4.85: The Door

The stone key felt unnaturally heavy in my pocket as I headed to the medical ward. Unnaturally bulky, too. I kept having visions of someone finding it in my pocket and figuring out what I was doing and…

That was absurd, obviously. People didn’t just go around searching my pockets, and someone seeing me with a key would obviously conclude, ‘oh, Kayden has a lockbox or something,’ not, ‘it must be an illegal copy, let’s check it against all my keys to check!’ or that it was some kind of a lucky charm or bit of jewellery, given that real keys weren’t typically made of stone. Carrying it around wasn’t incriminating in any way. And even if someone did somehow find out I’d made an illegal copy, the only thing that made me look guilty of was attempting to steal drugs from the hospital. Which, admittedly, would not be a fantastic thing to be accused of. But, y’know. Comparatively.

Of course, this was the one day I didn’t get sent on some boring categorisation task or a hundred little errands that involved going into the medicine storage room. I spent half the morning doing actually interesting and medically relevant stuff, watching Dae-Hyun work with patients and discussing medicine with him, before he finally said, “I have some things to do, why don’t you restock the disposables at the desk?” and handed me his key. I rushed to medicine storage and, after making sure no one was looking, slipped Cheryl’s copy out of my pocket.

It fit in the lock perfectly, of course. I half expected it to break as I turned it, most stones not known for their strength compared to iron, but Cheryl had moulded it to be strong, somehow, and it turned. The lock clicked.

I pushed the door.

It opened.

It worked! The key worked! I clamped down on the desire to laugh with relief, slipped into the storage room, and when I was definitely alone, allowed myself a little happy dance. I couldn’t believe that had worked! I’d half expected the keys to be magical, so any copy would fail no matter how faithfully the shape was recreated.

Safely alone in the room, I compared Dae-Hyun’s key to Cheryl’s, just to see how good the copy was. The keys were different. Interesting. Dae-Hyun’s key had two tiny indents drilled out along the key, and Cheryl’s had six.

I’d looked at the reference pictures I’d given Cheryl long and hard enough to know that key she’d copied (Malas’) had six little divots, so Malas and Dae-Hyun’s keys were marked differently. There were a couple of possible reasons for this. It might be some kind of variation in the manufacturing process; maybe the blanks they’d been cut from had those divots and came from different batches or something? I didn’t know how keys were cast. Or it might be a way to tell the keys apart, so if a key was found lying around they’d be able to figure out whose it was. But why use little holes drilled in the key instead of just etching a number or name on it like everyone else did?

Or, it could be like the flags that controlled the portals at Duniyasar. Each little flag having different notches on its pole, to tell the mechanism what portal to open. Perhaps there were areas that only Malas’ key could open, and that was how the key was identified. There’d have to be some kind of process involved in getting it to work; Malas had no problem loaning me his key, and he’d probably be more reluctant to do that if there was a chance of me activating the wrong thing by accident.

I compared the holes in Cheryl and Dae-Hyun’s keys. The two in Dae-Hyun’s key matched up exactly with two in Cheryl’s. Cheryl’s just had an extra four holes further along the spine of the key.

Okay, so it was probably a priority thing. If the first two holes were present, the room would look as it did to me now – that is, the portal at the back would open onto a wall. Meaning that if I wanted to use they key differently…

As soon as I was dismissed for lunch, I practically ran through my room and started digging around my potion stuff. Noting with relief that Max’s test tube was still there (what had I expected, that someone was going to steal it?), I ferretted through my materials until I found some semisoft wax. I filled in the two first holes on Cheryl’s key, the two that were also present on Dae-Hyun’s.

And then, of course, I spent the afternoon doing tasks that once again had nothing to do with going to medicine storage. Malas was there and wanted to talk about interesting things like human anatomy, and do his job by helping me learn medicine, which was frankly inconsiderate when it was getting in the way of me breaking into his stores and investigating stuff I wasn’t supposed to see. By the time some kid came in with a stomach ache and a red-faced explanation involving some unpleasantly old sour cream and an ill-advised dare, I was practically climbing the walls. Would Malas…?

