4.90: Memory Gambit

“So,” I said, “I was in bed, and – ”

“Are you hurt?” Malas asked. He took my chin in one huge hand and shone a little light in my eyes, checking for pupil dilation. “Any change in your head pain?”

“My head’s fine. I – ”

“I’m going to have to scan you again,” he said. “I know it’s unpleasant, but you did come in presenting unexplained symptoms, and with your familiarity link…”

“I get it, I – ugh!” I grit my teeth against the sensation of Malas’ magic moving through me. “I swear, that feels worse every time.”

“Does it? The last time I scanned you was about four hours ago. Has the feeling changed in that time?”

“No, no; it feels the same as then. I just hate it.”

“Sorry. Let’s get back to the ward.” He lead the way out of the room, completely ignoring the janitors, as was custom. “Care to explain why you were wandering the service corridors?”

“I got lost.”

“Well, yes, that much is obvious.”

“I went looking for Lee to get painkillers. You know, for the headache? And I saw that the medicine storage room was unlocked, so I figured he was in there.”

“It was unlocked?”

“Yeah.”

Malas chewed his lip. I could guess what he was probably thinking. He’d been rushing around a lot earlier, preparing for the potential emergency of something going wrong in the Pit. Could he have left the door unlocked? Or could one of his apprentices helping him have done that? People were pretty careful over that door, but everyone makes mistakes.

“He wasn’t in there,” I said, “but the room was different. With a tunnel in the back.”

“And you went in?!”

“I wanted to see what it was!”

“What is it with you and just wandering into random tunnels and getting lost? This is, what, the fourth time this has happened to you? Fifth?”

“Fourth, I think.”

“Kayden, you know as well as anyone how dangerous the unmarked areas of this tunnel system are!”

“That room with the big altar was weird, but it seemed pretty safe.”

“This time! This time, you didn’t get attacked by a lake monster, or get lost in a magical dream maze! Curiosity is one thing, but honestly, your recklessness is baffling! Look, I… okay. I’m going to tell you something that you should keep to yourself, okay? We don’t want gossip and panic about this. Understand?”

“Yes.”

“Good. You haven’t seen that tunnel before, right?”

“No.”

“That’s because you’re not supposed to. It’s a secure staff area, and it looks like the portal failed today, letting you in. This isn’t the first time this has happened. Sometimes, portals fail in the school. It’s not usually a big deal, but they can lead somewhere dangerous, so if this happens again, if you find yourself suddenly coming across an unmarked area of the school that you didn’t expect to be there, don’t go in. I was able to follow you this time, because I have access to that area, but that’s not always the case. Stop wandering into restricted areas of the school without authorisation. That’s an order from your master.”

“Fine, I’ll leave spooky corridors alone,” I said, rolling my eyes. “If it’s that important.”

“You’re such a smartarse, has anyone ever told you that?”

We arrived back at the medical ward. Malas told me to go to bed and checked on Kylie, who was sleeping peacefully. He left for a few minutes, then came back with a small glass of slightly red liquid. “Drink this.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“A mild sedative and painkiller. For the headache.”

I considered telling him that my head felt fine now, just to make him struggle for some other way to make me take the damned memory potion, but that wouldn’t really benefit anyone. I silently hoped that the janitors had successfully made the potion switch, gulped it down, and gasped at the pins and needles running down my spine. “You could’ve warned me that it was a magical painkiller!”

“Sorry.” He took the glass. “I need to get back to the Pit for the next competition. You rest up.”

I opened my mouth for a smartarsed reply, but the potion was already pulling me into sleep.

When I woke up, Malas was standing over me again. “How do you feel?” he asked.

“Gn.” I rubbed my eyes. “Tired.”

“Headache?”

“Completely gone.”

“Any other symptoms?”

“No. I’m fine. I feel fine.” I sat up. “How’s the Pit competitions going?”

“They’re all over. No problems.”

“Great!” I went to get out of bed, but Malas put a hand on my shoulder. “You two are staying under observation for the night.”

“I feel – ”

“Fine, yes; do we need to have this conversation about the unknown dangers of your bond yet again?”

“No,” I grumbled. “But at this rate we might as well move in to the ward.”

“At least it’d be a short trip for you to work. What’s forty seven plus sixty nine?”

“Huh?”

“Forty seven plus sixty nine. What is it?”

“One hundred and sixteen.”

“What’s the name of these bones?” He tapped the back of my hand.

“Metacarpals. Why – ?”

“How’s your vision? Hearing?”

“Fine. Everything’s fine.”

“The last thing you remember?”

Ah. That’s what this was about. “Kylie and I came in with headaches and you wouldn’t let me work today so I went to sleep.”

“Look this way, please.” He checked my pupil dilation again. “Excellent. I’m just going to perform a couple of basic reflex tests.”

“Why?”

“When students come in with unusual and unexplained headaches, I do cognitive tests. Pay attention to this; in a few years you’ll be doing these things for patients, too.”

After he left, Kylie and I didn’t talk about what had happened. Of course we didn’t. We were released and went back to our room, and still didn’t talk. (The bag I’d taken down into the service corridors was on my bed. The janitors must have taken it, presumably worried that Malas would find something suspicious. All my stuff was there, except for Cheryl’s stone key, which one of them must have taken from my pocket at some point.) We went for a walk outside in the fresh air, in a large field where we’d see anyone approaching long before they were in earshot, away from the school intranet, leaving our own tablets behind in the school, just in case.

“Holy shit,” I said. “That was just completely nuts on every level.”

