— Examination Day. Before the Queue. Before the Crystal. Before everything.
King Woke Up at the Fifth Bell
Not because an alarm woke him. Not because the light came through the window at the right angle. Not because someone knocked or the building made a noise.
He woke up because he wanted to, and his body had decided the fifth bell was a reasonable time to want to, and that was that.
He lay still for a moment, looking at the ceiling of the rented room.
Low ceiling. Water-stained in one corner. A crack running diagonally from the window frame toward the lamp hook that had been patched once and was working itself loose again. Thin walls—he could hear the couple in the next room beginning their morning argument about something involving money and someone's brother-in-law.
Thirty copper a night, he thought. The cheapest rate on the board at the transit lodging house.
He sat up.
The room had a small mirror above the washstand. He looked at himself in it for a moment—white hair, gold-green eyes at their usual half-lidded rest, lean frame in a plain undershirt. He looked, as far as he could tell, exactly like a young man who had arrived in the city the previous evening with a pack, no noble house affiliation, no guild sponsorship, and an enrollment receipt for the Magic Aptitude Examination.
That is what I am, he thought. Today. That is the entirety of what I am.
He got dressed. Plain dark trousers. A worn grey coat. Boots that had been broken in before he'd bought them, which was how he preferred boots—he didn't want to spend a week teaching footwear how to be comfortable.
He had thirty minutes before the first transit lines started running.
Good, he thought. That's enough time to walk.
---
Rume in the early morning was a completely different city from Rume in the afternoon.
King had arrived the previous evening—after dark, through the southern gate, on the back of a cargo transit that had come up from the Pannonia border provinces. He'd seen the city lit up: mana-lamps on every corner, the tiered mountain-face blazing with window light, the market districts still full at the ninth bell, the smell of roasting meat and woodsmoke and the particular stone-and-mana smell that tiered cities had.
That was Rume performing.
This was Rume being.
At the fifth bell, the lower residential tier was quiet enough to hear individual footsteps. Street sweepers moved through the stone alleys with long-handled brooms, pushing the night's debris toward the gutter drains. A woman opened a shutter two floors up and hung washing before the sun was fully over the mountain. A cat—an extraordinarily self-possessed orange cat—sat on a low wall and watched King walk past with the expression of someone who owned the district and was choosing to tolerate visitors.
King paused.
He looked at the cat.
The cat looked at him.
It looks healthy, he thought. Good coat. Well-fed. Someone in the building takes care of it.
He kept walking.
---
The examination boulevard was two tiers up—accessible by either the main road switchback or the internal stairway lifts built into the mountain face. He took the stairs. Four hundred and twelve steps, smooth from decades of use, cut directly through the rock. The walls of the stairwell were carved with old inscriptions—names, dates, short phrases in a script he recognized as an older Devas dialect.
He read them as he climbed. Names of people who had made this same climb on their own examination days. Some had written their results beside their names. E-Rank, Latium district, year 247. B-Rank, Rume upper tier, year 312. C-Rank, proud, year 389.
One inscription, near the top, had been chiseled out. Someone had decided later to remove it.
I wonder what it said, he thought.
He emerged from the stairwell onto the second tier's main avenue just as the city started properly waking up. Shutters opening. Carts being wheeled into position. The examination boulevard was already being set up—banners in Devas silver and blue going up on their poles, the official examiner tents being staked at the far end near the central plaza. A line of government officials in grey coats moved in organized clusters, clipboards in hand, reviewing setup logistics with the particular stressed energy of people managing something very large on a tight schedule.
The food vendors were also setting up.
King stopped walking.
There.
The first cart—three from the left, on the boulevard's eastern side—had a steel pan over a mana-burner and was producing a smell that was, in his extremely limited experience of mortal food so far, the best thing he had encountered in approximately eighteen hours of being in this city.
He walked over.
The vendor was a compact, grey-haired man with the kind of posture that came from decades of standing over a cart—permanently bent slightly forward at the waist, left shoulder lower than the right from years of working the pan with the same hand. He moved carefully. Not slowly—efficiently, but with a deliberateness that said certain angles hurt.
He had the squint of someone who spent most of his working hours in steam and smoke.
"Meat bun," King said.
The man pointed at the price board without looking up. Thirty copper.
King counted out thirty copper from his pocket and placed the coins on the counter.
The vendor's hand came forward to collect them. King's fingers lifted away as the vendor's fingers touched the coins—a normal exchange, half a second of overlapping contact through the copper in between.
The man straightened slightly.
He stood up fully.
King was already looking at the bun—wrapped in paper, still steaming, handed over with the efficient reflexes of someone who'd done this ten thousand times. He took it. Unwrapped one corner. Took a bite.
Warm. Dense. The filling was slightly sweet.
He made a mental note. He had been making a lot of mental notes about food in the last eighteen hours. The list was growing.
"—huh."
He glanced up.
The vendor was standing fully upright, both hands pressed flat on the counter, looking down at himself with an expression of quiet, personal confusion. He bent forward experimentally, the way you'd test something you expected to hurt. Then he bent further. Then he straightened up again and turned his back to King and touched his lower spine.
King watched him.
Oh, he thought.
He had been careful. He had been very, specifically, precisely careful about not putting anything into physical contact. The coins had been a relay he hadn't accounted for. Copper was a conductor in ways that had nothing to do with its electrical properties—a fact that was relevant now and embarrassing.
How long, he wondered, was that man's back hurting?
The vendor turned back to the cart. He picked up his long-handled pan and swung it in a slow arc—a motion King suspected normally required a specific careful angle to avoid aggravating something—and held it at full extension without changing expression.
