4.110: The Cursed Heart

They say that if you hit water from a high enough height, it’s like hitting concrete.

Well, I wasn’t worried about that. I knew I wasn’t high enough for that to be a concern. I’d fallen off this exact cliff before, struggling with di Fiore over a counterfeit Guardian Ring. And that time, I hadn’t had an oxygen supply.

I held the mask to my face and breathed as slowly and calmly as I could as I sank into the water. I’d wanted proper scuba gear, but my prepared excuse for why I was buying this oxygen (had the shopkeeper asked) had been that it was a safety precaution for a dangerous and complicated potion I was making. (Thank you, incredibly negligent school safety standards. A regular high school would never have allowed me to do that.) I had no such excuse for buying a scuba mask.

I tried to breathe as slowly and deeply as I could, concentrating on not choking on the small amounts of water that trickled in, while tentacles wrapped themselves around my legs, crept over my hips, up my waist. I stopped being able to feel them rather quickly, as they began to penetrate my flesh and my whole body was overtaken with pins and needles.

I had expected something like this. I knew that letting the lake system complete its job of magically binding me would leave no room for Fionnrath’s Destiny, and I knew that the struggle between the two would be uncomfortable. But this was overwhelming in a way that went beyond Fiore’s little trick to incapacitate me, beyond the spiked orange juice. This felt like dying.

I tried to breathe calmly, as my right arm felt like it was on fire. I tried to breathe calmly, as the pain receded, and there was… nothing. Nothing but dim, dead flesh. I tried to breath calmly, as my left leg felt like it was getting flayed. I tried to breathe calmly, as I felt nothing. Saina shouted something dimly in my mind, and then she was gone, her magic chased out like the feeble infection it was. Fionnrath’s Destiny struggled like it was panicking, my heart rate spiked, and I tried to breathe calmly, I tried to breathe calmly.

I couldn’t move my limbs. Why should I be able to? There was no life in them. They’d been scrubbed clean of vitality by ancient runes being bored into my flesh, the shadows of an ancient home etched down to the bone, like that long-dead skeleton down in the cavern under the lake.

The tentacles dragged me down, down.

I tried to breathe calmly.

I’d been carrying an awful lot of magical power throughout my body for a long time, but now most of me was cut off from it, and the power of Fionnrath’s Destiny churned in what little space it had left, burning in my mind. The flesh on my skull crawled as the tentacles completed their work, and as our familiarity link was finally, fully severed, Fionnrath’s Destiny gave a desperate sort of cry that filled my mind with broken images and concepts that came together to make complete gibberish, and I had the sudden sense that I understood now, but I had no idea what, and then I was floating, along, in the water, without a shred of life left in my body. A corpse.

The tentacles dragged me slowly, slowly, to the bottom of the lake. It had to be slow, I supposed, because they had to make sure that the victim was dead, their magic safely infused by the water, and someone took time to drown. Malas was probably dead by now, since he didn’t have an oxygen tank. I had one, but I was also dead.

I was dragged down, down.

My feet hit something soft, and I was pulled through some kind of pore in the membrane of the giant magic-mechanical beast, devoured and dragged into the great stomach that was the cavern beneath the lake. I was dropped, falling onto a pile of rubbish rather than the stone ground, preventing any serious damage. Not that it really mattered at this point. How much more could you hurt a corpse?

I lay there, unmoving, staring out through my open eyes at the rubbish-strewn cavern. I lay there for a long time. I couldn’t see much in the very dim light of the spelled water above, mostly shadows broken up by darker shadows. There was no sound but the soft drip-dripping of water somewhere, and my own deep, regular breathing.

My calm breathing.

Why was I breathing?

Janitors notwithstanding, corpses didn’t tend to breathe. Or shiver. I was as cold as the lake water, and shivering furiously. If I could breathe and I could shiver, then my muscles could move. If I could see and hear and feel, then I could direct them. They felt dead, but…

But they worked, and I had a job to do.

