4.113: Be the Music

Hammond stepped in front of Saina. “Parvi,” he muttered, “I’ll distract her attention; you hide in the seats until she’s clear of the door and then get out – ”

The pair were surrounded by a tornado of fire. Saina squealed and grabbed Hammond as the flames crept closer. A hole in the flaming wall opened to let Alania pass through, then closed behind her. She strode toward the pair, fury in every line of her being.

Hammond stepped between Saina and Alania, hands raised in a pacifying gesture. Alania flicked a wrist; a plume of fire roared out towards him, forcing him to dodge. Alania dashed forward and grabbed a handful of Saina’s hair, forcing her to her knees.

“Neither of you are going to move,” Alania growled. Hammond froze, eyes flicking between Saina and Alania. I couldn’t see what Saina was doing, since I was borrowing her eyes, but she grunted a reluctant acknowledgement. “Right,” Alania continued. “Miss Surya, how many of your people do you have hooked up in that little link of yours?”

“Just Kayden, right now, I – ”

“And he’s the one who broke the school, I’m guessing?”

“He had to. He – ”

“Yes, I read all about his little world-ending delusion. Hello, Kayden. I hope you realise the full weight of what you’ve done today. Did you know that I can’t find Malas anywhere? With… without his locus, he can’t… anyway. Miss Surya, please bring the leaders of all of your other little factions into the loop. As many as you can contact.”

“Huh? Why?”

Saina’s vision jumped around in a way that suggested that Alania was shaking her a bit by the hair. “Because,” Alania said, “if they don’t all immediately stop their various assaults and surrender, I am going to kill you. And your chances of survival here are much higher if they actually hear my demand, don’t you think?”

“Instruktanto Miratova, that – ”

“I don’t recall asking your opinion, Mr Ramani.”

“But that won’t work! Please, nobody’s going to stop what they’re doing for Saina, and for the few who would, it’s too late.”

“I’m the coordinator of this mission, not the leader,” Saina said through gritted teeth. “There’s a difference. Kayden and Kylie were going to do their mission anyway – me and the others didn’t get involved until after their arrest. Cheryl’s friends were ready to orchestrate a prison break anyway, they just lacked the means until they could plan for all the force fields to be brought down at once during a major distraction.”

“And the armed insurgents currently trying to track down and capture me and my colleagues in the name of restoring the true power of Duniyasar?”

“Parvi’s an excuse for them and you know it,” Hammond said. “Okay, yes, we used her position and a promise to take on the Eye of Duniyasar to get them all whipped up and make this attack, but do you think that threatening the life of their sage is going to make them put their weapons down and surrender? You think they’re going to stop mid-battle and let their enemies lock them up? If you kill her, they’ll just have a martyr to fight for instead of a sage. And when this is over, you’ll have another unstable power vacuum to contend with. Instruktanto, you know this can’t be stopped now. You know that any attempt to do so will make it worse.”

“Also,” Saina said, “I’m getting really fucking sick of this.” She moved. I couldn’t see exactly what she was doing, but there was a thump, and suddenly Saina was standing and Alania was on the ground. Alania scowled and raised a hand; Hammond grabbed Saina’s arm, ready to yank her out of the way of any oncoming flame, but Saina stood her ground.

“She has no intention of hurting us,” Saina said.

“Don’t be so sure,” Alania growled.

Saina shook her head. “You were throwing fire all over the place earlier, and neither of us even got singed by accident. You have a lot of control over that spell, and you were taking a lot of care not to hurt us. If you were genuinely willing to hurt us, you would’ve demonstrated your seriousness by doing that, not tried to scare us with theatrics. But with respect, Councillor Miratova, all you’ve really done is really pissed me off, and I’m working right now and do not have time for this.”

“Parvi…” Hammond murmured, warningly.

“Do you know why I came to this school under a fake name, Councillor? Do you know why I didn’t tell my mother when we had a prophecy suggesting someone was trying to kill me? Do you know why, after I nearly died in the Pit, I insisted on coming back here, even if I had to drag two insufferable bodyguards around with me to do it?”

