There was a knock and Sim’s voice came from the hallway. “Can we come in?” Without waiting for an answer, he opened the door and led an uncomfortable looking Wilem into the room.
“We heard . . .” Sim paused and turned to look at Mola. “He’s going to be okay, right?”
“He’ll be fine,” Mola said. “Provided his temperature levels out.” She picked up a key-gauge and stuck it in my mouth. “I know this will be hard for you, but try to keep your mouth shut for a minute.”
“In that case,” Simmon said with a grin, “We heard Kilvin took you somewhere private and showed you something that made you faint like a little sissy girl.”
I scowled at him, but kept my mouth shut.
Mola turned back to Wil and Sim. “His legs are going to hurt for a while, but there’s no permanent damage. His elbow should be fine too, though the stitching’s a mess. What the hell were you guys doing in Ambrose’s rooms, anyway?”
Wilem simply looked at her, characteristically dark-eyed and stoic.
No such luck with Sim. “Kvothe needed to get a ring for his ladylove,” he chirped cheerfully.
Mola turned to look at me, her expression furious. “You have a hell of a lot of nerve to lie right to my face,” she said, her eyes flat and angry as a cat’s. “Thank goodness you didn’t want to insult my intelligence or anything.”
I took a deep breath and reached up to take the key-gauge out of my mouth. “Goddammit Sim,” I said crossly. “Some day I’m going to teach you to lie.”
Sim looked back and forth between the two of us, flushed with panic and embarrassment. “Kvothe has a thing for a girl over the river,” he said defensively. “Ambrose took a ring of hers and won’t give it back. We just—”
Mola cut him off with a sharp gesture. “Why didn’t you just tell me that?” she demanded of me, irritated. “Everyone knows what Ambrose is like with women!”
“That’s why I didn’t tell you,” I said. “It sounded like a very convenient lie. There’s also the fact that it is not one whit of your goddamn business.”
Her expression hardened. “You come off pretty high and mighty for—”
“Stop. Just stop,” Wilem said, startling both of us out of our argument. He turned to Mola, “When Kvothe came here unconscious, what did you do first?”
“I checked his pupils for signs of head trauma,” Mola said automatically. “What the hell does that have to do with anything?”
Wilem gestured in my direction. “Look at his eyes now.”
Mola looked at me. “They’re dark,” she said, sounding surprised. “Dark green. Like a pine bough.”
Wil continued. “Don’t argue with him when his eyes go dark like that. No good comes of it.”
“It’s like the noise a rattlesnake makes,” Sim said.
“More like hackles on a dog, ”Wilem corrected. “It shows when he’s ready to bite.”
“All of you can go straight to hell,” I said. “Or you can give me a mirror so I can see what you’re talking about. I don’t care which.”
Wil ignored me. “Our little Kvothe has a flash-pan temper, but once he’s had a minute to cool down, he will realize the truth.” Wilem gave me a pointed look. “He’s not upset because you didn’t trust him, or that you tricked Sim. He’s upset because you found out what asinine lengths he is willing to go to in order to impress a woman.” He looked at me. “Is asinine the right word?”
I took a deep breath and let it out. “Pretty much,” I admitted.
“I chose it because it sounded like ass,” Wil said.
“I knew you two had to be involved,” Mola said with a hint of apology in her voice. “Honestly, the three of you are thick as thieves, and I do mean that in all its various clever implications.” She walked around the side of the bed and looked critically at my wounded elbow. “Which one of you stitched him up?”
“Me.” Sim grimaced. “I know I made a mess of it.”
“Mess would be generous.” Mola said, looking it over critically. “It looks like you were trying to stitch your name onto him and kept misspelling it.”
“I think he did quite well,” Wil said, meeting her eye. “Considering his lack of training, and the fact that he was helping a friend under less than ideal circumstances.”
Mola flushed. “I didn’t mean it like that,” she said quickly. “Working here, it’s easy to forget that not everyone . . .” She turned to Sim. “I’m sorry.”
