Chapter 258: The Witches from Sleeping Island (Part 1)
Tilly’s letter had raised one additional request: whether anyone in the Witch Union could offer a clue toward deciphering the ruins’ script.
Roland decided he would include everything in his reply — the news of the Devils, the Holy City of Taquila, Soraya’s illustrated reconstruction of the previous events as best they could recover them from stone and witness. Nothing should be withheld. If there were a weak point hidden somewhere in the Church’s history, understanding the shape of whatever catastrophe had buried it was the only way to find that point before the Church sealed it again. That something needed to be hidden was already established — otherwise four centuries of covering the past made no sense. Things were only buried at such effort when the living had reason to fear the dead.
As for the stone tower in the Concealing Forest: that required more than letters. Lightning’s account of what she’d seen inside it — the darkness, the figure, the sense of something that was neither human nor demonic beast — had lodged somewhere in Roland’s reasoning and stayed there. He wanted to send an expedition. He also wanted those people to come back. The expedition would wait until the First Army had its next generation of firearms, enough to respond to whatever a Devil could actually do. Only then would he send the witches in, and with enough soldiers alongside them to matter.
He suppressed the rest of the unease by the discipline of returning to the practical.
The test site was the same field outside the city walls that had served for every previous evaluation. He had the First Army establish a perimeter — no civilians entering, no one leaving — before the five witches and their escort emerged through the gate into the open air.
Lotus was first.
She was close to Nightingale in age, with short black hair worn in a thick cluster, the kind of face a traveller might call the pleasant daughter of an ordinary family — pleasant, open, nothing particularly striking until the moment she looked at the ground beneath her feet and the ground looked back. She stood at roughly one and a half meters, lean, and gave off the impression of someone still in the last stages of growing up, which made the shift all the more startling.
Within five meters of her feet, the earth moved.
He had read Tilly’s description. The description was insufficient. Lotus raised a section of the field and it rose in a single vertical column, climbing — three meters, five, seven — before the structural stress of loose Western Territory soil destabilized it and the column broke apart at eight meters, collapsing back to rubble. The sound of it landing was like a muffled drumbeat.
According to her own account, the looser the ground, the less magic the transformation required, but the quality of the result suffered proportionally. Gravel was particularly difficult to work with — she could change the terrain, but not the nature of the material composing it. In dense packed soil like Sleeping Island’s, she could raise structures of genuine thickness and solidity; here in the Western Territory, the looser composition meant every wall she raised needed to compensate with width.
Roland asked her to build a house.
The structure that emerged from the soil was stubborn about existing — it took several passes, the walls pressing together and reforming until a building stood with openings for a window and an arch, walls half a meter thick, the whole thing looking like a cave that had decided to take architectural ambitions seriously. It would not win any competition. But it would not leak air in winter, and with a brazier and a properly built sleeping platform it would be warmer than a canvas lean-to. If the brick supply ran short before the Months of Demons arrived, these could serve.
“How is her magic level?” Roland asked.
Nightingale, standing just behind his shoulder, answered without hesitation. “A dense brown cyclone. Very concentrated at the center. Close to Leaves — possibly slightly better.”
“Consumption?”
“Raising the terrain level is manageable. Transforming the earth itself drains her fast. I’d estimate a sustained transformation lasts one or two double-hours before she’s depleted.”
He noted this and moved on.
“Me, me, me!” Honey had her hand in the air before he could ask.
She was shorter than Lotus by a measure, with a head of curling brown hair that clustered tightly around her face and skin a shade darker than most of Border Town’s residents. She had passed her day of adulthood the previous winter and looked, in her enthusiasm, as if that transition was still a recent discovery. Around her neck and wrists and ankles she wore chains of small animal teeth.
Her primary ability was beast tongue: within her range, she could tame animals of any species, issuing commands they would carry out until the task was completed, at which point the taming effect lifted automatically — or she could lift it herself at will. The practical limit was scale: a dozen birds was manageable; a grown cow required most of her reserves, and two or three was the maximum she could manage at once.
The branching ability was stranger and more interesting. She called it animal messenger: she could pass a taming command from one animal to another, building a chain until her order reached the intended target. If only a small bird was nearby, she could send it to find a stronger animal — an eagle, a large predator — and transfer the command from there. The chain’s composition was outside her control; the result was always uncertain. A God’s Stone of Retaliation erased the instruction immediately on contact, releasing whatever animal had been holding it.
Roland wrote this down. The uncertainty in the branching ability was a constraint, but the primary was immediately useful. He already had the outline of a plan for Honey.
Evelyn was the third.
