On the Shoulders of Titans

by Andrew Rowe

  The handwriting was different from my own paperwork. He must have been given his assignment by someone different. I wasn’t sure if that mattered.

  My eyes reopened a minute later.

  “I don’t see anything overtly suspicious.” I handed it to the next person.

  Something seemed just a little bit off, though.

  Was I just being too suspicious of everything?

  “Okay, while everyone else is watching that, we still need to work. We’ve lost two horses, and some of our supplies are damaged.” Sera waved at the nearest wagon. “Fortunately, the horses for the other wagon didn’t bolt, so we still have one functional one.”

  “Can one horse pull a wagon?” Patrick asked.

  “Not one that heavy,” Roland replied. “But we might be able to consolidate the undamaged boxes into one carriage and leave the other behind.”

  “We can carry a few boxes if the horses can’t handle it all,” Marissa offered.

  I turned to Patrick. “Could you levitate a wagon?”

  He shook his head. “Nope. Way too heavy. One box, maybe, and even then I couldn’t do it for very long.”

  “Guess we’re consolidating boxes, then, and we’ll see if they can handle the load,” Kyra offered. “Let’s have a few of us stay here and watch the people using the crystal. The rest can check the damage and pack up.

  We got to work.

  Vyers pulled me to the side. “I may have misjudged you. That was a wise idea. I still don’t trust you, but there’s a better chance you’re not involved. But why did his orders say to find you?”

  I wasn’t sure if I should say, but at this point it was mostly out in the open. “I had orders to find the traitor — or traitors — in the group from the beginning.”

  “And you didn’t think to tell the rest of us about something that important?”

  “I didn’t want anyone to be aware that someone knew there were traitors. If I told everyone I knew about the infiltrators, everyone would be on their guard around me.”

  “Still a bad strategy. Ten set of eyes — or even five, if we have five traitors — would have been better than yours.”

  I titled my head back and forth noncommittally. “Maybe. I didn’t expect them to move this quickly.”

  “Well, they did. And now we’ve gotta clean up the mess. Anything else I should know?”

  My lips tightened as I considered. “Nothing I’m comfortable saying to one person at a time.”

  “That, at least, I can agree with. Fine. But if you do know anything, you need to find a time to share. And soon.”

  I nodded. “Agreed.”

  The only question was who I should share that information with.

  I had the most evidence that Roland was not involved, but elements of it still bothered me. His inability to share information still hadn’t been fully explained, and it certainly could have been because he was a Spider.

  Moreover, just seeing his paperwork didn’t mean he couldn’t have been given a different assignment verbally.

  And he was carrying a bunch of magical items, which I still hadn’t gotten an explanation for. If he was a Diviner, that meant he had definitely been equipped by someone in advance. I didn’t know if he had explosive items or not. I would have needed to examine everything in his bags for that.

  I wasn’t sure any degree of evidence was going to make me completely secure in Roland’s loyalties.

  Who, then?

  Could I trust that there were few enough traitors that just excluding Kathy from the discussion and including two or more others would mean it was likely at least one person I was talking to could be trusted?

  Was there any way I could determine someone’s affiliation with any degree of certainty?

  Vanniv descended from the sky while I was considering — and that gave me an idea.

  ***

  We marched on. Vanniv pointed out a few locations where we’d have to watch out for monsters, and in each case we sent a group ahead to wipe them out.

  There weren’t any major threats in the area — we had hundreds of students going down these pathways, and most of the monsters must have been cleared out by the earlier groups or the Soaring Wings.

  Later in the evening, I pulled Vyers, Sera, and Jin into a discussion.

  “I think I have a method of solving our problem. There’s one major issue, though. Kathy is most likely one of the traitors.”

  “Kathy?” Vyers looked incredulous. “You think they’d make a second-year... Wait, yeah, our professors really are that cruel. Okay. Maybe.”

  “I can handle Kathy.” Jin patted one of the pistols on his waist.

