4.92: Culpability

My next day off was also the day I’d agreed to give an interview to Stacey, the ‘magihacker’ I’d met at Josh’s party. I spent the morning with Kylie, searching through our possessions and Max’s noted for absolutely anything except the little glass test tube that could qualify as the ‘vessel’ from the prophecy, and turned up nothing. The search almost made me late, and I found myself rushing to Stacey’s room to make our meeting.

I needn’t have worried. When I got there, Stacey was looking frazzled, red hair a frizzy cloud around her face and yellow sash untied, her arms full of little boxes. “Kayden, I’m so sorry, I’m running behind,” she told me. “I know this is unprofessional, I’m sorry. Just, uh, just go in and help yourself to some tea, okay? I’ve got to drop these off at someone’s lab, and I’ll be right with you in a few minutes.”

“Do you need a hand with those?” I asked.

“You don’t have to do that,” she said, adjusting her grip on the boxes and immediately dropping one.

I picked it up and took half the pile from her arms. “Where are we going?”

“To give these to my friend Steve,” she said with a grateful smile. “He works with one of the scientists here. Alania Miratova.”

“Oh, yeah, I know where her lab is,” I said. “She used to be my surveyanto.”

“Wow! And then you became Malas’ apprentice. You sure stick to the stars, don’t you?”

“I didn’t go from Alania to Malas. She hasn’t been my surveyanto for awhile. But I know where her lab is.”

“I’m sorry, one of the counsellors of Skolala Refujeyo was your surveyanto and you gave her up for someone else?”

“It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

The lab wasn’t far. Stacey nudged the door open with her hip while I tried not to think too hard about the fact that the last time I was in this room, way back when I was an initiate, I had literally caught fire.

“Steve,” she called. “I’ve got your – uh, hello, Instruktanto Miratova.”

The lab was pretty much how I remembered it. Tables of experiments, shelves of black ichor. That couldron that had exploded last time, set up in the middle of the floor. (Well, a new, identical couldron, anyway. Not the exploded one. Obviously.) A few students were scattered around, mostly in master blue and a couple in wizard green. And Alania, of course. Stacey stared at her, frozen, an awestruck expression on her face that reminded me distinctly of Max’s expression the first time he’d seen her.

Alania looked her up and down with that no-nonsense expression that I distinctly remembered as being really intimidating, before I’d gotten to know her. “You would be Stacey, right?”

“Y-yes.”

“Excellent. These will be very helpful, thank you. Steve is down there.”

Stacey retreated to the other side of the lab with her boxes. I went to follow, but Alania put a hand on my shoulder. “Can we talk a moment, Kayden?”

“Um. Sure.” I dumped my pile of boxes on a random bench and followed her to a quiet corner. “Is everything alright?”

“I owe you a long overdue apology,” she said, awkwardly tucking a stray lock of hair back into her tight bun.

“… What? What for?”

She grimaced. “Really? After everything the High Council has put you through? I haven’t been your surveyanto for some time, but until recently you were still a student of, and are currently an apprentice of, my school. We owed you and Kylie better.”

I considered how to respond for a moment. The sentiment was nice, but it rang a bit hollow when Cheryl was still on the run after being framed for serious crimes because she’d protected us from the very thing that Alania was apologising for.

“It all worked out,” I said cautiously.

“It should have all worked out without dragging you into the Council chambers at all.”

Fuck diplomacy, I had to ask. Keeping my voice low enough to be overheard, I asked, “What are you going to do with Cheryl if you catch her?”

“With who?”

What did she mean ‘with who’?! “Cheryl! Cheryl Castor. The one you’re framing for the thing with the Pit.”

“Oh. Her. I know it’s hard to believe that your friend would do something so – ”

“Don’t give me that.” I struggled to keep my voice low. “You know she’s innocent. I know she’s innocent. We both know that there’s no way the High Council is going to allow the truth to come out in a fair trial. All I want to know is, what are you going to do with her?”

