Calliope never afterward knew how long she lay dazed in the throes of the spell burn.. Indeed, given the method of their escape, it was possible that the question itself did not make sense. Spell burn, aetheric dissonance, witches ague, arcanis magus synoscopia, all were names for the illness that descended on a mage who drew too much power too quickly. Most mages suffered a bout the first time they successfully worked a spell and were smart and careful enough not to experience it again. Calliope was in a worse state than Therman would be, assuming he survived, because she had used blood magic. In addition to the normal spell sickness, vitaemancy had boiled away a significant portion of her blood plasma and afflicted her with blood sweats. Unconsciousness in such a state was a blessing. Not an entirely unalloyed blessing however. Her mind whirled in strange fever dreams. Versions of herself made entirely of blood offered her cryptic advice and dire warnings she couldn’t quite understand. A parade of those she had killed filled past, each balancing the exact amount she had been paid for their lives on their heads. Neil arm-wrestling the gargoyle she had animated to kill him. A dead Neil making wise ass comments at his own paupers funeral. A great wyrm that burrowed beneath the earth, hungering to devour entire cities. Her own body transformed so that vast black wings and a long tail shadowed the sun. A forest made entirely of metal tress stretched from horizon to horizon, each copper leaf, burnished and razor sharp, clung to branches that dripped with ancient verdigris. Armies of animate bones, not arranged in skeletons but simple masses of spindly limbs marched spastically across night mare landscapes, to tear mindlessly at other such armies with endless clacking and splintering sounds to keep the beat. Faceless gods threw dice for stakes beyond her understanding. Cold… cold…. cold…

 

The dreams pulled back as she opened her eyes. Immediately the feverish delirium didn’t seem so bad. Her body was shivering and burning all at once. She was nude, save for her undergarments and a badly soiled but finely made vest that had been drapped over her like a blanket. Her stomach roiled and she tasted blood. She was in some kind of a hollow perhaps the kind cut under a bank by spring floods, with the roots of saplings interweaving the dirt of one wall. The other wall was piled snow, disturbed where a doorway had been dug out and then resealed. A small fire, pushed as close to the dirt wall as possible , smoldered low. Calliope shifted closer trying to pick up a piece of timber to add to the meager flame. It was hard. Her fingers were clumsy and she had no strength at all. The battle she had fought with the Magister had drained her to the breaking point. A few more spells and she would have been among the corpses cooling in the ballroom. The timber fell from her fingers and onto the fire with a shower of sparks. A simple spell would have been more than enough to warm her, but even the thought of magic made her vision swim. Where was she? Had Neil brought her here? That seemed likely, she was pretty sure the vest was his, but things got a bit hazy in her memory. She remembered cutting the throat of one of Therman’s flunkies and then trying to climb the stairs, but nothing beyond that. There was a scratching at the snow bank. Calliope turned as best she could looking for some kind of weapon, but she hadn’t found anything by the time familiar hands dug through the snow. Neil squeezed in, looking extremely cold  and carrying a pair of silvery fish on either end of a short stick.

 

“Hey, you’re finally awake,” he said as he saw her by the fire. He stepped in hurriedly, set the fish down, and hurriedly began heaping up snow to seal the entrance. There was a howling wind outside that gusted in fresh snow as he worked, but it only took a minute to seal up the hollow.

 

“Where are we?” she asked, wrapping the vest around her chest. There wasn’t enough fabric to warm her whole body and she coiled her legs closer to the fire. Neil must have been freezing too, having gone out into a snow storm in what appeared to be nothing more than an undershirt and trousers.

“No clue,” he admitted, “just grabbed you and jumped through some portal in the atrium right before the whole place collapsed.”

 

“The building had collapsed? How?” she asked. Had they unleashed so much destruction they had leveled the palace of a Magister? Apparently so.

“You tell me, I came downstairs to find everything on fire and the whole damn place falling in on itself. I only just managed to drag us out of there before the whole thing went down.”

 

Calliope was silent for a long moment. She had probably killed half the nobles in the space of a few minutes. Violated the sanctuary of a senior magister, killed several members of the Arcane Council and destroyed one of the most ancient and venerated palaces in the city. If there were any witnesses, they were in big trouble. She was going to have to do something very difficult, something she rarely did, but there was nothing for it so she pushed on before she lost her nerve.

“Thank you. For pulling me out of there.”