4.75: Blood And Paper

Clearly the ‘use English for the initiates’ portion of the meeting was over, because Malas spoke in Ido. “The decision to terminate kylie’s contract was sneaky and unlawful in the first place,” he said. “Given the new events that have transpired since the decision was made, I once again urge the Council to reconsider – ”

“If you have an issue of your own to raise, you will bring it through the proper channels, Mr Aksoy,” the Grand Master said firmly, also in Ido. “Schedule a meeting and – ”

“We’re here now, and we’re running out of time.”

“Demeter,” Alania said pleadingly, “you did say only if he was quiet. Can you revoke…?”

“Yes,” Demeter said. “He should get out of here.”

“It no longer matters,” the Grand Master said, standing up. “This meeting is over.”

“Good, then you have time to see me,” Malas said. “Grand Master, I urge you to consider – ”

“Leave, or I willhave you escorted out. You agreed to abide by the rules of this Council when you –”

“Oh, you’re concerned with myattitude to rules?” Malas stepped forward again. And every single Master on the Council flinched back.

I could see why. There was a slightly manic grin on his face, a baring of teeth just barely held under the social veneer of a smile. It was probably my imagination, or the lighting of the room, that made his vaguely luminous blue eyes seem to glow just a little brighter than normal. He looked a lot less like a friendly doctor who happened to have strange eyes, and more like some sort of dragon eyeing off the group of knights that had just stumbled into his lair.

His voice had a dangerous edge to it. He spoke slowly, regularly (which I appreciated, with my shaky grasp of Ido).

“When we built this place,” he said, “it was for specific purposes. It was to protect our own and to protect the world from our own, and for that purpose we took with us old rules and built new, because the rules in blood wasn’t enough, was it? Oh, no. The Master gave up his fire and the Crone gave up her Eye and the Inquisitor gave up its irons and your predecessors replaced their ancient rights with paper and words and told themselves that that would be enough, so long as they held them sacred, so long as they always followed the rules. They kept the kuracar out, because who would give up something so useful, and bent it to the rules to, and we agreed. My predecessors played along, and so did I, and so do I today. But you nine, you think you can take paper and words written long ago and bend them to whatever’s convenient to you at the time, use them as personal, mutable weapons, use them against the very people you serve, casting them off or justifying geases to stoke your own power and ego. And youtell me, that I’mgoing against the rules, because you bend the words to break them secretly and I stand honestly? I agreed to these rules and so did you. If you’ve decided they don’t apply any more, is that what you want? To go back to the real, old ways? To test your power against mine?”

“Are youthreatening this Council, Mr Aksoy?”

“No,” he said. “I’m not. I, unlike you, have respect for the rules that we all agreed to. And I will stand by them, as they were intended, whether you decide to be traitors or not.”

At being called traitors, the Council rose as one, furious. Kylie grabbed my arm. “Meeting’s over, time to go.”

All the witches, and Mr Cooper, got out of there, right as the shouting started. I couldn’t make out anything the people still inside were saying, but they were very angry about it, and their voices carried.

As we moved down the corridor, and their voices faded into the distance, Instruktanto Cooper cleared his throat. “Well,” he said to the initiates, “we should… have a meeting tomorrow. To unpack this.”

“Will we know what’s happening by then?” Alan asked.

“Oh, yes. They’ll make decisions quickly.” He glanced back down the corridor. “I hope you all appreciate how dangerous that was.”

“It wasn’t dangerous,” Cheryl said. “They had no cause to do anything to us.”

“I would’ve said the same thing about myself, last time,” I pointed out. “And that turned out to be wrong.”

“Also,” Instruktanto Cooper said, “you fail to take into account the possibility that any of these initiates might want to continue their education here, if the Council makes the changes they want. Any future political aspirations will be coloured by this. If they ever have to rely on the Council’s good will for anything, they’ll have an uphill battle.”

“I don’t care,” Helen said. “What they were doing to Kylie and Kayden wasn’t okay, and nobody seemed to be doing anything about it. If I do ever become a politician or whatever, it’s better that I’m not the sort of person who wouldn’t have made a stand here. Someone who’d let this kind of thing go so that the Council isn’t mad at them later is someone you wouldn’t want in politics anyway.”

“We’ll discuss this tomorrow,” Instruktanto Cooper said. “Good day, all of you.” He took off down the hall, somewhat awkwardly.

Talbot burst out laughing. “Seven Points, you guys! You all just formed this little political activist group and scared the shit out of the Council! I’m so proud of all of you! Cheryl, isn’t your master a politician? He’s going to hate this.”