  “That’s...not exactly the kind of problem I was talking about, Jin. But good to know.” I shook my head. “It’s information that’s the issue. I need to ask a policy question on whether something is allowed, and I’m not sure I can trust the answers from the second-years. If Kathy is compromised, Jordan might be as well.”

  “That seems a little extreme. We’d have to doubt every element of our assignments at that point,” Sera pointed out. “Which, I suppose, could be the purpose of this assignment. But I doubt it. They want us to be working toward being soldiers, and that’s going to require a degree of trust for the chain of command and authority figures.”

  “I concur,” Vyers replied. “If Kathy is compromised, I find it less likely that Jordan would be. And in either case, I doubt that a rules issue would be something they could lie about. That seems like it’s beyond the scope of someone playing a traitor in the test.”

  “Fair. It’s a wording question.”

  “Why do you think Kathy is a traitor?” Sera asked.

  “One of the players on the other team told me,” I explained.

  “...Why would they give you an honest answer about that?” Vyers asked. “They’re probably just trying to sew discord.”

  I shook my head. “I doubt it. It was after I eliminated them.”

  “They probably just wanted to get back at you, then, by planting false information. Maybe save their score.” Vyers explained.

  “Maybe.” I shrugged. “But they told me because I was being nice.”

  “...Oh. Hm.”

  “You’re sure about this, Corin?” Sera sounded concerned.

  “No. I’m not sure about any of this. I’m terrible at people. But, if nothing else, now we have a means for getting answers.”

  Sera smirked at that. “Okay. Let’s give it a try. I’ll go get Jordan.”

  She walked off, bringing Jordan over to the rest of us a few minutes later.

  “What’s this about?” Jordan asked.

  “I have a question. Our orders from before the test were that we could not show our paperwork to other students. Correct?”

  He shrugged a shoulder. “Sure.”

  “Does that mean we could show them to someone else who isn’t a student? Say, a professor?”

  Jordan nodded. “Good question. Yeah, if you find one of the professors at the encampment, you could show them your orders.”

  “And other non-students?” I asked.

  “I guess, but I don’t see any reason that other people would be out here.”

  I turned toward Sera.

  She’d already picked up on the idea, of course. “Vanniv, I summon you.”

  Vanniv appeared by her side. “Twice? You must have missed me terribly.”

  Jordan turned to Vanniv, then back to us. “I’m not...hmm... Yeah, you know what? Breaking the spirit of the rules a little bit, but I think you’d get away with it.”

  “That’s all I needed to know.” I reached into my pouch and retrieved my paperwork. “Vanniv, do me a favor and read this out loud.”

  A few minutes later, Vanniv had read the paperwork of Sera, Vyers, myself, and even Jordan out loud.

  Everyone had little secondary assignments, but aside from mine, none mentioned the Spiders in the group. The others were pretty mundane. Sera was tasked with making a contract with a monst
er living in the woods, for example.

  And none of them had any orders to sabotage the group.

  “Shall we continue this with everyone else?” Sera asked.

  “Let’s.” Vyers replied.

  “Don’t forget that this doesn’t prove anything,” I pointed out. “We may very well discover that no one has written instructions to betray the group. They could have been given their orders verbally.”

  “It’s still a good start. There has to be a reason they wouldn’t let us share our orders directly. We’re fortunate we had help.” Sera patted Vanniv on the arm.

  “I live to serve.” Vanniv bowed. “Myself, that is.”

  Sera rolled her eyes. “Truly, you’re a paragon of virtue.”

  “When one considers self-preservation a virtue, I would indeed be an exemplar.”

  We retrieved the others. “Be ready for anything.”

  “What’s this?” Kyra asked.

  “We’ve determined a fair method for learning everyone’s assignments without breaking the rules.” Sera waved to Vanniv. “He’s not a student, so we can share them with him. He reads them aloud.”

  “That feels a little like cheating,” Rupert pointed out.

