4.32: The Cursebinder

I don’t know where they went, but Max and Kylie weren’t in our room when I got back. I really should wait for them, rather than go off on my own, but… but I was all jazzed up now, and I wanted to make some progress, so I wrote a note explaining where I was going and that if I wasn’t visible on the school map within two hours I might need rescue, then went looking for my rock climbing equipment.

I’d bought the equipment after my old rock climbing equipment had ended up at the bottom of the empowered lake, but I never actually used it these days, so it was buried deep in a pile of random stuff in the bottom of my wardrobe. I tossed an empty potion flask into the bag, a couple of different squares of cloth and a couple of different kinds of knives, and a bottle of water, before changing into something a bit more suited to physical activity than my everyday robes.

Then I nipped by the cafeteria for lunch, because on the off chance I did end up waiting for rescue for two hours, I didn’t want to do it hungry.

That should be everything. Time to go. Time to do this.

I headed for the empowered lake in the middle of the school.

I found the tunnel that opened to the sandy slope leading down to the lake, the slope I’d fallen down on my very first day at Refujeyo. I hammered a piton into the wall, tied a rope and put my full weight on it, making sure it didn’t move. Then I hammered in two more pitons and tested them, too. Just to be completely safe.

With my safety rope tied to all three pitons, I descended down the slope.

Someone had cut up my chest with precision beyond what the best surgeons should be capable of, and it had healed perfectly, before I’d ever gotten to Refujeyo. That’s what Malas said. But who was this mysterious surgeon, why didn’t I remember any of it, how had I found them, how had nobody else noticed?

No. Malas didn’t know any of what he’d told me; they were all assumptions based on what his spell could see. And his spell coulnd’t see the past. All we actually knew was that something had interfered with my body in some way that interrupted the collagen network in the skin over my heart, and that it had happened before he had scanned me for the first time. To Malas, perhaps, that was the same thing; how would you sever those strands of collagen without cutting through everything else in the skin? Stands to reason.

How? Magic. Skolala Refujeyo was brimming with magic.

I was pretty sure my chest had never been cut open. But I knew for a fact that I’d encountered a weird magical lake squid thing right before being scanned by Malas. And that in the chamber underneath the lake, where it dumped its junk, was a skeleton etched with the same kinds of runes that had been etched into my skin.

I didn’t know how, or why, or… much at all, really. But the pieces I did know, fit. I was going to find out what the hell that lake monster was.

I set my stuff down far from the water, where it would be nice and dry, propped up my tablet to illuminate the shore, and checked that my safety rope was well anchored one last time.

Then I turned, and strode confidently into the calm waters.

I paused when the water reached my calves, but nothing grabbed me. I paused again when the water reached my hips. Again, no response. It wasn’t until my feet had left the bottom of the lake that something snaked its way around my ankle.

Immediately, I questioned whether this was a good idea. The fact that I had my safety rope didn’t matter; what if the monster was stronger than I remembered? What if it was smart, and could untie the rope, and would drag me out and drown me and –

Panicking wasn’t useful. I crushed down the impulse. With one hand, I reached own to my ankle and grabbed a fistful of tentacle. With the other, I pulled a knife from my belt.

I’d brought a few different blades, not sure which would work best, but I needn’t have bothered; the first one I’d drawn was for slicing tough, fibrous roots for potions, and it sliced through the tentacles without any problems. Whatever I was facing didn’t appear capable of pain, or at least, it didn’t react to it. The other tentacles didn’t shrink away as a sliced; they held on and kept pulling me steadily into the lake. That loaned credence to Max’s seaweed theory, I supposed.

I dropped the knife (I wanted to get out of here quickly and knives were cheap), grabbed the safety rope, and started pulling myself to shore. The tentacles still gripping me were an insistent tug, but not a strong one, and they released as soon as my legs reached open air.