“No doubt you wanted to take advantage of our stellar student safety and welfare standards and unparallelled quality of education,” Alania said drily, apparently finding it in herself to be sarcastic even in these circumstances. She’d never looked so much like the old woman she was.

“It’s because when you’re the High Crone’s daughter, you go through life with everyone seeing you as a way to control somebody else’s decisions, through either threat or kindness. And I refuse, Councillor, I absolutely fucking refuse to live my life as a goddamned hostage. Next time you want to come in here and try to use my life as a bargaining chip with someone else, make sure you’re willing to follow through with your threats, because I have had it up to here with this kind of nonsense. I’m sorry about your friend. I’m sorry about the other friends we’re both probably losing in this struggle right now. And when this is all over, I’ll be happy to apologise and grovel and start paying whatever reparations the courts and social law demands of me, but right fucking now, I have a job to do, and that job involves making sure as few people die in this mess as possible, and since I’m sure that at least is a mutual goal between us, I’m going to ask you politely, politician to politician, to stay the fuck out of my way and prepare for the inevitable mountain of political cleanup that’s going to fall on the shoulders of any of us unlucky enough to survive this. Hammond, for the moment I’m reassigning you to Counsellor Miratova here. You’re going to answer absolutely everything she asks, with candour and without hesitation, because after this is over we’re going to have a lot of complicated negotiation to do with the Circle, Council and Inquisition, and it would be nice to have at least one political opponent who knows what the fuck is going on. And I suggest that you, Councillor, either take advantage of this opportunity and forestall your attempts to destroy us until you can do so in the civilised realm of the Council chambers, or stop grandstanding and incinerate me now, because this is going to end in one of those two ways and I don’t have time to stand around and be scared by your grandstanding first.”

Alania stood up. She raised one hand, threateningly, ready to cast at Saina “You’re awfully brave for somebody who’s gotten Malas Aksoy killed. I should kill you right now.”

“You won’t, though. You’ve already proven that you’re not the kind of person to do anything about things like that. Why don’t you save us some time and just do what you always do in retaliation to the vulnerable students in your care getting hurt? Compromise for political expedience, and make a good-sounding apology for later.” She turned away. “I am going to go over there and get back to my job, and I’d ask that neither of you interrupt me without a damned good reason.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Hammond said.

Saina stalked off to sit in the bleachers. “Sorry about that, love,” she whispered to me. “Everything okay with you?”

“Holy shit,” I said.

“Yeah, that wasn’t very smart of me, politically. Where are you?”

“I’m just about at the end of the directions I have on this map,” I said. “But I don’t recognise where it’s lead me.” It had, in fact, lead me to a dead end, with a dim light shining from somewhere above. I looked up. There was a perfectly circular hole directly above me, leading to… sunlight? Maybe. Fairly diffuse though, and very high up. I’d expected the map to lead me back to the school, or at least somewhere familiar, but I had no idea where I was. No idea where to go.

My stab of panic excited the spells within me. They jabbed at my nerves, poked at my skin from underneath. I forced myself to calm down, to get them moving in harmony again. I hummed my tune (what tune was I even humming? Did I know this song?) and looked around.

There was a ladder, hanging down from the hole above. The climb was ridiculously high; several stories up, at least. It was a rope ladder, with steel rungs. The rope was dirty, the rungs spotted with rust. This ladder had been exposed to water at some point, probably several times.

Up was the only way forward, but where was I?

Then suddenly I realised, all at once, in a single, certain flash of recognition. I choked back a sob.

“Everything alright?” Saina asked.

“Yeah,” I managed. Following Max’s map had kept me, metaphorically speaking, on the staircase that started at the home of the Heart of Refujeyo, and lead all the way up to the Top of the World. I hadn’t ascended through the Lake of Inquisition, or through the Pit, not physically. But I was travelling up the spine of Refujeyo nevertheless, climbing to the top of the world, and had come out at a point still on that spine.

