I Accidentally Caught a Falling Goddess - Summons to the Raven Tower

The bailiff didn’t speak. He smelled of cold mutton fat and the cheap pipe-tobacco common soldiers smoked to keep the river damp out of their lungs.

At the top of the stair stood an iron-sheeted oak door studded with square-headed bronze bolts. The bailiff didn’t knock; he turned a five-inch iron key in the lock, shoved the heavy panel inward until the draft whistled through the hinges, and stepped aside, keeping his eyes fixed on the floor.

“Inside, cadet,” the bailiff muttered. “Wipe the gravel off your boots on the rush mat. The Chancellor doesn’t like grit on the sheepskins.”

Corin stepped through the doorway.

The private study of Arch-Mage Juan, Duke of Pontus and Chancellor of the Royal College, smelled of cedar shavings, beeswax, stale pipesmoke, and thousands of volumes of ancient vellum rotting slowly in the dry warmth of a massive fireplace. The room was octagonal, occupying the entire upper drum of the Raven Tower, thirty paces across, with soaring lancet windows overlooking the black expanse of Lake Angdos three hundred feet below. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves of dark bog-oak lined seven of the eight walls, crowded with calfskin folios, brass astrolabes, glass specimen jars holding pickled sea-wyrm gallbladders, and rolled sheepskin maps stamped with the faded red seals of the first emperor.

In the center of the room sat a desk carved from a single trunk of petrified mountain oak, thick as a butcher’s block.

Behind the desk, slumped deep into a high-backed armchair upholstered in faded crimson velvet, was the Duke.

Juan was seventy-four years old, with skin like yellow parchment stretched across a skull that had grown too narrow for its teeth. His sparse, snow-white hair was tied back with a piece of dirty black ribbon, and he wore an oversized scholar’s gown of dark brown wool lined with marten fur that was bald at the elbows. Between his long, liver-spotted fingers, he held a clay pipe with a reed stem, puffing slow, fragrant plumes of Latakia leaf toward the timbered ceiling.

Standing by the massive granite fireplace, warming his palms over the birch logs, was Inspector Branden Toners.

The magistrate wore his dark blue service tunic, unbuttoned at the throat, his silver investigator’s badge pinned crookedly to his lapel, an earthenware mug of dark mulled wine steaming on the mantelpiece beside his elbow.

“Close the door, Frankland,” Branden said without turning around. “The lake wind rattles the casements when the chimney draws.”

Corin pulled the heavy oak panel shut until the latch dropped with a dull thud. He stood on the woven rush mat by the threshold, his navy blue cadet tunic buttoned to the collar, his unweighted canvas satchel held loosely in his left hand. The bandage over his right ear felt tight, throbbing with a dull, steady pulse from the afternoon’s bout in the sand-ring.

The Arch-Mage didn’t look at Corin immediately. He took two slow, bubbling draws from his pipe, tapped the bowl against an iron tray to knock out the grey ash, and set the stem down on a stack of tax ledgers.

“You broke young Fenwick’s wrist at two o’clock,” Juan said. His voice was not the thin quaver of an old man; it was a deep, dry rasp that sounded like gravel sliding down a wooden chute. “His father, the Master of the Mint, sent three couriers to my gatehouse before the bells struck four. He wants you stripped of your uniform, branded on the thumb for common assault, and remanded to the municipal quarry at High Rock.”

Corin kept his boots planted four inches apart, his back straight. “Cadet Fenwick used an uninspected, tapered stave, Chancellor. He aimed a high-line thrust at my head on the opening pass. I used the mechanical fulcrum of the Old March fifth guard to disarm him. Instructor Brittany marked the point as clean.”

“Brittany is a soldier’s daughter who thinks any boy who squeals on the sand should be sent to the infantry baggage train,” Juan muttered, leaning his elbows on the petrified oak. His pale, cloudy blue eyes fixed upon Corin’s face—not with anger, but with the cold, dissecting scrutiny of a physician examining an unusual tumor on a beggar’s knee. “I am not interested in Fenwick’s wrist. The boy is a fop who uses almond pomade to hide the fact that his marrow is as thin as dishwater. His father will scream at the Governor, and I will tell the Governor to audit the Mint’s silver receipts — we are auditing them already, Frankland, two tons of northern silver passed through the Mint-master’s scales this year that never once appeared on the border registry, so his father has reasons to scream beyond your little duel — and the matter will be settled with four barrels of winter wine for the proctors’ cellar.”

The Duke reached into the drawer of the desk, pulled out a small piece of dark slate, and tossed it onto the wood.

The slate was three inches long, fractured at the corners, scorched black along one edge.

“This was brought to my desk two hours ago from the terrace of the Virgin’s Bower,” the Arch-Mage said softly. “The Grand Inquisitor’s investigators claim that an Heretic Archon named Kormac attempted to breach the living vessel’s chamber during the noon Cleansing, and that his core collapsed when he struck the stone balustrade.”

Branden Toners turned from the fireplace, picking up his wine mug, his dark eyes watching Corin over the rim.

