Some days later.

Loudly huffing and puffing, Nick ducked to avoid getting hit and finally completed running the final lap. Julia followed a few steps behind him.

“Ah, sir, may, I, ask?” - gulping air should make him look weak, but just now he had finished running a little over a standard marathon while continuously avoiding random projectiles. Considering that he previously admitted that he had never done any sports, it was impressive. Or rather, it would be better to say that magic is impressive.

I dropped several remaining fist-sized pieces of rubber that I had cut from old tractor tires (it took ages to find some, by the way) and nodded: “Go ahead.”

He took a deep breath to steady his breathing before continuing: “Sir, how long will it take to reach an acceptable fitness level?”

I shrugged, pointing at the books on my desk: “You have learned history of magic, right? Did you ever think where these half-mythical Atlantean, Hyperborean, Uttarakuru, Thule and other magic warriors from? Note a similarity, that they are often described as big and powerful, with vanguards being three meters tall. Of course, textbooks describe them in passing, as anecdotes of the ancient sorcerer kingdoms that did not pass the test of time, different from wizardry.”

“Wasn’t it that the big number of sorcerers tended to cause local instabilities during the transition period, and the resulting catastrophes resulted in heavy damages, making them unable to resist the ‘barbarian invasions’ later on?” - Julia interjected.

My reading speed and lack of need to sleep allowed me to read and remember much more information than any usual student. Well, I also had access to Internet, restricted areas in Depository and lots of free time.

So I pointed out Julia’s misunderstanding: “That is an interpretation by those who wrote basic books that you use to study. A series of accidents that would make them all disappear should be enough to crack the planet, I am afraid. But that is not what I wanted to say. Note that they shared interesting qualities of being able to use magic and having great personal strength.”

My student nodded obediently and Nick added: “They were all really powerful sorcerers, right? Equal to fifteen-step tower wizard, I’ve read.”

“Oh, you are not taking into account the theory of temporal stabilisation of cosmos, where magic becomes more rigid and difficult to use over time. What I wanted to say,” - I organized the pieces of information I had found and told them what I knew: “It should be impossible to have a whole nation of combat-capable magic-users, be it wizards or sorcerers, naturally. And all of the surviving descriptions note their power, not techniques, while the ratio of people capable of using complicated stuff in their population seems to have been roughly the same as now. And the only real thing that made them different from modern wizards, except for their power, of course, was their focus on physical training. ”

Julia cocked her head to the side: “But sir, if it is such a good way to improve power, why don’t we use it?”

I smiled, as I had also thought a lot about that contradiction: “Simple. How much do you study?”

Nick answered immediately: “Around fourteen hours every day, to keep up with the others.”

I spread my hands: “That is your answer. To become a three meters, or rather, ten feet tall magic siege cannon, you will need to train daily like a bodybuilder. Most people would end up stuck as wizard of first step at best. Being able to hurl basic magic with double-triple-quadruple power is only good for ordinary soldiers. And those advanced magician-priests in Atlantis and others, were usually described as scrawny, by the way. Wizards claim to frown upon such segregation and role division, so that is why such training became obsolete.”

Nick frowned: “But sir, won’t we need then to train more, and won’t it affect our studies?”

“If you want to aim for the title of Mr Olympia, sure, go ahead. If you will use magic and train, with sufficient food, there is a high chance that your muscles will be stimulated to grow like crazy, although at some point you will need specially-built training gear like extra-heavy weights and so on. But you, and most others, seem to forget that thousands, if not tens of thousands years have passed. While they had their amazing things in those legendary times, history is not only about forgetting and degradation. There have been breakthroughs, discoveries and other advances.”

Julia asked, thoughtfully: “Sir, therefore you are telling us to maintain a suitable balance?”

I shrugged: “Not really. Basically, it is much simpler and faster to train the basics. In your situation, slight improvement in body shape will enhance your overall power more efficiently than several years of studying. If you would want to balance both ways of training, at some point you would need more time than there are hours in the day. It is just a bottleneck of talent and all kinds of resources. Hypothetically, there is an option to hook you up to intravenous nutrition and combine your studies with all sorts of highly dangerous methods like forceful cognitive stimulation, but I doubt you would like this. And sorry,” - I pointedly looked at somewhat expectant Nick: “but the hassle involved is too much, as it would require too many people. Even if it would be possible to churn out third step wizards with the firepower of sixth step, it is simply too risky. And pretty useless. You two should know that wizards do not rely on raw power that much after fifth step anyway.”

“Yes, and Mentor Colbert has said that if we don’t comprehend the basics, there is a real danger of accidentally squeezing our own brains out of the noses if we try the stuff beyond first step without understanding all the intricacies. ” - Julia whispered to Nick.

Nick whispered back: “I bet you simply don’t want all the muscles Mentor described.”

My first actual lecture was interrupted by knocking. At my ‘Come in’ the intruder turned out to be Matthew Marsh. Hm, it was already past noon.

“Mentor asked me to call you. He said, it’s serious.” - he said.