I willed an arm to move. It did.

Slowly, I struggled to my feet. I stripped off my soaking wet prison robes (I wasn’t sure when I’d stopped thinking of black as an initiate colour and started thinking of it as a prison colour) and scrounged around the piled of rubbish for something warmer and dryer to wear. I didn’t have a tablet to light my way, but the lighter in my pack still worked; I used it to light the way and build a small fire to warm up to ‘probably won’t die of hypothermia’ levels.

My body still felt lifeless, but it moved, It responded normally, both with voluntary and involuntary movements. What was going on?

I laughed out loud when I figured it out. There was nothing wrong with my body other than a lot of bumps, bruises, and cold. The problem was that I’d been a magical livewire for over a year now, slowly taking in more and more of Kylie’s magic, and now it was all gone. This was just what normal flesh felt like. Lonely, nonmagical, barely animate.

People lived like this? I’d spent the first fifteen years of my life feeling like this?

Well, I was going to have to get used to it. I had work to do, a world waiting on me. Theoretically, I should be fairly safe from pursuit for the moment; the number of people who could find the Lake of Inquisition was limited, and with the janitors dead, I didn’t know if there was even anyone alive who could navigate the Labyrinth safely. A horrible thought crept into my mind, and I tore my pack open, digging until… there, the map. I still had a map.

Thank fate, I still had a map.

Anyway, I should be safe from pursuit for now, but I couldn’t be certain. Refujeyo was full of secrets I didn’t know, and there could be security squads trained specifically to hunt criminals through these tunnels for all I knew. Also, there might be a lot of magical dangers I couldn’t anticipate. And Kylie was probably still channelling, now without my help, and Talbot and Hua were waiting on me for whatever it was they were supposed to be doing, and…

Anyway, I should hurry. My skin felt cold and clammy still, but I wasn’t sure if it was actual cold or just the absence of magic within me. I wasn’t shivering any more, and while parts of me were still wet, my scavenged clothes weren’t, so I was probably warm enough to be safe. There was a dim awareness in the back of my mind, a dreamlike sense of understanding even though I wasn’t sure what it was I was so sure I understood. Fionnrath’s Destiny had left something, fragments, etched into my mind like one of Kylie’s prophecies, but not in words. Just confusing… relationships between things.

I looked at the statue in the centre of the room, the giant version of Power in Layers of Pearl, and understood that the staircase below was a spine that was crumbling with age, crumbling in a way beyond the physical. But crumbling on a scale of many human lifetimes; one that a prophecy might think important, but that shouldn’t matter to me, in my brief life. I could walk down the bones and through the veins of this ancient home of which the tentacled device above had made my body into a copy, a shadow sufficient for temporary transport, but not permanent habitation.

I knew how to reveal the staircase. I’d watched myself do it in the memories recovered for me by the Staffbreaker, those etched in the magical memories of a sheet of perspex, safe from the interference of potions. The memories that he had traded his soul to recover. I looked around for something long and straight, and ended up finding an umbrella. I climbed the sculpture until I reached the part where something was missing, jammed the umbrella in, hit the right switches. The floor around the statue opened up.

I descended the staircase, the spine of the school. Or its lower part, at least; this structure reached from the deepest part of the school all the way up into the sky, spiralling up the central tower of Duniyasar, and while the staircase itself was absent on the middle levels, present only down here and up there, that didn’t matter; they were, in a metaphysical way, the same staircase, a singular rod around which the whole structure was hung.

And somewhere around here would be the Heart of Refujeyo.

The semicircular room that the staircase opened into was, as before, well lit, the stone itself seeming to glow. There were clear signs of human intrusion. For one thing, the bag of old, rusted climbing equipment I’d lugged down last time was still sitting at the bottom of the stairs. But more interestingly, one of the half-ring of titanium pillars had been destroyed, somehow cleaved in half, with clear signs of melting on both the base still sticking up out of the stone and the top half lying where it had fallen. It was the one that Max had excitedly identified last time as containing the Eye of Duniyasar.

