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Chapter 16: No Body for the Trial

Chapter 16: No Body for the Trial

The first bell had barely stopped when Vhar entered the eastern classroom with Radrazh and Ulqor secured between his shoulder blades.

Nyra stood beside the back wall with her spear, Thronebreak, resting against one shoulder. Dark cloth covered the spearhead, and a narrow leather binding held the wrap beneath the blade. She glanced at the empty chair beside Vhar, then at the crossed scabbards.

"I was deciding whether you could sit without taking out the row behind you."

Vhar tested the chair with one hand. "If they survive the lesson, I’ll consider it a success."

Her mouth curved as she sat beside him. Her spear, Thronebreak, stayed within reach instead of entering the common rack. Its handling seal carried Nyra’s mark, not the Academy’s.

A woman in a gray coat entered with a brass field meter and rolled a quarry map across the table. Red stakes bordered the southern extraction shelves. Beyond them, a black line enclosed several stone fissures and bore the hooked mark of the Wildblood Desolation.

"Your first field trial crosses a managed beast territory," the instructor said. "The Academy controls your assessment, but Wildblood workers maintain that boundary because they know what feeds, nests, and hunts there. If their red stake disagrees with your map, you stop, and you do not improve the ground before somebody records what changed."

She set a dull blue stone beneath the meter. Its needle rose across one colored band.

"This reads Uvar cadence disturbing the material around it. It cannot tell you who caused the disturbance, what they intended, or whether the nearest living thing is responsible." She added an iron nail, and the needle shifted again. "Mineral pockets, old machinery, and habitat-linked tissue can share one physical route, so your eyes still have work to do."

Nyra leaned closer to the map. "What lives beyond the black line?"

"The current contract records one Tier III territorial predator in the deep fissures, although the trial lane does not enter its feeding ground. Gray-backed scavengers move through the drainage cuts. If the scavengers flee together, find the feeding path or fissure they abandoned."

She replaced the blue stone with a shallow tray of quarry gravel. Several translucent threads had been fixed between the stones and one wedge of mineral-dense bone.

"A Tomb-Root Beast makes habitat part of its body. Its sensory filaments anchor through fissures. Unless you cut the strands feeding a section of stone, it can feel your steps and steer through that section." She touched the outermost thread. The bone moved before the stones shifted. "Wildblood workers map active strands, feeding paths, and resting hours. Their boundary warns quarry families away from the fissures that feed the beast."

Vhar watched the motion travel through each physical connection. "If machinery disturbs the same stone, the animal feels that too."

"Yes, although the meter cannot tell you whether a pulse comes from an animal, a collector drum, or somebody using one to wake the other. That judgment requires spoor, timing, and the ground in front of you."

Nyra studied the thread rather than the bone. "If we find living filament inside the trial lane?"

"Mark any living filament and leave it intact unless it has wrapped or struck a person. Cutting a sensory filament can blind the beast on one side, but the strand also shows where its habitat reached."

The instructor turned the map toward the class and tapped a marked shelf. Their objective was a sealed mineral sample from the lower extraction level. The convoy would stop at the upper rim, observers would remain within horn range, and the five candidates would carry their own retreat line.

"The emergency rule allows one candidate to pull a beast away while the others reach extraction," she said. "Use it only when the team has kept that person a route back."

Vhar studied the narrow shelves. "Does the person drawing it away receive a separate route back?"

"Only the route their team preserves."

The instructor closed the meter case. "Your briefing room is through the south door. Take your water with you, and remember that a warning marker belongs to the workers who expect to return tomorrow."

Five field packs waited along the next room’s wall with water, food, lamps, weather sheets, medical packets, and sealed sample containers. A thick rope coil lay on the central table beside a ledger.

The clerk behind it had ink on both hands. "Sign for what you carry because damaged equipment can be replaced, but only if someone tells me where it failed."

A tall boy in a brown work vest reached the rope first. A hooked stave rested across his back. He bent the line between both hands, frowned at pale fibers beneath the outer weave, and held it toward the clerk.

"This fray will open when the ledge takes weight. I’m Reth Varel, and if route duty is going to make me unpopular, I’d rather start here."

The clerk exchanged it for another coil. "Complain before the fall and I’ll thank you afterward."

Reth tested the replacement, then looked at Vhar. "You broke the assessment frame yesterday, didn’t you?"

"Yeah."

"If I need help with an anchor, grab the iron below the collar, but leave me attached to the rest of it."