Sim ran his hand through his sandy hair. “I suppose you could make it up to me sometime,” he said, grinning boyishly. “Like maybe tomorrow afternoon? When you let me buy you lunch?” He looked at her hopefully.
Mola rolled her eyes and sighed, somewhere between amusement and exasperation. “Fine.”
“My work here is done,”Wil said gravely. “I’m leaving. I hate this place.”
“Thanks Wil,” I said.
He gave a perfunctory wave over one shoulder and closed the door behind him.
Mola agreed to leave mention of my suspicious injuries off her report and stuck to her original diagnosis of heat exhaustion. She also cut away Sim’s stitches, then recleaned, resewed, and rebandaged my arm. Not a pleasant experience, but I knew it would heal more quickly under her experienced care.
In closing, she advised me to drink more water, get some sleep, and suggested that in the future I refrain from strenuous physical activity in a hot room the day after falling off a roof.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Slipping
UP UNTIL THIS POINT in the term, Elxa Dal had been teaching us theory in Adept Sympathy. How much light could be produced from ten thaums of continuous heat using iron? Using basalt? Using human flesh? We memorized tables of figures and learned how to calculate escalating squares, angular momentum, and compounded degradations.
Simply said, it was mind-numbing.
Don’t get me wrong. I knew it was essential information. Bindings of the sort we’d shown Denna were simple. But when things grew complicated, a skilled sympathist needed to do some fairly tricky calculations.
In terms of energy, there isn’t much difference between lighting a candle and melting it into a puddle of tallow. The only difference is one of focus and control. When the candle is sitting in front of you, these things are easy. You simply stare at the wick and stop pouring in heat when you see the first flicker of flame. But if the candle is a quarter mile away, or in a different room, focus and control are exponentially more difficult to maintain.
And there are worse things than melted candles waiting for a careless sympathist. The question Denna had asked in the Eolian was all-important: “Where does the extra energy go?”
As Wil had explained, some went into the air, some went into the linked items, and the rest went into the sympathist’s body. The technical term for it was “thaumic overfill,” but even Elxa Dal tended to refer to it as slippage.
Every year or so some careless sympathist with a strong Alar channeled enough heat through a bad link to spike his body temperature and drive himself fever-mad. Dal told us of one extreme case where a student managed to cook himself from the inside out.
I mentioned the last to Manet the day after Dal shared the story with our class. I expected him to join me in some healthy scoffing, but it turned out Manet had actually been a student back when it had happened.
“Smelled like pork,” Manet said grimly. “Damnedest thing. Felt bad for him of course, but you can only feel so much pity for an idiot. A little slippage here and there, you hardly notice, but he must have slipped two hundred thousand thaums inside two seconds.” Manet shook his head, not looking up from the piece of tin he was engraving. “Whole wing of Mains reeked. Nobody could use those rooms for a year.”
I stared at him.
“Thermal slippage is fairly common though,” Manet continued. “Now kinetic slippage . . .” He raised his eyebrows appreciatively. “Twenty years back some damn fool El’the got drunk and tried to lift a manure cart onto the roof of the Maste
rs’ Hall on a bet. Tore his own arm off at the shoulder.”
Manet bent back over his piece of tin, engraving a careful rune. “Takes a special kind of stupid to do something like that.”
The next day I was especially attentive to what Dal had to say.
He drilled us mercilessly. Calculations for enthaupy. Charts showing distance of decay. Equations that described the entropic curves a skilled sympathist needs to understand on an almost instinctive level.
But Dal was no fool. So before we grew bored and sloppy, he turned it into a competition.
He made us draw heat from odd sources, from red-hot irons, from blocks of ice, from our own blood. Lighting candles in distant rooms was the easiest of it. Lighting one of a dozen identical candles was harder. Lighting a candle you’d never actually seen in an unknown location . . . it was like juggling in the dark.
