4.68: Stalking

“What does any of this mean?” I asked.

Kylie shrugged. “It might still be a coincidence. They might not be involved.”

“How could they possibly not be involved at this point?”

“Maybe it’s just protocol. If anyone ends up in the Labyrinth of Dreams, maybe it’s protocol to rescue them and wipe their memory. And as for Max’s stuff, maybe these notes have a specific recipient, and there’s been a problem. Like, maybe his personal effects go to his family and his research goes to Alania, or something, and she hasn’t been available, so they haven’t moved his notes yet.”

“And what about them guiding both of us to the Lake of Inquisition?”

“Maybe there just happened to be a janitor working in that area at that moment. I was following you; I went off the map in the same place you did. If there was a janitor working there, it’s not surprising that we both ran into them, and both ended up chasing them to the same place.”

“To that specific place, though? The heart of the school?”

“Well, you said yourself that it’s not impossible for you have ended up there by accident. You found another route there by accident later, didn’t you? With di Fiore? So, if it’s not impossible for you to find it accidentally, and I was following you and heard the same guy you followed…”

“That raises another good question, actually. How did I find a second route to the lake when I was fighting him over the fake Guardian Ring? That’s a hell of a coincidence, right?”

“Were you following any janitors that time?”

“No; I was just picking paths on impulse. It doesn’t matter. Point is, I’m pretty sure that if the janitors didn’t want us in that lake, they would have rescued us, right? That’s part of what they do. That one janitor we followed knew I’d fallen in, at least, so they would’ve gone for help right away, wouldn’t they? But they didn’t; Alania didn’t arrive for ages. They led us there and then left us there; it had to be deliberate.”

“Maybe they didn’t realise you’d fallen – ”

“Come on, Kylie.”

“Yeah, okay, I know. But if they are involved, what exactly are we supposed to do? We can’t grab a random janitor and try to make them talk.”

“Do you think Fionnrath’s Destiny might have any advice about them?”

“I really, really doubt it. It’d almost definitely just confuse and mislead us by accident.”

“Yeah. We’re better off going as far as we can without the prophecy. We can always turn to it later.” I bit my lip. I didn’t say what I knew we were both thinking; getting Fionnrath’s Destiny to say anything when it wasn’t giving a death prophecy would require being in a highly magical or Destiny-empowering location, and the only one of those that we had easy access to was Duniyasar. Where Max had died. No; we didn’t need Destiny. “We should… follow one, maybe? Secretly. Without them noticing.”

Kylie stared. “How?”

“Janitors are everywhere. They have to clean everything.”

“They come out when nobody’s around as often as they can. On the rare occasions we do actually see them, we’re supposed to ignore them. And they definitely know the school’s tunnels a hundred times better than we do. There’s no way we could follow oe without being noticed. And the only way to call them is to sound the alarm for an emergency, so unless you’re planning to do anything that’s likely to cause one…”

“This school doesn’t have a set schedule,” I pointed out. “Lessons and stuff are run 24 hours. That means there’s students in the halls 24 hours. There’s no ‘after hours’ to clean or anything; the janitors are just doing their best to get to our rooms and stuff when they’re empty, right?”

“Right...”

“So, I’m thinking they probably have service tunnels of their own, right? The only time I see them in school tunnels is when they’re cleaning and stuff. If they were travelling through the normal school tunnels, we’d see them there all the time. We don’t need to follow them; at least, not very far. We just need to find out where their tunnels are, and… well, then decide how to explore from there, I guess.”

“So you want to, what, stay in our room all day until they show up? Then somehow sneakily follow them out?”

“Wouldn’t work. When I was on three-day lockdowns with Saina, the janitors just didn’t show up for those days. But there’s one location that gets used at all hours that they absolutely can’t afford to leave alone. The mess hall! The food there constantly needs to be replaced, right? They probably have a kitchen really close by with a hidden entrance, or something.”

“Yes!” Kylie’s eyes lit up. “We probably won’t see much doing that, but at this stage, any information is good information. It’s unfortunate that we’re just two people; staking the place out will look suspicious.”

“We shouldn’t have to do it for long,” I pointed out. “They have three different meals per day and presumably they have to change the food out more often than that as it gets eaten. Anyway, we can stake it out in shifts, which would look less suspicious.”

“No, we should go together. If we’re there long enough to look suspicious at all, then going in shifts would probably be more suspicious than two friends having an absurdly long lunch together. And two pairs of eyes gives us a much better chance of success.” She bit her lip. “Of course, we don’t know if we’re being watched; if there were some way to avoid suspicion completely.”

“Oh!” I grinned. “I think there is!” I scrambled back over Max’s bed and reclaimed my own. After a minute or so of rummaging through my wardrobe, I produced a set of robes. “Ta-da!”

Kylie frowned. “You’re going to… wear your nicest clothing to lunch.”

“We’regoing to wear our nicest clothing to lunch. Think about it. We’re a couple of low-status mage students with a weird claim to fame,” I tapped my familiarity mark, “who’re constantly, accidentally involved in politics, and we just lost our high-status benefactor. I don’t know if anyone knows that we just refused an Acanthos adoption, but either way – ”

“You want to make it look like we’re waiting for someone else, for some political meeting,” she said. “Or scouting someone out, or something. Social climbing.”

“We see legacy mages doing their little social politics over lunch all the time, and there’s no way we don’t have a reputation as social climbers after everything.”

“That’s your fault. You dated Magistus and now Saina.”

“You were the one who wanted to be roommates with our old roommate in the first place,” I told her. “I blame you. Point is, everyone always expects us to be playing politics. So why not use it? We’re going to be sitting around for a long time, trying to look like we’re innocently eating a really long lunch, while watching everyone, so...”

