4.89: There's A Perfectly Reasonable Explanation For This

“Max,” Kylie said, faintly, disbelievingly.

“What the hell?” I tried to lunge forward again, but the janitor restraining me knew what they were doing, and had my arms behind my back in some kind of immobilising hold that I couldn’t twist out of. “I cannot believe you! Seriously, what the fuck are you playing at?! You let us think you were dead! Everyone thought you were dead! Do you have any fucking idea what you put us through?!”

Max, looking startled, stepped back. “Hey,” he said. “I just work here.”

“What the fuck kind of an excuse is that?!”

“Oh yeah,” the janitor holding me said in Ido. “These two were really close friends with Maximillian Acanthos.”

Reginald glared at her. “Oh, were they now? What fantastic information that would have been to have ten minutes ago.”

“How did you not already know? It wasn’t a secret!”

“Well excuse me if I don’t go around stalking the students! We’re supposed to be uninvolved, of course I didn’t – it doesn’t matter. You,” he said to Max, “Get out of here.”

“Who’s Maximillian Acanthos?”

“I’ll explain later. Just go, your presence is only going to upset them further. We’ll go with your plan; go and do the potion switch immediately.”

“Don’t send him away!” I said, trying and failing to pull myself free again. “He has a lot of explaining to do!”

“He won’t be able to answer any of your questions.”

“He’s going to fucking try to answer my – ”

“Let him go,” Kylie said quietly. She wasn’t struggling against the janitor restraining her. She wasn’t looking at Max. She was staring resolutely at the floor, eyes wet. “Just let him go. I don’t want to see him.”

Reginald nodded at Max. Max scampered away.

“Hey!” I called after him, which was of course ignored. To Kylie, I said, “You don’t mean that. I mean, I’m pissed as hell at him too, but – ”

“That’s not him,” she said. “That’s not our friend.”

“What are you talking about? You heard him! Saw him!”

“I heard and saw that he had no idea who we were or what you were talking about. That isn’t him.”

“Listen,” Reginald said, “can you two have an identity crisis later? We have limited time here to – ”

“No!” I snapped. “No, we will not have an identity crisis later! This is too far! You lot have been jerking us around ever since we got to this school, don’t even try to pretend otherwise! You almost got me fucking drowned in the Lake of Inquisition, you found us in the Labyrinth of Dreams and wiped our fucking memories, or maybe let Malas do it, same thing, you left us Max’s notes with absolutely no explanation and now it turns out you’ve got our supposedly dead friend with you, like he just faked his death and didn’t even tell us and he’s running around doing whatever bullshit you lot do, and we come here and you just threaten us with knives and expect us to go along with your plans and protect your secrets? No. Fuck you. You want me to lie to Malas and leave you alone and not draw attention to you? Explain to me why I should. We have a mission here and we have no idea how you’re involved or whose side you’re on, so if you want my cooperation, you can start by explaining what the fuck is going on.”

Reginald shook his head. “The less you know, the less you need to keep secret from – ”

“The less I know, the less inclined I am to keep secrets, too. Or are you going to threaten me with the fucking knife again? We both know that’s an irrelevant threat.”

“You think we won’t kill you if we have to?”

“I think it doesn’t matter. You clearly want us alive or we’d be dead already, and you can’t threaten compliance out of us with that thing. What’s to stop us from agreeing to whatever you want and then turning around and doing the opposite as soon as we’re out of here? You’re either going to have to kill us, or find something else to convince us. Tell us who you are!”

“This is a waste of time,” Reginald said, “but if it’s the only way to move the conversation forward, then fine.” He flicked a hand. The janitors restraining us released us, and all the janitors in the room started uncovering their hands and faces.

There were twelve janitors in the room, and every single one of them was touched with Malas’ magic. A couple just had touches of it visible, like Reginald. Most of them were more like Max, with extensive head trauma covered in pale blue, and some of them were very extensively healed. One person down the back looked almost entirely blue; I could only see their face and hands, but the only actual human flesh I could count was one eye and two fingers.

They were all, for some reason, injured. No, it was more than that; somebody didn’t lose as much flesh as that blue person and just count as ‘injured’. And Max had been injured months ago, yet still carried Malas’ magic across skin that should have long since healed. If it could heal.

Max hadn’t faked his death.

“You’re all dead,” I said. “Aren’t you.”

Reginald nodded.

“I have so many questions,” I said.

“We don’t have time for them,” Reginald said. “I’ll give you the quick explanation. Sometimes, somebody is injured, and they go to hospital. And most of the time, if you’ve got the kurcar around, they get better. The kuracar can keep people alive in situations that you’d think impossible. Those spells can diagnose almost any injury and replicate almost any flesh. But their ability is built on averages, on how human tissue typically behaves. The kuracar cannot scan for damage to something unique, and repair it. If connections in the brain is destroyed, if part of the brain dies, there’s nothing that the kuracar can do.

