4.14: The Child

“Oh,” I said weakly. “Is that all?”

“What do you mean, Kylie?” Max asked.

“Well. This place. Doesn’t it strike you as a bit… weird?”

“Yes,” I said, “in a great many ways. What specific weirdness are we talking about?”

“It’s just… how do you start a place like this? ‘Oh, we’ll build really complicated underground infrastructure, all secret and secure, and trap a bunch of spells here, and then we can profit!’ It’s all very…” she waved her hands about vaguely for a moment, then seemed to give up. “Okay, so. My spell.”

“Yes?”

“It predicts things about people. And having a society as a character, well, that’s weird, but according to Lydia it sometimes does stuff like that, so the Hero makes sense. But isn’t it strange that a whole bunch of disparate spells are given a name and treated as a character in the prophecy? That’s weird. That’s not how I would expect the Destiny to talk about a bunch of spells.”

“You think the Child is something else?” I asked.

“No. No, I just… have you wondered about that name? About why it gets called ‘the Child’? And those riddles, they’re about things being more than the sum of their parts, right? If a collection of dreams is a spell, what is a collection of spells? That’s the question. All the spells together. Well, we know what a bunch of prophecies all together can be, don’t we, Kayden?”

I nodded. “When I first saw those prophecies, during the Initiation, I thought, ‘oh, it’s a bunch of spells all bundled up together pretending to be a person’. And the spellthing’s response was to look at me and say, ‘oh, it’s a bunch of cells all bundled up together pretending to be a person’.”

“You take enough cells of the right kind, put together in the right way, that’s a person,” Kylie said, nodding. “You take spells of the right kind, put them together in the right way, and you can make the thing you met. What if you used more spells? What if you used every spell in the labyrinth?”

“Ah.” Max pointed to a line in his notebook. “‘In a time that’s partly been, a Child screams a thousand screams. / Imprisoned in the buried heart it pushes, presses, tries to start. / In a time that’s not yet been, the Hero dies, the Child free.’” You think this is about the spells… manifesting? Merging into a single thing, and destroying Refujeyo in the process?”

Kylie nodded. “If it’s a Child, what is there to do but be born?”

We all fell silent and reflected on that thought for a bit. It wasn’t a good thought.

“And you think that this is on purpose,” Max said eventually.

Kylie nodded. “Skolala Refujeyo tries to be all… sciencey… about magic, but that’s a pretty modern, local thing. When I was taking lessons with Lydia, she was a lot more… religious about it, I guess? And she’s not the only one. There are groups of mages out there who talk about traditional ‘old ways’ in really spiritual terms. Especially when it comes to prophecies. Especially when it comes to Duniyasar, home of prophecies, home of the most powerful prophecy in the world that hasn’t been seen since the Pit was established.”

“Wait, what?” I asked.

Kylie ignored the question. “What convinces a whole bunch of mages to get together here, under Duniyasar, and start work on a complicated and impractical spell-harvesting labyrinth, and build an entire society here? What convinces them to stick around living in tunnels for long enough for Refujeyo to become the dominant mage society, based on that spell harvesting? That’s not something you do just for the sake of it. It’s not even something you do to protect commonfolk by cleansing the world of spells, or whatever. That’s something you do with religious fervour. The fact that it’s here, the fact that it’s so secret, the fact that all the spells are housed together like this in a place where nobody goes, instead of safely cached in separate places… this isn’t a spell collection growing out of control. This was planned.”

“You think the staff are secretly trying to manifest a spell monster?”

“I don’t know what the staff are doing now. Alania certainly doesn’t seem the type. Maybe the project is still in control of someone, maybe it was so secret that it’s been forgotten about. But yeah. A being born of magic? A thing, more than the sum of its parts, built of human thoughts and dreams, a level above humanity itself, superior to our minds in the same way that we are superior to plants? Yes. I think people built this place to attempt to birth a god.”

We stared. Kylie fidgeted.

“I mean,” she mumbled, “it’s just a theory.”

“Well,” Max said weakly, “we probably shouldn’t let that happen.”