There were contests of precision. Contests of finesse. Contests of focus and control. After two span, I was the highest ranked student in our class of twenty-three Re’lar. Fenton nipped at my heels in second place.
As luck would have it, the day after my assault on Ambrose’s rooms was the same day we began dueling in Adept Sympathy. Dueling required all the subtlety and control of our previous competitions, with the added challenge of having another student actively opposing your Alar.
So, despite my recent trip to the Medica for heat exhaustion, I melted a hole through a block of ice in a distant room. Despite two nights of scant sleep, I raised the temperature of a pint of mercury exactly ten degrees. Despite my throbbing bruises and the stinging itch of my bandaged arm, I tore the king of spades in half while leaving the other cards in the deck untouched.
All of these things I did in less than two minutes, despite the fact that Fenton set the whole of his Alar to oppose me. It is not for nothing that they came to call me Kvothe the Arcane. My Alar was like a blade of Ramston steel.
“It’s rather impressive,” Dal said to me after class. “It’s been years since I’ve had a student go undefeated for so long. Will anyone even bet against you anymore?”
I shook my head. “That dried up a long time ago.”
“The price of fame.” Dal smiled, then looked a little more serious. “I wanted to warn you before I announce it to the class. Next span I’ll probably start setting students against you in pairs.”
“I’ll have to go against Fenton and Brey at the same time?” I asked.
Dal shook his head. “We’ll start with the two lowest ranked duelists. It will be a nice lead-in to the teamwork exercises we’ll be doing later in the term.” He smiled. “And it will keep you from growing complacent.” Dal gave me a sharp look, his smile fading. “Are you all right?”
“Just a chill,” I said unconvincingly as I shivered. “Could we go stand by the brazier?”
I stood as close as I could without pressing myself against the hot metal, spreading my hands over the glimmering bowl of hot coals. After a moment the chill passed and I noticed Dal looking at me curiously.
“I ended up in the Medica with a bit of heat exhaustion earlier today,” I admitted. “My body’s just a bit confused. I’m fine now.”
He frowned. “You shouldn’t come to class if you aren’t feeling well,” he said. “And you certainly shouldn’t be dueling. Sympathy of this sort stresses the body and mind. You shouldn’t risk compounding that with an illness.”
“I felt fine when I came to class,” I lied. “My body is just reminding me I owe it a good night’s sleep.”
“See that you give it one,” he said sternly, spreading his own hands to the fire. “If you drive yourself too hard you’ll pay for it later. You’ve been looking a little ragged lately. Ragged isn’t the right word, really.”
“Weary?” I guessed.
“Yes. Weary.” He eyed me speculatively, smoothing his beard with a hand. “You have a gift for words. It’s one of the reasons you ended up with Elodin, I expect.”
I didn’t say anything to that. I must have said it quite loudly too, because Dal gave me a curious look. “How are your studies progressing with Elodin?” he asked casually.
“Well enough,” I hedged.
He looked at me.
“Not as well as I might hope,” I admitted. “Studying with Master Elodin isn’t what I expected.”
Dal nodded. “He can be difficult.”
A question sprang up in me. “Do you know any names, Master Dal?”
He nodded solemnly.
“What are they?” I pressed.
He stiffened slightly, then relaxed as he turned his hands back and forth over the fire. “That isn’t really a polite question,” he said gently. “Well, not impolite, it’s just the sort of question you don’t ask. Like asking a man how often he makes love to his wife.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No need to be,” he said. “There’s no reason for you to know. It’s a holdover from older times, I think. Back when we had more to fear from our fellow arcanists. If you knew what names your enemy knew, you could guess his strengths, his weaknesses.”
We were both silent for a moment, warming ourselves by the coals. “Fire,” he said after a long moment. “I know the name of fire. And one other.”
“Only two?” I blurted without thinking.
“And how many do you know?” He mocked me gently. “Yes, only two. But two is a great number of names to know these days. Elodin says it was different, long ago.”
