The Exiled Duke's Lottery system

Chapter 262: Chapter255: The Bucket With a Spout

(Protected lab, SKYFORGE)

The hole in the east wall of the testing shed had been patched with a sheet of scrap plate. Gandalf had bolted it on himself, and he called it "the lesson."

"Well that was a bad idea"

"Yeah,we are not opening the channel wide again," he said, "until we understand why it sat dead for three weeks and then blew a hole in a wall."

"Agreed." Maerath had a fresh sheet pinned to the bench, ruled into a grid. "So we stop guessing and start measuring. Every draw gets three numbers: how wide I open the channel, how long I hold it, and how much comes out. If there’s a rule in this thing, it’ll show up in the numbers."

"You’re making a table for a thing that exploded."

"It exploded once, at one setting. I want to know exactly how far that setting sits from every safe one. That’s not recklessness, it’s the opposite."

"Tell that to the wall."

"The wall isn’t listening."

"The wall is the best listener at Skyforge. Hasn’t argued with me once since I bolted it on."

The first dozen readings were almost boring. Narrow channel, ten seconds, a small steady trickle into the crystal. Open it a little wider, same ten seconds, a slightly bigger trickle. Wider still, bigger still. Maerath filled line after line of the grid and felt, for the first time since Caelrith, like a man doing ordinary engineering instead of negotiating with a rock.

"It’s a straight line," he said. "Width in, power out. Simple as a tap."

"Don’t say that out loud."

"Why not? It’s a fact."

"Because every time one of us decides this sphere is simple, it costs us something. Last time it was a wall. Before that, Pell’s eyebrows."

"That’s not how the world works, Gandalf."

"Neither is anything else in this shed, and yet."

Maerath kept drawing. Reading fifteen sat on the line. Reading sixteen sat on the line. Reading seventeen did not.

At a width barely past the one before it, the crystal took in nearly double what the pattern promised — and then the sphere took it back. All at once, in the wrong direction, through equipment was never built for it. The rod frosted white in under a second. The crystal didn’t crack and didn’t shatter. It simply went dark, like a lamp switched off.

Gandalf, standing well clear, still ended up sitting on the floor.

"What," he said, "was that."

"I don’t know." Maerath looked at his hand. It had been nearest the rod, and it wasn’t burned — just numb, which he minded more. "It gave the power. Then it reached out and took it back. As if it changed its mind halfway through."

"Write that down."

"I’m writing ’the sphere changed its mind’ in a technical report. I’m aware of how that reads."

"Write it anyway. Better an honest sentence that sounds mad than a tidy one that lies." Gandalf got up, flexing his fingers. They’d gone cold too, and he’d been nowhere near the apparatus. "The whole room went cold, Maerath. Not the rod. The room."

"I noticed."

"Everything else we’ve ever built runs hot when it’s pushed. This ran cold. I don’t like a thing that works backward from everything I know."

"You didn’t like it when it did nothing, either."

"When it did nothing, it was a paperweight. Paperweights don’t reach across a room and pull the warmth out of my hands."

They repeated that exact setting three times over the next two days — carefully, from a distance, using a stick to open the channel. The first repeat: same result, power drawn then snatched back, the air biting cold for a heartbeat. The second repeat: the same again. The third: nothing at all. The crystal filled cleanly and sat there glowing, perfectly well behaved.

Gandalf found the well-behaved one the most offensive of the three.

"Twice it does its trick. Third time, butter wouldn’t melt."

"Which means it isn’t the width." Maerath stared at his grid, which had stopped being a straight line and become a scatter of contradictions. "If the width alone caused it, the same width would cause it every time. Same setting, three different answers. There’s another variable, and it’s not on my sheet."

"Such as?"

"Time since the last draw. Which of us stood closer. The weather, for all I know." He rubbed his eyes. "I’m about to say something that will sound like peasant superstition, and I want it noted that I hate it."

"Noted. Say it."

"I don’t think it’s reacting to how we draw. I think it’s reacting to what we’re drawing into."

Gandalf went still.

"Go on."