“No shit,” I said. “Do we have any idea what a thing like that would even be like? What it would do to the world?”

“I don’t even want to speculate,” Max said. “If that happens, even my best case scenarios don’t bear thinking about.”

“So what do we do about it?” I asked.

“I still don’t know.”

“Do you think we did know?” Kylie asked. “Down in the labyrinth?” Her eyes rested on the scar on my arm.

“Maybe.” Max flipped through his notebook some more. “If we could safely go back – ”

“Absolutely not,” Kylie said at the same moment I said, “Don’t even think about it.”

“I said if! It was a hypothetical! Obviously it’s far too dangerous without a verified way back. We can’t afford to be reckless if we need to stop this.  If Kylie’s right, there might be people who will actively try to stop us dealing with this, so we can’t even go for help without being absolutely sure of the loyalties of who we’re talking to. And who they might talk to.”

“Malas,” I said. “He has to have been the one who erased our memories, right?”

“Most likely, yes,” Max sighed. “We can’t discount the possibility that he’s innocent, and it was some defense mechanism in the Labyrinth itself – ”

“Or the janitors,” Kylie said. “They saved us, right?”

“Most likely.”

“Most likely?”

“When I woke up in the ward,” Max said, “Malas told me that the janitors had found us. I don’t have any evidence for that, besides his word.”

“So,” I said, “we have to worry about Malas. Or the janitors. Or both. Or, quite possibly, neither.”

“I think we should worry about them anyway,” Kylie said. “They’re always creeping around in the background, doing… janitor stuff.”

“That is their job,” I pointed out, but she was right. They went out of their way to be ignored; I, and everyone else, had long since stopped paying attention to them. When was the last time I’d even noticed them, outside of an emergency situation? They could, and did, go everywhere, and that seemed to include down in the labyrinth itself. In the circumstances, that was suspicious.

“And Malas may not technically have any political power in Refujeyo,” Max said, “but he’s the heart and soul of it. He can’t leave this place, and the kuracar is just about the only non-expendable component of the school. Can you imagine how much more dangerous this place would be without his services? How many people owe their lives to him? It’s possible that he doesn’t know what’s going on, but…”

“But that’s not something that we can afford to assume,” I finished. “So between him and the janitors, we basically need to be Maximum Paranoid.”

“We can’t write anything down,” Kylie said. “The janitors clean in here, and I’m sure they could get through the force fields on the beds if they had to. If only for emergencies.”

Max nodded. “We can’t write down anything different,” he corrected. “I’m already mapping the school and soforth. It would be more suspicious to stop.”

“We need to worry about the Surya family as well,” Kylie said. “Duniyasar is – ”

“Saina has nothing to do with this,” I said.

“How can you know that? They’ve been high up in Refujeyo’s government for generations, they directed the founding of Refujeyo! Their territory – ”

“I don’t care what her ancestors did or didn’t do, she wouldn’t be involved in something like this.”

“She came to school under a fake name.”

“To avoid this kind of nonsense!” I snapped. “What, everyone whose name isn’t on their birth certificate is suspicious, now? What about the Magistae?” Or me.

“That’s not what I meant, I just meant that we should be careful.”

“Well, yeah, I’m not going to go tell her or anyone else about this. That should be obvious. And maybe her mum is involved or something, I don’t know, I’ve never met her mum. But Saina wouldn’t be involved in something like this.”

“Not of her own free will,” Max said.

“What?”

“Nothing. Just… trying not to discount any possibilities. Kayden, Saina invited you to her pit comp team right after we came back to school after the whole Labyrinth of Dreams thing, right?”

“So?”

“So, if that put you on her radar…”

“Nothing put me on her radar! There is no radar! We were already friends, alright? We take potioncrafting together. And it was Peter who put forward the idea of me joining the pit comp team, and I’m pretty sure Peter isn’t secretly part of some powerful family trying to create a new magical god.”

“I’m just saying we should be careful,” Kylie said.

