4.83: The Vessel

“Are you going to eat today or what?” Kylie called from her bed.

“In a bit. I want to finish this notebook.” I was continuing the tedious task of photographing all of Max’s notes, in case the notebooks ended up confiscated or something and actually contained something important. It was taking a really, really long time, and was somehow even more tedious than my apprenticeship. I was trying to be methodical, and not waste time taking pictures of things I already had pictures of, but at least twice now some notebook had wrongly ended up in the ‘not yet photographed’ pile and I’d spent an hour photographing pages before I realised that some of the notes were familiar.

It was, on the whole, a demoralising task – time consuming, probably completely pointless, and brainless enough that it provided no distraction whatsoever against the things I didn’t want to think about.

“Do you think it was sabotage?” I asked.

Kylie didn’t need to ask what I was talking about. “Of course not. It’s got to be a frame job. They had techs looking at the Pit for months trying to find what was wrong, and now these guys are like, ‘oh, it’s definitely her, for reasons we’re not going to tell you except that a spell like hers was used’? That’s bullshit. If her stone-manipulating spell was used in some way to be that obvious, the tech would’ve noticed immediately. Even if they didn’t have a culprit yet, they’d have an answer, but the Council clearly had no idea whether it was sabotage or a random flaw when we saw them last. They’re framing her.”

“Yeah,” I sighed. “I know.” And we were helpless to do anything about it. We’d spoken to the rest of the coven as soon as we could, and none of them had seen Cheryl be arrested or anything. So far as they knew, she’d definitely left Refujeyo, but what after that? Had Sekura Refujeyo picked her up right off campus? She clearly had no idea they were looking for her, or she wouldn’t have come to the party in the first place. Had she found out in time to give them the slip? And even if she had… how? Where could she go?

“It’s a bit extreme, though, isn’t it?” I asked. “I mean, the Council need someone or something to blame for the Pit glitch, and she pissed them off with that whole thing that got us staying in school, but framing her for this? If she’s found guilty, that’s a Law of Intent violation for trying to get people hurt in the Pit – and succeeding! – at the very least, plus the destruction of school property. And that’s assuming nobody tries to spin it to look like she was trying to kill someone.”

“And Law of Intent is triple penalty,” Kylie said. I couldn’t see her with the stone wall between us separating the bed areas, but I could practically feel her nodding thoughtfully.

“And that’s just ridiculous. I mean, I don’t like the Council but there’s no way they’re all the kind of people who’d do that to someone for embarrassing them in a hearing. Alania wouldn’t stand for it at the very least, and despite what they tried to do to us, I don’t think the others are all vengeful sociopaths.”

“Mm-hmm. But I think you’re missing something important.”

“Which is…?”

“This is Cheryl we’re talking about. She organised that little stunt with the initiates, behind our backs.”

“So?”

“So do you really think this is the only thing she was doing? Her master’s a politician, and she seemed to think he’d be proud of that stunt of hers. She hangs around other politicians all the time and she’s, well, her. Are those nine Councillors really gonna be the only powerful people that she might be an ongoing problem for?”

“Ugh. You’re probably right.”

“Of course. I’m always right.”

“And we can’t do anything about this!”

“I know.”

Probably for the best that we couldn’t be involved, I supposed. We had enough on our plates already. We had this whole saving the world thing to deal with still.

But, man. I knew that what was happening wasn’t technically our fault, but… but she’d gone up against the Council to protect us. It kind of felt like our fault.

I finished photographing the last page of the journal, then opened a drawer to get another one. And heard something rolling.

Hmm.

A quick ferret through the drawer found the offender; a small glass test tube. The glass was frosted, which was weird but not unheard of. It was corked, but empty. How very odd. Not that Max would have such a thing – it could be from my potion kit, mixed up in his things by accidnet, or from Alania’s lab – but that it was still here. It must have been overlooked when the janitors had cleared out his stuff. Since they were leaving his notes behind, they probably hadn’t bothered to carefully search through every stack of them looking for misplaced things.

I went to put it aside, but something flashed in the light. The cork. It was threaded with something shiny. A few thin lines snaking over it, embedded in the material. I ran my thumb over it; the metal made my skin itch.

Huh. I wasn’t allergic to any metals, so far as I knew. But some closer inspection told me that the metal was probably silver, although it was impossible to be sure about something so thin without breaking it. (When you spend your childhood trying to keep a curse suppressed, you get really, really good at identifying traditional curse repellents.) Lines of silver running up and down the wooden cork. Why?

There were a lot of things one could use silver for, but for Max, he liked to use it for runecrafting. Both of the fetishes he’d made, the pen and the compass, had had the runes inscribed in silver, and that awl he’d been working on when he died had had silver runes inlaid into the wooden handle. The cork didn’t have any runes on it, but if I assumed that the lines of silver were guiding lines in a runic circle, then they were placed to channel magic up the cork and… back down again? Yeah. They’d just take power and put it back where it came from. Why?