“Malas is very, very good at his job. He can keep life in a body that any other healer would consider a corpse. But he sees a lot of patients, and sometimes – not often, but sometimes – a brain is damaged so extensively that there just isn’t enough of the person inside left to be a person any more. The patient is dead, and there’s nothing that can be done about it. The kuracar is left with a body – a body to which magic still adheres perfectly well, but which has no person inside it.”

“Oh, right,” I said sarcastically. “So you might as well magically create some new brain, hand it a broom and create a horde of zombie housekeepers. That’s a perfectly reasonable action to take!”

“It’s better than letting flesh go to waste rotting in the ground,” Reginald shrugged.

“Is it?” I asked. “Is it really? I’m not trying to offend your entire existence or anything, I really am trying to keep up here, but I don’t see how this is superior to burying people properly and just hiring janitors. I mean, what the fuck? Also, side question: do Max’s family know about this? I went to his funeral and his family seemed pretty convinced that he was getting buried in some fancy Refujeyo graveyard.”

“They don’t,” Reginald said. “Very few people know how this operates.”

“So Malas is a graverobber too! Fantastic!”

“It’s about control,” Kylie mumbled. She was staring at the floor, refusing to look at any of the janitors. “If you hire people, you have employees. You have potential problems. Janitors handle all kinds of sensitive tasks all around the school, things that are best done by people who can’t be lazy and can’t be bribed and can’t gossip with outsiders. These… these… janitors, they don’t have friends and families to worry about them and look out for them. And they can’t walk away. They need Malas’ magic to continue to exist. Control, see?”

“Y’know, every time I learn something new about this place I think it’s as fucked up as it can possibly get,” I said. “And then I learn another new thing and I’m immediately proven wrong. This day was going so well, and then it turns out that my master secretly turned my close friend into a zombie slave to sweep floors and do laundry for lazy students.”

“This day wasn’t going that well,” Kylie pointed out, smiling at the floor.

“Well, okay. But by comparison. How many of you are there?”

“Enough,” Reginald said. “It’s not important.”

“I just mean, there must be a lot, right? But you said that Malas doesn’t lose many patients.”

“We have been around a long time. The oldest among us were made from the unluckiest of the labourers building these very halls. The kuracar’s skills were far less powerful or refined at the time, of course.”

That made sense, in a horrible sort of way. You’re building a big structure in a hurry, probably with a limited workforce. Your on-site magical doctor is patching up broken bones and deep cuts from stone as quickly as they can to keep the workforce as operational as possible, and if those patients sometimes return too damaged to really be considered alive any more… well, why draw a line there? A body that can dig is a body that can dig, and a brain that can be trained to do it is a brain that can be trained to do it, even if it’s made of as much magic as human tissue. And then, when your tunnels are built, carved by hands comprised largely of the very magic that would settle into their forms as its new locus… why stop? Why kill your dead labourers all over again? They, presumably, don’t want to die, any more than the healer wants to murder them by cutting off their magic. And the tunnels still need maintenance. They will always need maintenance.

“Are you that old?” I asked Reginald.

“Me? No. Our skin doesn’t wear down nearly as quickly as yours does, but the best magical support can’t maintain this much skin for that long.”

“How old are you?”

“Older than you. Old enough to know these halls like my own bones, to know the whisper of magic, true magic, and hear the call of its becoming. The mages being farmed in this place believe themselves powerful because they can call forth the spells infesting their very flesh, but they have very little control and no real understanding. None of you know what you are doing. That is not a criticism; you’re not supposed to know what you’re doing, that’s not a requirement for a mage. I mention it only as a fact.”

“What about Malas?” I asked.

Reginald waved a hand dismissively. “Malas is powerful only in that he holds the power of life and death over us,” he said, as if this was an inconsequential thing. “He isn’t fundamentally different from any of you. He’s a mage – a very old one, by the standards of your kind, but just a mage, and he’s never going to be anything else. Generally, we consider your trials and squabbles to be relatively inconsequential to our work, but here we find ourselves in the rare situation where mages might present a threat, which is why some of my colleagues are panicking over your presence here.”

“Hey,” I said, “we didn’t come here to hurt any – ”

“That is inconsequential. You’re going to bring Malas’ attention upon us, and that simply cannot be allowed. Do you understand? If the wrong people even suspect us of being involved in anything, everything is over. The world is doomed. We have our job to do, and you have yours.”

