4.28: Available Resources

“For those of you who want to go on to be enchanters,” Instruktanto Animus explained, drawing big runes on a board in front of us in broad, sweeping motions, “the extremely difficult and complicated act of actually seating the spell in an object through runework is only the second hardest part of the job. The hardest part of enchanting an object is, of course, getting the spell out of your body in the first place.

“I’m sure you’re all familiar with the ‘Enchanter’s Wave’ that took place shortly after the Purity Revolution. Those of you who have studied history will know why enchanted objects, previously unbelievably rare and valuable, suddenly became so much more accessible, at least to Refujeyo. Anybody?”

“Because of the Pit,” someone in the back said. I didn’t bother to look who it was.

“Exactly. Once upon a time, mere accessibility to spells was the limiting factor in enchanting objects – after skill, of course. Enchantment is still one of the most difficult disciplines in the world, no matter how many spells you have access to. After the construction of the Pit and the consolidation of the majority of the world’s spells, as well as the gathering of most of the world’s best enchanters in one place, enchantment became far more accessible to runecrafters. And now, enchanting an object for the school is an often-used avenue to gain Master status.” He paused. “For now.”

I glanced at the people around me. There was the usual mix of expressions; interested, bored, a little puzzled. I was pretty sure that I was the only one who was feeling angry.

‘After the construction of the Pit and the consolidation of the majority of the world’s spells’. Cute euphemism. (Was that a euphemism? Was that what a euphemism was?) What he meant was, ‘after a bunch of rich bastards stole magic from the rest of the population and turned any outsiders with magic into pariahs’.

Well, okay, that wasn’t entirely fair – it’s not like it was the fault of Refujeyo or the Pit or even the Purity Revolution that witches were hated or feared. It was because sometimes a spell went out of control and killed a bunch of people in some really awful way. The Purity Revolution predated Refujeyo (well, Refujeyo was built smack in the middle of the Purity Revolution, technically, but that meant that the Revolution wasn’t Refujeyo’s fault), and anti-witch sentiments had existed throughout all of time. Every major culture had purity rituals – wreaths or iron on the door, holly tea, chants and salt – to protect themselves and their homes from curses. From cursed people. They always had. It wasn’t Refujeyo that had turned us into pariahs.

But boy had they taken advantage of it. ‘Consolidated the majority of the world’s spells’. Hoarded them and their weilders for personal game and made it look like they were doing the world a favour, because they maintained a divide between smart, responsible mages and dangerous, probably evil witches. They hadn’t just gone along with anti-witch bias; the’d actively fed it. There were enchantments woven into the school itself, designed to discourage us from telling people that a mage was just a witch with prestige. And now they took advantage of those spells to produce an overabundance of enchanted items, and make empowered water incredibly cheaply, and control both the political and magical future of –

Huh. I was starting to sound like Talbot. Maybe I should listen to his rants more.

“Kayden?”

Oh, right! I was in class!

“Uh, sorry, what was the question?”

“Why is the production of enchanted objects slowing back down?”

Fuck. I had no idea. Was I supposed to know something like that? Okay, so he’d told us that the rate limiting step was access to spells, so there had been a boom after the creation of the Pit, so…

“Um. Is… the Pit running out of spells?” As soon as I said it, I knew the answer was stupid. Of course the Pit wasn’t running out of spells. We were dealing with a massive danger to human life because the Pit had too many spells. Stupid answer.

But Instruktanto Animus beamed. “Exactly. Well, not technically – the Pit had plenty of spells. But specifically, the ones that are extracted and put into objects are those that it is the easiest to extract and put into objects. Spells, as a whole, are quite clingy; most won’t leave a living person without significant difficulty. For an object to be enchanted, a spell has to be removed from the body and then bound to the object – both things which magic as a whole does not like to do. We are consuming the available enchantable spells at an alarming rate. Those of you who intend to become enchanters will have much greater difficulty than your grandparents or great-grandparents, simply because you are likely to be working with clingier spells, and will need to find ways to accommodate for that.”

