“Qethumkeroliadugthumkeroliadugthumkeroliadugthumkeroliadugut.”

  To the audience’s astonishment, Dwayne’s magic raised four of the steel plates and installed them as the walls of the receptacle he was building. This burned stamina, but when he’d used Qechicieut to push the first plate into place, the audience’s disinterest had been palpable. While he couldn’t hope to match the Lo Ducas for artistry, he could show off. He only had to hide how hard it was.

  With the receptacle’s sides and bottom in place, Dwayne’s next step was to seal them together. The easiest way would be to use Ri’iki’oora and melt the steel, but he wasn’t in the Tower basement, out of the public eye. The way a real Qe mage would cast Qedehmeleut, but that spell guaranteed thaumaturgical deprivation. Luckily, he had a third way.

  While still running his compound casts of Qethumkeroliadugut, Dwayne placed a hand on two plates, recalled steel’s alchemical components, and said, “nQerm.”

  Officially, nQe magic wasn’t Canon, but, in an attempt to forestall the end of a study session, Dwayne had asked Magdala to teach him anyway, justifying it with a “what if they ask me about this in the Oral?” hypothetical. Gleefully, Magdala had taught him nQerm, nQeuom, and the thirty-six most common alchemical components. She’d had to repeat herself a few times, not just because nQe was confusing, but also because she had been so captivating Dwayne forgot to listen to what she was saying.

  Under his hand, the gaps between the steel plates disappeared. Unfortunately, with his Qethumkeroliadugut still in place, Dwayne had to abandon finesse and go fast, turning a careful casting into a sprint. It was too bad that the one person who knew how impressive this was wasn’t sitting in the stands.

  And then he was done. “Qeit.”

  With Qethumkeroliadugut undone, it was easier to keep standing and pretend that holding it, and casting nQerm eight times in a row, was as easy as breathing even as his tongue was ached to cast Ri. However, he wasn’t done yet.

  The welding process had lost the audience’s attention again, but he knew how to fix that, at least for one person. He placed one hand on each enxofric salt barrel. There was no obvious way to open them, but Dwayne was a mage.

  “Qechicieut.”

  Both barrels rose into the air and settled into position over the receptacle, then Dwayne looked Dean Bruce straight in the eyes and said, “Qezisarkelo.”

  The barrels jerked as blades of air sliced their bottoms off. Dwayne caught both pieces of wood, keeping his eyes on the dean as red tinged black powder poured into the receptacle while the rest of the audience cheered.

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  “R-Qeit.”

  He was out of time. The deprivation would hit him soon. As the barrels fell to the ground, Dwayne tossed away their bottoms and grabbed the bottles of activating agent, tapping the last metal plate with his foot as he passed. “Qechiciebiet.”

  As the last steel plate rose into the air, Dwayne dumped the activating agent into the receptacle then pushed the plate into place over it. “Qeit.” The plate dropped into position.

  Time for one last flashy move. Facing the examiners while holding an image of the last four unwelded edges in his mind, Dwayne said, “nQerm.”

  He knew it worked because his head filled with nails, the tip of his tongue pasted itself to the roof of his mouth, and no one in the audience, not the examiners, not the foreigners, not even Lady Pol could do anything but breathe hot cyan out of their warm green faces.

  Dwayne tensed. Warm green? Hot cyan? And the audience was clearly cheering, he could see their mouths moving, yet he heard nothing. Was this a new effect of thaumaturgical deprivation?

  And why was his back warm?

  Dwayne turned around and watched the receptacle warm from yellow to green in a process that was as mesmerizing as it was nonsensical. None of the spells he’d casted should have had that effect. He must have missed something. He pulled the practical instructions out of his pocket and read them again, but they said nothing about the result heating up and certainly nothing about strange colors. By the time he finished reading, the receptacle had warmed to greenish-blue and the green was draining away every second. Dwayne could be seeing pressure, somehow, but his mind persisted in thinking the colors had temperature, and besides pressure alone wouldn’t cause this. There had to be an explanation. He read the instructions again and again and then finally remembered the piece of paper in his waistcoat pocket. He pulled it out and read three words that sent chills down his spine: “It’s a bomb.”

  Dwayne looked up. Dean Bruce was smirking. Worse, four mages in green cloaks had taken up position at the edge of the arena, solving the mystery of why Dwayne couldn’t hear the audience. They’d put up a muffling effect around the arena. He was trapped.

  Meanwhile, the receptacle, the bomb, had warmed to cyan.

  Obviously, the goal was to either kill Dwayne or reveal him as Ri. To prevent either, he could loosen his tongue with a small Ri spell, put up an earthen wall with Qe magic, and hope that that was enough for him to survive the blast. Afterwards, he could blame the examiners for not being careful enough to prevent this, and no one would learn he was Ri. Except that the same intuition that told him the colors were temperature also told him that letting the bomb explode would result in steel and earth flying out with lethal force, especially for the first few rows. If he tried to protect only himself, others would get hurt, and his little secret wasn’t worth that.

  The bomb had warmed to dark blue, almost purple. He was out of time.

  Dwayne faced the bomb. “Ri’mun’ui’, mun’ui’, mun’ui’, mun’ui’, po!”

  The bomb turned gray, its natural color, which made it easy to see that the heat had compromised the welding. Dwayne’s compound cast of the heat shield spell wouldn’t be enough to contain the explosion, but it was enough to loosen his tongue. “Qedehmeleut!”

  Holding a Qe spell and a Ri spell at the same time was easier than the Qe spell alone, but he’d soon suffer thaumaturgical shock if he had to hold this-

  The world broke.