4.50: The Lake of Inquisition

Saina got out of the hospital the next day. Despite my fears, she wasn’t pulled out of school. (There were probably political reasons, I supposed, why the leader of Refujeyo pulling their child out of the school and showing a lack of faith in an entire third of the Refujeyo government might be a bad idea.) She could stay… with some concessions.

I tried to ignore the two bodyguards while I crushed basil in our little potion workshop, but they didn’t make it easy. The muscular, tattooed woman was the same one who’d stopped me from seeing Saina in the hospital, and she had the kind of presence that seemed to take up the majority of whatever room she was in. Her much smaller partner was far less imposing, but carefully scrutinised everything either of us picked up through a pair of large, dark glasses. From the way his eyes lingered on anything magical, it didn’t take a genius to figure out that his glasses were probably enchanted with some kind of magic-detecting spell. I didn’t like the way his gaze lingered on me.

“Hey, hey!” Saina snatched the pestle from my hand. “We want it crushed, but we don’t want a paste!”

“Right. Sorry.”

“Are you alright?”

“Yeah. Just… glad you’re okay.” I hadn’t seen Max since our fight the previous night. I wasn’t sure if he was avoiding me, or if our schedules just hadn’t lined up. Sometimes, if he was working in Alania’s lab late and getting up early, I didn’t see him for a couple of days; that was fine. And even if he was avoiding me, that was… that was fine. Saina was okay, and I’d apologise to Max soon, and then everything would be back to normal.

I took the pestle back, and caught Saina’s fingers with my other hand, raising them up for a quick kiss. She giggled.

“The potion will be ruined if we don’t get the basil in soon,” she pointed out.

“Shit! Right! The potion!” I got back to work.

I kept an eye on Saina while we worked, in case she was still hurt and hiding it, but aside from the blue magic holding her skin and cracked skull together, she seemed perfectly fine. She could’ve been so badly hurt. We’d been so lucky. Again. I just hoped that we could keep being lucky.

After our little potioncrafting session, I had something else to do. Something important, but risky. I took a deep breath, mentally went over my game plan one more time, and knocked on Fiore’s door.

“Come on in, Kayden,” he called.

I did. He set out two cups of tea and sat down. “So. How have you been?”

“Well, you know,” I shrugged. “Someone tried to assassinate my girlfriend.”

“Ah, yes. I’m sorry that you had to go through that. Rest assured that she’s perfectly well protected now. Whoever made that attempt won’t get a second chance.”

I shrugged. “Maybe not, but I’m pretty sure half the school wants to assassinate her now for getting pit comps banned while they investigate.” There was no point in trying to convince Fiore that the thing with the Pit had been an accident because of a failing system; if the higher-ups were convinced it was an assassination attempt, why would he believe any different? Anyway, I wanted to know how much he knew without me telling him.

Fiore might know something important. Or he might not. We were running out of leads and out of time, enough so that I was desperate enough to start feeling out whether he’d be helpful. Max had said that it should be fine so long as I didn’t give him reason to suspect we were going to, you know, destroy the entire foundation of mage society and all that, but that shouldn’t be too difficult. All I needed was a believable, misleading reason why I might be investigating something. Same as Dr Peterson and the whole memory wiping potion thing. I needed something to talk to him about that would give me an idea of how helpful he might be, but wasn’t directly related to the whole Hero and Child thing.

I had the perfect thing for that.

“You’re supposed to help me make sense of stuff in the school, right?” I asked.

“That is part of my job, yes. There’s something you’re confused about?”

I stared contemplatively into my tea for a few seconds, deciding how, specifically, to approach this. Fiore tried to hide it, but he leaned forward just a little, watched me with just a bit too much intensity.

“There’s something I’ve been trying to figure out for a while,” I said. “Something happened to me, when I first came here, and I can’t make sense of it.”

“Yes?”

“On my first day here, I got lost and ended up in a lake. I… this is going to sound really weird, but I swear it’s true, ask Miratova if you don’t believe me… I got attacked by some kind of lake monster. That doesn’t make sense, right? Some kind of big octopus or something, I don’t know, just in a lake in the school, no warning signs or nothing! You have to admit that that’s weird!”

“I suppose,” Fiore said cautiously.

“Right, so I tried to look into it, and I can’t find anything about it. Cooper wouldn’t tell me what it was. Miratova wouldn’t tell me what it was.” This wasn’t true; I’d never asked either of them about it. But Alania had tried to discourage Max from investigating the school, so it would have been in character for her to brush off the lake monster if I’d asked. In character enough for Fiore to believe it. “I figured, okay, nobody’s going to help me with this, but… I mean, I’m leaving in five months. I have to go with Kylie. I just want to know what happened to me before then.”

Fiore shrugged. “I’m not sure that there’s much to say,” he said. “This place is old, and it’s full of things that once had a use and are now just there, without any obvious purpose. My advice is to move on.”

Did that mean he knew something about the lake, or that he didn’t? I’d need to press further.

“I can’t just move on. I nearly died because of something that doesn’t even make sense! I figured I’d have years to get to the bottom of this, but I don’t. So. If you can’t help me either, then I’ll just have to go poking around myself.” Again.

“You won’t find it again,” Fiore said. “No mater how hard you look. This place is a maze, I’m surprised that you ended up there even once.” He sipped his tea.

He did know something about it, then. “Of course I will,” I said. “It’s easy, there are a couple of routes down there from the school. It’s not very far.”

Fiore fumbled his cup and set it carefully down. “You’re been back?” he asked.

“Um. Yes?”

“On purpose?”

“… Yes? Why?”

“Can you take me there?”

“Why?”

