4.104: The Miratova Conspiracy

“Di Fiore betrayed me like that?!”

“He understood his duty and the importance of keeping an eye on an active danger to the school. What is the key for?”

I considered lying. But the instant I got caught doing that here, this information game was over, and I needed information to find a way out. Everything except finding a way to talk myself out of this room was functionally irrelevant at this point. Besides, Malas or any of his apprentices would recognise the key easily; it’s not like it was a secret I’d be able to protect for long if Fiore turned the key over.

“It’s a replica of Malas’ key for the drug storage room in the hospital ward.”

“What? Why?”

“it’s my turn. What did – ?”

“Is that where you went on the night the Pit re-opened?”

“You were spying on me?”

“Two sets of your robes went into the hospital storage and then into some area that my system can’t track you through. I assume you were wandering about outside of school bounds again.”

Two sets of robes. Shit. Fuck. If Malas found out that Kylie had been with me, but the janitors had claimed to have only found me… I needed a way to make that trip unsuspicious. I needed time to think.

“That’s a fun think to ask about when it’s your turn, but right now, it’s mine. What did you do to me, just now? When I tried to get past you?”

“When you tried to attack me with a magical weapon, you mean? The short answer is nothing.”

“That wasn’t nothing!”

“Oh, it was. You’ve seen my spell work, yes? You know it’s a generalised change spell, capable of turning one type of matter to another.”

“You changedsomething in – ?”

“Points, no! Do you know how delicate the biochemistry of the human body is? That would have killed you.” His grip on my wrists was like iron. “There are three steps to affecting a change. You tag what you want to change, decide what you want it to become, and force the transition. I took the water throughout your body and turned it into water.”

Oh! “No physical change, just filling me with magic for a moment.”

“Exactly. Most people wouldn’t have noticed a thing, but given your particular sensitivities to magic, it seemed a safe way to secure you without you hurting either of us.”

“And if you’d upset my familiarity link and killed me or Kylie somehow?”

“If the link was that unstable, it would have killed you both already. What were you doing the night that the Pit opened?”

Okay. I needed to deflect this. Logically, I should pretend to have no memory of that night, what with Malas having wiped my memory and all, but that wasn’t going to fly here – me having no explanation for what I was doing would just make it more likely that Fiore would tell the sekuranti or Malas or somebody about two people going back there Even if Kylie and I were to fail, incriminating the janitors in that way was simply not acceptable. But admitting I did remember that night would also incriminate the janitors, once Malas learned of it. I didn’t have a neat way to explain both the memories and two sets of robes going back there. But I could explain one, and confuse the hell out of the issue enough to hopefully obscure the other.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Kayden – ”

“Seriously, I just did what Alania said! She gave me a potion and told me to switch it for another; she didn’t tell me what it was. And then I just followed the map she gave me.”

Fiore stiffened above me. His grip on my wrists was like iron. “Alania sent you there.”

“Yes.”

“Did she send you into the spell tunnels too, in your first year?”

“How did you know about that?”

“I know a lot of things, Kayden. Did she send you down there?”

“Yes. She wanted Max to find something. I didn’t understand it, exactly. But she told him that if he could get it for her, then she could show him how to get there, and that it was the best place in the world to attempt his human familiarity experiment.” Sorry, Max.

“And now that Max is gone…”

I nod against the floor. “She tries to keep us in the dark, but we’re sick of it. That’s why we’re going to Fionnrath. She promised to explain everything if we stay, but I don’t care any more. Fuck her. I hope you manage to put her in jail.”

His grip on my wrists was like iron. Come on, you bastard. Take the bait. You were pretending to want to help me to get me to turn on her; well, now’s your chance. Let me up and tell me to go get that information so I can go and save the fucking world.

Fiore sighed. “Come on, Kayden. At least pretend to respect my intelligence.”

Fuck. I’d pushed too hard to be convincing.

“After getting so indignant about how the Council treated Cheryl, I didn’t think you’d actually go ahead and frame Alania. Unless it’s revenge for Cheryl, perhaps? But you have to know that the accusation wouldn’t stick. It’s hard enough to get a guilty Council member convicted of anything, let alone a completely innocent one.”

Wait. What?

“Um,” I said. “What?”

“Kayden, a member of the High Council of Skolala Refujeyo has better things to do with her time than play around assembling secret teams of high profile teenagers. Whatever conspiracies Alania does have her sticky little hands in, she’s far too clever not to use adults with a proven track record for reliability.”

“But… the whole reason you agreed to be my surveyanto was because of this!”

“The reason I became your surveyanto was because you were a student at this school who needed one, and you asked me. But, yes, obviously the chance to keep an eye on you and hopefully learn some information was a bonus. And people reveal a lot more when they’re wrong about what you’re looking for.”

“But you just said – ”

“I’d be lax in my duties to this school to not keep an eye on Fionnrath’s spies.””

