There were a few days still left before the new recruiting term started, when August would begin his training with the new Hanoan magus recruits, so he spent his last carefree days in quiet contemplation and solitude, conversing only with Le Toumb. They spent most of their evenings together atop the ramparts, sometimes silent, other times in calm discussion. They talked of many things - magic, strategy, history - but never of the war. Fighting, even as enemies, had brought them closer together than fighting on the same side, and Le Toumb, though by far the stronger of the two, had grown to respect the young man’s cunning on the battlefield. But despite his grim demeanor, the memories of war were painful even to him.

  Sometimes August would want to ask Le Toumb about the war, about why Hanoa had invaded his island, and all the others of the archipelago, after so many years of peace. But he knew that it was not a fair question. They were both soldiers; August had not asked questions of his leaders when he had been called to fight - why should he demand that Le Toumb justify a war he had no part in creating? But the silence on this topic prevented their talks from getting anything more than purely academic - Le Toumb may have been his savior, but he was not his friend. All he knew of Le Toumb is that he had a wife, somewhere on the mainland, who he had not seen since the war begun, and a brother, who served in the Hanoan Navy.

  The days he would spend familiarizing himself with the fortress that would serve as a forwards academy for training Hanoan casters. It sat on an island some fifty miles off the coast of Hanoa, and was one of the first islands taken in the rapid Hanoan assault on the archipelago. The fortress was not theirs - they had seized it effortlessly in the first days of the invasion, and used the multiple ports to launch their ships further into the sea. The fortress was ringed by two walls, but even on its own it would have been an impressive structure. Five towers marked the outer perimeter of its inner wall, forming the inner courtyard into a pentagon. The towers were enormous, each surging hundreds of feet into the air, and from atop any of them one could nearly make out the coastline to either side of the island, and peer over the top of the mountain wall that led further inland. The courtyard itself was no less impressive, with huge multi-storied facilities and underground areas for training and storage. Nested against one of the walls of the pentagon was the academy building, lined with lecture halls and engineering facilities. There was a mess hall too, and a forge, and anything else a fortress might need to withstand a siege, but those August had seen many times before.

  In his treks to the academy library, he had seen only officers and other officials, and the occasional gray-haired man clad in scholar's robes, but not yet any recruits, and nobody his age. In the first few days that he arrived he had been often stopped by a passing soldier and shouted at in Hanoan, he could only pick up certain words and phrases. All he did was pull up his shirt and turn his back to them, baring the slave mark Le Toumb had tattooed into his skin, and they would shake their head and be on their way. Taking captives of war as recruits was, apparently, how Hanoa had expanded their territory so rapidly on the mainland - and the casters were especially valuable. Many of these “converts” became the most fanatical warriors, so taken were they by the Hanoan faith.

  Le Toumb himself was not devout, and so the usual religious bombardment that the Hanaons used on their captives had not taken place, but August was curious even without Le Toumb’s encouragement, and one of the first volumes that he brought to Le Toumb in one of their daily language-learning sessions was the Hanoan Holy Book - The Rites of Imperium, or Rites, as most called it. Amused, Le Toumb had translated several passages for him, and August was instantly struck by the force of their rhetoric. They were not like the tribal faiths of the Islands - August and his father had worshiped Neleius, the God of Water, and built him a shrine by the coast where they would burn offerings, but apart from that there was no structure or reason to their faith. The Rites were different - they preached a warlike determination to impose the will of Klea, their highest Goddess, onto the material world, and so to unite the realms of Heaven and Earth into one kingdom. The conviction was frightening, and August soon returned the thick volume to the library.

  The rest of his reading had been on the Hanoan systems of casting - they were similar to the training he had received on his Island, but the Hanoan knowledge of the sigils and their derivations was far more advanced than what he had been taught. But even the Hanoan scholars could not decipher nor organize the archaic alphabet of magic that called forth their spells. In the end, they too resorted to brute memorization of sequences of syllables and gestures. They, however, were able to create sealed versions of the sigils, printed with ink onto thin sheets of paper which could be released simply by lighting them on fire - any soldier with a matchstick could light one of these thin rectangular strips, and with a flash, the spell would be released. They were, however, far simpler and much more unpredictable than the standard subvocalization invocations that mages used, and would often backfire or do nothing at all.

  The reason for this, August learned, was twofold. First, the sigil itself was imperfect. While most casters could recite the syllables of an invocation more or less correctly, drawing the sigil was far more difficult. Verbal casting conjured up the correct sigil, and even with imperfect intonation the sigil was often good enough to channel their mana correctly, but attempting to mimic the intricate details of the glowing lines was far too difficult to do with any great precision. One had to make a press for them as well, as drawing each strip of paper by hand was far too inefficient to be useful, and often the metal presses had small deformities in their structure that made the resulting seals even more flawed. Secondly, someone without any knowledge of the God-tongue releasing the sigils meant that they could not regulate the flow of mana as it was converted by the sigil into the spell, which often led to an imperfect spell being released with too much or too little force. One of the biggest goals of the caster-engineers in the war effort was to create sets of standardized seals with inscribed mana-regulators, but without knowledge of the actual God-tongue, this had been thus far impossible. Lastly, attempting to release a spell consisting of multiple sigils was impossible, as the mana of the untrained soldier could not establish the sequence of the inscribed sigils.