“Like Jonny Onefoot?” someone asked from the back. “Is it true that he really – ”

“While amputating the area with a mage mark will free a spell in the vast majority of cases,” Instruktanto Animus cut her off, “it is absolutely not recommended that you amputate any body parts in the pursuit of graduating as a Master. School rules are being written as we speak to disqualify graduation attempts that involve acts of grievous or excessive self harm.”

“So you’re saying Jonny really was desperate enough to – ”

“But this class is about runes!” Instruktanto Animus cut her off again, louder this time. “And using runes to seat a spell into an object is a separate challenge to unseating the spell from your body. So, to seat a spell in an object…”

I tuned out again, like most of the class. Very few people ever tried to become enchanters, but the basics were part of the curriculum. I already knew it wasn’t for me; if my and Kylie’s spells were anything to go by, magic hated letting me go. I didn’t know if it had always been like that, or if it was part of the effect of the runes cut into my chest, holding magic in, preventing me from casting. Either way, I could find the most agreeable, enchantmentable, non-sticky spell in the world, coax it into my body, and then try to put it in an object, and it’d probably stick to me forever.

Besides, after he broke the Pit, I might not get a chance to have a career at all. I might die in the act. Or spend the rest of my life in jail.

I hadn’t considered jail. Somehow, illogically, that seemed like the scariest consequence. An amalgamation of spells destroying Refujeyo and going on to wreak havoc on the world was… abstract. And death, death was also something a little abstract, and something I was used to thinking about, by now. But jail felt real. Concrete. It made me feel like an initiate again, confused and unsure, waiting for my trial.

It might be jail. Or execution. Somehow, that seemed different than just death. Worse.

Oh, god. There were no ‘good’ endings here, were there?

I pulled on my old habits and put a lid on the dread before it could turn into panic or despair. These were familiar emotions, emotions I’d dealt with since I was cursed, and I knew how to kill them.

Think of another problem, smaller scale. The next step. Getting information about memory erasing potions. I needed something on Dr Peterson, some way to goad him into action, into giving me information to…

Wait. No I didn’t.

I didn’t need to get information from Dr Peterson. Max had managed to find enough information on the structure of the school to find the Labyrinth of Dreams and make predictions on what he expected to find in the centre; information on some potions that happened to be banned couldn’t possibly be harder to find than that. We were going with Dr Peterson because we needed some kind of believable excuse to be looking for the information, and ‘Kayden’s seeking a quick fix for emotional problems’ was (unflatteringly) a perfectly believable excuse. But that didn’t mean I needed the information from him. ‘Kayden goads his therapist into giving him information about prescription potions’ worked. ‘Kayden’s therapist tells him prescription potions won’t help and, in a fit of stubborn contrariness, Kayden starts researching them to prove him wrong’ also fit. I could just look them up myself, if I could figure out where to find the information.

Okay. So, now that I had the excuse to go looking for the information… where would I find it?

Best not to ask Max. He’d play along, but it was safest not to have Max or Kylie involved in this research at all. I’d report back with answers.

I could ask my potioncrafting teacher. She liked me, liked my focus on potions. I could say I was looking into some potioncrafting theory or… no. She knew about my little side business. She’d immediately see the possibility that I might be wanting to make illegal memory erasing potions to sell, and she’d be obliged to look into that. I wasn’t going to do that, but I could do without that kind of attention.

If Max knew how to access obscure information, some of my other legacy friends might, too. Hadn’t Max borrowed books from Saina for his research into the Labyrinth of Dreams? If her family had access to obscure, possibly forbidden books…

Hmm, no, probably not. He’d been looking into the history and structure of Refujeyo; of course the Surya family would have books about that. There was no reason for them to collect books on illegal potions, and while Saina could make potions, she probably didn’t spend her free time looking into illegal ones.