“Well, yeah, obviously. But we don’t even know if you’re right about this whole magical-being Child thing. This is all just random speculation, so it’s a bit rich to go around accusing our friends.”

“Whether Kylie is right about this magical-being Child thing,” Max said, “doesn’t really matter. Whether we’re looking at an accidental containment failure destroying Refujeyo and everyone inside, or a deliberate containment failure destroying Duniyasar and everyone inside and creating some new level of life form, our response is the same. We need to do everything we can to stop it, and we need to do so secretly, because we don’t know if someone will try to stop us and we can’t afford to be wrong about that. I just wish we had some idea of next steps – ”

“Can’t we just break it?” I asked.

Max stared. “What?”

“I mean, I’m not saying it’s easy. But it is simple, right? Big spell trap full of spells, eventually they’re going to meet some kind of critical mass or whatever and it’s over. So can’t we just break the spell trap before that happens? Blow it up, or – ?”

“Blow it up? The labyrinth down there is the size of a city! How do you plan to blow it up without killing everyone in Refujeyo?”

“Or get that many explosives,” Kylie put in.

I shrugged. “It was just an idea.”

“The answer probably will be ‘breaking’ it, but in a specific way,” Max said. “We need to deduce exactly what process Fionnrath’s Destiny is suggesting we use. And then figure out if we can come up with something better, because I still don’t trust that prophecy to have the same priorities as us.”

“‘Prepare its heart in offering, and be the music – climb, and sing’,” I quoted. “I don’t know what any of that is supposed to mean, except that the Child is ‘imprisoned in the buried heart’, so the heart has to be something in the Labyrinth.”

“I’d make a guess,” Kylie put in, “that ‘climb’ probably means ‘go to the Top of the World’, as mentioned earlier in the prophecy. From context.”

I groaned. “If we have to carry some artefact to the North Pole or some shit – ”

“Unlikely,” Max said. “North as ‘top’ is fairly arbitrary.”

“We live on a globe. Anywhere as ‘top’ is arbitrary, unless it means Mount Everest.”

“True, but we want the kind of arbitrary that a prophecy is likely to use. The Top of the World is the World’s Head, the symbolic high place from which prophets survey the world.”

“Duniyasar.”

“Exactly.”

“Well, at least that’s a short journey,” I said. “So it’s the whole heart preparing thing that’s the difficult part.”

“And singing,” Kylie said. “I assume they don’t mean literally just singing a song.”

“This would be a lot simpler if we had the data I wanted from the Labyrinth,” Max said. “I feel like that has to contain our answer. For all I know, we probably saw the ‘heart’ down there, and forgot.”

“We can’t go – ”

“I know we can’t just go back! Well, not without a lot of preparation. We’re going to have to eventually.” He bit his lip thoughtfully. “But perhaps we can get the data another way. Kayden, you’re our potion expert.”

“You’re the academic! Just because I can whip up a few potions doesn’t make me – ”

“Memory potions. How complete is the erasure?”

“What?”

“I’d imagine, given how brains work, it’s probably quite difficult to cleanly erase a memory. More likely, the memories aren’t erased – they are buried. And that means there’s a chance that they might be recoverable.”

“I… don’t know,” I said. “I’ve been looking into memory potions, just out of interest, but the kind that erase memories are really hard to find information on. I could push for information, maybe play up the ‘eager curious student’ and charm Instruktanto Costa, but…”

“But a sudden interest in memory erasure might raise alarm bells, and we don’t know who to trust.” Max nodded. “I can try asking my family, through text and word-of-mouth. That runs the risk of people thinking I’m making some illegal political ploy, which is its own kind of dangerous, but at least it’s an unrelated kind.”

“Hang on,” I said, an idea striking. “I think there’s a non-suspicious way. It’s not perfect, but it’s worth a shot. Memory erasure potions aren’t illegal. They’re controlled. You can get a prescription, which means there’s at least one situation where trying to get a lot of information about them isn’t suspicious at all.”

Kylie grinned. “You mean…?”

“Yeah.” I tried not to look too bitter about it.

I had to go to fucking therapy.