Alania’s eyes dropped, for just a second, to my bag, the one I kept my tablet in. She was wondering if I was recording her, I realised. It was a fair question. That’s how we’d caught Clara as initiates, by goading her into a confession and recording it.

“I know you want your friend to be innocent,” she said. “All I can promise you is that we’re going to do everything we can to keep everyone safe.”

“Safe from young women forcing you to do your fucking job by looking after your students instead of abandoning them? The horror.”

“This isn’t about that stunt with the witch initiates.”

“It isn’t?”

“Not completely. Tristan Arum is a disruptive person with powerful friends. All politicians are disruptive to some degree, but some kinds of disruption are dangerous. Chaos and potential war levels of dangerous.”

“Cheryl isn’t her master.”

“Do you think she’s any more stable? Do you think that meeting with the High Council was the first or last stunt she pulled? We don’t want anyone to get hurt, and sometimes that means making sure people don’t hurt each other.”

“So you’re gonna clip her wings, then.”

“Better to clip a bird’s wings than let it fly into a hurricane.”

“You’re gonna, what, tangle her up in prohibitive contracts under the threat of death?”

“We all sign contracts, Kayden.”

“How are you going to make her comply, if she’s so disruptive? Threaten her family?”

“We’d never threaten anyone’s – ”

“Wrap her up in geases?”

“Overly restrictive geases can be dangerous. We don’t like to use them unless it’s necessary.”

“Like it was necessary to silence me?”

Alania looked away. Okay, so that hadn’t been particularly fair. She’d been trying to prevent me from getting put under geas. It wasn’t fair of me to blame her for her coworkers’ decisions.

Except, she was still part of the group that kept making these decisions. She was complicit.

“You have had the misfortune of seeing only the worst of us,” she said quietly. “We’re not a shadowy group of power-hungry despots trying to control the world. We’re a school administration board trying to prevent a bunch of teenagers and their immature parents from killing each other.”

“Why do you even work with them?” I asked. “You hate politics.”

“So do you. And yet, you seem to find yourself in scandal after scandal.”

“Yeah, well, the universe has it out for me, I think.”

“You’re not the only one. Sometimes you find yourself pushed by circumstance into a role that isn’t for you, but you stay because leaving means that somebody else would do it worse.”

“I still don’t think that’s – ” I stopped talking. I’d just glimpsed something on the shelf behind Alania, between a rack of tubes of ichor and some wooden rods painted with symbols. Something I certainly hadn’t expected to see here.

A rack of empty stoppered test tubes. They looked to be made of frosted glass, and there was a sort of glint to their cork stoppers. I ducked around her and picked one up. As I’d thought, runes were etched in the glass, spiralling up the tube, almost too small to make out. And the cork was inlaid with threads of silver.

They were just like the test tube we’d found among Max’s notes.

“Ah,” she said, “Max showed you those, did he? You can have them, if you want. We don’t need them.”

“What are they?” I asked.

“They’re ichor cartridges, for the magic wand he was designing.”

“Magic wand? Like Instruktanto Cooper’s?”

“No, Taine just uses a wand as a fetish. Max was designing a wand that anybody could use to create a variety of magical effects. Here, I’ll show you.” She took the tube from my hand and filled it with ichor from a rack on the shelf. Then, she picked up one of the wooden rods covered in painted symbols, and handed it to me.

The rod was about as long as my forearm, and it wasn’t one piece of solid wood. It was in three equal pieces that screwed together. Rings of symbols I didn’t recognise were painted around the connection points, so that partly screwing or unscrewing the pieces matched them up differently.

Alania took the wand and unscrewed the back third. There was a hollow inside the back third, about the size of a test tube. Now exposed at the end of the other two thirds was a cork, threaded with lines of silver, embedded in the wood.