Twenty-five or twenty-six, with the particular vowel shapes of someone who had grown up in King’s City’s outer districts. She had Tilly’s letter attribution: ability to alter the flavor and character of wine entirely according to preference, provided she has tasted the desired result previously.
The reasoning behind his selection of her was not complicated. A witch who could convert diluted ale into any wine she had previously tasted should, in principle, be able to convert diluted ale into pure alcohol. This was the theory. The practical test would take more care than an open field under the afternoon sun could provide.
He had prepared five glass bottles at graduated concentrations: fifty percent through ninety-five percent. A small amount of the higher concentrations, taken carefully, would not seriously harm anyone who had some tolerance. The crucial step was establishing that she understood the highest-concentration liquid to be a type of wine at all — its smell and mouthfeel were severe enough that a reasonable person encountering it for the first time might simply assume it was poison.
The field was wrong for this. No ice, no appropriate glassware, no context that would allow a proper tasting. He deferred the test to dinner, noted the deferral in his book, and moved to the next witch.
The fourth was Sylvie.
He had felt her attention throughout the entire test, even when she was standing still — the particular awareness of someone who was watching on a level no one else in the group shared. He could not see it, but he could feel the shape of it: nothing hostile, nothing aggressive, more like the steady regard of someone who could not turn it off entirely even when they were trying.
He was also aware, in a way he found only faintly amusing, that being in her presence meant being completely without opacity. Whatever he was carrying in his expression, in his posture, in the habitual small evasions of a man who had learned to keep his own counsel — all of it visible. He shifted his legs under the table and told himself this was a rational response.
She was the most visually distinctive of the five: aquamarine hair cut straight to her shoulders, eyebrows fine and angled, the hair fringe sitting with a precision that made her look like someone composed by a careful hand. The pupils were amber, nearly transparent, catching and redistributing light with the quality of polished mirrors. After a few seconds of meeting them Roland had the persistent and irrational sense of a target lock.
Her ability: inner sight. She could see everything — behind her, through walls, through the earth, to whatever depth her concentration and magic sustained. The branching ability tracked magic itself: she could observe the gathering and dissipation of magical power in real time, in any witch within range.
The branching ability resembled Nightingale’s secondary perception. When Roland asked whether the primary abilities were similar, Sylvie paused. Then she said, clearly and slowly, that among the hundreds of witches on Sleeping Island, she had not encountered another who saw magic the way she did.
He felt the faint pressure of Nightingale’s fingers at his side — confirmation. True.
Sample size problem, Roland thought. But it was interesting all the same.
The last was Candle.
She and Anna had both reached their day of adulthood during the same season’s Months of Demons. As a minor, Candle’s ability had extended only to lighting flames — candles, oil lamps, torches. After adulthood, the expansion had added a second capacity: she could preserve an object’s state for a measured duration. Ice held in the sun would not melt. A block of stone held at the moment of maximum compression would not crack.
The first test of the day’s potential applications was the blast furnace question: could she preserve a molten steel droplet in its incandescent state indefinitely, providing an eternal heat source? The answer was no. The enchanting category required direct physical contact, which made extreme-temperature objects impossible targets without Anna’s specific immunity. Even if he stretched a thin iron wire to give Candle a handle at a safe distance from the red end, the fundamental problem remained: the more extreme the object’s deviation from its neutral state, the greater the magical consumption, and the shorter the duration.
He tested this precisely. Two equal ice blocks — one placed on the scorched summer ground, the other in a basin of water. The ground-placed ice held its form for one hour before melting; the water-cooled ice outlasted the test. The more the environment pressed against the preserved state, the faster the preservation failed.
Volume added a further cost. Like Hummingbird and Mystery Moon, the larger the object, the more it drained her. According to Nightingale’s assessment, Candle’s total magic reserve placed her in the lower-middle range — a fine golden mist that had not yet organized itself into the dense cyclone of a mature ability.
But even bounded, even expensive to sustain, what she could do was something Roland had not encountered before in any form. The problem of material fatigue in mechanical systems was constant: metal deformed under repeated heating and cooling cycles, tools abraded with use, structural components lost their tolerance over time. He could not reverse entropy. But Candle could hold selected components in their designed state — their normal state, the state at which they functioned as intended — for as long as her magic held. A drill bit that did not wear out. A key machine component that held its dimension through a thousand operating cycles. The mechanical performance of inferior materials, maintained at the efficiency ceiling of a superior one.
Put plainly: she could make the First Army’s manufacturing capability significantly more powerful than the raw quality of the available materials would otherwise allow.
Roland closed his notebook. The day had been productive.
He sat for a moment in the stillness of the field, the First Army perimeter standing easy at the edge, the sun beginning to move past its peak, and thought about five women and what they made possible, and what they would need, and what the winter was going to bring.