Chapter 29
Practice Hall
Vael gave him his first real task at their second meeting.
'You're holding too much,' she said, looking at him with the assessment of someone reading a pressure gauge. 'I can feel it from here. The Mark is efficient -- more efficient than anything the Umbros texts describe -- but if you can't release in controlled amounts you're going to keep overflowing.'
'I've been practicing,' he said. 'Small releases. Into the ground, at night.'
'Into the ground dissipates it. That's waste.' She looked at him steadily. 'The Umbros school didn't waste absorbed mana. That was the point. You're a reservoir, not a drain. What goes in should be usable.'
'I don't know how to use it.'
'That's what we're going to work on.' She pushed a small stone across the desk toward him. It was mana-inert -- he could feel the absence of any enchantment in it, just ordinary rock. 'The difference between Umbros work and standard spellwork is intent. Standard mages shape their own generated mana -- it's theirs, it behaves according to their training. What you hold is absorbed, which means it has different characteristics depending on the source. What I want you to do is hold a small amount of what you've absorbed and try to push it into the stone. Not a spell. Not a technique. Just push.'
He looked at the stone.
'If I push wrong?'
'The stone is inert. The worst outcome is it gets warm.'
He took off his glove. The seven lines on his palm were clearly visible in the lamplight of her office, the cyan-black of them slightly luminous at this mana density. He picked up the stone.
He tried to push.
What happened instead was pull. The stone was inert but the air around it had ambient mana from the enchantments in the walls, and his palm drew from that rather than releasing into the stone. The stone stayed as it was. He felt slightly fuller.
'The reflex is to take,' Vael said, watching. 'You'll have to override it.'
He tried again. Override it: he thought about the small night releases, the deliberate decision to open rather than close, the specific mental motion of pushing outward rather than pulling inward.
The stone got warm.
Not dramatically. Not glowing. Just warm, the way a stone got warm in sunlight, the warmth concentrated in the point where his thumb pressed against it.
He set it down.
'Good,' Vael said.
'That took considerable effort for very little result,' Cyan said.
'Everything does at first.' She picked up the stone, examined it. 'The mana you pushed into this is altered. I can feel the difference -- it's not the same quality as the ambient mana that was around it. It's been through you.' She set it down. 'That's the other thing the Umbros texts describe. Mana that passes through a Hollow practitioner comes out changed. They called it darkened. The texts don't agree on what that means in practice.'
He looked at the warm stone. 'What do you think it means?'
'I think we'll find out.' She folded her hands. 'I want you to go to the practice halls. Not during staffed hours -- late evening, when the residual mana from the day's practice sessions is still heavy in the air. Sit in it. Practice the push. Small amounts, consistent effort, every night.'
'If someone finds me there after hours --'
'Tell them you have my authorization. Write it down and I'll sign it.' She was already reaching for paper.
He took the authorization card she produced and went that first evening, late, when the practice halls were empty and warm with the residual mana of a day's worth of training by hundreds of students.
He sat in the middle of the largest hall and put his hands on the floor and felt the mana around him like water around a stone, and practiced for two hours the specific mental motion of giving back what had been taken.
It was slow. It was not elegant. By the end of two hours he could move small amounts, inconsistently, with effort.
But he was growing.
The mark on his palm pulsed steadily in the warm dark of the empty hall, and he thought: seven beats, like a second heart, and something that had been patient for a very long time slowly deciding it was almost ready.