I looked at the handful of severed tentacles. They were very thin, as I’d expected them to be, remembering how they’d cut up my legs the first time. (I ignored the lacerations this time; I had a healing potion for that.) The thickest of them were about as wide as a grass root, but mostly they were the width of strands of cotton, with some as thin as dental floss. I had no idea how to best preserve them, which is why I’d brought several methods. Some went into my potion flask, which I first filled with water from the lake. Some were wrapped in a square of cloth that I’d brought, which would absorb the moisture and dry them out a bit; others were wrapped in a piece of waterproof cloth, in case keeping them a bit wet was a good idea. And some I just tied to my belt and let hang in the air.

I packed up, climbed back up into the tunnel (the rope held), and headed back for the school. As soon as I had intranet access again, I made sure my location on the map was on (so nobody would send rescue parties for me) and, cursing myself for not thinking to do it earlier, looked for a free workshop that had a microscope in it. I was in luck; a small bio lab was available immediately.

I don’t know anything about biology. But I’d done boring labs like everyone else, at my old school. I knew, at least, what plant cells looked like, and what animal cells looked like, and how to use a microscope. So. Let’s start there.

I set everything up, and went to slice off a thin section of one of my samples. This turned out to be quite difficult. Grabbing an handful of tentacles and hacking them off was one thing, but the tentacles absolutely did not want to be cut into thin slices. They just kind of… frayed?… under the blade, no matter how sharp a scalpel I used.

Okay, I’d try cutting the other way, then. Lengthwise along the tentacle. This, as it turned out, was easy, and soon I was mounting a thin sample on a slide and slipping it under the microscope. I bent over the lens, focused it...

Nothing. The sample showed up black. I couldn’t see anything.

This wasn’t a new experience for me. My bio labs, back at my old school when I’d had them, had never gone well. But unlike my old school, I couldn’t just look at the diagram in the book and fake a sketch of what I saw. I actually needed to see this.

So, probably, the sample was too dirty, or too thick. I squirted some distilled water over it, rooted around in the supplies until I found a couple of really tiny needles, and used them to just kind of rip the sample apart on the slide. There, perfect! Instead of a thick black stripe down the centre of the slide, I saw…

Many thinner black stripes, all crisscrossing each other. Still no light penetration. Hmm.

Okay, there was no way that the sample was still too thick. I checked the microscope magnification, looked up the size of cells, and did some quick mental math. Then I redid the math on my tablet, in case I’d gotten it wrong. The long, dark tubes were a lot thinner than onion cells, and I knew I could see inside onion cells under a microscope just fine, I’d done it at my old school. So. Thickness wasn’t the issue. Light didn’t penetrate these, apparently. Okay, maybe they had weird cell walls, or something. I poked at the sample with one of my tiny needles, moving the dark lines around a bit. They reminded me of…

Hairs. That’s what they looked like. Some more math and a bit of research told me that they weren’t hairs, they were far too thin, but I knew that some bacteria had hair-like tentacles, so maybe that’s what I was looking at. Except that I couldn’t see anything that could be a bacterium. Maybe these were bacteria with absurdly long hair things, all living in the middle of the lake together with hundreds-metre-long bacterial hairs that they could… move around like tentacles, I supposed? That didn’t sound right. I was pretty sure that bacteria couldn’t grow their hair things that long. And I still couldn’t see any cells.

What the hell was I looking at?

Okay, this was beyond me. It was officially time to make this the job of a scientist.

“Good,” said Max behind me, arriving just in time. “You’re okay.”

“What the hell were you thinking?” Kylie snapped. “Going down there alone?”

“I know, I should’ve waited. But I had a safety rope, I was perfectly – ”

“The first time you went down there, you nearly died! I was seconds away from not being able to save you! And then we both nearly died!”

Oh. Right. That had been the first prophecy she’d given at the school, the first one ever not to be about friends and family. On her first day here. And she’d very nearly not been able to save me.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t think.”

She made a frustrated noise. “You never do.”

“Well, since everybody is perfectly safe,” Max said, “what are we looking at, here?”