I headed for the library. As I headed through the dehydrating field, I felt kind of silly for trying to dry off upstairs. I could’ve just come down here and let the field pull the water from my skin, clothes, hair, and, ouch, eyeballs.

I coughed in the sudden dryness and tried to rub some moisture back into my eyes. Okay, now to find the heart. It had to be somewhere in this library, right? Where could I even start looking?

“Hello, deer.”

I froze. The spellthing sat casually at a desk near the door, and it was… texting on a flip phone? That couldn’t be right. The phone was clearly off, anyway, and damaged beyond all usability. But it was holding it, and looking at it. For a brief second, the absurdity of the situation overrode the being’s general creepiness.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Reminiscing. Are we not all entitled to a little reflection?” It put the phone down and looked at me with those creepy symmetrical eyes. It bared its wide mouth of teeth in something that could almost have been a grin, but wasn’t. The bite scar on my arm itched. “Are you lost, little deer?”

I bared my teeth in return. “Did you know that a deer, when the mood strikes, will happily eat vermin alive?”

The spellthing laughed. “Well, it’s a good thing that you’re here to kill me, then, I suppose.”

“And we both know that you’re not going to try to stop me, so the creepy act is a waste of time.”

“I do not act, my deer. I simply am. But the hero of the hour isn’t me, it’s you! Do you even know what you’re looking for?”

“Any useful little last minute hints?”

“I’m afraid that I’ve already given you all the scars that are mine to give. The rest, you’ll have to acquire on your own.” It opened its lips wider. “Unless you’re angling for one last farewell kiss?”

“I… don’t think so.”

“Well, then.”

Okay, this wasn’t useful. I ignored the spellthing (not an easy thing to do) and skimmed what I could see of the room, seeing if anything would jump out as a clue.

There were… some books. And also, some more books.

Maybe I should start in the other room? Less stuff to search? I glanced back at the door.

The wall that the door was set in was mostly flat, the flat part of the semicircular room. Mostly flat, except for a round bulge in the middle, where the staircase was. The staircase was open to the room on the other side, but presumably the moisture from above would be bad for the books, so it was walled off from the library, forcing anyone entering to pass through the door with the dehydration filter. The bulge in the wall was a lot larger than one would expect, to house a staircase, because of the enormous width of the column that the staircase spiralled around. It was a good few metres wide, the same width as Power in Layers of Pearl above.

That still struck me as such an odd name for a sculpture.

I headed back into the other room, and frowned at the stairs. The stairs I knew to be, metaphysically, part of the staircase, the same staircase that spiralled up the tower in Duniyasar, despite the great distance between the two sections.

The part of the staircase at Duniyasar was even wider, because it wound around the walls of the tower itself. The ‘central column’ of the spiral was, essentially, the rooms of the tower.

The staircase, here and up the tower and the space between, formed an axis of power for the school upon which everything was hung. If I was building this place, and I was to put the heart, the core of its power, anywhere, where would I put it?

I needed tools. I ruffled through my pack, but didn’t find anything suitable. Then my eye caught the other bag, the one full of old, rusty climbing equipment that I’d lost in the lake back during my initiation semester. I fished out the heaviest spike I could find, and a hammer.

I set the spike against the central column of the spiral staircase. And I started to hammer it in.

It took a while. The spike was a climbing piton, not a chisel. If was designed to dig into rock as firmly as possible while doing minimum damage. But it was what I had, so I chipped away at the wall until – yes! – the column was hollow. There was a cavity inside! I kept chipping, and when the hole was big enough, fetched the fallen titanium spire that had once contained Saina’s spell. I could get a huge amount of leverage with that thing, and quickly hammered and levered a hole in the wall big enough to see through.

And there it was. On a little plinth in the central spire at the very bottom of the staircase.

The Heart of Refujeyo.