Did I have any more nerdy, borderline-illegal-research friends? The Magistae were unlikely to know anything. Di Fiore… well, I actually had no idea whether he was a nerdy research guy or not. But he certainly had no reason to help me. If he knew I was looking into illegal potions, I didn’t think he’d report me to anyone. After the whole thing in our initiation semester, where he could’ve gotten in massive trouble if anyone had found out about the destroyed Guardian Ring, and we’d taken down Clara together, I was pretty sure I could trust him to at least keep secrets. But actually helping was a different matter. He didn’t owe me anything for clearing his name there; he’d been involved in taking her down, too. And his uncle had long paid back his debt to me by keeping Fionnrath away from Kylie’s family, so no leverage with Fiore either, nor any reason to trust him with something like this. (For all I knew, he might be in on the whole memory erasure thing. Anyone of the staff could be in on it.)

Clara! Clara might know! She was as nerdy as Max, and she’d used potions to poison Alania, so clearly she knew about potions. And she probably had access to whatever research Alania did, so she could find it easily, probably.

I dismissed that option immediately. I had no idea how to contact Clara, and she certainly had no reason to want anything from me except for me to die in a fire, after I’d kind of exposed all her crimes and ruined her life. Anyway, even if I could somehow convince her to help, she was way too close to Alania. Too risky. And going that far for information about the potions… didn’t really fit into my ‘stubbornly going against therapist’s advice’ excuse. I needed to stick with people close, people I might impulsively ask.

So I messaged Talbot.

He met me on Agreabla Insulo, just like we used to when I was an initiate. I came through the portal to see him standing on the shore, silhouetted by the setting sun, hair and coat whipping dramatically in the wind like the overdramatic bastard that he was.

“Kayden!” he called in greeting, sounding surprised and pleased, like he hadn’t specifically been posing and waiting for me. (I wondered vaguely how he knew it was me. I was too far away for his spell to feel me out, I hadn’t said anything, and he’d never shown any weird abilities like being able to distinguish people’s footsteps. Even if he had, we were on sand. Maybe he just knew that the island was barely used, and was taking a guess.)

“Talbot.” I jogged over.

“So, what are we here to discuss?”

This part was tricky. I was supposed to be seeking information on memory erasing potions because I wanted to look into taking them, but if I used that explanation on Talbot he’d just tell me how fucking stupid I was and refuse to help. But I couldn’t tell him the truth, either. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust Talbot, it was just… he tended to get carried away when he was ranting. If I told him that I was pretty sure the school’s head doctor or janitorial staff had erased the memories of me and my friends to protect their secrets and I needed help uncovering The Truth, there was simply no way that some form of ‘the sinister staff here are mindwiping students for sinister purposes’ wouldn’t make its way into his usual litany of complaints and warnings about the school.

Especially since we were going to be meeting with the current witch initiates soon. There were going to be a lot of anti-establishement rants I couldn’t risk it.

So, I had to either convince him that me looking into erasing my own memory for mental health purposes was an absolutely fantastic idea, or I had to come up with some other plausible lie.

“I need information for something,” I said. “It’s kind of a secret – ”

“Better not tell me the details, then. What do you need?”

… Oh. Okay, yeah, that would work.

“i need to learn about memory erasing potions, but because they’re a controlled substance, none of the school books have any information on them.”

“Oh! That sort of thing is easy enough. You want to get old books from the library. Physical ones, that have no electronic copy, from before the school started to omit the information. They’re usually not redacted.”

“… Oh. It’s that easy?”

“You want to learn about potions they don’t want you making, right? It’s not nuclear launch codes. I doubt anyone permanently defaced valuable books over it.”

Ugh. He was probably right. I was going to have to read so much. Read old, physical books, so no audio versions would be available. Without Max’s help.

Was it too late to just decide to let the eldritch spellgod be born instead?