“The stone in that fragment is metamorphosed granite,” Juan continued, pointing the stem of his clay pipe at the slate. “Granite melts at twelve hundred degrees. It does not melt from a chaotic core-collapse. It melts when a consecrated auric blade cuts through the ambient air at three times the speed of sound. And the residue in the quartz crystal is not human marrow-pressure. It is the celestial signature of the First Reign.”

The room went completely silent, save for the hiss of the birch sap in the fireplace and the steady howling of the lake wind against the high leaded glass.

A subtle, suffocating vibration began to build in the air.

It was not a visible spell; it was an invisible probe of pure mental aether, cold and patient, spreading out from the Duke’s forehead, washing across the eight walls of the study like cold river water. The books on the shelves gave a faint, sympathetic rattle; the glass specimen jars hummed against the oak planks.

The probe reached Corin’s boots.

It rose through his shins, through his knees, creeping toward his pelvic basin like a dozen cold, metallic needles searching for an open circuit.

Corin remembered Elspeth’s furious warning on the wash-bench: Lock the valves. Force the blood back into the bone-core. Play the clumsy dyer.

He didn’t fight the probe with his jade energy. He pulled his breath deep into his lower abdomen, locked his diaphragm down against his pelvis with the brutal, crushing tension he had used to haul forty-gallon vats of boiling mordant, and forced his newly opened emerald circuit down into the very center of his bone marrow, burying the green fire beneath three layers of dense, physical muscle-strain.

At the surface of his skin, in his forearms and knuckles, he allowed only a tiny, flickering leak of raw, unrefined violet pressure to bleed out through his sweat pores—a ragged, unstable initiate spark that sputtered and died against the Duke’s probe like damp kindling in a drizzle.

The Arch-Mage’s eyes narrowed slightly.

The invisible pressure in the room intensified, bearing down on Corin’s shoulders until the wood beneath his boots groaned, but Corin did not shift his stance. He allowed his knees to tremble slightly, his breathing to become ragged and shallow, his forehead to bead with cold, greasy sweat—the exact physiological response of a terrified first-year cadet being interrogated by a Duke of the realm.

After ten long, agonizing seconds, Juan exhaled through his nose and broke the connection.

The humming in the glass jars died away.

“Nothing,” the old Duke muttered, picking up his clay pipe and reaching for an iron taper to light the weed. “A rough initiate baseline with erratic capillary tension. He has the marrow of a carter who eats too much salt.”

Branden Toners stepped forward, setting his empty mug on the corner of the petrified desk. “I told you, your Grace. The boy is an apprentice from the lower dye-works. He threw a four-pound cobble at the warlock in the lumber yard because the gardener’s boy was his classmate. He has good wrist-snap and a thick skull, but he doesn’t know high liturgical theory from a cabbage leaf. If someone drew the Sun-Blade on the high terrace, it was an operative from the Holy Blades who slipped out through the drainage tunnels before my squads arrived.”

Juan puffed on his pipe, watching the blue smoke drift toward the high rafters. “Perhaps. But the Holy Blades do not carry unranked apprentices through the Fourth Nave at three in the morning.”

He leaned back in his velvet chair, looking at Corin over the rim of his spectacles.

“Master Frankland,” the Duke said, his voice dropping into a dry, dangerous cadence. “You are an anomaly in this college. You have a baronet’s patent from an extinct line, you paid one hundred unclipped northern gold crowns at the registration desk, and you broke the wrist of the MintMaster’s son on your second day of instruction. If I find that you are in the pay of the Thanecroft Council—or if I find that your sudden martial aptitude is the result of northern blood-alchemy—I will not expel you. I will hand you to the Inquisitor-General for anatomical verification. Do you understand what anatomical verification means, Master Frankland?”

“Yes, your Grace,” Corin answered, keeping his eyes on the slate fragment on the desk. “It means they take the skin off my ribs with iron scrapers to see why my marrow doesn’t match the registry.”

A faint, dry chuckle escaped the Duke’s throat. “A realist. How refreshingly vulgar.”

He waved his hand toward the heavy oak door.

“Get out of my tower, boy. Go back to your barracks and learn your tactical geography. The winter muster takes place in six weeks. If you score below the fiftieth percentile on the field maneuvers, you will find yourself in an infantry company on the northern border, where the cold will freeze that stubborn jaw of yours permanently shut. Dismissed.”

Corin bowed from the hips, keeping his back straight, turned on his heel, and pulled the heavy door open.

He walked down the ninety-two steps of the spiral staircase in absolute silence, the iron lantern of the bailiff long gone, the darkness smelling of wet lime and cold draft. He didn’t run. He kept his pace slow, measured, and rhythmic, his boots hitting the center of each worn stone step until he emerged through the lower archway into the freezing December night.

The quadrangle was deserted, the snow beginning to fall in fine, dry flakes that swirled around the bronze hooves of Emperor Pierre’s warhorse.

Corin stood beneath the colonnade, pulled off his wool cap, and wiped the cold sweat from his forehead with the back of his dye-stained hand.

Beneath his navy blue coat, deep in the core of his pelvic basin, the hidden jade flame flared once, hot, clean, and silent, before settling back into the dark.