“So you do remember, then?”

“Yes! Obviously, I remember!”

“Just checking. I was worried that something had gone wrong with the potion switch.”

“No, I’m just a really amazing actor. I don’t know what I expected to learn today, but I didn’t expect any of that.”

“I’d been hoping for something more useful,” Kylie said. “‘We are flat out refusing to tell you anything’ isn’t a great step forward for us.”

“Not a great step forward? We learned that he’s alive! He’s alive, Kylie!”

“He is, by definition, dead,” she pointed out. “That’s kind of the point.”

“No, he died, but he was brought back. With magic. That’s the point. He – ”

“Kayden. That thing down there was not our friend. It’s just some new thing puppetting his corpse.”

“Wow, rude. You saw him, Kylie!”

“I saw that it had no idea who we were, or anything else. It didn’t even recognise his name!”

“So he has memory loss! So what? We lost some of our memories, in the Labyrinth of Dreams, and we’re not any less ourselves, are we?”

“This isn’t forgetting an afternoon of spelunking! You heard how that Reginald creature explained it. Malas does this when there’s nothing left to save.”

“Which is obviously complete bullshit. Max didn’t die all that long ago. Down there, he could not only walk around and wield a knife and stuff, but he spoke fluent Ido and English, and knew enough about potions to suggest the switch. You think, what, he learned all that again after he died? In such a short span of time? And even if he did, so what? Sometimes people have to relearn stuff. You know, my grandpa died when I was young, and he had Alzheimer’s first. Usually when we visited, he didn’t remember who I was, same as Max down there didn’t remember. Does that mean he wasn’t my grandfather? Should I have just decided he was someone else I shouldn’t care about, just because he didn’t remember me?”

“That’s not the same thing!”

“It’s exactly the same thing!”

“So what are you going to do, then? Find that thing again and give it his notebooks? Try to teach it to be our friend?”

“I wasn’t going to do anything! He’s got other stuff going on! I was just being happy that my friend isn’t dead! Why aren’t you?”

“Why aren’t I happy that the school doctor stole my friend’s corpse from his grieving family and turned it into some kind of zombie puppet thing to save on hiring real housekeepers? Is that a serious question?”

“He’s not a puppet! They’re obviously not puppets, you saw them.”

Kylie didn’t answer. She just scowled at the ground, arms crossed.

“You know what I can’t stop thinking about?” I asked.

“What?”

“The stuff that Fionnrath’s destiny said to him.”

“Fionnrath’s Destiny said a lot of stuff to him.”

“I mean specifically the stuff about having to break himself three times to break the world. Mind, then soul, then body.”

“… Oh. That.”

“Yeah. He was so calm about the whole thing, almost excited when it told him that he’d have to sacrifice his soul to gain access to secrets known to no mage. He just assumed that that meant giving up his spell, and he never wanted that damn thing anyway. So.” I kicked at a random weed. “I guess it technically didn’t lie, did it.”

“Some more details certainly would’ve been nice.”

“Yeah. He only went into that fucking well in Duniyasar on that prophecy’s advice. He thought he knew the price and he was willing to pay what he thought it was. If the Destiny hadn’t said anything, he never would’ve charged in without us like that.”

“It’s always like this,” she said. “It’s always been like this. Deceiving people, leading them along without actually lying to them. This is exactly the kind of bullshit that got me to come to this school in the first place. It lures you into a false sense of security and then it gets someone hurt or killed.”

“What do you think breaking his body is going to be?” I asked.

Kylie frowned at me. “You saw the body,” she pointed out. “Half of it’s face is missing.”

“A third of his face, at most.”

“That’s still pretty broken.”

“But it said mind, then soul, then body, right? If giving up his soul was dying, then that damage happened before dying, right?”

Kylie chewed her lip. “Maybe he was right. Maybe giving up his soul was losing his spell. He used his power channelling awl thing, right? To cave in the tunnel so that the two of us could get out? Maybe he succeeded in figuring out how to extract a spell with it, and that was breaking his soul, and his body broke seconds later in the cave in.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe.” Max being alive changed everything. It meant that we might be – still probably were, actually – on track for the Destiny’s plan, whatever the hell that was. “And now he’s off doing whatever the hell he’s meant to with the janitors, to break the world.”

“He’s still dead, Kayden.”

“I guess it was stupid of us to assume that fulfilling this prophecy would be something we’d do together. That we’d get to keep him.” I rubbed at my eyes, which were wet. I couldn’t rub fast enough. The tears kept coming. “Fuck, I don’t… sorry, I don’t…”

“No, I’m with you,” Kylie said. “I am also super fucking pissed that this is happening.”

“I’m not angry about seeing my friend again!” I took a deep breath, trying to avoid sobbing. I was crying in front of someone again. This was so humiliating.

“You do that a lot, you know.”

“Do what?”

“Announce what you think you should be feeling as if it’s fact. You just decide to feel something and claim you are.”

“I don’t claim to have fake feelings!”

“Uh-huh. And you’re totally calm right now.”

“I’m not angry at Max. I’m happy that he’s alive.”

“He’s not alive.”

“Well, you’re entitled to your opinion.” I scrubbed my eyes dry. “Anyway. We have a job to do, and limited avenues of information left. You know what we have to do, right?”

Kylie nodded. “We need to talk to Fionnrath’s Destiny.”

“And there are a very limited number of locations where the Destiny is coherent.”

“Yeah. I know.” She sighed. “We have to go back to Duniyasar.”