  “No, it’s fair.” Kathy explained. “It was expected that someone would eventually think to ask for outside help. Either that, or you’d just have someone like Kyra rifle through everyone’s bags at night.”

  That was the backup plan, but I was going to ask Jin, not Kyra.

  “Vanniv, go ahead and read the ones we already handed you first.”

  Vanniv read ours out loud again.

  “Now, let’s form a line and have everyone—”

  “Sera could have asked the karvensi to say anything,” Kyra protested. “And a Summoner with a karvensi would be quite capable of helping an Enchanter make a fire enchantment.”

  “I am quite proficient at fire magic,” Vanniv offered.

  “Not helping right now,” Sera nudged him. “Look, the rest of these people saw me summon Vanniv. I couldn’t have given him orders like that.”

  “Standing orders. You could have told him last time you summoned him, when he was ‘scouting’,” Kyra pointed out.

  That was...true. And Sera did have the planning abilities to have told him something like that in advance.

  Maybe she’d come up with this plan before I had...and maybe..

  “Vanniv, I command you to ignore any previous orders that I may have given you related to those papers. I command you to read them aloud again, without any alterations.”

  He read the papers aloud again. There were no changes.

  “Satisfied?” Sera asked.

  “...Probably.” Kyra replied.

  Kyra and Vyers were almost as paranoid as I was. I decided I liked them.

  “Okay, if that’s resolved, can we have him read the rest of the papers?” I asked.

  “One problem,” Rupert replied. “I lit mine on fire.”

  I blinked. “Seriously?”

  “Actually,” Kathy added, “I did, too.”

  Convenient.

  But it wasn’t a bad strategy, even for someone who wasn’t a traitor, if they had any information in their documents they didn’t want getting out. It was possible I should have destroyed my own paperwork to prevent any Spiders from reading it.

  “Great. Well, the rest of you, then?”

  “I destroyed mine as well,” Roland added belatedly. “But you all saw me reading them.”

  Most people seemed satisfied with that, but I wasn’t certain.

  Vanniv read the paperwork that was handed to him after that. I felt intensely relieved that Patrick and Marissa didn’t have anything suspicious in their assignments.

  I was less relieved and more surprised when Kyra didn’t have any suspicious orders. Her personal assignment was to discover the location of a hidden item in the encampment we were heading to and to retrieve it. Nothing involving Spiders.

  Vanniv returned everyone’s papers to their original owners, and we packed them away.

  “So, now what?” Vyers asked. “We’re no closer to a solution.”

  “We are,” Sera replied. “We have at least partial verification that several people are innocent. Rupert and Kathy are now our most serious subjects.”

  “Don’t blame me just because I was smart enough to take precautions against theft.” Rupert folded his arms. “And you think a second-year is a suspect? Please.”

  “Actually,” I put a hand on the hilt of my sword, “I had a little conversation with one of the members of the other team after we beat them down.”

  “Oh?”

  I drew my weapon and pointed it at Kathy. “He said you were their contact.”

  Kathy put a hand over her heart. “Me? That’s insane. I’m one of your supervisors.”

  “And I have a practiced distrust for authority figures.” I took a step forward. “What’s your attunement, Kathy? You never told us.”

  “Mine?” She tilted her head to the side. “It’s the one that lets me do—”

  Marissa grabbed her from behind, pinning Kathy’s arms. “Nope. That’s an ‘I’m about to surprise attack you’ phrase if I’ve ever heard one.”

  “Could have just said an attunement name if you wanted to tell us,” Vyers replied.

  Kathy growled. “You’re making a big mistake.”

  “Why? You still haven’t told us your attunement. Are you still claiming you’re innocent?” I asked.

  “No, not because of that. Because while you’ve been watching me, my partner has been finishing our assignment.”

  “Assignment?” Vyers asked.

  The sound of a gunshot rang out through the air.

  Chapter XVII – Shots Fired

  The next sound was a body falling to the ground near the wagon.

