4.35: The Device

Fiore watched me, patient, smiling, waiting for an answer. I quickly assessed my options.

One: I could tell him. I could just explain as much of our adventure under the school as the geas would let me, and let him figure out the rest. This was a promising idea; the whole reason I’d picked him as a surveyanto was to have someone else to fight in our corner if we needed it, and boy did we need it now. This was absolutely the time to pull out all stops and make myself look as valuable to him as possible; would explaining this do that? Would it give him information that he didn’t already have? Or at least hint that I might have information he didn’t already have? It was worth a shot, right?

Except that I’d already shot my stupid mouth once today and gotten myself bewitched and endangered my friends. So maybe I shouldn’t go making any more impulsive truth bomb decisions without thinking things over. Talking to Max, at the very least. Max would know better than me how to handle this.

Two: lie. I could say that I’d read or heard about it somewhere… no, he’d want to know where, and that’d blow up in my face really fast. I could say it was a lucky guess, that I’d noticed my own reluctance to tell people and drawn conclusions… no, he’d never buy that. He’d know that I wouldn’t have used it as a threat if it was a guess. It would have weakened the threat too much if I’d been wrong.

So it’d have to be option three, then. I opened my mouth and tried to directly tell Fiore what curses were.

“Stop, stop!” he said, as my throat locked up. “I’m sorry, I should’ve foreseen that. Obviously this would be close enough to – stop trying to talk, you’re going to hurt yourself.”

I tried to look angry and frustrated, which wasn’t hard, since those had been my baseline feelings since meeting the High Council. I wasn’t half as worried about hurting myself as Fiore was. He was worried I was trying to outsmart the geas, closing loopholes, but I hadn’t done that. I’d just bashed into it straight-on. There were no loopholes there to close.

It still wasn’t comfortable, though, to have control of my own body temporarily wrested away like that. I stopped talking and took a few breaths to reassure myself that I still could, then a sip of juice.  My throat worked fine. I wasn’t having a seizure or anything. This was fine.

“Are you alright?” Fiore asked.

“Yeah.”

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked.”

“It’s not your fault. I shouldn’t have tried to answer. I knew what I was going to say; you didn’t. We should’ve had this conversation about two hours ago, before all that. Terrible timing.”

“Yes,” Fiore said, in a considering sort of tone. Probably already trying to figure out how to ask me for information without triggering the geas. Yeah, I was definitely going to need to talk this over with Max.

“I should go,” I said, standing up. “Thanks for trying to help.”

Fiore raised a brow. “Trying? Oh, this isn’t over. That jumped-up Council know that their reasoning for essentially banishing your mage is flimsy, or they wouldn’t have announced it in such a rushed, underhanded way. And getting rid of you by proxy, as an unfortunate practical side effect of being her familiar that they’ve decided to make your responsibility, is an act of sheer cowardice. Don’t start packing your bags just yet.”

Back in our room, Kylie wasn’t on her tablet, hiding behind closed bedcurtains. She just sat on the end of her bed, staring at her hands.

“You alright?” I asked.

She nodded. “You?”

I shrugged.

“Alania thinks this is her fault,” she said quietly.

“What? How? She was fighting to keep us, wasn’t she?”

“She’s the one who discovered that I had Fionnrath’s Destiny. If she hadn’t looked into it, nothing with the Fionnrath teacher, or with any of this – ”

“If she hadn’t done her job? We asked her to help us with our – with everything!” (I was being overcautious. I was sure I could say the word ‘curse’ and be fine. But I’d rather stay well away from my new magical restrictions than have my throat frozen without warning again. Ugh, I was already cooperating, like a dog in a shock collar. Was I going to have to keep this in mind my whole life? No… it’d probably become automatic after awhile. That was worse.)

“I told her that,” Kylie said. “I think she still blames herself.”

“You know what I’m looking forward to the least? Telling Max.”

Kylie grimaced. “Yeah, that conversation isn’t gonna be – ”

She was interrupted by the door bursting open. Max bustled in, arms full of lake tentacle samples and eyes alight with what I’d come to recognise as ‘weird new research project’ fervour. “Guys! You will never guess what I’ve found!”

Kylie and I exchanged a glance. We were going to have to tell him soon, as in today, but probably not right this second.

“What did you find?” I asked, backing up and trying to indicate that  did not want the wet pieces of tentacle he was trying to return to me.

“Something weird. Think of the weirdest thing you think this monster might be. You’re wrong! It’s weirder. I called in some favours to borrow Chen’s enchanted telescope and you’re absolutely not going to believe this. Well, you are, because I have the photos. But still.” He ducked into the bathroom to shove the wet samples on the counter in there, then pulled out his tablet and motioned for us to crowd around. “So, the thing about those samples is, I couldn’t get a look at them. Couldn’t get light through, couldn’t get enough light off to be useful, and they wouldn’t take dye, any dye. They didn’t have plant cell walls, they weren’t strands of keratin, I even tried gram tests on the offchance that they were the world’s weirdest bacteria and got nothing, as in not even a negative result. They’re not the right shape for cells, they don’t take dyes like cells, they don’t look like cells, so what conclusion do we have to draw?”

“They’re not cells?” I hazarded.

“Exactly!”