“On… what?”

His grip on my wrists was like iron. “You thought I wouldn’t see the pattern? Two witches from the same place enter our school at the same time. They enlist the help of a third student, one who’s already known to be a potential genius, and they somehow figure out how to bypass the protections obscuring the location of the Lake of Inquisition and spent the next year or two exploring the school, managing to find their way deep into the machinations of the place itself. Then, we start getting some conspicuous school system failures. Now, it’s worth noting that system failures have always occurred; that’s simply the nature of complex systems. And there do seem to be more of them now than in the past. But we’ve been getting some very conspicuous failures recently, ones that cause actual damage and problems with no clear cause. A ventilation failure that causes a school evacuation during which people still in the school can do whatever they like without suspicion, a Pit safety failure during which a politician’s daughter is almost killed which causes a great deal of panic and political trouble, all after these students had a chance to wander unsupervised through the school’s base machinery. And checking the ventilation systems and the Pit’s surface systems reveal no problems. I had my nephew double check, and he’s very good at this sort of thing. Meaning that the problem is deeper.”

“You think we sabotaged something in the Labyrinth of Dreams?”

“I can’t help but notice that after you came out of there, it was a matter of mere weeks before Fionnrath’s Destiny was identified. You were linked to the prophet as her familiar, an absurd decision that I still don’t understand the reasoning behind but I have to assume it was a component in your sabotage, and now the pair of you had a way out before the school systems started to collapse. Your ride home arrived, and… things didn’t go according to plan, did they? I suppose you’d expected more damage, for the school to collapse faster. You didn’t expect this level of resilience; you realised that your job wasn’t done.

“Only now, you’d created a political problem for yourself.” His grip on my wrists was like iron. “Clearly, some of your co-conspirators in Fionnrath were getting cold feet, or thought you’d done enough and that sticking around was too much of a risk to the Destiny, because some of them wanted you out. You had to fight to not be forced onto the escape pod, to stick around and complete your mission. When resisting Lydia became untenable, you had to frame and kill her. You had to enlist every ally you had, all of whom I’m sure had no knowledge of your real intentions, just like I didn’t, to buy time to stay.

“And then, suddenly, you just… changed your mind. Turned you back on a promising apprenticeship, Kylie turned her back on her future, to be trapped in a small town. After all that work you put into fighting so intensely to staying out of that place, you suddenly decide that no, you both want to go now. And you spend the next two weeks stocking up on supplies and preparing for a trip.”

“We’re going on a trip,” I pointed out.

“The medical supplies I understand, since you are a healer’s apprentice, but you want me to believe that you’re buying trail rations and water purification tablets in order to move to Fionnrath? Waterproof backpacking gear? Oxygen tanks?”

“You’ve been spying on my purchases?”

“Kayden, I cannot emphasise enough how utterly weird it is for a student to have a sudden desire to collect oxygen tanks. No, you’re planning to try again, to do your job properly and then skip out to the safety of Fionnrath. Fionnrath’s Destiny acts in the best interests of Fionnrath’s people; that’s what it’s for. And it found its way to our school. But I can’t let you hurt the people here, Kayden.”

His grip on my wrists was like iron. I wriggled, but to no avail. “You’ve got all of it wrong,” I said. “This has nothing to do with Fionnrath. And I don’t want to hurt anyone. If you don’t let me complete – ”

The door opened. Three men looked down at us. None of them were wearing sekuranti’s distinctive pink, but I recognised Ralphie, the sekkie who’d come with Inquisitor Hagan to interrogate us about Cheryl’s disappearance. His neck was bare, showing the Sekura Refujeyo tattoo.

The man at the front of the group, a tall, bald man, looked down at us. “Trouble?”

“He just panicked,” Fiore said. “He’s not violent. You don’t need to hurt him.”

“That’ll be up to him, won’t it. Are you going to come quietly, Mr James?”

“You’re all making a big mistake,” I told the floor.

“Which you’ll be able to explain to the interrogators in as much detail as you like. But that’s not my job and I don’t care. Are you going to come quietly, or not?”

For just a brief second, I entertained the possibility of not coming quietly. But I wasn’t able to convince myself that it was a realistic option even for long enough to think it through. If I couldn’t get away from Fiore, I had no chance whatsoever against three trained sekkies. And even if I did manage to slip past them and run… what then? Where would I run to? I was trapped in the school. They could just come and find me whenever they wanted. I could try for the heart of the Labyrinth, but I couldn’t fulfil the prophecy without at least some key items, like Max’s map. That was in my room, and they would have already searched my room. I had no options.

“Yes,” I said. “I will.”

Fiore let go of my wrists and let me up, and I had a brief second of blessed freedom before the handcuffs went on.

And that was it. Here we were. I had no way out of this.

It was all over.