The military bunk, after a week of tree hollows and combat rations and six days without a proper sleep surface, registered as something considerably closer to adequate than it had any right to be. He slept without the spatial domain running, which was the first time he had done that in over a week, and his body took the opportunity to do what bodies did when they were finally given uninterrupted time: process the accumulated cost of the past seven days and begin the work of paying it down.
He woke at five fifty. The watch vibrated at six, confirming that the RCUM's Illinois City line had started its service.
Celeste was in the administration office when he came to say goodbye.
She looked up from her desk with the expression of someone who had expected him earlier and was revising the estimate upward. She had, apparently, slept at the command post rather than in the residential quarter, which either meant she had been working through the night on the post-purge reports or that the command post's residential standards were better than the bunk facility's. He suspected the former.
They exchanged contact details in the efficient way of two people who had reached the end of a situation and wanted to maintain the thread.
"Tournament next week," she said.
"I know."
"And Markus — remember what I said." She said it once and did not repeat it, which was the way things that needed to be remembered were most effectively said.
He went to the station.
Illinois City Platform 2¾ had a vendor adjacent to the waiting area who had apparently decided that the gap between military-mess-hall-adjacent and restaurant-district was too significant to leave unfilled. He bought a Korean beef bulgogi gimbap from the display case — compact, well-sealed, the sesame oil and the soy marinade legible through the packaging at the olfactory level — and a reprint of an Iron Man comics collection from a rack of pre-apocalypse popular culture material.
He sat on the bench and looked at the comic.
He had not done this in some time. He had, in the three months since he awakened, moved from task to task with the focused momentum of someone who understood that the timeline was not unlimited, but the steady accumulation of urgent things had left almost no room for the quality of attention that was not aimed at anything in particular. Reading for pleasure. Sitting on a platform bench eating gimbap and looking at a man in a metal suit making jokes about physics.
Life in the academy is missions, classes, missions, more missions, he thought. At some point I should spend a week doing alchemy in the laboratory with Grandma.
The train arrived.
He found a seat by the window as the carriage decoupled and settled into the geomagnetic glide of the RCUM's long-distance lines. He checked on Nagini through the bond.
She was larger — nearly seven feet now, the hibernation's growth having continued through the week in a way that was visible to his spatial sense as a progressive expansion of the physical form relative to the spatial domain that housed it. New patterns had appeared on her scales since the last time he had properly looked: streaks and spots of white interwoven with the black, the constellation marks that had been specifically Sagittarius becoming something more complex, as though the template was expanding to accommodate a larger expression of the same principle.
She was asleep and comfortable and the 100% law comprehension pulsed steadily at the centre of her domain with the patient vibration of something that had never needed to worry about ceilings.
He ate his gimbap and read about a man in a metal suit, and the capital's skyline appeared at the horizon, and he found that he had missed it.
The capital metro station had the specific quality of home as a sensory experience: the particular circulation of mana-conditioned air, the specific acoustic signature of a space that processed tens of thousands of people daily and had arrived at a characteristic ambient sound. He came up the escalator into the main concourse with the gimbap finished and the comic in his inventory and the Void Repulsor and three other items in an acquisition box in the same inventory.
A steak restaurant by the concourse's eastern exit had a New York strip that he had been thinking about since somewhere around the Illinois City border. He ordered it and ate standing at the counter because the queue at the tables was longer than the time he had, and the steak was good enough to be worth the compromise.
He was deciding between the eastern exit and the northern one when the two men appeared.
They were dressed in suits designed to be unmemorable — the specific anonymous quality of professional institutional dress, charcoal wool and white cotton, nothing that announced a rank or an affiliation. His Fate's Eye read them as neutral: not hostile, not deceptive, simply here for a function they had been sent to perform.
"Markus Blackwell?" the nearer one said. "Student, Valerian Royal Academy. Grandchild of the Blackwell household."
"Yes," he said.
"Swiss Guards, Imperial Palace. His Majesty Valerian the First has extended an invitation for a conversation at the Royal Palace. Lunch, today." He produced the letter.
The envelope was not the kind of thing that arrived by accident. The paper was heavier than ordinary paper, the weight of something that had been made to communicate its own significance before it was opened. The Royal Cypher on the seal was pressed in a gold so saturated it registered to his spatial sense as mana-active — not just dye, the colour a property of a material that had been treated with something that changed its molecular relationship to light.
He took it and read the seal carefully before breaking it.