“I think he’ll be proud of me for paying so much attention to his advice,” she said. “The entire angle with the High Crone’s daughter was his suggestion.”

“Wait, he – ?”

“If anyone asks, he had no idea about any of this and it’s terrible how I went behind his back like that.”

“You do realise,” Hua said quietly, “that openly pitching the kuracar against the government like that will have massive knock-on effects?”

“No, it won’t. Do you think they haven’t fought before? Mr Aksoy will get pissed at the Council’s decisions and stubbornness, and the Council will get even more stubborn because they’re pissed off at him interfering when he’s technically a random civillian with no political power and the inherent power of holding such a politically important spell scares them in this modern ‘it’s all about families and agreements and democracy and we don’t do power based on what spell you have any more’ system, and one of them will back down and the relevent decision will be reversed. And then they’ll conveniently forget the whole thing happened, because nobody’s interested in an extended fight over nothing, and nobody except us will even know the whole thing happened. I’ve seen enough politicians fight, and it’s always like this.”

“What if the decision goes the wrong way, though?” I asked. “I mean, Kylie and me going to Fionnrath was something that probably would’ve happened anyway, but you’ve put a pretty big stake on reversing it. You’ve put this witch law on the table. And we absolutely don’t ant to lose that – that’s the one good thing that’s come out of, well, a lot of political garbage. Making it easier for witches to come here and learn control, and enter mage society if they want.”

“Is it, though?” Alan asked. “Everything we said in there was completely true. It wasn’t just about you two. If they’re going to pull garbage like that, breaking whatever contracts they want, then we don’t want to have contracts with them. If they’re going to behave like that, then pulling vulnerable, scared witches into this system is a bad thing.”

“Worse than leaving them alone among the nemaganti?” I asked. “Because that’s the alternative.”

“It won’t matter either way,” Cheryl shrugged. “Malas will win this one. Too much work has been put into trying to expand their reach in commonfolk societies, to let them approach younger witches. There’s simply no way that the two compare. The Council are only holding out because they’re stubborn, but Malas is far too invested in the witch law, as are a lot of other people. They might be cheap enough to decide to send Kylie to Fionnrath instead of organising some kind of payout to rent their spell for a lifetime, but not with these laws on the table. Malas will make them see reason. He has too much to lose not to.”

“And they’ll know they can’t just break their own rules and use us as pawns like that,” Jamil said fiercely.

Cheryl smiled. “Well, not to do this specific thing. But in my experience, rich people and politicians are always breaking as many rules as they can get away with, and treat most people like pawns.”

“So we’ll just have to stay alert and be ready for if they ever need another kick in the pants,” Talbot grinned. “Kylie?”

“Right here.”

He swept his free arm around her and kissed the side of her face. “Rescued from the Murdertown! How do you feel?”

“Only one of them tried to kill me, not the whole town,” she corrected him. But she was smiling. “Thanks, guys. That was dangerous, but…”

“It was necessary,” jamil insisted, a scowl on his face. “Nobody else was doing anything! They lure us here because we have these stupid, dangerous curses and we don’t have any choice, and then they go around not keeping their side of the bargain? that’s not happening.”

I studied Jamil’s fierce expression. He was the youngest of the initiates, and, I felt, the most trapped, afraid of the potential dangers of a curse when he had no idea what it did. I remembered being like that. His choices were staying at a school he hated, or possibly inflicting a dangerous curse on his loved ones at home – well, all of them had that choice, I supposed, but he was only twelve, and it weighed so heavily on him.

He didn’t know about the third choice. The easy, fast, apparently harmless third choice that could make all of his problems disappear. Nobody knew about the third choice except me, because straight after I’d discovered it i’d been put under a stupid geas that prevented me from telling anyone.

But these kids deserved to know that they had a third option, a way to render their curses safe without entering any contracts with mages, if they wanted. Fiore had warned me about trying to go against my geas, about how trying to find loopholes would close them and restrict my behaviour more and more like struggling against a noose. Trying to do forbidden things now could leave me with restrictions that I’d have to live with for the rest of my life.

But what was I supposed to do? Not tell them?

“Hey,” I said quietly to Jamil after the conversation had moved on a bit, “are you busy?”

He looked at the others, who were still deep in conversation as we neared the familiar corridors of the school. Then back to me. “Not right now,” he said. “Why?”

“I want to show you something. Something important. Trust me, you’ll want to see this.”

“The others…?”

“Bring them or don’t. You’ll tell them about it later anyway.”

So, about half an hour later, I found myself leading three witch initiates to the Lake of Inquisition.

“Careful,” I said. “The tunnel ends abruptly at the top of a cliff here. Point your light down there… you see it?”

