4.78: The Magic Wall

“Kayden.”

“Hmm?” I looked up from the syringes I was cataloguing at Dae-hyun, one of Malas’ older apprentices. I’d been an apprentice for about two weeks before Malas paired me with Dae-hyun and told me to learn from him. I was still just cleaning and cataloguing stuff, but now with random lectures and pop quizzes throughout the day.

“Come and help me with this patient,” he said.

I perked up. ‘Help with this patient’ usually meant watch whatever Malas or Dae-hyun did and then go fetch bandages or something, but it was still more interesting than cataloguing. It also meant that I got to meet some new people, which was… interesting. Sometimes I wondered about Malas’ generally blasé, if exasperated, reactions to when I used to come in with weird injuries all the time. I no longer wondered about that. As it turned out, I wasn’t even close to the most chaotic patient he had to deal with regularly. And there were some… odd groups of students out there. With odd thoughts about medicine.

The patient was a redheaded girl I didn’t know in the green robes of a wizard, one arm cradled to her chest and a grimace of pain on her face.

“It looks like a fractured arm,” Dae-hyun said. “How should we treat it?”

Oh, we were moving on to real life pop quizzes! That was good! Although he’d started me with something absurdly easy. “Get Malas to do it,” I said. “His spell works better with bone than with anything else.”

The reaction to this suggestion told me that it was the wrong answer. Not Dae-hyun’s reaction; he just nodded. But the girl practically snarled and drew back. “I don’t want that stuff inside me,” she said. And that’s when I realised that her grimace hadn’t been completely because of pain, but because I’d been in the room. And that should’ve been my clue that she was a unimagist.

The unimagists were weird. There weren’t very many of them – I’d never even heard of them before becoming Malas’ apprentice – but their beliefs were annoying to work around. They had the idea that using magic in the human body, especially in a mage’s body, was unhealthy; that the only magic that should be in the body was one’s own spell, and putting other magic within one’s body was unnatural and weakened it. As someone who reacted badly to any magic inside me except Kylie’s, it was easy to identify with the sentiment, even though it clearly wasn’t true for other people. But I didn’t like the unimagists, because as soon as they saw the familiarity mark on my arm marking me as the ultimate corruption of their views, someone saturated in another person’s magic at all times, they started treating me like something gross they’d found stuck to the bottom of their shoe.

Which was going to make it difficult to provide them with any medical care, once I was allowed to do that.

“Ah, right,” I said. “In that case, you’d want to x-ray the arm, have the x-ray tech analyse the image, and see if everything’s in the right place. Most likely, everything’s where it should be and it just needs a sling, possibly a cast or splint if the damage is severe enough.”

“Would you diagnose anything else?”

“Um. Painkillers.”

Dae-hyun nodded and handed me a key. “Go and get her painkillers, please.”

I hesitated. I was sent to fetch pills a lot, but usually whoever was sending me was a lot more specific. I’d never been expected to pick the right painkillers myself before. I hoped I didn’t fuck it up.

“Are you allergic to anything?” I asked the patient. She shook her head.

Right. Okay. Painkillers.

I unlocked the pharmacy stockroom and scanned the well-stocked shelves. (The shelves were always well-stocked. I’d never been asked to restock them, so it was probably done by non-hospital staff – janitors or couriers from the school shop or something – coming in when I wasn’t there.) The painkillers were down the back, for some reason, and I was well-versed on the sixteen types we had, of various strengths and with various side effects.

I leaned against the blank back wall of the room, feeling a little sick with nervousness over my decision, which was kind of pathetic when you think about it. I mean, I was just grabbing some painkillers. It wasn’t a big deal. And there were no stakes, other than me looking like an idiot; if I made a bad choice, Dae-hyun would just send be back. Something anti-inflammatory, maybe, for a fracture? I should’ve asked the patient if she had circulatory problems.

I stepped forward off the wall and reached for a bottle, instantly feeling better. Decision made; now I could –

Wait.

I knew that slight feeling of sickness. That tingling, that barely detectable nausea.  That wasn’t nervousness over some random, unimportant decision. That was magic.

I leaned back against the back wall again. The feeling returned.

I stepped away from the wall. The feeling left.

Hmm.

I didn’t have much time to mess around with a patient waiting, but after a few seconds of experimentation I found that whatever it was was a couple of inches away from the blank back wall and the entire width of the room. I went to give the pills to Dae-hyun.