That did not sound good.

---

“Three coastal villages, two mundane and one of wizards, were attacked by selkies of Unseelie affiliation.” - Arthur Wiseman pointed at the area around Aberdeen on the map. The map did not seem to be old, but was full of colourful markings.

For fanden! The Scottish weather awakened my Danish half. I had read about selkies in Depository… their tribes that served the Unseelie Court of Scottish elves, the Aos-sídhe, were nasty. Blood-thirsty creatures who rarely adapted human form, preferring shark-toothed twisted shape that let them fully enjoy drowning or slowly ripping apart other living creatures.

He tapped his finger: “And the geoport radius has shrunk again, and we can’t confirm the state of several island communities. It is miracle that we can still maintain communications with some of the organizations on the continent.”

Merda! Running out of Danish curses, my memory obligingly provided Italian alternative. If Arthur was going to continue, at some point I would have to start combining the profanities into yet-unheard combinations.

He looked at me: “However, we got a message through our diplomatic contacts in the Courts. The elf-lord we both know, got a cailleachan of Bheur’s line to transmit a message.”

Oh, I did not expect that with all the recent apocalyptic events, Fergus would actually manage to get something done. Swearing was postponed. For now.

So I hinted for him to continue: “Yes?”

“Well…” - Arthur moved a few steps back and forth before continuing: “Apparently, he managed to find something on an island off the eastern coast.”

I tried my best trying to remember any notable island east from Scotland. Nothing came to my mind. Eala had said that her portal should lead to Emain Ablach. I had looked up the available information before, but most texts and rumours pointed it’s location to be in Irish Sea. Supposedly, the place was later known as Avalon, and should have nothing to do with North Sea.

Arthur nodded: “Yes, that's what concerned me too. If we also consider the coastal attacks we just talked about, I believe there’s an unpleasantly high chance that it is some sort of diversion. It does sound like Unseelies, using a chain of misleading information to mislead people.”

I sighed: “Anything else?”

“Yes.” - Arthur admitted: “To be honest, I didn’t want to distract you. But two more people were killed last night in Akadem. At. The. Same. Time.”

I guessed what he meant: “You thought that it was one killer?”

He looked annoyed as he said: “Exactly. And Committee seems to be too busy to effectively respond. We can only hope that Protectors manage to find the culprits. ”

---

Matthew joined me when I left Arthur’s office and handed me a dusty notebook.

“Finished with inventory, sir.” - he explained.

That was surprisingly fast, considering how cluttered were some of the rooms in Whinstone Manor.

I accepted the notebook and leafed through it, memorizing the pages. Analyzing the details would take some time.

I asked: “Anything you fancy? You...two?”

Matthew fidgeted, looking embarrassed: “I would appreciate some of the books from eleventh page, if you don’t mind, sir.”

I recalled the page: “The ones like Waketh and riseth and Bann'd drugs deep in the earth?”

“Well, sir, they are simply unique personal works.” - he explained.

“What else?” - I knew that his other personality would prefer something else.

“Page thirty-six, focusing crystal set, if you really don’t need.” - Matthew stated.

Hmm, page thirty-six...row twenty-nine, Alchemical focusing lenses, quartz crystal, circa 1770. I knew that the modern ones from glass, sold in Akadem, were better - less distortion, precise focus and all other bonuses of three centuries of industrial development. Probably, Mattea wanted to use these as a reference or raw material?

“Take it. Mind if I ask, why would you need that junk?”

Matthew fished out her cell phone from his pocket and waved it around: “No coverage here anymore. So much work down the drain. I believe, however, that using radio might work. And not only with long waves - although those would help us to reestablish contact with Siberian shaman conclave. I have some ideas, or for now, I think I have the idea that could get ordinary signals too, as long as I orient the oscillation axis precisely enough. Fifteen thousand miles reception, if everything works as it should. I guess. Except that we can’t know if that range is enough to even reach London nowadays.

“Good luck with that.” - but the last part got me curious: “London?”

He excitedly nodded: “I heard geomancers calculated last week, that Highlands have at least doubled in last few months. Some fault or something has become volcanic or something too.”

I was not intimately familiar with geography of Scotland, but could it have something to do with those new mountains that could now be seen to the north from Edinburgh?

***

Back in Edinburgh, I first noted how most of my downloads had stopped. A quick check showed, that the World Wide Web had turned at most into the ‘Lothian Wide Web’, with only a few local IPs remaining in torrent peer contacts by accident. Well, I had finished searching and backuping most important technical information a week or so ago, so the remaining entertainment media was not a huge loss either. What was more troubling, were the saved RSS feeds displaying headlines like ‘Remaining communications satellites being lost’. I still considered it to be praiseworthy that local providers managed to keep the local phone and network functioning. Except that Edinburgh city LAN storage had little to offer except for a full collection of Doctor Who and some Sherlock Holmes remakes. Oh, and local chat that was full of messages urgently buying toilet paper.