Maerath lined the crystals up on the bench — the six good ones from the first days on the left, the dark one on the right.

"These six took a slow charge and held it. No trouble, ever. And all six are plain storage crystals. Buckets. They hold what they’re given and do nothing else." He picked up the dark one. "This one I built differently. I wired a draw-loop into it — a way to pull the charge back out quickly, because I wanted to test discharge speed next. It isn’t just a bucket. It’s a bucket with a spout."

"And you think it noticed the spout."

"I think every clean draw we’ve ever had went into something that only holds. And the one time it slammed the door on us, cold, out of nowhere — that was the one time we handed it something already built to spend what it was given."

Gandalf looked at the row of crystals for a long moment. Then he took a piece of chalk and drew two shapes on the bench: a plain circle, and a circle with a line coming off it.

"Then we stop arguing and test it. Build four plain ones. Build four with spouts. Same draw, same width, same time, one after another. If the spout is what it hates, we’ll know by supper."

"That’s a day of building."

"It’s a day that ends the argument. Cheap at the price."

They built the eight crystals and ran the test the next morning, narrow and slow, exactly the way the first six had been filled.

The four plain vessels filled without incident. All four glowed quietly on the bench, identical to their older cousins.

Of the four with spouts, two filled just as cleanly — charged, stable, no complaint. The other two went dark within seconds, and each time the room went cold for the space of a breath.

Gandalf stared at the results.

"Two spouted ones fine. Two spouted ones dark. That’s not a rule, Maerath. That’s a coin toss."

"Unless it isn’t the spout itself it objects to." Maerath picked up one of the spouted crystals that had filled cleanly and turned it over. Then he picked up a dark one and set them side by side. "Look at the loops."

"They’re the same loop."

"They’re the same design. They’re not the same winding." He tapped the clean one. "This one I wound loose — built to bleed its charge out slowly, over minutes, when something downstream asks for it. And this one—" the dark one, "—I wound tight. Built to dump everything it holds the instant it’s called for. Fast discharge. That was the point of it."

Gandalf looked from one to the other.

"The loose ones passed. The tight ones went dark."

"Both tight ones. Both loose ones. Four out of four." Maerath set them down. "It isn’t punishing us for building something that can spend power. It’s punishing us for building something greedy about it. Slow spending, it allows. Fast spending, it refuses — and it doesn’t refuse politely."

Gandalf was quiet for a while, which in him was rare enough to be its own kind of statement.

"That’s not a mana core," he said at last. "A core doesn’t care what happens to its power afterward. It can’t care. It makes power, it hands it over, and the rest is none of its business — because it has no business. It’s a rock with a working baked in."

"I know."

"This thing is inspecting what we plug into it and making decisions."

"I know that too. And the only way I can say what I think is happening will make you unhappy, so brace." Maerath put his pencil down. "It behaves like something that was told to be careful. Long ago, by whoever made it — someone who knew exactly what it could do if it ever stopped being careful."

Gandalf looked at the scrap plate bolted over the hole in the wall. Then at the bench: ten glowing crystals and three dark ones, all in a row.

"A power source with instructions," he said. "Standing orders, from a dead civilization, still being obeyed."

"That’s a dramatic way to put it."

"It blew a hole in a wall for being asked too quickly. I’ve earned a little drama." He picked up one of the dark crystals and held it to the lamp. No light passed through it at all, which light should have. "So. Tomorrow we wind every loop looser and find out how slow is slow enough. If it rewards patience the way it punishes greed, we may finally have the beginning of a method."

"And if there’s only one narrow band where it tolerates us at all?"

"Then we learn to live in the narrow band." Gandalf set the crystal down. "And we write to Ironbreaker that the band is exactly as wide as it needs to be, and let him lose the sleep over whether that’s true. He’s better rested than we are. He can afford it."

That night Maerath wrote the report by lamplight, and for once did not soften any of it: the reversal, the cold, the darkened crystals, the windings, and the sentence he’d promised himself he wouldn’t write and wrote anyway.

The sphere is not deciding how much to give us. It is deciding whether we can be trusted with it.

He read it back twice, left it in, and went to bed.