“Not for anything nefarious. I just want to be sure that we’re talking about the same lake.”

“Are there multiple underground lakes with monsters in them that I should be worried about?”

“Kayden.”

Well, this seemed incredibly suspicious in every possible way. What the hell did Fiore want with the lake? ‘Not for anything nefarious’, he’d said. What did he want to do?

Probably nothing more damaging than what we were going to do. And this could be a way to gain some leverage.

“I’ll show you the way,” I said, “if you tell me what it is, and what it’s doing there.”

“… Fine. That’s fair.”

“Great.” I stood up. “Let’s go.”

About twenty minutes later, we were overlooking the empowered lake. I’d taken Fiore via the valley, through the route I’d discovered accidentally with di Fiore. It meant that we were overlooking the water from a tunnel high up in the cliffside, nowhere near the gentle slope to the shore, so Fiore would have a hard time actually accessing the lake from this route, if he was planning on doing anything nefarious.

“Huh,” he said. “There it is. The Lake of Inquisition.” But he’d barely spared the lake a glance. He was mostly staring at me.

“What?” I asked. Did I have something on my face.

“You came here on your first day?”

“Yeah, by accident.”

“And you’ve returned on purpose since? Like this?”

“Um. Yes? Why?”

“Have you told anyone else about this?”

I edged away from the cliff. “You know that’s the most supervillain thing you’ve ever said, right?”

“What? I – ” he laughed. “I suppose it is. This place isn’t a secret, if that’s what you’re worried about. It’s just supposed to be more secure than this.”

“Secure?”

“It’s a, well, a delicate location. It’s complicated.”

“Is that why I can’t find any information on it? It’s like a state secret kind of thing? The Area 51 of the mage world?”

“I don’t know what that means, but if you’ve been looking at resources available in the school itself, you won’t find much. You’d need to talk to architects, or historians. The Inquisition, perhaps. There are a lot of things in mage history that is better forgotten.”

“Like the thing in there? What is it?”

“It’s complic – ”

“You said you’d tell me.”

“I did, yes.” Fiore hesitated. “Promise you won’t get upset.”

I narrowed my eyes. “Oh, so it’s something I should be upset about. Good to know.”

“It’s… I want to emphasise that it’s a device from a more desperate time. When we didn’t have the resources or common practices that we do today. It was only ever for the most desperate of circumstances, even back then, and it hasn’t been in use for centuries. It’s only here because removing parts of the school’s architecture is risky and difficult.”

“And what’s it for?”

Fiore sighed. “A long time ago, during the Purity Revolution, this place was established as a haven for the bearers of magic. Several of the more powerful mage lineages all around the world saw the danger posed by a world that was growing more and more hostile to magic every day, and they realised that their best chance was to stand together, united and organised. Thus, Refujeyo was built.”

“I know,” I said impatiently.

“This place was supposed to be somewhere that anybody touched by magic could be safe. Our predecessors welcomed those with history and respect int heir communities, helped them to relocate and work together under a new system. And those without such privileges, kids who’d woken up with a spell one day and been hunted by their own fearful communities. Eventually, the construction of the Pit made spell inheritance safer and more streamlined, but the Pit was a long, complicated project. As I’m sure you’re aware, some spells are a lot easier to handle than others, and those without a lineage of inheritance tend to be the most unpredictable and difficult to safely handle.

“If a boy shows up with an unknown curse that hurt someone by pushing them off a roof, that’s not particularly dangerous. You get to work finding out what exactly his spell can do, and teach him to control it. If a girl shows up with a complicated prophecy that foretels doom, frantic that misinterpretation has lead to innocent people getting killed, that’s not a problem. You investigate the prophecy and find her a qualified teacher. But what do you suppose happens if, for example, you catch wind of a baby carrying the Mandrake’s Curse, a curse that kills anyone who hears their voice? You can’t teach a baby to control that. At that point, Sekura Refujeyo needs to send people in to make a decision. There are a few ways to deal with a problem like that, but the kindest and most straightforward is usually to find a deaf surgeon.”

“That’s – ”

“Better than the alternatives. Better that someone grows up mute than with a body count. Better than leaving the kid out there to kill its guardians until someone kills it out of desperation, freeing the curse to infect somebody else, and create the same problems all over again. Take the cursed kid in, give them a good education and a secure future, where they can kee the curse harmlessly trapped inside themselves for the rest of their life and be part of our community instead of an active danger in their parents’. These are the sorts of choices that Sekura Refujeyo have to make. For a long time, in the early days, it was one of their primary purposes.

“But let’s say there’s a different curse running around. Let’s say that somebody has… oh, let’s go with Midas’ Touch. Everything they touch has a chance of turning to gold. How do you contain this? How do you give them a decent chance of a life, without putting others at risk? You could try imprisoning them somewhere, isolating them for the rest of their life and having lots of resources on hand to replace anything they turn to gold, but what kind of a life is that? You can’t disable Midas’ Touch with a mere throat surgery. That person simply cannot have a normal life. Every moment they are alive, they are dangerous, and when they die, the curse will be free. Free to infect a new host. If you’re trying to keep magekind safe, what do you do when you hear about someone like that running around?”

I looked away. I knew the answer, from a hundred bedtime stories as a kid; if you lose control of your curse, the mages will come, and they’ll kill you. A curse like that, that couldn’t be rendered safe…

Except, that wasn’t the answer, was it? Because then, as Fiore had said, the curse would be free to find a new host.

“At that point,” Fiore said quietly, “you need a way to kill a spell. And that’s what the Lake of Inquisition was for. This,” Fiore gestured over the lake with one arm, “was what they used to destroy magic.”