"Show me the correct hold first because I’ve never used quarry anchors."

"Alright, I can work with someone who says that before touching the rope."

The next candidate was broad through the shoulders, with a quarry hammer hanging at her hip. She took a brace harness from the pile, found a split near one buckle, and laid it across the ledger.

"I’m Sera Marn, and if somebody gets hurt, I carry them, which means this needs to survive both of us."

While the clerk found another harness, Nyra passed Sera the second medical packet. "Two quarry seasons?"

Sera glanced at the calluses around Nyra’s hands. "Enough to know that frightened people drag an injured person before they check the broken harness, rope, or ledge. Call me first unless the ground is already falling."

"If it is, I’ll call while moving."

Kavos Dren arrived last with a shortbow in his left hand and hook-tipped arrows at his belt. He checked the northern shelf on the map before signing.

"That upper ledge narrows behind the split marker," he said. "If any of you cross below me without warning, I lose the shot or risk putting an arrow through the wrong person."

"You’ll get the warning," Vhar said. "If the lane fills, hold the arrow."

Kavos nodded once. "Good. I need that warning before I loose an arrow."

Nyra signed for her pack and lifted Thronebreak. The clerk gestured toward the convoy rack, but she kept one hand around the spear’s middle grip.

"It stays with me, though you may seal the head until the field boundary."

The clerk examined the wrap without opening it, checked the small handling mark already set into the leather, and pressed blue wax around a fresh thread. "Your personal bonded armament travels under Academy field seal, and if the thread breaks, you report when and why."

Nyra waited until he had written the spear into her equipment line before fastening it across her back.

The room was too narrow for the full war spear to turn behind the other candidates, so she angled the shaft beside her hip, slid her forward hand beneath its middle, and brought the wrapped head through the open space above the packs. The motion cleared Sera’s hammer, Kavos’s bow, and Reth’s coil without asking any of them to move.

Reth watched the spear settle. "Do that before you step onto the west shelf. If the shaft catches our retreat line, we all discover how good my knots are at once."

"I would rather admire them from stable ground," Nyra said. "Call the rope height before I unseal the head."

Kavos lifted one hook-tipped arrow. "And call before you raise the point into my firing lane."

"You call before shooting over my shoulder."

Vhar rested one hand over the twin grips. "The same arrangement for these."

"Both?"

"Both remain sheathed unless the ground gives me room to draw."

The clerk tied one thread across the paired grips. "If you break it, I need to know which blade left first."

The field supervisor entered carrying a signal horn and dust in the seams of his boots. He checked each pack, handed Reth the red extraction cord, and told them the convoy would camp on the upper rim before a first-light descent.

Sera studied the map’s narrowest turn. "If a collapse divides us, who owns the retreat decision?"

"The person who can still see the route," the supervisor said. "I can sound extraction from the rim, but below it, you keep each other alive."

Vhar pulled Reth’s rope toward the center of the table. "Show us one line that can keep all five connected, because a rule leaving the option open does not make anyone the spare body."

Reth looped the rope through an iron collar and passed the free section around the group. Sera adjusted the height for her harness, Kavos tested where he could leave it for a shot, and Nyra shifted Thronebreak until the shaft cleared everyone’s hands.

The supervisor watched them solve the problem before writing their decision into the team sheet.

He made them repeat the movement with their eyes on the map instead of the rope. Reth changed the collar height, forcing Sera to duck beneath one section while Kavos stepped outside the loop to simulate a shooting ledge. Nyra shortened Thronebreak’s working length by choking her grip around the middle, and Vhar moved from front to rear without letting either sealed sword grip strike the person behind him.

On the second pass, Sera’s harness caught the rope.

"Stop," she said before anyone pulled harder. She freed the buckle, adjusted the rear strap, and tried again. "That would have turned me sideways on a ledge."

Reth lowered the line by one handspan. "Better to find it while the floor is being polite."

Their third pass carried all five through without a trapped weapon, hand, or harness.

Outside, workers loaded water and food into two broad wagons. One worker drove a harness tongue into its iron receiver.

CLACK!

The buckle locked. Vhar lifted the team stores into the first wagon. Reth followed with the line coil, Sera checked the water straps, and Kavos kept his bow sleeved across his chest. Nyra took the rear corner with Thronebreak within reach beneath its unbroken seal.

As the Academy gate opened, Vhar looked once at the black boundary on the rolled map.

The trial required a mineral sample. The marked quarry also held scavengers, sensory filaments, and a Tier III predator below the trial lane.