Three glowing tablets angled their light down over the cliff.

“A lake?” Helen asked.

I nodded. “It’s called the Lake of Inquisition. A magical robot monster lives in there, so be careful. If you fall in, it’ll try to drown you.”

All three of them stared at me like they weren’t sure whether I was joking or not.

“I’m one hundred per cent serious,” I said. “I ended up in there on my first day here. Kylie had to save me.”

“So why are you showing us?” Alan asked.

I hesitated. This was the dangerous part. This was the part where I had to be very, very careful not to trigger my geas. But also not too careful, or I might find and close loopholes for myself just by overthinking things. Ugh. This was a terrible idea.

“We’re here,” I said, “because I know you’re all worried. You have a hard choice to make. Do you stay here, under the stewardship of a bunch of mages you can’t trust? Or go home, with all the fears and worries that sent you to this school in the first place, except even worse because everyone knows you’re witches now? Well.” I gestured to the water. “I’m here to sho you your third option.”

They looked at the water. Then back at me.

“I assume you don’t mean drowning,” Alan said.

“No! No, I… look. I… there are reasons that I can’t explain this directly, but… okay. You guys know my history, right? You all saw the trial over the thing at my school.”

“Yeah,” Helen said. “Of course.”

“You know how my innocence was proven. And you know that years later, nothing’s changed – I still can’t do magic.” That wasn’t technically true – I could work with potions and runes just fine. But I didn’t want to specify about my ability to at-will cast in case it triggered the geas.

“That’s a good thing, though, right?” Jamil said. “I mean, you have no idea what that thing in you does. Why would you want to wake it up?”

I nodded. “That’s a valid perspective. And I can see why you’d feel obligated to stick around here, even if you don’t like the place, just for safety. But there’s a difference between you and me, and that’s that I’ve been in that lake.” They looked confused. I was going to have to provide more context. Carefully.

“There’s a thing in there,” I said. “A magical machine with tentacles. If you go in the water, it’ll try to grab you, and it’ll try to drown you.”

“Yeah, you said that.”

“It’ll also get its smallest tenacles, thin as a hair, under your skin. It’ll cut you up inside, cut very, very small channels into your body, so small that Malas won’t even be able to tell they’re recent injuries. It cut a pattern over my heart. A runic circle.”

Comprehension began to dawn on their faces. They knew where my spell lived in my body.

“My friend Max was studying runes, and he had a look at the pattern for me. It’s apparently very effective at binding magic.”

“You found a cursebinding method that actually works?” Alan asked.

I didn’t respond. I was worried that even a nod might be too much for the geas. We were being pretty vague, so I was probably fine, but there was no need to take unnecessary chances. Especially since overthinking possible loopholes was a danger in itself.

“You’re telling us,” Jamil said, “that this place has a way to bind curses and they never even told us?! They could’ve given us this and sent us home but they just threw us in their school instead? Why?!”

“You know why,” Helen said. “They want us here. Why would we stay, and go through their dangerous Initiation and everything, if they couldn’t hold curse ontrol over our heads?”

I knew that wasn’t a fair accusation. I was pretty sure that the school as a hole had never considered using the Lake of Inquisition for cursebinding. Its job was to kill spells; my situation, being rescued at the right time, was anomalous. They weren’t concealing anything from the initiates, so much as it hadn’t occurred to anyone to throw kids into a deadly, long-abandoned part of their infrastructure to take advantage of a side effect that it hadn’t occurred to them existed.

But even if I felt like defending the school, I was powerless to do so. I couldn’t risk talking about the nature of curses, after all. Ha! Should’ve thought of that, Lord Solus.

“So you think we should, what? Jump in the lake?” Alan asked.

I shrugged. “I’d use a safety line rather than jumping in if you don’t want to drown. Really, it’s up to you. I brought you here because I had information that you had a right to. No you have it, and the rest is up to you. If you want to use it, let me know and I’ll guide you back here.”

“We can probably find our on way here, the route isn’t complicated,” Helen said. “Thank you. For telling us.”

“If you can find it again without my help, let me know. That’d be unexpected and really important information. But for now, let’s get out of here. We’ve spent enough time in weird off-campus tunnels today.”

The initiates were quiet on the way back to the school. Lost in thought.

They had a very important decision to make.

Shortly after I got back to my room, I got a message from Fiore, informing me that the Council’s decision on Kylie’s contract had been reversed. From the tone of the message, it was clear that he had no idea what had transpired; I could tell, because he seemed to be subtlely trying to take credit for the change himself.

I let him. I could always correct him if he tried to hold it over me later. But I’d dealt with enough political bullshit for one day.