  August had, even on his home island, attempted to make sense of the God-tongue for himself, spending countless hours repeating and writing down the syllables they used to cast, and writing and re-writing the sigils they conjured, trying to establish any meaning or connection hidden within them, but he, like everyone else, could make nothing of it. In fact, he could not even cast a spell of more than two or three sigils consistently, as when he attempted to conjure a fourth, his concentration wavered, his mental image and inner voice faltered, and the other three dissipated into nothingness. One had to hold both the image and the syllable in their head simultaneously for the sigil to be stable, and maintain that image while conjuring the other sigils, which amounted to essentially, attempting to perform multiple mental calculations in your head at the same time. He did not know how it was possible to do so with four or even five different sigils, but he had heard stories of mages from the mainland who were able to maintain seven or eight sigils simultaneously. The feat seemed impossible to him, but perhaps with more practice, holding them in his mind would become instinctual enough as to allow him to keep four or five in his head at the same time.

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  He was in the process of reviewing the sigils the Hanoans had discovered that he had not seen in the magical texts of his island’s casters when Le Toumb found him in the library. It was the day before the new recruits were to be brought to the fortress, and there was news from across the waves that the Hanoans were close to capturing the capital of the island that neighboured his - Inelandia. With this battlefield success they would be able to establish a blockade around the entire archipelago, and prevent supplies and reinforcements from rival nations from arriving to aid in the fight against Hanoa. Or so he had heard, anyway. In times of war much of what was brought as news by the ships full of returning soldiers often held very little of its weight in water. If the Hanoans were seeing such success, why would they need to keep training new casters, who were so difficult and costly to train correctly, and who were often the best defended in the field by the infantry? Perhaps the Island nations had some formidable magic of their own. But these questions were now beyond him. If the time came for him to fight, this time on the Hanoan side, he did not know what he would do, so August just ignored that looming possibility and buried himself in the study of the God-tongue, and perfecting his subvocalization, his focus, and his memory.

  Le Toumb, however, looked even more grim than usual, the deep creases of his sun-tanned face stretching up to his forehead as he stared down at August. The youth reluctantly closed the volume and turned to face him.

  “We have to talk. The training starts tomorrow, and there are some things we have to address before it begins.”

  “I’m fine. You know I'm not going to start anything.”

  “That’s well and all, but you couldn’t even if you wanted to, so that's not what i'm here to talk about.” Le Toum switched to Hanoan, which August was almost thankful for, as his accent in August’s native Kerenian was almost too thick to bear. August now replied in Hanoan, mirroring Le Toumb.

  “Then what is it? Do not leave the winds to chance, to use your idioms.”

  Le Toumb grimaced. “A decent attempt, but the usage is off. The matter is, the children,” he stared pointedly at August “and you are still children, that are integrated into our military, they are all on a volunteer basis. We do not train casters by force, unlike your people.”

  “A funny thing to say to a slave.”

  “That is a different issue. My point is a request: do not tell them you fought for the enemy. That you are a slave recruit, from the islands, they will know. Your tongue gives it away. But that you were a Magus for the enemy, do not tell them. It is not for myself that I am asking you this. It is for your own good.”

  “They will hate me for it?”

  “That is the way the mainlanders are. They are children. They do not understand what it is to be a soldier. And you do not either,” he crossed his arms “despite the fact that you were one.”

  “I don’t hate you.”

  “You do not hate me yet.” Le Toumb replied. “Because you do not know what it is to hate. War and Magic have damaged your psyche in ways that you cannot begin to understand yet. If it were up to me,” he continued “I would have freed you after your land was conquered, and returned you to your family. But I could not do this.”

  “It is dishonorable to hate.” August answered.

  “Hate is never a choice. We do not choose dishonor, yet many commit it.”

  “I am not like them.”

  “We are all like them. You just do not understand yet what was taken from you by us.”

  “Perhaps. But you have given me magic.”

  “Magic is your birthright. It cannot be given, nor taken.”

  August fell into a brooding silence, and opening the manual of sigils, began to absentmindedly scan the pages again.

  “Fine,” he said. “I will not test their honor. I will keep silent, you have my word.”

  “Thank you. When the time comes, they will know.” Le Toumb turned and began to walk quietly away. Before closing the heavy-set wooden door behind him, he turned and sent a small red sigil dancing from his finger into the center of the room. It shattered, lighting all the candles that lined the walls and tables of the cramped library. “Do not read in such bad lighting. You will ruin your eyes. Just put the candles out when you leave.” He stepped one foot out the door before changing his mind again, and turned back towards August.

  “And don’t go too hard on them the first few weeks. The basic training is quite rigorous in Hanoa, but they have not yet seen the battlefield.”

  “You know my sword arm is weak. There is no sword fighting culture on the Islands.”

  “But your eyes are good, and your sigils are clean. Just be careful with them. Good night.”

  He turned and left, slowly shutting the door closed behind him.

  August spent a few more minutes brooding over the book. Tomorrow he was going to meet the people he would spend the next few years of his life with. Unlike the Islanders, the Hanoans had enough casters to organize them into their own divisions, which fought as a unit. The first time he had encountered one of their battle-magi in the field, they were in a group of four and had decimated August's entrenched position on the outskirts of the capital. He barely retreated to the rear guard with a third of his men still alive - almost twenty soldiers had been killed by just four of their casters. And it was not just their magic that was fearful; their hand-to-hand combat far surpassed the standard training an islander infantryman received, and August himself had received none at all - he was the sole caster in his division, in charge of support and strategy, but never taking head on attacks. To the Hanoans, however, casters made the best shock troops, weakening the enemy before the standard infantrymen poured into the gaps created by the Magi.

  There was a funny feeling in his stomach, one well known to him from the time he first came under fire from an enemy caster; it was a mixture of amusement, fear, and excitement - a vague anxiety, an eerie anticipation. He brushed it off. He had faced real Hanoan battle-mages, just not in hand-to-hand combat. How bad could a few fledgling mages be?

  But now that he thought real hard, he had never talked with a mainlander before.