The effect was probably a portal. It felt like a portal. I couldn’t be sure – I had the ability to feel when magic displaced Kylie’s magic inside me, but I had no ability to tell what the magic actually did, merely that it was present. But there were a limited number of magical effects that one would stretch across a room like that, and Refujeyo was lousy with random portals. It wasn’t any kind of illusion, there were no temperature changes on the wall, and while there might be ‘sterilising fields’ or something I didn’t know about in a hospital, there wouldn’t be one against the very back wall like that. It must be a portal.

Dae-hyun took his key back, inspected the bottle, and nodded. Good; I’d made the right choice. I was a bit too distracted to care any more, and was happy to return to cataloguing, which would give me space to think.

Why would there be a portal across the back of a room like that? It didn’t make sense; there was no tunnel there. It was a storage room. Putting a tunnel there was a security risk, and probably not good for the medicines, either; while the temperature and humidity was pretty tightly controlled through all of Refujeyo, there was no reason to introduce random elements into an environment that was easier to control as an isolated room. And it was an isolated room. There was a wall there. What was the point of putting a portal right in front of a wall?

Well. Just because it was a wall for me, didn’t mean it was a wall for everyone, did it? That was, after all, how portals worked. The portals leading outside opened into cliff faces and stuff that didn’t exist inside the school. When someone left the gym, the door lead to the initiate halls for initiates and the main school for the rest of us. And the portal in the back of that room just lead to a blank wall for me, and… something else, for someone else.

Why?

Most likely, it was another security feature. Maybe the room was longer, with other, more dangerous drugs stored back there. Drugs I wasn’t qualified to touch, or… shouldn’t know about. (Memory potions, to give to students who wandered too far and asked too many questions and ended up in the heart of the school…)

The other option was that it was an alternate way to access the room, without having to go through the ward. I’d never seen anyone come in to restock the medicines, even though they were topped up at least daily. Sure, they might come in when I wasn’t there. Or they might come into the room through the back, through the portal.

So, most likely, it was either storage for other medicines that had been deliberately, actively hidden, even from Malas’ apprentices, or there was a service tunnel for the janitors there.

Either way, I needed to get in there. I needed to take a look.

After my shift was over, I hurried to explain my discovery to Kylie. She sat cross-legged on her bed, nodding thoughtfully, while I paced the room.

“Yeah, that’s probably a portal,” she agreed. “But how to we get a look?”

“No idea,” I said. “Absolutely no idea.” I started counting complications off my fingers. “One: I assume you’re not going to let me go alone – ”

“Absolutely not.”

“ – which means we need some way to smuggle you in. The room is alarmed; anyone except Malas or an apprentice enters and it sends an alert. The credentials are in our robes; you can borrow some of mine, but you walking around in apprentice robes is going to be instantly suspicious, making smuggling you in even harder. Two: we’re going to need a lot of time in there, probably, and the ward is always occupied. Usually Malas is there; when he’s not, at least one apprentice is. Even if we somehow found some way to sneak you in, which is probably impossible, being in that room longer than it takes to grab some medicine and catalogue it would raise questions. Three: the door’s locked, and I don’t have a key. The older apprentices do, but I’m too new, and I don’t know how much time we have to wait. Four: what do we even do? We don’t know how to deactivate a portal. If we could do that, we would’ve just gone through that one near the cafeteria.”

“Five,” Kylie said. “Even if we somehow snuck in and found out everything, how do we get out without leaving a trace? We don’t just need to know how to deactivate a portal, we need to know how to reactivate it. And of course, there’s probably some kind of safety alarm system checking for failure. Remember when the ventilation system went down that one time and the school evacuated? They know when something breaks.”

“There was no such alarm when the safeties in the Pit went down. Or when that portal accidentally took us to Duniyasar as initiates.”

“No but they were fiddly add-on systems, built way after the school was. The portals are a fundamental part of the school. If one failed, it’d be more like the ventilation system failing. They have to have some kind of safety monitoring for the portals.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, that’s… a potential problem.”

“And it could turn out that the portal’s hiding something really boring. Just restricted drugs or whatever.”

“It might be hiding the potion they gave us to erase our memories!”

“It might, yeah. But so what? How would seeing that actually help us?”

“Yeah,” I sighed. “Yeah, you’re right.” Getting through that portal might be an impossible puzzle with no reward. Or it might grant us access to the janitors’ service tunnels, a way to try and find out what under the seven Points those mysterious fuckers were actually up to. It might be a waste of time and a needless risk, or it might mean everything.

I’d have to think on it. I’d have to try to find a way in.

I couldn’t just ignore it.