4.51: Going On Ahead

“Destroy magic?” I asked. “How?”

“Modern enchantments are designed so that a spell trapped in an object is freed if the runic circle is destroyed beyond repair. But there are other runic languages that have other ways of doing things. You know how to empower water, yes?”

“In theory,” I shrugged. There were specific ways to put power into water or oil for potionmaking, via direct channelling or ichor extraction. It was fiddly, exhausting, and the return was extremely low for the power you put in, which is why everyone just bought their empowered water from Refujeyo, which (if Max’s theories were right) used water as a kind of energy dampener to absorb the runoff from its big rune tunnels that people were always moving through.

Fiore nodded. “The Lake of Inquisition has a device in it that binds magic. It binds magic exceptionally well, traps it too tightly to use. It traps it too tightly to escape. Then, the person carrying the dangerous spell is submerged.”

“And they drown.”

“Yes. They drown, but the spell can’t escape. Once they are dead and the spell is released, it’s still trapped in their body. It leaks slowly, the energy absorbed by the water as the body decays, empowering it. If anything of the spell escapes the water at all, it’s too damaged to do anything but dissipate harmlessly.” He grimaced at the lake. “It’s an ugly thing, from a more desperate time. We don’t do this any more.”

“What happens now, then? To those… unmanageable spells?”

“We keep their hosts as comfortable and safe as possible, the same as we do for anyone who comes here. When they die, their spells are captured by the Pit, rather than released back out into the world. It’s a simple matter to keep them locked away and avoid using them for initiations. So. Does that answer your questions about what happened to you?”

“Yeah,” I said. “It does, actually. Thanks.” Fiore clearly knew a lot about the history and structure of Refujeyo. This could be useful. I just needed to figure out what I needed to learn, and how to ask without raising suspicions.

He was still watching me carefully. Appraisingly. “You said you found this place on your first day?” he asked. “And it nearly killed you?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“How did you get out?”

Kylie had found me and pulled me out of the water. But I didn’t like the way Fiore was looking at me. Best not to rope her into this.”

“I, uh, I got out, and then Alania showed up and saved us.”

“Us?”

Shit. “Me.”

“… Right. Miratova didn’t send you here or anything?”

“No! No, she was really annoyed at me, actually. Her rescuing me was the first time we ever met.”

“Hmm.”

“Why? What’s with all the questions?”

“She didn’t seem unusual to you?”

Oh. I relaxed. This was more of his ‘Alania Miratova is doing something weird involving a bunch of suspicious young mages’ conspiracy theory. I shrugged. “I didn’t know her at the time, so I couldn’t say. She mostly seemed annoyed that I’d interrupted what she was doing, and worried about my safety. Wrote a scathing report to Cooper, who was my surveyato at the time.

“And then you, what, kept coming back here?”

I shrugged. “I’ve been here a few times since. Why do you want to know? I haven’t been swimming in the lake and playing toesies with the spellbinding lake monster or anything.” Falling in with di Fiore that one time didn’t count. And deliberately getting caught so I could get samples of the tentacles also didn’t count.

“Right. Just… keep yourself safe.”

“Hey, don’t worry. I’m only here five more months; I promise not to get myself horribly drowned in that time.”

“I wouldn’t count on it,” Fiore murmured.

“On not getting drowned?!”

“On leaving in five months. Don’t worry. We’re working on it.”

“‘We’?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

Standing with my surveyato in the harsh light of my tablet in a hidden cave overlooking an ancient execution device while he said vague bullshit like that, I wished, not for the first time, that Fiore looked less like a Disney villain. “Can we get out of here?” I asked.

“Of course. Lead the way.”

Back in my room, I laid on my bed and stared at stone above for a while. So. That’s what the magical tentacle machine was for. It had bound my spell in my heart for the purpose of killing it. By killing me.

That explained the poor bastard whose rune-etched skeleton had been among the junk under the lake, I supposed. Nobody had been around to save them before the tentacles could finish their work. I wondered who they’d been. Somebody who’d gone missing, I supposed, their body never found (it would have been removed if it had been found). I couldn’t even bring myself to figure out if I should be angry about the whole thing, about a big lake built to dispose of witches who were just too much trouble to accommodate. I had too many current problems to spend time deciding whether to be mad about one from a couple of hundred years ago.

I could see why it hadn’t come up in magical history classes, though. Skolala Refujeyo was always pretty cagey about anything to do with Refujeyo’s construction and early years, but that little tidbit especially… yeah. Not great PR, when they were so actively trying to get as many new witch students as possible.

It was kind of funny, in a way, in that if I had’ve been a lot more proactive on solving that little mystery, things could’ve gone pretty badly. I mean, if I’d learned about what that lake could do while we still thought that the Child and Hero prophecy was about my spell? Yeah. I mean, I wouldn’t have done it. But I would’ve thought about it an awful lot. Instead, now, it was kind of an afterthought. I’d learned about an execution machine that could destroy curses, something that would’ve been the biggest discovery ever at any other time in my life, and compared to what I was trying to deal with now, it just straight-up didn’t matter.