“How many does Elodin know?”
“Even if I knew, it would be exceptionally bad form for me to tell you that,” he said with a hint of disapproval. “But it’s safe to say he knows a few.”
“Could you show me something with the name of fire?” I asked. “If that’s not inappropriate?”
Dal hesitated for a moment, then smiled. He looked intently into the brazier between us, closed his eyes, then gestured to the unlit brazier across the room. “Fire.” He spoke the word like a commandment and the distant brazier roared up in a pillar of flame.
“Fire?” I said puzzled. “That’s it? The name of fire is fire?”
Elxa Dal smiled and shook his head. “That’s not what I actually said. Some part of you just filled in a familiar word.”
“My sleeping mind translated it?”
“Sleeping mind?” He gave me a puzzled look.
“That’s what Elodin calls the part of us that knows names,” I explained.
Dal shrugged and ran a hand over his short black beard. “Call it what you will. The fact that you heard me say anything is probably a good sign.”
“I don’t know why I’m bothering with naming sometimes,” I groused. “I could have lit that brazier with sympathy.”
“Not without a link,” Dal pointed out. “Without a binding, a source of energy . . .”
“It still seems pointless,” I said. “I learn things every day in your class. Useful things. I don’t have a thing to show for all the time I’ve spent on naming. Yesterday you know what Elodin lectured about?”
Dal shook his head.
“The difference between being naked and being nude,” I said flatly. Dal burst into laughter. “I’m serious. I fought to be in his class, but now all I can do is think about all the time I’m wasting there, time I could be spending on more practical things.”
“There are things more practical than names,” Dal admitted. “But watch.” He focused on the brazier in front of us again, then his eyes grew distant. He spoke again, whispering this time, then slowly lowered his hand until it was inches above the hot coals.
Then, with an intent expression on his face, Dal pressed his hand deep into the heart of the fire, nestling his spread fingers into the orange coals as if they were nothing more than loose gravel.
I realized I was holding my breath and let it out softly, not wanting to break his concentration. “How?”
“Names,” Dal said firmly, and drew his hand back out of the fire. It was smudged with white ash, but perfectly unharmed. “Names reflect
true understanding of a thing, and when you truly understand a thing you have power over it.”
“But fire isn’t a thing unto itself,” I protested. “It’s merely an exothermal chemical reaction. It . . .” I spluttered to a stop.
Dal drew in a breath, and for a moment it looked as if he would explain. Then he laughed instead, shrugging helplessly. “I don’t have the wit to explain it to you. Ask Elodin. He’s the one who claims to understand these things. I just work here.”
After Dal’s class, I made my way over the river to Imre. I didn’t find Denna at the inn where she was staying, so I headed to the Eolian despite the fact that I knew it was too early to find her there.
There were barely a dozen people inside, but I did see a familiar face at the far end of the bar, talking to Stanchion. Count Threpe waved, and I walked over to join them.
“Kvothe my boy!” Threpe said enthusiastically. “I haven’t seen you in a mortal age.”
“Things have been rather hectic on the other side of the river,” I said, setting down my lute case.
Stanchion looked me over. “You look it,” he said frankly. “You look pale. You should get more red meat. Or more sleep.” He pointed to a nearby stool. “Barring that, I’ll stand you a mug of metheglin.”
“I’ll thank you for that,” I said, climbing onto a stool. It felt wonderful to take the weight off my aching legs.
“If it’s meat and sleep you need,” Threpe said ingratiatingly. “You should come to dinner at my estate. I promise wonderful food and conversation so dull you can drowse straight through it and not worry about missing a thing.” He gave me an imploring look. “Come now. I’ll beg if I must. It won’t be more than ten people. I’ve been dying to show you off for months now.”
I picked up the mug of metheglin and looked at Threpe. His velvet jacket was a royal blue, and his suede boots were dyed to match. I couldn’t show up for a formal dinner at his home dressed in secondhand road clothes, which were the only sort I owned.