transplant doesn’t kill you first.”
He knew he oughtn’t ask—knew he’d sound like a man grasping at straws—but frankly, he was.
“Can the body not withstand it?”
The surgeon shook his head. “The faculties begin to adapt to the body from childhood. After that, they’re too attuned to their owner to be fit for transplant. The body rejects them. Give it twenty years and fifty thousand lyrin, and you might stand a chance of finding a match.”
Felix nodded slowly. He certainly didn’t have either.
“There’s no fixing me,” he said. If something in him was screaming at the knowledge, it did so quietly inside a locked cell.
“Carry on without an excision, and you’ll last . . . two years, perhaps?” the surgeon went on. “Power like yours, with no release . . . it’ll wear you to a husk. And that’s if you don’t burn through those stoppers by accident.”
“Yes. I’ll consider it,” Felix said. The surgeon eyed him up, as though sensing what consider really meant. Nonetheless, he let the matter drop.
“As for learning to cast again, therical science has come a long way since your academy days. They’ve all kinds of arcanic gauntlets on the shelves.”
Tyras gestured to his desk, where a glove-like contraption of celerium, steel and cloth lay on its stand. Vials of green arcana ringed the wrist, feeding into the minuscule glass channels that traced down to the fingertips.
“It’s not the same as freehand work, but it’s better than nothing,” said the doctor, then glanced at Felix’s uniform. “Lawman, aren’t you?”
Felix nodded. That was one of the mercies the centurion had bought him: a prefecture commission. Short of standing for election, it was as close to war as a man could come in civilian life.
“The good ones are refined enough for that sort of work. Visit a therical laboratory. Have them fit you out.”
“Indeed. I’m having a pair designed as we speak,” said Felix, manufacturing a smile. “Well, thank you, Doctor.”
Tyras escorted him back through the corridors to the reception hall. At the threshold, the doctor drew breath and dropped his gaze.
“I don’t mean to speak out of turn, Master Aurelias, but I’ve treated a great many wounded soldiers in my time,” he said. “In one way or another, they all need to accept their new limits.”
Felix nodded dutifully. He’d quickly learned it was the shortest path out of that conversation.
“I could put you in touch with one of them, if you’d like,” Tyras added. “A member of the corps, Fifth Company. Similar injuries, about . . . oh, eight years ago, at Seawyck Cove, up in Celadonius Magna? She refused to have the surgery for years, and it almost killed her.”
“What happened to her?” he asked hesitantly.
“She finally had the excision, and she’s happier for it. I could introduce you.”
“Yes. Of course,” he said, more in the interest of a quick escape than anything. “Good day.”
With that, he thrust an iniquitous sum of money at the doctor’s secretary and near as ran for the daylight. He burst out into the sun, and the roar of Carintheum engulfed him.
Phaetons screeched past, horns blaring, fighting the horse-drawn chariots for command of the road. Speakers shouted on the street corners, brandishing pamphlets, while passersby snickered and booed. With the Praetorium elections nearing, their declaiming was even more colorful than usual.
Ladies bustled by in flashes of satin. Guttersnipes eyed up gentlemen sidelong, measuring their pockets.
The hot wind whipped at skirts and news scrolls, and the stink of manure and industry waged war against the perfume of spring.
The place was full of shoving, shouting, hawking, threats and laughter, commerce and crime.
Felix closed his eyes and let the chaos soothe his soul.
Ever since that day six months ago, it was as if someone had seized the dials of nature and turned them down.
Every color, every texture, every taste had dulled.
A dimension had gone missing from the world.
The great assault of sight and sound that was Carintheum, though .
. . it was a kind of artificial replacement.
His pocket watch chimed. His eyes opened. He’d promised to meet Diana at the Elysius Academy to pick up his new gauntlets, and he was already late.
Felix set off; yet the crowd was stiflingly slow about him, a trap made of a thousand dawdling civilians. Irritation sped his pace. He shoved, they cursed, and all was fair and equal in Carintheum. The faster he walked, though, the more his body itched to run.
You can’t carry on like this, said some small voice of sanity. He’d already consulted more surgeons than he could afford, hoping one of them would promise him a miracle. After five of them had delivered the same verdict, though, there was no resisting it.
Not in his wits, at any rate. His heart was a different matter.
Yes, keeping his arcana meant three hours’ sleep a night and his pulse running ninety beats to the minute, even at rest. It meant sparring in dark gentlemen’s clubs at hours that decent people were in bed, and fighting the urge to leap gaps that he couldn’t possibly jump.
It also meant keeping hold of one last thread to the world he’d always known. His power might be locked away from him, but it was still there. His comrades’ arcanic signals had once been clear as songs; now they were murmurs. Surrender to that surgery, though, and they’d fall silent altogether.
He rounded the corner and saw the sunlight glinting off Elysius Tower. His sister was waiting. Best have those maudlin thoughts far from his head before he got there. If he told her what he was contemplating, she’d never understand.
And she’d beat you to death with a therical textbook.
That thought, at least, was enough to coax a smile to his face. He locked it there and pressed on into the madness of Carintheum.
“This isn’t proper magic,” said Felix, adjusting a dial on the gauntlets. To a man accustomed to a subtle and many-stringed instrument, using those infernal devices felt like hitting a gong with a mallet. Diana grinned and elbowed him in the ribs.
“It’s good enough for everyone else. And stop calling it magic. This isn’t the eighth century.”
“Forgive me, master. The fifth science.”
“Absolved, my child. Now, you slot the fuel into the brackets over the wrist. This is just a cheap blend, but the expensive ones are smoother.”
His sister clipped a vial of arcana into place and turned a dial. Copper liquid flowed out into the glass veins that lined the gauntlets.
“It’s unnatural,” he muttered.
“Pish. It’s the same principle as freehand casting. The gauntlets manipulate the arcana, the arcana resonates the fabric, and the fabric”—she clicked her fingers—“moves the world.”
“No, I mean . . . harvesting arcana. Bottling it. Selling it in shops. I’ve heard they power kettles with it, these days.”
“You’re an incorrigible snob, brother mine,” Diana said with a sigh. “You’ve been away from civilization for too long. Half the city’s connected to the arcanic grid. You should see the manufactories! They collect thousands of primens an hour. It’s incredible.”
He’d seen it on a smaller scale, of course. On the battlefield, the common arcani fed the generators that powered their shields and artillery. It was more efficient for the half-trained men to pool their powers into the machines than to shape the spells freehand.
In the city, though, they shunted workers through the manufactories in droves, milking them like cows for their arcana.
Great engines milled it down and pulped that living power into one homogeneous mass.
They flooded it into the grid, or drained it into bottles and labeled it like drink.
It was unnatural in a way he could scarcely express.
Arcana was as personal as memory, as natural as breath. It wasn’t for sale.
“I still don’t like it,” he said instead.