Millennial Mage novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Dust Rank
Hana falls out of a filing cabinet into the Hall of Examination, tests as the lowest rank of mage and tells two hundred people the Hall's crystal count is wrong; a stolen crystal turns up in her coat and the High Examiner orders her hanged at dawn.
The drawer stuck at eleven at night, on the last Tuesday of my contract.
I was in the records basement of Hollis & Marsh Insurance, filing claim folders from 1994 by hand.
Nobody had asked me to.
I was a temp, and nobody ever asked me for anything except to be gone by Friday.
I put my knee against the cabinet and pulled.
The drawer came out all at once, and there was no cabinet behind it.
There was daylight, and a drop, and the smell of hot stone.
I fell with a folder in each hand.
I landed on my back on a polished floor, in the middle of a huge round hall, and two hundred people stared down at me.
They wore robes, or leather, or the good wool of people who had walked a long way.
A man in gray silk stood on a dais above them with a velvet tray in his hands.
"An outsider," he said, in a voice that carried to the walls.
"The Hall takes every body that falls into it. Stand up."
I stood up.
I wore a cardigan, a lanyard that said TEMP and a rip in my tights.
"Where am I?" I asked.
"The Hall of Examination, at Marrow Cross, in the realm of Orlenne," the man said, as if it were a bus stop.
"I am the High Examiner, Dorrance Vesk. You will be tested like everyone else."
A clerk shoved a cold crystal into my palm.
It glowed the gray of old dishwater and went out.
The hall laughed.
"Dust," said Vesk, and wrote it down. "The lowest rank there is. Outsiders pay six silver for the test."
"I don't have six silver."
"Then you will serve the Hall as a store clerk for ten years, to work it off."
A clerk put a quill in my hand.
I looked at the indenture, and I looked at the tray he held.
The tray had nine velvet slots, and eight crystals sat in them.
I had counted them when he walked on, the way I count every stack of paper that is put in front of me.
The roll on the dais said NINE.
I put my thumb on that line of the roll, and it felt wrong.
It felt hollow.
I had never felt anything like it in my life.
I also felt a thin pull pointing at the man in gray.
"Excuse me," I said.
Vesk looked at me.
"Your tray holds eight crystals," I said. "Your roll says nine."
The hall went quiet.
"The Hall's count is the Hall's count," said Vesk.
"I'm sure it is. But I counted eight, and the line on that page is a number somebody knew was false."
I turned to the candidates, because nobody ever listens to the temp in the room, but they will listen to a crowd.
"Does anyone else count eight?" I asked.
A boy near the front, maybe nineteen, slowly raised his hand.
"I count eight," he said. "I counted them while we stood in line."
Murmurs ran around the walls.
I had made a choice, in a cardigan, in front of two hundred strangers, and my hands were shaking.
I did not take it back.
Vesk smiled thinly and snapped his fingers.
The clerk beside me bumped my shoulder with a bow of apology.
I felt something heavy drop into my coat pocket.
At the door, a guard with a notched sword and a tired face turned his head and looked straight at the clerk's hands.
He did not move.
"Search her," said Vesk.
The clerk pulled a violet crystal out of my pocket, held it up to the light, and the hall gasped.
"The ninth," said Vesk, softly. "Stolen from the tray, by a woman who has been in Orlenne for five minutes."
"I did not take that," I said. "He put it there."
"Theft from the Hall is a hanging offence."
He turned the page of his roll.
"Take her below," said Vesk. "She hangs at dawn."
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