Arcanum by Simon Morden Page B

transaction.
    Except there now seemed to be a problem, and no one was telling her what it was. She would have to find out for herself.
    Nikoleta took her courage and the letter in her hands, and stepped out into the cloister.
    There was no rule requiring her to cover herself, but she felt the overwhelming need to do so, so she did. She felt safer, which was stupid because it was only a bit of cloth: she had a full repertoire of defensive and offensive spells, but she distrusted them to protect her from whatever was wrong.
    She didn’t run though, or walk quickly, to the projector. Decorum and order were nothing more than theatre, but she’d grown up in a city where the show of power was more impressive than the power itself. She understood such things and how effective they could be.
    She walked along two sides of the cloister square. It was late, and the air spilling down from the mountains was cold. A fog was rising off the river and the lights of the adepts’ house were haloed with mist. Because of the curfew, there was no one else about. It felt odd. There was always activity of some sort, even if it was just the sound of distant, rhythmic screaming.
    Nikoleta stopped before she left the cloister and looked behind her. There, in the far corner, was the adept master. Almost, but not quite, impossible to detect, hidden in shadow and shrouded in white. He was watching her, to see what she’d do, to see whether she’d be obedient. Perhaps he hadn’t thought she’d spot him, but he made no further effort to hide. Why should he?
    She gripped Thaler’s letter more tightly, and hurried down the vaulted corridor to the projector room.
    When she’d first seen it, she’d been struck by its simplicity. For most novices, the discovery that spellcasting was a matter of will, disfigurement and rote learning that left little room for either aptitude or aesthetics was a surprise soon overcome. The same with the projector, which was nothing more than a glass sphere on a stand in the middle of an empty room. And even then, the stand was superfluous, and the sphere only there to be a focus. Masters, she was told, didn’t even need that.
    She was alone, which was good, because she wasn’t used to queuing, and she didn’t need an audience, either, even though she’d projected dozens of times, never failing to connect after that first time, which had been humiliating and excruciating in equal measure. Not quite: the embarrassment had burnt long after the whip-marks had faded.
    As she opened the door, she was struck by the smell, heavy and decaying, but on sight of the glass, she blotted it out. “Hoson zês, phainou. Mêden holôs su lupou.”
    Hesitation wasn’t part of the spell. She walked straight up to the stand and rested the fingertips of her right hand on the top of the sphere, barely touching the cool, clear surface. The whole world was within, and Nikoleta had to search it all for a knot of existence that lay to the east of her. She closed her eyes and felt her concentration waver.
    That shouldn’t have happened. She stepped back, wiped her hand on her robe, then extended her hand again.
    She stared through the convoluted refractions of the glass to its very centre, the place where she wanted to be, suspended in the middle of a ball of nothing. Then she closed her eyes again.
    The glass was black, a black hole she could pass any object through, like a letter, to anywhere she imagined, such as the Protector of Wien’s offices. Something was tapping at her hand. Slowly, rhythmically.
    Nikoleta opened her eyes, and saw watery brown dribbles running down her wrist. She looked up.
    She jerked back so fast she pushed the glass sphere away from her, the reflex too instinctive to overcome. She landed on her back, the stone floor jarring her all the way from her backside to her jaw. The sphere rolled up the indentation on top of the stand, and the whole thing rocked.
    Her breath caught in her throat. The stand teetered for a