“Kayden, go and get the medicine for this patient,” he told me, handing me his key. Yes! Thank you, random pop quiz method of practical teaching!

I checked that Malas was distracted with his patient, jammed my temporarily modified version of Cheryl’s key in the lock, and…

The door still opened. Excellent. Hardly daring to breathe, I pushed it open.

The back wall was different. Yes, yes, yes!

I KNEW I’d been right about the portal! And of course the key would affect it! It all made perfect sense! I was a genius!

Of course, I had absolutely no idea what was behind the door, and I absolutely wasn’t stupid enough to investigate it right now, with Malas in the room waiting for me to return. Or before at least telling Kylie about it; she’d skin me alive if I went off on my own after everything. I had no idea if it was a cool tunnel leading to the janitor service tunnels where we might get some answers, or something even cooler, or just a hidden room to store the more dangerous drugs so that apprentices and customers couldn’t get at them. That last one was still a distinct possibility, and would be pretty disappointing after all this.

I grabbed something to settle the kid’s stomach and headed back out. The key worked! I could get to a new mysterious hidden door in the ward whenever I wanted!

Now I just needed it to be unmanned at some point so I could get in without being caught immediately. Like that was ever going to happen.

I found Kylie in the library, at one of the smaller tables, which seated only four people. She was with Magistus, di Fiore, and one of Magistus’ friends I vaguely knew named Lauren. I headed over. “Hey,” I said, stopping to rub my eyes.

“Are you alright?” Lauren asked.

“Yeah. Nausea.”

“It’s his familiarity link,” Kylie explained. “Happens a lot.”

“I’ve given up trying to keep track,” I said. I dropped into the empty seat and glanced between the three of them. “There is so much magic around here.”

Magistus raised an eyebrow. “Magic? In a magic school? Amazing. I assume you’re here to help us with math.”

“I dropped by to steal Kylie, but it can wait,” I said, getting up again; but it was too late. Kylie grabbed my arm.

“You’re here, so you can help us with our maths homework.”

“I never agreed to that. Anyway, I suck at maths.”

“It’s good practice for you, then.”

“What makes you think I need practice?”

Lauren pointedly looked up and down my healer’s robes. “If you intend to ever graduate as a healer, I think it’ll probably come up.” She pushed a piece of paper towards me.

“Oh, no; I have a rule about algebra. I’m not going to – oh, wait, these are weight, volume and concentration calculations. This stuff is easy.”

“I thought you sucked at maths?” Kylie said.

“Yeah, but there’s a cool trick with this stuff that doesn’t work for most maths. You just pretend you’re making a potion. Like, this question about determining the concentration of salt in water? Just imagine you’re adjusting the salinity of, say, Chullain’s Breath, and do what you’d do to work that out, and it gives you the answer. Here, I’ll show you.”

Eventually, we finished up their little study group, and I was alone with Kylie. I practically pulled her back to our room, shut the door behind us, and fixed her with an excited grin.

“What’s up?” she asked.

“I’ve done it.”

“What?”

“The portal! In the medicine storage room! I can get in and turn it off at will!” I explained the key experiment. “It might be something boring, but – ”

“But we can’t ignore it,” Kylie agreed. “It’s the only reliable way to control a portal we’ve found, and we need to look into the janitors somehow. It’s risky, though. If we get caught sneaking around in the medicine supplies, we might just get expelled. Which would make everything rather a waste.”

“And also make it kind of hard to save the world,” I agreed. “It’d be safer if I take a peak by mysel – ”

“No. No more sneaking off by ourselves.”

“I wasn’t going to sneak off. Just explore behind one door.”

“And if it does lead to service tunnels, and you get lost or something?”

“… Yeah, okay. Point. But sneaking you in too makes everything a whole lot harder.”

“Not really. We need to do it at a time when you’re not expected to be doing anything. You’d have to sneak in anyway.”

“I suppose. You’ll need to borrow one of my robes.”

“That’d help me blend in, but if anyone does see us hanging around it’d look awfully suspicious.”