“I have no idea,” I admitted, stepping back from the microscope. “I can’t even see the cells. And speaking of ‘perfectly safe’, how exactly did you burn yourself?”

“Never mind that. Let’s have a look.” He peered into the microscope. Played with the focus a bit. Made some thoughtful noises.

“Well?” I asked, after awhile.

“Hmm.” He cut a new sample and prepared a new slide, like he thought I might’ve messed up that simple step, and had a look at that. He poked it and teased it apart with needles, like I’d done. “Hmm.”

“What is it – ?”

“Hang on. I need to look into something.” He pulled out his tablet to read something with a lot more scientific words in it than I was willing to try to understand.

Kylie was playing minesweeper on her tablet. I followed her lead.

After quite a lot of reading, he said, “Can one of you check the supply cupboard over there for dyes? I need – ” and rattled off a handful of chemical names. We went looking and found a few of the ones he wanted. “Also, does this microscope only have a backlight?”

“I think so? I think it’s just, y’know, what you see is what you get.”

“Alright. Can you grab me that lamp over there? Also that little light up on that shelf.” He prepared some more slides, adds various drops of dyes and chemicals to them that I didn’t bother to try to follow, and played around with lights and lenses on the microscope for awhile. I got bored with minesweeper and started playing solitaire instead. It was a full twenty minutes later (to be fair, most of that time was waiting for dyes to set) when he leaned back, cracked his knuckles, and said, “Alright.”

“You’ve found something?”

“Yes. I’ve found that I need a better microscope. Do you mind if I borrow these samples?”

“Take ‘em. You’ll make more progress with them than I will.”

“Thanks.” Max snatched up my samples and left, leaving us to clean up the lab.

Kylie didn’t help. She stood there, arms crossed, and just kind of glared while I cleaned stuff up.

“I’m sorry I went down to the lake alone,” I said. “I should’ve waited.”

“Yes. You should have. You’re the one who keeps pointing out how we nearly die when we split up. You’re the one who’s always freaking out about this kind of thing. And you run off like that without backup on some kind of whim? Why do you suddenly care about this lake monster thing anyway?”

“It’s, um… a bit complicated? I mean, not really complicated, but I’d rather only explain it once.”

“Right.”

I finished cleaning the lab in awkward silence. Just as we were leaving, we ran into Alania in the hall. A tall, thin man I didn’t know stood behind her. He wore the blue robes of a master (although from his bearing I got the impression he wasn’t a student aiming for mastery, but someone who had achieved it) and a cold expression.

“Kylie,” Alania said. She was trying to sound gentle, but nothing in her bearing looked calm or happy.

“You have been summoned,” the man announced, “to appear before the High Council. Immediately.”

Kylie stepped back. “What’s going on?”

“You haven’t done anything wrong,” Alania said. “And you should have been given a lot more warning for a meeting like this, but it is what it is.”

“Warning?” the man asked. “The decision is made. Shouldn’t she know right away? This way, please.”

The last time Kylie had been pulled into a serious meeting with a stranger like this, it had been someone who’d ultimately tried to poison her. I kept pace with her as they headed back down the hall.

“Your presence isn’t required,” the man told me.

“This decision is going to affect him,” Alania said.

The man shrugged. “The decision has nothing official or enforceable to say about him. How he chooses to react is his own affair, but isn’t pertinent to this meeting.

“Can he stop me from coming?” I asked Alania, tapping the familiarity link on my arm.

She gave me a small smile. “No. He can’t.”

“I’m coming, then.”

We were lead down a series of corridors I’d never been down before, until the crystals on the wall turned violet. I had no idea what violet lighting meant; I’d never seen it before. Eventually, we arrived in front of a huge. Elaborately carved wooden door, with two pink-robed guards standing at attention. I didn’t have a chance to make out what the elaborate carving on the door actually were before a guard pushed it open. Alania gave my shoulder and Kylie’s a gentle, reassuring squeeze, before leading the way inside.