He set the pan back down.
He pulled King's change from the box under the counter—five copper—and placed it on the board without a word.
"Thank you," King said.
The vendor grunted. He began ladling the next batch of filling onto the wrapper sheets with the focus of someone who had decided to think about something later and was choosing right now to focus on the job.
King took his change, took his bun, and moved back from the cart.
He ate slowly.
That was not intentional, he thought. I should not touch things that other people will touch. Or stand near coins. Or—this is a long list.
He would add to it as he went.
---
He looked down the boulevard. The line for the examination grounds was already forming at the northern plaza entrance—several hundred people visible from here, more streaming in from every connecting street. Young faces, most of them. Eighteen years old, by law. The examination was mandatory. You didn't get to choose whether you showed up.
Strange, he thought again. Deciding a person's worth in a single morning.
He finished the first bun.
He went back for a second.
The vendor handed it over without looking up.
King paid with coins he'd touched as little as possible, setting them on the counter board instead of placing them directly in the man's palm. He took the second bun and moved away.
The vendor rolled his shoulders. The motion was loose in a way it hadn't been ten minutes ago.
King did not look back.
Third, he thought. One more. Then the line.
He was aware, in a distant way, that he was somewhat nervous about the line. Not about the examination itself—the examination would do what it was going to do and he had already accepted that he had no control over whatever a three-hundred-year-old enchanted crystal decided to say about him. That was outside his ability to manage.
He was nervous about the part that came before. Standing in a line of ten thousand people. Listening to their heartbeats, their breathing patterns, their mana cycling—all of it available to him in fine detail whether he wanted it or not, the way sunlight was available to skin. He couldn't not perceive it. He could only decide what to do with what he perceived.
The challenge was to do nothing. To hear a thousand different fears and not fix any of them. To feel the compressed stress of ten thousand young people on the most important morning of their lives and to stand in the middle of it and simply be a person in a line.
He'd practiced this. He had a plan.
Look at the vendors, he thought. Look at the city. Look at the cloud patterns. When you notice something about someone near you—stop. Don't analyze. Just let it be.
He bought the third bun from a different cart—this one selling a variant with a spiced vegetable filling, which he wanted to compare—and stood at the edge of the boulevard eating it, watching the examination grounds fill up.
Ten thousand people, assembling. From every district in Devas, from provinces along every border. Some of them had traveled weeks to be here—he could tell by the quality of road dust on certain coats, the makeshift bundles that had been repacked too many times. Some of them were from Rume itself, local district kids who had grown up watching this line from their windows and were now standing in it.
Every single one of them was scared in some specific and personal way.
King ate the third bun.
This one is better, he decided. The spice is different. Regional variation in the seed blend, probably—the eastern quarter uses more cumin.
He folded the wrapper. Put it in the nearest waste bin.
He looked at the line.
He looked at the central plaza at the line's end, where, behind the examination tents and the official banners and the crowd of grey-coated bureaucrats, the top of the Evaluation Pillar was just visible above the tent peaks—twenty feet of clear enchanted crystal catching the morning light, throwing small prismatic patterns on the tent canvas around it.
Three hundred years, the plaque would say. Three hundred years without incident.
King looked at it for a moment.
He thought about the coins. The vendor's back. The small ways that proximity worked, that contact worked, that even thirty copper passing through his hands and then through someone else's could carry something he hadn't intended to carry.
This is going to be fine, he thought.
Then he thought: probably.
Then he thought: I should stand very still and think small thoughts.
---
He joined the line.
It moved slowly.
The woman two places ahead of him was cycling her mana in tight controlled spirals—preparation technique, the kind you did to present cleanly on an evaluation. The boy directly in front of him was white-knuckle gripping a small metal charm on a cord around his wrist and hadn't let go since King got in line behind him.
King put his hands in his pockets.
He looked at the city.
From this part of the boulevard, the second tier's residential blocks were visible to the east—long rows of attached stone buildings, the washing-lines strung between windows, the slow start of the morning routine. He could see the orange cat from the lower tier—it had apparently climbed one of the stairwell exits and was now sitting on a second-tier wall, watching the examination crowd from a higher vantage point.
Same cat, King confirmed. Good territorial range.
The line moved forward. He moved with it.
Don't fix things, he reminded himself. Don't solve things. You are a person in a line. People in lines do not solve the aquifer problem or identify stress fractures in the mountain face or catalog ambient mana patterns for twenty meters in every direction.
He looked at the cloud formation over the mountain's peak. Cumulus, light. No rain today. That was just weather observation. That was allowed.
The bell toll for the seventh hour moved across the city from the civic tower.
The line moved forward again.
King watched the Evaluation Pillar at the plaza's center—still distant, still just visible above the tent peaks, catching the light. He watched three separate examinees approach it and test. From this distance he couldn't see the results, only the faint bloom of color from inside the crystal and the examiner's pen moving.
Three ordinary examinations, he thought. That's what this should be. That's what I'm hoping for.
He watched the crystal receive each person calmly and return its answer calmly and move on.
Good, he thought. It's cooperating well. Very reasonable. Good crystal.
He was, he admitted privately, a little concerned about the crystal.
The line moved forward.
King kept his hands in his pockets and his thoughts as small as he could make them, which was smaller than anyone in the line would have believed possible and still, somehow, not quite small enough.
He watched the Evaluation Pillar.
The Evaluation Pillar, from its position at the center of the plaza, seemed—in the very particular way of objects that were about to have the worst day of their three-century career—to have no idea what was coming.
King felt slightly bad about that.
I'll try to be careful, he thought.
He was approximately nine hundred people from the front.