“If we’re going to look suspicious, we might as well look like it’s over something harmless. I like it. People will find it inappropriate to ask questions, and if they do, evasiveness will be expected.”

“Exactly! Clear your schedule, Kylie – you and I are having a political luncheon.”

Keeping an eye out for someone that you’ve spent the last couple of years teaching yourself to ignore completely is actually pretty hard, especially when you’re too bored to force yourself to properly pay attention. An hour into our Absurdly Long Lunch, I almost didn’t notice the brown-swathed figure that showed up to collect some empty dishes. My eyes just slid right over them.

“There!” Kylie said, subtly gripping my knee under the table and pointing the figure out with a small flick of her fingers. They were heading for one of the many entrances into the mess hall. “Should we…?”

“Not yet,” I said. We watched them leave.

Fifteen minutes later, another janitor (or possibly the same one?) came through the same entrance to set down a plate of tiny sandwiches. After another half an hour, a third came in with fresh cutlery. When they turned to leave through the same entrance, I stood up. “Okay,” I said. “Looks like they all use one route. The kitchen must be through there.”

“If we do find their kitchen and service halls and stuff, do we have a plan for actually spying on them there without getting caught?” Kylie asked.

“Nope. One thing at a time.”

The mess hall was almost deserted. The janitors tended to come in during the least active times, which wasn’t really a surprise. Kylie pulled up the school map on her tablet, like we were innocently heading off on some unfamiliar route to a new Totally Non Suspicious Location, and we completely coincidentally headed for the same exit as the janitor.

Following someone who you’re used to ignoring, and who expects you to ignore them, is both harder and easier than you’d think. We couldn’t look at the janitor directly, couldn’t really watch them, but awkwardly following them at some distance wasn’t all that suspicious. We were coincidentally using the same hall, after all, and were trailing behind to be polite.

We didn’t have to follow them for very long, anyway. We were barely our of the mess hall when, about ten metres ahead of us, the janitor turned a corner; we raced to catch up, and they were gone. The hall they’d turned into was perfectly straight, with no turns and no doorways to duck into, for a good hundred metres; unless they’d broken into a run at inhuman speeds the moment they’d turned the corner, they should be in sight.

A few years ago, this would’ve been confusing, but I’d been at Refujeyo long enough to know how this sort of thing worked by now. With the portals scattered throughout the halls, it wasn’t unusual for someone to turn a corner ahead of you and be gone by the time you got there, if they were heading to a different location than you. The school portals sent you to different halls depending on the route you’d taken to get to them, and the janitor was clearly headed somewhere that we either hadn’t taken the correct route to get to, or didn’t have access to.

I stepped forward into the new, straight hall, and backward, a couple of times. Based on my experience, I assumed that the portals in the school were built into blind corners, not straight halls or places where you were likely to be in people’s line of sight. Otherwise, students would disconcertingly disappear in front of each other every so often, and I’d never known that to happen; you always lost track of people when they moved out of your sight. But moving back and forward through where I expected the portal to be did not magically grant me access to the kitchen. I sighed.

“Well,” I said. “This wasn’t a complete waste of time, but it can’t exactly be called a great leap forward.”

Kylie nodded. “They probably have access to places we don’t. Or took a specific route to get to the mess hall – probably through the tunnels we’re looking for – that will allow them to get back. Or… huh. Or the opposite.” She was squinting closely at the wall.

“What is it?” I asked.

She pointed. It took me a moment to see what she was looking at – a seam in the stone, a faint line running vertically up the wall where one side of stone just barely didn’t quite match the other. It ran along the floor, too, and up the other wall. A ring all the way around us.

“The portal,” I said. “One side of this is on a different location to the other side. So what?”

“So,” she said, “what if theirs isn’t? We’re shunted through portals all the time, but the janitors are maintenance and emergency staff. They’re the people you call on if there’s a problem. If something happened that affected the portal network...”

“Then you’d want you emergency staff unimpeded,” I said, catching on. “You don’t think this portal sent the janitor and us to different places. You think it’s teleporting us, but not moving the janitor at all.”

She nodded. “It’s a theory.”

“I’ve got some rock climbing pitons and a hammer in our room. I could destroy this portal and – ”

“Woah, woah! What are you trying to do, get us arrested?”

“… Yeah, okay. But we’ve got to disable it somehow.” I bit my lip. “Man, if only I’d been – ” My throat locked up. I struggled with it, choking, until I remembered to stop trying to talk and concentrate on breathing normally. “Fuck!”

“You alright?”

“Yeah; I forgot about this stupid fucking geas.” What I’d wanted to say was ‘if only I’d been right, back when I’d thought my curse was some kind of universal temporary counterspell. I’d probably have mastered it by now, and could knock this portal out easy.’ But apparently that counted as talking about the nature of curses, and was off-limits.

I thought of the kid who’d put me under the geas, eyes wide and serious, Malas’ bright blue magic across his throat. What had he done to someone, to make them try to kill him? My geas was inconvenient, but I wouldn’t cut someone’s throat over it. I’d gotten off easily, I suppose. Who knew what the Council would do if they found us messing around trying to follow the janitors? If they found out what we intended to do? What kind of geas – ?

Well, no, that was a stupid question. They’d probably just kill us. Or at least imprison us for life.

“Okay,” I said. “So we need to bypass this portal in some way that’s not going to get us arrested.”

“We’ve gotten into harder places,” Kylie said.

“We always nearly die in those places, Kylie.”

“Pessimist.”