4.91: Interrogating Destiny

So we went to the medical ward, painted the runes in blood, opened the door and cleaned it very thoroughly before walking through to avoid a lecture from Malas, and stepped out onto the desert sands.

“It always seems a bit weird,” I remarked, “how we walk sideways through a door in order to move upwards to the ground right above the school.”

“Yeah,” Kylie said. She sounded tense, probably thinking of the tragedy last time we were here. Or the time she was almost murdered here. “Can we get this over with?” She started channelling before we even reached the building, and I found myself walking beside Fionnrath’s Destiny, stumbling Kylie’s body forward in that stiff, barely aware way that it always had.

I stopped walking, grabbing Kylie’s arm to stop the Destiny, and it trained her eyes on me. “You come to me for a reading,” it said.

“You’re an arsehole,” I told it. “And I came for an explanation.”

It reached two fingers up and touched them to my cheek, in the same place where Kylie’s mage mark was on her own face. After a moment, it said, “You are almost ready. But they must be carried far more efficiently than I. Do you understand?”

“Not even a little bit,” I said. “But talking to you isn’t going to help much with that, is it?”

Fionnrath’s Destiny appeared to ignore this. “A vessel, once shaped, must be fired. Scout and vessel are almost ready, but they must be completed, and you must know the route to the top of he world. To untangle your path, you will need to rely on the gifts that got you out of the labyrinth twice before.”

“Yeah, you’ve said that before,” I said. This was old news – I needed my excellent sense of direction to navigate to the heart, the same sense that I’d used to get out of the Pit for my Initiation, and to pace out the Labyrinth of Dreams. I’d already used it to learn routes to the Lake of Inquisition, which we knew to be directly over the heart. We knew this part. This part wasn’t the issue. “It’s the ‘route to the top of the world’ part that’s the issue. We need a, a map or something.”

“You had one. You gave it up.”

“Yeah, when we were mind wiped, I remember. Or I don’t, I guess. Whatever. Any advice on making a new one without going down there and nearly dying again?”

The Destiny touched my cheek again and concentrated. After a while, it said, “there are many ways to accomplish this task.”

“What’s the safest and most likely to succeed?”

“Use the one you have already made.”

“It’s gone. What with Lilith’s Veil and all that.”

The Destiny cocked Kylie’s head. “There are many ways to store a memory.”

It was right. Thanks to the way the Destiny’s prophecies were recorded indelibly in my brain, I had access to some memories from the centre of the Labyrinth, little snatches dragged along by their association to the prophecy it had given down there. Was the way out locked in my brain somewhere? Did I remember? Fionnrath’s destiny clearly thought I did.

“Okay,” I said, “the… ‘vessel’. You said it needs to be finished?”

“Yes. You had a toolmaker to begin the process, but now it is up to you.”

“Max. The um, the Staffbreaker, you used to call him. He’s who you mean?”

“Yes.”

I fished the test tube we’d found in Max’s belongings out of my pocket. “Is this what we need?” I asked. “How do we finish it?”

The Destiny locked Kylie’s eyes onto the tube, but in a blank way, like it wasn’t really seeing it. I tried not to get frustrated. Fionnrath’s Destiny had never been great with objects. All of its prophecies were centred around the actions of people, or things that it could personify, like societies. But it was the one who prophesied the whole vessel thing in the first place, so it should be able to grasp this very simple concept.

“The last time we found the heart of Refujeyo, you gave a prophecy, where you said we were bringing ‘both scout and vessel, unprepared’. Max had a lot of stuff with him at that point, and I didn’t exactly do a thorough inventory of his bag, so I don’t know specifically what he was carrying that’s actually important. Is this what we need, or not?”

Fionnrath’s Destiny didn’t answer.

Okay. Fine. Maybe if I phrased the question to make it about a person, a person whose destiny it was reading. “How do I find the vessel?”

“You have it.”

Good. That was very good. I had a very limited amount of Max’s stuff. There was the tube, and the perspex school model shaped like a top that Melissa had made (I could discount that immediately, since it hadn’t existed when we went into the Labyrinth of Dreams), and a bunch of notes. I’d have to search our room to see if I could find anything else that could be a vessel.

“How do I finish preparing the vessel?” I asked.

“There is a device that can do this. You will find it on your journey to the heart. You will need to misuse it.”

“Can you be more specific?”

The Destiny stared blankly. Fine. Whatever. This was plenty. We could use this.

“What’s the vessel for?”

Another blank stare. Okay. People and events, it could understand people and events.

“How do we use the vessel? Do we… carry the heart in it, somehow?”

The Destiny touched my face again. It seemed to take a lot longer than usual to make its reading. Almost an entire minute went by before it answered. “The heart must be carried, but it need not be within the vessel. In a time long been, the vessel would not have been necessary. But now, the power is too great. The dead water must be carried within the vessel, or the entire structure may collapse before it is time to sing.”