“Right, yes, stop the creation of an eldritch mage god, we get that part, but – ”

“Fantastic, we’re all on the same page. So here is what’s going to happen. In a few minutes, Malas will be here, looking for who tripped the alarms. We can’t feign ignorance; it would put all of us in danger and start a major investigation if you aren’t caught. So, some of my people are going to sneak you, Kylie, out of here, while you, Kayden, are going to wait with us for Malas. You’re going to come up with some excuse for how you found your way down here that doesn’t incriminate us or make you look too dangerous, and Malas will give you a health checkup and dose you with Lilith’s Veil to wipe your memory. One of us is switching the potion with a sedative as we speak. When you wake up, you’re going to pretend to have no memory of any of this, and you’re going to keep pretending that, and the two of you are going to do your jobs without doing anything to draw suspicion down on us ever again. Understand?”

“How?” Kylie asked, still not looking up.

“What?”

“How do you expect us to do anything? Why do you think we’re down here? We don’t have enough information! Tell us what we’re supposed to do!”

“How should we know?”

“You obviously do,” I said, “because you keep getting involved. This is your master plan, isn’t it?”

“No one person or group ever has a master plan,” Reginald said. “Events are an intermingling of a lot of plans. We’ve helped where we can, but if you’re looking for the full story, I’d suggest you ask Fionnrath’s Destiny.”

“Have you tried getting a straight answer out of Fionnrath’s Destiny?” Kylie asked.

“I’ve spent a lot of time talking to prophecies and I’m pretty sure they know even less about what’s going on than we do,” I pointed out. “They don’t have the capacity to understand things in that way. So how about you tell us what you know, and we’ll ask the Destiny what it knows, and then maybe we might have enough information to go and save the fucking world, hmm?”

“No,” Reginald said.

“Why the hell not?!”

“Because what if you fail? What if you get caught, acting on information that you got from us?”

“Well I imagine that with the entire world at stake we all want us to not fail, and we’re a lot more likely to fail without – ”

“There will be other heroes,” Reginald said. “Other candidates, other plans. You are not our first attempt at saving this world. Now, I won’t lie; I really, really hope that you’re the last, because this is the closest that we’ve come to success, ever. As time passes, as the formation of the New World grows nearer, stopping it becomes harder and harder. So far, nobody has come even half as close to being able to stop this as you two have, probably because we have the assistance of Fionnrath’s Destiny now. If you do fail, we’ll have less time to try to get someone to do an even harder task, and Fionnrath won’t allow their Destiny near this place ever again. It is very likely that you are indeed the last hope of eliminating this threat to the world without destroying a significant part of Pakistan, killing a quarter of the world’s mages and probably prompting the largest ever world war.”

“And I’m sure we’d all like to avoid that,” I said, “so – ”

“You are very likely the world’s last hope. But it is not certain. Without you, there may still be the possibility of success. Do you know what situation would give us no possibility of success at all? If Malas, or any mage in power really, gets any hint whatsoever that the true staff of this place intend to destroy it, and they kill us all. If you die, we will do our best to pull together and raise another. If we die, there will be no other. There will be no surviving knowledge of the threat. The world will be doomed. If you die or are discovered, there is still a slight chance of success, and failing that, other methods – they will be destructive, there will be massive war and death, but humanity will survive. If we are all discovered? There will be no one left to stop this thing by any method. So no. We cannot give you information that you can’t find on your own, and we cannot be involved. You will need to figure it out.”

“You have interfered, though,” I pointed out.

“When absolutely necessary.”

“What was so necessary about nearly getting me drowned in the Lake of Inquisition?”

Several of the janitors in the room shuffled awkwardly. The one who’d been restraining me earlier spoke up. “We, ah. We thought that you were the prophet.”

“You thought he was me?” Kylie asked.

“We didn’t know what you looked like! We knew that Fionnrath’s Destiny was arriving that year, from Australia. We knew that its prophet would need to be able to find the centre. Kayden wandered into the right area, and somebody made a decision with the information they had on hand. Nobody knew there were two witches!”

“Great,” I said. “So I nearly died over a case of mistaken identity. Fun.”

“You do realise,” Kylie said, “that if it had been me, that little stunt could have killed Fionnrath’s Destiny?”

“The spell wouldn’t have let you drown,” the janitor said.

“Malas is coming!” someone called.

Instantly, everyone sprang into action. Most of the janitors rushed out of the room, taking Kylie with them. Three remained, quickly replacing their headgear; one of them grabbed my arms. About fifteen seconds later, Malas walked in.

He blinked at me. “Kayden? What are you doing here?”

“Hi, Malas. I can definitely explain this.”