Mana ink. Array Grandmaster work. He had seen Sloane's study's collection of institutional correspondence — the letters from regional commanders, trading partners, other awakener families. This was categorically different from any of those. Not in degree of formality. In kind.
The calligraphy inside was Copperplate, the style that had been used for royal correspondence in the old world and had survived the apocalypse with the specific persistence of things that were tied to the exercise of power rather than to any particular technology. The language was the language of a crown writing to a subject — not unkind, not threatening, but carrying the grammatical weight of summoning rather than inviting.
His Majesty requests the pleasure of your company. The word requests was doing significant work in that sentence.
He folded the letter, stored it carefully, and got into a taxicab.
I'll consult Elena before anything else, he thought. Sending a royal summons when my grandparents are at the border smells like timing that is not accidental.
The academy's gates had the same grandeur they had had three months ago when he first approached them as a new first-year, and he still had not adjusted to it. Some things maintained their initial quality regardless of frequency of exposure. He went through the side entrance with his badge and took the central lift directly to the fifth floor.
Elena was at her desk with the specific posture of someone who had been working and had decided to make the transition to conversation without making it look like a transition. Lucy was on the armrest of the couch, occupying the space with the deliberate ownership of a cat that had established her position and was seeing no reason to reconsider it.
"Welcome back," Elena said. "How was the north?"
"Productive," he said. He sat on the couch and let Lucy investigate his hand — she accepted him, which was her consistent standard for people who had spent time in this office, and arranged herself on the adjacent cushion with the composed authority of a creature making a social concession. "The Vane family made another attempt. Someone in the adventurer's guild, external contractor, hired team. Same pattern."
Elena's expression shifted in the direction it shifted when she was managing something she found actively annoying. "How did it resolve?"
"The forest resolved most of it," he said. "The purple recluse spider colony's territory was more accessible than the contractor had planned for."
She held his gaze for a moment. "And you."
"I watched from a tree."
"And the contractor."
"Did not emerge from the forest."
She was quiet for a moment in which she was clearly running the arithmetic. Then she picked up her espresso and said nothing further about it, which was the decision of a person who had made a mana oath and understood what that oath covered.
"Do you want me to address the Vane situation formally?" she said. "I have the storage rings from the previous two incidents as institutional evidence."
"Not yet," he said. "The family is still restructuring after Sylas. Let it develop. If they escalate further I'll reconsider." He reached into his jacket. "There's something more pressing." He placed the letter on the coffee table between them.
Elena looked at it without touching it. Her spatial sense, he had come to understand, was good enough to read mana ink at this range without contact. She held the reading for a long moment.
"Grandmaster Merlin," she said, finally. "I haven't seen his work in three years." She picked it up carefully — the way you handled something that had been made by a specific person and deserved acknowledgment of that. "The Emperor."
"Invited for lunch," Markus said. "Today. Which is also the day my grandparents are at the southern border, a week before the tournament that the entire academy is watching, and approximately twelve hours after I returned from an external mission where I reached Level 50 and broke through to 50% spatial law comprehension."
Elena set the letter down.
"You think it's timed," she said.
"I think the timing is not accidental. Whether the reason behind it is hostile, curious, or opportunistic — I don't know yet. That's why I came here first." He looked at her. "I'd like you to come with me. As my guardian, officially."
She looked at the letter.
She looked at Lucy, who expressed no opinion.
"The Emperor is a difficult man," she said. "Tier 8, decades at the summit, and the specific quality of someone who has been the most powerful person in a room for so long that the assumption has become structural rather than situational. Every word you say will be evaluated against every piece of intelligence he has about you, which is going to be considerable." She paused. "He will also be evaluating the fact that you came prepared, with a guardian from the academy, rather than alone. That will tell him something."
"What will it tell him?"
"That you're careful. And that you understand the difference between a conversation and an audience." She stood and collected her outer robe from the coat stand, which had the specific movement of someone who had made a decision. "Sloane is going to owe me for this in a way that I will enjoy collecting on." She straightened the collar. "I'll inform the administrative office we're departing. Fifteen minutes."
He picked up the letter and placed it back in his jacket, and felt the mana ink's warmth against his palm through the paper.
Outside the office window, the academy's grounds continued their ordinary function — students in the combat arena, the afternoon light on the garden hedges, the city's skyline at the horizon maintaining the particular permanence of things that had been built with the intention of outlasting individual moments.
In fifteen minutes, they were going to the Royal Palace.
He thought about Braveheart's words: the academy is a greenhouse.
He was beginning to understand what he had meant.