Specifically, I was at the bottom of the well in Duniyasar. This was where Kylie and I had come down to find Max after he’d run off in search of the Library. This was where we had swum through rising waters to escape drowning in a dead end in a cave network. This was mere metres away from where Max had died.

I forced myself to breathe in deep, even breaths. I didn’t have time to break down right now. The magic inside me moved, agitated, grating on the pulp of my teeth and the nail beds of my fingers and toes, and it was hard to keep humming through the sobs, harmony, harmony, I needed to maintain harmony.

“Kayden?”

“I’m fine,” I said. “I just… sorry, Saina, but I really need to maintain focus right now.”

“I have to do check-ins, anyway. Be back later. Good luck, love.” She dropped out of my mind.

I knelt on the wet, muddy stone at the base of the ladder and forced myself to maintain a grip. I had to ascend. I had to get this damned magic out of me as quickly as possible. How had this ladder gotten here, anyway? Had Kylie’s team put it here? Or the janitors? No; it was water damaged, it had seen at least one tide in this place. But when we’d been here last, the water had risen in response to our presence, I was pretty sure. Did it normally even have tides? Who could possibly have –

Oh. This ladder probably belonged to the rescue team that had come to find Max. They’d rushed him to hospital as soon as they could, in the hopes that Malas could save him. They’d probably left this behind.

And now I was going to have to climb it. With a heavy, unbalanced backpack, and a body that was only vaguely doing what I told it to, and magic singing in my marrow, and with no light source but the very, very dim suggestion of sunlight above.

It was so, so high. If I slipped on this thing, I would die. If I twitched wrong, it would kill me.

I grabbed a rung and pulled myself up off my knees. Immediately, my hand spasmed, and I dropped back down into the mud.

How the fuck was I supposed to do this?! My body wasn’t made for this. My mind wasn’t made for this. I was just a teenager with a talent for getting into places he shouldn’t be, jammed ad-hoc into someone else’s world-saving plans through luck, coincidence, and the shadowy manipulation of a handful of prophecies and broom-pushing zombies that seemed to have barely more understanding of what was going on than I did. Even Kylie had been chosen by Fionnrath’s Destiny well in advance, could be said to at least have the history and bearing for this kind of thing; I was only involved at all because on my very first day here I’d nearly drowned because a janitor had mistaken me for her.

I wasn’t physically equipped for this. I wasn’t mentally equipped for this. I wasn’t magically equipped for this. I wasn’t emotionally equipped for this. There was no fucking way that Kayden James was going to be able to get these spells up that ladder.

But these spells needed to get up that ladder.

So… I was going to have to be something other than Kayden James.

Magic hummed in the pulp of my teeth, in the marrow of my bones, in the fluid of my eyes, in the fat under my skin. It hummed and it screamed and it sang and my head and heart rang with it and we sang together.

The trick wasn’t to control the dance of the magic, force it to march to my beat. It never had been.

The trick was to march with it.

The elemental designation tattooed over my heart was sound. Sound is not a physical thing. Sound is a condition of other things, a description of the way they move. A movement used to transport information, a movement that can be transferred between objects. Tuned properly, sound can move through barriers, or break them. It can take information within itself and carry it from one location to another, unwalled and unchained, because it is not a matter, it does not compete with objects for existence. It works with them, through them. Through water and metal and stone and, most importantly, air.

High above us, the Airess was singing my song. I was too far away to hear, but she was there, she was there, we knew that she was there. In her song came promises; the promise of freedom, of new hosts, of a return to where we belonged. I didn’t understand most of the random gibberish that Fionnrath’s Destiny had left in my mind when it had left, but those messages were not for human minds to comprehend. The spells within me, though? We heard what awaited us. Our scout waited above, having surveyed the land, ready to guide us. Our vessel here, to carry us to it.

It was all so easy, when you didn’t think about it at all.

We put a hand on a rung.

And we began to climb.