  Jin stood over the fallen body of Loria Marshal.

  I felt my heart freeze in my chest. I turned and raised my sword, preparing to charge.

  Kathy shook and managed to wrench herself free from Marissa’s grip, then spun and kicked Marissa backward with surprising force.

  With a laugh, Kathy reached into a pouch at her side and pulled out a bell.

  Without hesitation, Jin raised his pistol and fired twice more.

  Both bullets hit Kathy straight in the chest. Her Sunstone-level shroud absorbed some of the impact, but not enough.

  Her shield sigil cracked.

  I charged at Jin. Sera stepped in my way. “Corin, stop.”

  “Jin is—”

  “Disposing of both traitors,” Jin replied. Then he knelt down and helped Loria to her feet.

  Loria shook her head. “Resh it. How’d you know I was there?”

  I looked at Loria again with my attunement active. Her aura was still Quartz, hard to discern.

  But she was carrying fewer items on her belt than I’d seen before. Two, rather than three.

  She has an item with the same function as Jin’s attunement, I realized. That’s why I wasn’t even thinking about her. And it was why he was able to pick up on it.

  “My secret,” Jin replied. “Sorry I hit you that close.”

  She shook her head. “No problem. Didn’t hurt. Rubber bullets?”

  Jin nodded. “Indeed.”

  Kathy grumbled and set her bell down. “Bah. We were so close.”

  I turned to Kathy. “So, you were another Enchanter, and you worked with Loria — an Elementalist — to make the explosive devices?”

  “Got it in one.” Kathy sighed. “Were we that obvious?”

  “Not at all.” I shook my head. “You two did great. Can you confirm if there are any other traitors in the group?”

  Kathy shook her head. “It was just the two of us. Good job figuring us out.”

  I breathed a sigh of relief.

  I couldn’t trust her completely, but since she was eliminated from the test, I figured she didn’t have much motivation to continue deceiving us.

  Marissa gave Kathy
a concerned look. “You two aren’t going to be failed out, are you?”

  Kathy shook her head. “Probably not. We managed to blow up one of the wagons, after all. And we were pretty badly outnumbered.”

  “What do we do now?” Patrick asked.

  “Probably wait here for the Soaring Wings to pick these two up, then keep going. We’ve already found two traitors. And if Kathy is lying and there any more are in the group, they’re badly outnumbered at this point.” I offered.

  “We wanna do anything else to check people while we’re stuck ‘ere?” Marissa asked.

  “Don’t know if we can. Unless Roland has any spells that might be of use?” I turned toward Roland.

  “Nothing relevant, I’m afraid. If I knew any truth detection spells, I would have been using them a long time ago. And it’s not like there’s a ‘detect spider division’ spell.”

  “Okay, let’s take this time to rest, then,” Sera suggested. “Maybe get another meal. It’s late.”

  We took Sera up on that suggestion. Everyone ate together, even the two students we’d already eliminated. There were no hard feelings — they were just doing their assignment. In fact, things seemed less tense now that the conflict had been resolved.

  After the meal break, we pressed on for the remainder of the day. We didn’t quite make it to the settlement by nightfall, though. While Marissa wanted to press on through the rest of the evening, most of us were too exhausted, including the horses.

  We made camp just a little way off the trail.

  It had been ages since I’d gone camping with a large group. My last “camping” experience was when I’d been teleported out of the spire directly to Keras. I’d spent the night in the middle of the woods with him and my injured allies.

  In retrospect, it’s fascinating that Katashi was able to teleport me directly to Keras’ location. Did he know exactly where Keras was, or did he have some kind of anchor directly connected to Keras?

  It’s probably something specific to Keras, because if Katashi could just teleport to any person he wanted, he would have found Tenjin immediately.

  Hrm.

  Normally, I would have just pushed those questions into my queue of things to research, but I was trying to break the habit of putting things off. And I needed to be better about taking advantage of the information sources I had available.