“This cork,” Alania explained, tapping the cork stoppering the test tube, “is designed to trap power and flow it back into the tube. This one,” she tapped the cork embedded in the wand, “does the opposite. So…” she unstoppered the test tube of ichor and pushed it onto the cork in the wand. Then, she screwed the back third of the wand back on, so that the tube of ichor was safely concealed inside.

“All together like this, the power can flow,” she explained. “I can put the ‘safety’ on by undoing it by a half-twist, breaking the rune lines inside the wand.” She partly unscrewed and then rescrewed the back again to demonstrate. “The front part alters the mode, changing how the runes inside are connected for different effects. You can tell what mode the want is in by how the symbols are matched up. For instance, if I twist it like this…” she twisted the wand, and the end glowed brightly. “Whereas this…” she twisted the front end to match up different symbols, then touched the end to a metal workbench. Electricity sparked.

“Max made this?” I asked.

“Yes. There are a lot of kinks; most of the modes are… temperamental. He was mostly interested in increasing the efficiency of the power usage. Drawing the symbols in silver instead of ichor makes them far, far less powerful, and consumes the power n the ichor too fast, but there isn’t really a good way to get decent capillary action to draw the ichor itself into the wand to draw the symbols. He was looking through a breakthrough using an obscure, ancient rune language he’d discovered that’s better for raw logic.”

“The one in Duniyasar,” I said.

“Yes.”

Huh. I’d often wondered how Max had made his research into the Duniyasar runes so non-suspicious. I supposed that just suddenly being into an obscure runic language wasn’t all that suspicious in a researcher anyway, people like him got obsessed with random things all the time, but the magic wand was a good cover.

Unless it wasn’t a cover. Unless it was actually important. I took the wand from Alania, careful to twist the safety on, and inspected it. Was this, somehow, the ‘vessel’ we needed?

“This is pretty amazing,” I said.

“It’s a good technical feat for a junior researcher,” she agreed. “Hardly in the range of human familiarity, but so far as intentional design goes, it was very good.”

“Why did he make it?” I asked.

She shrugged. “You’d be surprised how many people do. It’s usually students from commonfolk families, though, who read fantasy books and want to make the cool devices they read about. Max dreamed of creating a magic wand that people could just point and cast preset spells from. Variable, controllable magic at your fingertips, no matter what spell you had. You could use it without any spell at all, if you had a mage to donate ichor for you.”

“That could revolutionise the world,” I said.

Alania shrugged again. “There’s usually a few in every generation that try it. There’s a lot of magic wand designs out there, although few have the runic talents of Max to make an adjustable design like this.”

“Why doesn’t everyone have magic wands, then?”

“Because they’re useless. That little demonstration I showed you would have used up about a third of the power in that preserved ichor, and that method of ichor preservation is pretty new – most preserved ichor is weaker. You know what’s a thousand times more reliable and more efficient than this wand? A torch or a taser with a battery in it. The problem isn’t necessary making gadgets that can do magic, it’s making gadgets that can create magical effects better than what we can create by other means. The only really efficient way we have to make a magical item is enchanting. Max was convinced that he could use his favourite runic language to make it efficient enough to be viable, but there’s only so much you can do with silver.” She smiled a little fond, reminiscing smile, which might have been endearing under different circumstances, but looking at her, I could only think about one thing: did she know about the janitors? Did Alania know what had happened to Max, after he died?

She had to know, right? The Council had to know. It was pretty important to the logistics of the school. There’s no way that they just didn’t notice that the school didn’t seem to hire any actual people with actual lives to maintain it and cook food and stuff. There was simply no way that Alania didn’t know the fate of the boy she was smiling about. She’d given up on him, pretending he was dead, and had the nerve to act like this.

I forced myself to stay calm. Starting a fight would help no one.

“I can have this?” I confirmed.

“Yes. Take it.”

“Thanks.” I knew she really did feel guilty about all the Council stuff, because under normal circumstances there is no way that Alania Miratova would give me, Kayden James, a magical taser. I got out of there and went to do Stacey’s interview before she could change her mind.