“But they’re too thin to be hair or something,” I pointed out. “I thought maybe they were super long versions of, like those hairs that germs can have?”

“They’re neither pili nor flagella,” Max said, grinning. “I checked.”

“What are they made of, then?” Kylie asked.

“No idea!”

“Oh, well, that’s helpful.”

“Hey. I said don’t know what they’re made of. That doesn’t mean I don’t know what they are. I can tell you that those tentacles are made of four different materials. Chen has an enchanted microscope that can distinguish up to six kinds of materials, so it’s useless for looking at cells and stuff which are made of thousands, and honestly I only eventually resorted to it out of sheer desperation and I’m glad I did because look at this.” He flicked through some photos on his tablet.

I stared at the photos. “Oh,” I said. “That’s…”

He grinned. “I know, right?”

The four materials detected by the enchanted microscope showed up in the photos as four distinct colours. Mostly blue and red, with a generous dash of green throughout and rare fine threads of yellow. With the four materials easily distinguished, the structure of the tentacles was obvious. A whole lot of long strands, twisted together.

“It’s rope,” Kylie gasped. “Or thread or cotton, I guess, given how small it is.”

“It’s much finer than thread or cotton,” Max said. “These filaments are subcellular in diameter. And the braiding is also a lot more complex. These parts are just twisted like rope, but here.” He flicked to a new photo. “Look at how complicated the weaving is in this part. And the yellow material looks like it was stitched through the others, like some kind of three-dimensional internal embroidery.”

“How?” I asked.

“What part? How could a thread exist this thin? How would it be woven with such precision? How could anyone sew anything through it, when no needle should be that fine?”

“Yeah,” I said. “How all of that. Also, what the fuck. This is from the tentacle samples I gave you, right? Those things are not just rope. They grabbed me. They’re alive.”

“Nope! They’re animate. Not necessarily alive. Here, I made a kind of 3D model of a little section of the rope. It was a pain in the arse, I had to carefully remove unbelievably tiny layers and take images, it was like working with Alania’s old staff again if her staff had been a fraction of the size of a grain of rice. But look. Here’s a 3D model of half a millimeter of the yellow and green, with the rest of the rope missing. Notice anything familiar?”

“They’re the runes at Duniyasar,” Kylie said. “And on that skeleton.”

They were. A complicated web of runes joined by lines, like a really elegant version of what Max had been modelling with wood. Or a three dimensional version of what had been cut into my chest – no, not cut. Magically etched, somehow, without injury, by these tentacles. But how?

And why?

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“It’s a machine!” Max said, grinning even wider. “A magical machine, coded and built from runes and powered, I have to assume, by the lake itself. You can get some pretty complicated and lifelike behaviour out of a machine, if the code is complex enough… and with the size of these runes, there’s room to make it really, really complex.”

“But why?” I practically wailed.

“No idea!” Someone less dignified than Max would probably be jumping up and down at this point. “I have no idea whatsoever why somebody would program a fake magical tentacle monster and dump it in a lake of empowered water. The amount of time this must have taken, the research, the resources… it’s insane! And it raises another interesting question, too. When we thought this thing was alive, and that it had therefore evolved the ability to drown prey, it seemed obvious that that ability must be important to its diet, so the question was, who was feeding it? But this didn’t evolve, meaning maybe nobody has to ‘feed’ it. It raises a bigger question, instead.”

“Who programmed this thing specifically to drown students, and then dumped it in a lake?” Kylie asked.

“Exactly! It seems so pointless! Why is it here? My first guess was that it’s some kind of now-defunct security feature, but that makes no sense. It’s too easy to circumvent, and there are far easier and better security enchantments available. So I thought maybe it was some kind of cleaning system, grabbing stray stuff in the lake and dumping it below, and the fact that it can grab living humans isn’t an intended feature but a safety oversight. But, again, there are much, much easier ways to filter water. It just doesn’t make sense that something this complicated, this difficult to build, is there! Why go to all that trouble just to drown people?”

Because it’s not there just to drown people, I thought. I put a hand on my chest, where Malas had found the pattern of the same kinds of runes that these tentacles were full of, a mere couple of hours after I’d made contact with them. The same kinds if runes in the skeleton under the lake, who hadn’t been so lucky. Who’d been in the grip of the tentacles at least long enough to drown and be dragged below, far longer than they’d touched me. Is that what they would’ve done to me? Kept scouring runes inside me, down into the very bone, while I slowly died from lack of oxygen?

Like Max had asked… why?

“And why were you looking into this in the first place, Kayden? Did you find some other kind of information on it?”

Could I tell Max about this? Maybe. I’d been instructed not to tell anyone about ‘the nature of curses’ – talking about how mine was bound hardly counted, right? They were barely related. But if the geas depended partly on my conception of it, and I was even asking the question…

Best not to risk it. If I was going to have to live the rest of my life with this thing, I should avoid tangling with edge cases. I shrugged apologetically. “I don’t think I can tell you,” I said. “Sorry.”

Max’s eyes lit up further. “Oooh, someone else’s secret project? I feel so betrayed.”

“Not… really.” I looked to Kylie. She nodded.

“Okay,” she said, “so here’s the thing. Right after you went in search of a better microscope...”