Later, I took a roundabout route to Sword Hall’s rented gym. The gradually shrinking radius of local military and police activity was a disturbing sign, and already the areas further than a few streets away from city centre were starting to show signs of growing anarchy. And just in a quarter of hour, I already saw three processions, apparently belonging to Anglican and Catholic churches. I also observed a few activities that belonged to other major faiths - lots of saffron orange of Hinduists or Buddhists, recognizable long-winded mentions of Allah from Muslims and clearly new, loudspeaker-supported sermons of new, yet unknown doomsday cults.

One such cult, for example, was made of small group of people clothed in blue raincoats, who tortured my superior hearing ability by loudly and repeatedly droning in monotone something like “Embrace the Mother Sea, for we all are unclean! Come, join us, let the water wash away all filth!”. I could not imagine any person with bare minimum of awareness who would get attracted by such cheesy lines. On the other hand, as my father liked to repeat - “you can never underestimate how dumb people can be”.

***

I lowered my hips and swept the broadsword sideways, blocking the incoming blade and while paying extreme attention to avoid roughly overpowering him with my inhuman strength, shifted my sword’s strong blade with a wrist flip onto the opponent’s weak blade to ruin his leverage and proceeded with a smooth thrust towards face, thus forcing him to withdraw. A loud clap stopped everyone in the hall, and we turned towards Peter, the Maître d’arms who announced the end of today’s training. I raised my sword in salute to my training partner and we went to return the weapons to the rack.

“Hey, Matt,” - I casually started my long-planned conversation: “Did you succeed?”

Matt, a slightly chubby, but rather nimble man, smiled: “Yeah. You found the right man too, although I suppose we got quite a bunch of smiths, engineers and other handy people here.”

I snorted: “Well, I doubt anyone else is actually a research engineer in mechanics.”

“But you know, I wanted to be a smith! I mean, yeah, when I was younger. Turned out, I was much better with numbers than some kind of artistic sense.” - he showed an overexaggerated grimace.

“So?”

“Ah, well, yeah. Quite funny thing, your chain. Imagine what, man, I ran a bunch of tests - ultrasound, acid, Rockwell, Brinell, and so on. Got curious results all over the place - definitely alloy, but further forge-welded from different types. It took effort to get neutron tomograph going, considering the current electricity difficulties that affect even our lab, imagine? And yeah, look - I’ve no idea how, but your chain is a-ma-zing. Never seen such folding, it is superb technique, no idea who would bother doing that, though. Yeah, you said you found it by the river?” - never minding his childhood aspirations, Matt was a good, albeit chatty, specialist in metallurgy.

After several training sessions I had carefully manipulated to get better familiar with Matt, I managed to get him to analyze my Giant-lock chain. The interesting artifact did not seem to be magically active while exhibiting significant paranormal effect, and thus piqued my curiosity - it was significantly different from most magical tools I had found and read about in the Akadem. As the chain was a work of svartalfar, the really rarely seen Scandinavian gnomes, the Akadem had almost no information about its possible work principle. Not to mention that it made logical sense to understand an item that could quite easily affect me. For now, I gave Matt unclear answers and waited for him to finish.

Matt finally reached the point: “... it was definitely forged, but I can’t say who and why. Really, why one would go through all the trouble of planning and designing a folding pattern that would end up invisible? I can understand designing a beautiful damascus pattern or hamon, yeah, but internal structure?...”

Finally, after changing the clothes, he found the folder with printed images. I looked at the stack of greyscale reconstructed images of neutron tomography scans. And unless I was really wrong, they showed a cross-section of Giant-lock chain link, where metals of different properties formed recognizable, organized shapes. However, each shape was three-dimensional, making it difficult to properly analyze on paper.

I turned the papers, trying to make sense of the oddly-familiar shapes. I had browsed through the available runic alphabets, so once I found a recognizable pattern, it became easier. Some details were similar to acute angles that brought to mind the runic letter ‘ᚢ’, a Futhark rune Uruz. Some, from different point, looked like tiny triangle in the middle of the line, just like ‘ᚦ’, the Thurisaz. Aurochs or water … and giants? Well, not only some shapes look like rarely-seen bind runes, but they were in a messy three-dimensional form, and my understanding was inflexibly limited to some common encyclopedic knowledge. But why would runes forged into metal show such effect? Runes were popular magical symbols, even wizards used some as psychic keys or bookmarks for complex sequences. But no magic textbook in Akadem mentioned runes as independent, effective magical component. Not to mention that there were plenty of stones and other archeological artifacts in museums with these runes, but surely nothing weird happened with these? Was the key their 3D structure? But then, casting the runes by pouring into moulds or twisting wires together would be enough, no?

I put away the print-outs and joined Matt, Andrew, Rob, Max and others near the entrance. Some people were planning to go hunting. I thought about Arthur’s words and the draugir by the coast.

Just as Robert, the one who was called by his full name to differentiate from Rob, called out for more participants, I leisurely waved my raised hand: “Mind if I join?”.