“Can’t be helped. The medicine storage room is alarmed so random people don’t just walk in. If you go in there and you’re not wearing healer’s robes, Malas will know.”

“Another complicating factor. Great.”

“We’ll figure it out.”

“Yeah. We’ll figure it out.”

My tablet chirped. A message.

“Medical emergency?” Kylie asked.

“You have amazing faith in me if you think I’d be called for medical anything.” I checked it. “Huh. It’s Fiore.”

“Why?”

“He just says he wants to catch up. See how things are going.”

“Again: why? He’s not your surveyanto any more.”

I shrugged. Fiore had specified that nothing was urgent, but I went over to see him right away anyway. If I didn’t find something to do, I’d have to get started on homework, so might as well.

He answered the door before I’d even finished knocked. “Kayden! Come in. How are you?”

“Uh… fine. Is something the matter?”

“Not at all. I just wanted to check in, see how your apprenticeship was going. I know I’m not responsible for you any more, but I’d feel terrible if the apprenticeship I helped negotiate wasn’t working out in some way. If you do have any problems that Malas can’t help with, let me know, alright?”

“I… I will. Thanks.”

“Never any problem.” He went to pour some me tea, caught himself, and handed me a little bottle of orange juice instead. Sipping his own tea, he peered over his glasses at me in that slightly irritating paternalistic way of his. “So, will you be going back into the Pit?”

“Uh, no. I don’t think so.”

“That’s totally understandable, after your last competition. I imagine Miss Surya is even less eager.”

“Even if she wanted to, there’s no way her bodyguards would let her.”

“Ha, that’s a fair point. What do you think about them reopening it?”

“Terrible idea,” I said.

“Oh, I agree. I mean, one of the sabateurs is still on the loose! Just because they caught the problem doesn’t mean the danger has passed. I get that they needed to reopen to maintain faith, especially since they’d put an Initiation through the Pit; it’d look pretty bad if they admitted they hadn’t solved the problem for too long after that! But this is a safety issue. They really shouldn’t reopen anything until they’ve caught both of them.”

“Wait,” I said. “Both of them?”

“Well, yes. They caught Tristan Arum, but his apprentice is still out – oh. Sorry. I forgot you to were friends.” He looked away, looking geniuinely apologetic. Interesting. I’d gotten to be able to tell when Max put a social mask on, if I was watching him do it, but for Fiore the change in emotion was seamless. The emotion itself was seamless. I’d seen him be actually apologetic before, and this was how he looked. If circumstances were different, I would genuinely have believed that we were having an honest and open conversation.

Of course, since this was Fiore, and he’d summoned me to ask me about my supposed terrorist friend, I didn’t believe that for a single second. He wanted to know if I had any useful information about her, information that he could give to Sekura Refujeyo for prestige and favour. He probably wanted to know if I knew where she was.

And I was in kind of a trap here, because I knew where Cheryl was, or at least had been recently, and my ability to lie to Fiore was limited. Could I deceive him and make him think I was trying to deceive him in a different way? Of course. Could I feign ignorance convincingly enough for him to actually believe me? Absolutely no way. He was watching for my reaction, watching to see if I had anything to hide, and I’d already hesitated for too long. Normally, I’d distract Fiore by telling him what he wanted to hear without telling him what I didn’t want him to know, but I hadn’t exactly planned for this. I didn’t exactly have anything to distract with here.

Oh, wait, yes I did. A different truth about Cheryl. I could get defensive for reasons completely unrelated to protecting her whereabouts.

“She didn’t do it,” I said. “She wouldn’t.”

“Kayden,” Fiore said gently. “I know you trust your friends, but – ”

“She was framed!” I insisted. “By the High Council. They’re pissed that she forced them to reverse the decision with Kylie and Fionnrath, and, and probably with other stuff she’s done. I don’t know the details, but I know she was framed.”

There. He wouldn’t believe me, of course, any more than his nephew had, but –

“Hmm.” Fiore sipped his tea thoughtfully. “Well. That makes a whole lot more sense.”