Well, it was a cork for a vial. They took magic from the vial and put it back in the vial. They were probably designed to stop magic from escaping the vial. But you couldn’t just put some random lines down and expect magic to follow them; you needed runes to… hmm.

I took the test tube over to one of the lighting crystals and took a closer look at it. There, etched into the glass, so fine they were difficult to see, were runes. The glass wasn’t frosted, it was just absolutely covered in etched runes, spread in a helix up the vial.  Most of them were the kind of runes we’d covered in runecrafting class, just the standard runic language, but there were some little offshoots from the spiral that were written in Duniyasar runes, and others that I didn’t recognise at all.

What was this? Max had never mentioned this. That wasn’t unusual; he usually only told us about his projects if they became important, or if we asked. But why would this be here if it wasn’t important?

Aside from just being overlooked by the janitors. That was a distinct possibility. It could’ve just been a random bit of junk from an old experiment. But come on! It was a mysterious rune-inscribed vial with silver in the cork!

And the words to the prophecy given in the Labyrinth of Dreams were still fresh in my mind.

Staffbreaker brings to hidden lair

Both scout and vessel, unprepared

A container for liquid was a vessel.

“Uh, Kylie? You need to see this.”

Ten minutes of furious speculation taught us… nothing new. We figured that the ‘vessel’ was probably for the pearl-containing potion I needed to get, maybe. Perhaps it was a dangerous potion, and needed special containment? Hard to say without more information. But we had the vial now, at least, so.

I had some frosted glass equipment in my potioncrafting supplies, so I taped the cork in with a bit of red tape (a reminder for myself so I didn’t accidentally use it) and stashed it in there. Now, on the off-chance that some lunatic did go searching through our stuff, it wouldn’t stand out as anything strange.

“Now will you get something to eat?” Kylie asked. “Or are you going to photograph notes for another hour?”

“You’re right, I should leave some of the joy of photographing notes to you,” I said.

“How generous. Come on.”

As we finished up lunch, I spotted di Fiore eating alone. I said goodbye to Kylie and went over to sit next to him.

“Hey,” I said.

He didn’t look up from his salad. “Oh, it’s you. What do you want?”

“They say you’re some kind of awesome magical rune hacker.”

He rolled his eyes. “They’re misinformed.”

“They say you were investigating the whole problem with the Pit. But you didn’t find any problems with it, did you?”

He rolled his eyes again, harder this time. “So I missed the signs of sabotage. Sue me. The actual Pit techs didn’t find them for months, either, so – ”

“But when you looked, you didn’t find anything, right?”

“I’m sorry, but do I barge into your workshop and critique every potion you make?”

“No, that’s not… I’m not trying to… look. So far as you could determine, there was no sabotage, right?”

“I couldn’t determine what had happened. The experts could. Because they’re experts. And I’m not. Is that what you wanted to hear?”

“No, you idiot! I’m saying I think you’re right!”

“I’m right in my answer of ‘I don’t know what happened here’? I agree. Can I go back to my salad now?”

“I’m saying they’re wrong about the sabotage. Even an idiot like you would’ve noticed if it was sabotage.”

“Well, thank you for the stalwart faith in my skills and intelligence.”

“They let slip some of their evidence. They think Cheryl used her spell to – ”

“Who’s Cheryl?”

“The person they’re accusing!”

“Oh. And she used a spell to do it? Makes sense that nobody caught it for so long, then. Magic can be quite – ”

“Her spell literally warps stone! You would’ve noticed that! Did the runes look normal to you? All set out how they should’ve been? Nothing damaged? Because if so – ”

“Yes, yes, I missed the damage. In a giant network of tiny runes carved into stone centuries ago, covered in patched repairs and add-ons, I didn’t notice a sabateur’s addition. I’m so sorry my extremely small amount of training wasn’t enough to notice the effect of a particular type of spell on – ”

“That’s not – I’m not making fun of you! Listen to what I’m saying! She’s being framed!”

“framed by who?”

“The government!”

Di Fiore finally looked up from his salad to stare at me. “I’m sorry, the government?”

“The Council, at the very least. Maybe the Circle, I’m not sure yet, but an Inquisitor came by and – ”

“Do you have any idea what you sound like right now?”

“I’m not – you know what this place can be like! You were involved in the whole Clara thing!”

“Where she used your paranoia to try to frame me for attempted murder; yes, I remember. Kayden. Listen to me. Whatever weird conspiracy bullshit you’ve tangled yourself up in, I don’t care.”

“But – ”

“I don’t care. I don’t want any part of this. The way you guys run around getting yourself into trouble all the time, you’re going to end up in prison before you’re even out of school. I’m not getting involved in any of that. Leave me alone. Just… just don’t talk to me any more. That’s probably what’s best.”

“Somebody else could be getting framed for attempted murder here, and you have a testimony that could help save them, and you’re just going to sit aside and – ”

“Kayden.”

“What?!”

“Forget me.”

“What?”

The chair beside me moved, and I heard footsteps walk past. Grumpily, I finished my salad, hoping it would settle the sudden low buzz of nausea simmering in my gut.

Sometimes this place really pissed me off.