Dead water? I’d heard that phrase before, somewhere. “What is – ?” No, phrase it in a way that the Destiny might understand… “How do I find dead water?”

It stared blankly. Oh, come on! That was a pretty damned direct question! Sometimes talking to this prophecy was like trying to talk to those chatbots on the internet. Not that I’d had a chance to do that for a few years.

“What does the dead water – ?”

Kylie gasped and dropped to her knees in the sand. I rushed to help her up. “Are you alright?”

“Yeah. Sorry. With how much power we can shoulder between us, it’s just gotten more tiring to channel. I’ll try again.”

“No, no; if you need to rest, rest. We can talk to the Destiny at any time. I want your opinion on what we’ve got so far, anyway.” I sat down on the sand and played my recording of the conversation for her.

She frowned. “It’s supposed to get more coherent when we give it more power, not less.”

“I think it is more coherent than it used to be, I was just trying to ask it much more specific questions than we used to. I don’t think it knows nearly as much as it sounds like it knows.”

“Between Fionnrath’s Destiny, the janitors, and that spellthing you met, I’m starting to think that nobody knows nearly as much about this as it sounds like they do.”

“Well, maybe we can be the first to figure out what the fuck is actually going on. What do you think of ‘dead water’? I’ve definitely heard that phrase before, have you?”

“It does sound familiar, but I can’t remember where.” She chewed her lip. “It has to be the Lake of Inquisition, though.”

“It… does?”

“Fionnrath’s Destiny is a spell. The Lake is full of water originally empowered by killing spells inside it so their energy infused into the water. If a spell’s going to call anything ‘dead water’…”

“Yeah, that makes sense. Remember that it said that a long time ago, this whole vessel carrying dead water step wouldn’t be required, but now it is because the dead water makes things unstable. Presumably, the empowered water in the lake was far less powerful in the early days of Refujeyo. So the vessel is to drain the lake, I guess? Remove that unstable element?” I frowned at the little test tube I’d found among Max’s things. “Well, there’s no way that this can do that. And I can’t think of anything we have that Max made that can. It’s not like he went around designing water pumps.”

“Hmm,” Kylie said. “Maybe it’s a figurative thing, like if you carry a little bit of the water in it, that somehow works?”

“I don’t see how. Unless you have a way to, I dunno, drain the power out of the rest of the empowered water and put it in the vial.”

“Maybe the way forward will become obvious when we have to do it.”

“Yeah. Maybe.”

We headed back to school. We ate dinner. We went to bed. And the next day, I went to work for Malas.

To my surprise, I wasn’t paired with Dae-hyun. He was off doing something. Instead, I was working with Malas directly. Part of me wondered if this was on purpose, if I hadn’t been convincing enough in pretending that my memory had been wiped, if he was probing for any hint that I remembered my foray into the service tunnels the previous day. But he gave no indication of that. It quickly became clear what his real intent was in having me follow him around and do minor chores – he spent the whole shift asking me random medical questions, testing my understanding. Probably testing if I was ready to move onto more complicated duties.

That was fine. That was a normal thing for him to be doing. I had nothing to worry about.

Every time I looked at him, I saw the faces of the janitors, layered with blue like some magical infection. I saw Max, looking at me with absolutely no recognition in his eyes, and asking who Maximillian Acanthos was and why it mattered that he’d been our friend.

“Are you alright?” Malas asked me, frowning at me with concern. The open, honest concern of a master worried about his apprentice, or possibly a doctor worried about his patient, since I’d been under medical observation the day before. “You seem distracted. Does your head hurt again?”

“No, I’m fine,” I said with a weak smile. “It’s just a lot of information, you know? And every body part and illness has such long, complicated names.”

“Ha, that’s true,” he said. “But really, it’s quite simple once you learn what all the different parts of the words mean. See, any time you see a word beginning with ‘endo’…”

If my headache really had been a result of the familiarity bond and we hadn’t faked it with a potion, if it had been something that caused brain damage that Malas couldn’t stop, that we couldn’t recover from, would Kylie and I be back in those service tunnels with Max, with no memory of who we were while out families were lied to about what had happened to our remains? How far gone did a patient have to be before Malas gave up, before he stopped seeing his job as saving a life and started seeing it as building a janitor? I glanced over at the beds, hidden behind their soundproofed curtains. I remembered which one Max had been lying in when I’d rushed over to him, only to be told that my friend couldn’t be saved, that he was gone forever. I’d changed sheets on it, brought food to patients in it, mopped the floor under it, dozens of times. I’d almost gotten over thinking of Max every time I saw it, but now?

“… That’s how I do it, anyway, but everyone has their own strategy,” Malas finished. “It’s pretty simple. Trust me.”

“Sure,” I said, and tried to sound like I did.