Chapter 702: Someone Impossible to Meet
The mountain path was guarded at regular intervals, sentries posted at every natural choke point, the coverage dense enough that No. 76 catalogued it automatically and concluded she would not have gotten through alone. She had considered it as a possibility — a covert approach to identify the Chosen One before any formal contact — and was relieved, in a technical sense, to find it impossible. The relief simplified her options.
A red brick wall rose out of the snow forest ahead of them, half-hidden by white-laden branches. Large. More serious than anything she’d expected to find attached to an individual witch’s residence.
At least Senior Witches receive some appropriate treatment here. The guards implied respect, or at least caution. In the old days, Taquila’s promoted witches had been housed in the upper districts, attended, protected. It was fitting. She had been mildly troubled by the notion of a witch of this level living without any of that acknowledgment.
Though she still didn’t understand why a witch would put her home on a mountain ridge.
“This is it,” Wendy said, and knocked on the gate.
A girl opened it. Young — unbloomed, no magic signature at all. Bright expression, practical manner.
“Sister Wendy! I’ve been waiting.”
“Where’s your sister?”
“Machine tool testing with Sister Anna.”
Wendy turned. “This is Ring White — Lucia’s younger sister. She’s a probationary clerk with the Union, not yet awakened.”
“Welcome,” Ring White said, with the confidence of someone entirely at ease with her role, and stepped back to let them in.
The yard inside was an industrial workshop. Canvas-roofed shelters over equipment that No. 76 couldn’t immediately identify. The stone-paved ground was streaked with oil and metal shavings. Multiple work areas, multiple ongoing projects, the kind of organized chaos that accumulated around sustained invention.
“Lucia works here regularly alongside Anna,” Wendy said, walking them through. “She’s responsible for materials research. Her ability also evolved when she came of age — quite dramatically, similar to Anna’s. She’s among the few witches who can drive a Sigil of God’s Will.”
No. 76’s foot caught the threshold.
She recovered. She hoped it looked like the ordinary stumble of someone who hadn’t been watching the ground.
What did she say.
“What’s a Sigil?” someone asked — Amy, the pronunciation tentative, as though she wasn’t sure she’d heard the word correctly.
“A Sigil of God’s Will.” Wendy’s tone was pleasant and informative. “It requires an enormous amount of magic power to activate. Most witches find it difficult to light even the first of its four stones. His Majesty has hung it in the castle hall — anyone who joins the Union can test it. At the moment, four witches in the Union can light the final stone. Everyone is trying to guess who the fifth will be.”
“Hung it in the hall,” No. 76 repeated internally, with the careful flatness of someone reading a phrase in a foreign language and trying to construct meaning from the individual words.
“Only four witches.” She repeated this too.
Only.
The Sigil of God’s Will was the exclusive armament of the Three Chiefs of the Union. In Taquila’s long history, activating all four stones had been the achievement of Transcendents — witches who had devoted their entire existence to the development of their power, who had set aside every other consideration to reach that ceiling. The Union at its height had three. Three.
And here they were being told: only four, in this city, and everyone was wondering who the fifth would be, as though this were a competition rather than a miracle.
And the king had hung it on the wall. As a test device. For general use.
No. 76 pressed her hand briefly to the side of her head where a dull pressure had begun to build.
They found Lucia working at a bench alongside Anna — and No. 76 took them both in quickly, measuring her impressions against her expectations, and finding them insufficient to contain what she was seeing. Two witches of this magnitude, working side by side, treating each other like colleagues. Both of them managed by Wendy, who was not evolved and apparently had no difficulty with this. Anna had shown none of the detachment that Senior Witches in Taquila had sometimes developed — the high-altitude remove that came from standing too far above ordinary experience. She seemed, from the few minutes No. 76 had been present, like someone who was simply engaged in her work and moderately pleased to have visitors.
The Wolfheart witches fell into easy conversation with Lucia, who had the directness of someone who didn’t practice social distance.
No. 76 waited until everyone’s attention was organized elsewhere, then raised the ring.
Lucia’s beam appeared: nearly twice the width of Maggie’s. Substantial. Cohered and complex and entirely consistent with the evolution Wendy had described.
Then Anna’s.
The width of it — roughly equivalent to what she’d measured in the Foreign Affairs Building the previous night, from the invisible witch who had stood at her bedside and extinguished the candle.
Nightingale was Anna’s beam. Anna was Nightingale’s.
She lowered the ring.
Neither was the Chosen One.
Which meant the light that had filled half the sky from the direction of the castle — wider than anything she’d measured today, wider than anything she’d measured in four centuries — belonged to a third witch. A witch she hadn’t yet seen. A witch who was apparently somewhere in this city, unremarkable enough that no one had mentioned her in the context of Anna and Lucia, or remarkable enough that no one had thought to start there.
She was still working this out when Broken Sword asked, with the artless curiosity of someone who genuinely wanted to know, “How many witches in the Union have evolved their powers?”
The sound of Wendy counting on her fingers was, under the circumstances, extremely loud.
“…nine, ten. Ten.”
No. 76 heard the number and felt something in her interior machinery quietly stop functioning.
Ten.
The intelligence from Black Money had placed Neverwinter’s entire witch population at approximately twenty. She had planned to use the city as a starting point — a place to establish herself, gather initial observations, and then continue on to Sleeping Island, which was the actual center of gravity for surviving witches in the current era.
Ten Senior Witches.
In a city of perhaps twenty witches total.
The Union at Taquila, at its greatest height, across the entire long history of the civilization it had built, had produced Senior Witches through a process that required talent and time and the particular alignment of conditions that couldn’t be manufactured or rushed. It had lost ground in the final century before the fall precisely because promotion had nearly stopped — an empire hollowing from within, the ceiling intact while everything beneath it thinned.
And this place had ten.
She was composing a mental letter to Pasha — not yet sent, not yet fully worded, but taking shape — when the gate of the backyard opened.
A woman walked in with several glass bottles held carefully in both hands. Blue hair. The bearing of someone accustomed to being the most technically precise person in any given room, and not particularly interested in social acknowledgment of this fact. She set the bottles in front of Anna.
“The anticorrosion results you requested. Test sample aluminium alloy 1872 performed best, as His Majesty predicted.”
“Thank you, Agatha.”
“Mm.” A nod. She turned to go.
No. 76 raised the ring out of reflex — professional habit, the same automatic assessment she applied to every witch in her line of sight — and saw the beam appear in the crystal and register its reading, and in the same instant, across the gap of four hundred years, recognized the face.
A thunderbolt would have been less sudden.
She had seen that face. She had seen it not in this century or the last, but before the fall — before the maze, before the long dark of the ruins, before everything that had come after. She had seen it in Taquila, in the age when the city still stood, when its streets had been full and its upper halls had held people she had known by name.
That is impossible.
And yet.