Good thing, too, since I couldn’t risk telling Max and Kylie about it. There was probably a way to convey the information without ‘talking about the nature of curses’, but I’d rather not have to try to tiptoe around my geas if I could help it.

Did this explain why our familiarity link was so stable? Maybe. If this thing could bind a spell inside a body so completely that it couldn’t be activated and it couldn’t be released even in death, then maybe that’s why Kylie’s magic couldn’t spiral out of control in my body and kill me. Or let me go, for that matter; it might be why we couldn’t cancel the link, too. Did that make sense? Maybe. This sort of thing was more Max’s area than mine.

I spent the rest of the day sort of in a daze, until I was getting ready for bed and Kylie burst in, looking stressed. “Have you seen Max?” she asked.

“Not today.” I ducked into the bathroom to brush my teeth. “He’s probably super busy, you know how he gets sometimes.”

“Yeah. Maybe. Only, he doesn’t usually turn off his location on the map, does he?”

“No… why?”

“Well, I started checking for him on the map seven hours ago and – ”

I dropped my toothbrush in the sink and almost tripped over spinning around to stare at her. “He’s been off-campus for at least seven hours?”

“Looks that way.” She bit her lip.

Right. Right. That was no need to panic. “No need to panic,” I said. “I know last time, he… but he promised not to do anything that stupid alone again. He promised not to go behind our backs into dangerous places again.”

“Right. Of course. He’s… probably just getting something for Alania. Or doing some research somewhere. And he just didn’t think to tell us he’d be a long time, or he just… lost track of time. You know how he is.”

“Right. Yes. Of course. He’s not lost track of time for seven hours before, but you’re right. He did promise.”

“Yeah. He wouldn’t run off and do something stupid without us. Even if he did go to Duniyasar or something, it’s probably just to do some research, not… you know.”

“Yeah.” I nodded. “Anyway, he couldn’t do something stupid, because he can’t get to Duniyasar without you, so…”

“Well, in theory he could; he has permission to be there. But I never taught him the entrance runes or anything.”

“Right.” I paused. “Of course, he does have an absurdly good memory for runes, and he’s seen three separate people draw those entrance runes. He’s probably seen you do them a dozen times by now.”

“That’s true.” Kylie paused. “But even if he did go there to research, he wouldn’t – ”

“Of course he wouldn’t. He promised.”

“He did promise. And you trust him, right?”

“Of course I trust him! You trust him, right?”

“I absolutely trust him!”

We stared at each other for an eternal five seconds or so.

“Hey,” Kylie said, “fancy a trip to Duniyasar?”

“Points, yes!” I grabbed a coat. “Just for, you know.”

“To see if he needs help with the research he might be doing there! Not – ”

“Not that we think he might’ve gone down the well alone,” I agreed. “He just might be there doing other stuff, and need help.”

“Exactly!”

Five minutes later, Malas was glaring at us, arms crossed, as Kylie traced the entrance rune on the glass door.

“Do you really have to contaminate my nice clean hospital every time?” he asked. “Isn’t there another way?”

“Blame whoever put the door in here,” Kylie said. “Has Max been through here today?”

“I don’t know. I just got here. I can ask my apprentice whether anybody made extra cleaning work for him, if you like.”

“It’d probably be faster to check ourselves,” I shrugged.

Malas threw up his hands. “Of course it would. Why waste an perfectgly good opportunity to cover my hospital in blood?”

Kylie pulled open the door, and we ran out onto the sands of Duniyasar.

Max wasn’t immediately in sight, but we hadn’t expected him to be. We made our way into the building and made for the central room at the base of the tower. What we saw there made my heart drop like a stone.

The well in the centre of the assembly room was right there, where it had always been, but there had been some changes. Its usual crown of mirrors had been carefully dismantled and set aside, and surrounding it was a clean, strong, new-looking metal frame of some kind with a single metal crossbar across the top of the well. A rope hung from it, down into the well itself.

I went to inspect the rope. It was climbing rope, the kind I used. The sort of thing the store would give you if you just went up and ordered a rock climbing rope. I tugged on it; it was heavy, very heavy. Either it was anchored to something at the bottom, or it was very, very long.

I swallowed around the lump in my throat. “Maybe he’s just been busy setting this up,” I suggested. “Preparing for when he convinces us to go down with him. Maybe he’s set this up and gone back to the room and we missed – ” I caught sight of what Kylie had just picked up, and my next word froze in my throat.

It was a coat. The kind of thing you might wear if you were going to a desert location and expected to be there after dark, but that you’d toss aside to, for example, put on a climbing harness and descend down a well.

It was Max’s coat.

“Oh, that stupid, stupid bastard,” I breathed.