4.01: Back to Business

I guess I figured, after the whole death at Duniyasar thing, that things would move along fairly quickly. But they didn’t. I explained everything to Casey, and they nodded and took notes and said they’d contact me when they had something to report, and left. I tried to get in contact with Saina, but it seemed like she was taking a bit of a break from school, presumably at the insistence of her mother. I didn’t know if she’d be coming back. Nobody had gossipped about the whole thing at Duniyasar, so for once people weren’t gossipping about us, which was a nice change.

The most interesting development was a full week later, when Max walked into our room in orange robes. Kylie and I stared.

“When did that happen?” I asked. “I mean, congratulations, but what?”

“You didn’t tell us that you were testing up a grade,” Kylie said, sounding vaguely accusatory.

“Hmm? Oh. Yeah.” He gestured at his new robes, as if we hadn’t just made it very clear that, yes, we’d noticed them. “I’m an apprentice now. My family were very upset when I didn’t grade up after six months, so I thought it best to get it out of the way.”

“They were upset because you didn’t go up a grade at the earliest opportunity that it’s possible to go up a grade?”

He nodded. “The whole human familiar thing got them off my back about it, but there’s no way they would’ve responded well to me waiting an entire year. If I didn’t get this done now, I’d never hear the end of it.”

“Isn’t a year to eighteen months the average amount of time someone’s an acolyte?” Kylie asked.

“Exactly. Average. You see the problem.”

“We’d better hurry up, Kylie,” I said drily. “Do nothing for too long and we might be below average.”

“Oh no,” she said. “The horror.”

“I didn’t see you, like, studying to test up or anything,” I said. “Were you trying to keep it a secret or something?”

He shrugged. “Didn’t seem worth mentioning. I didn’t need to study,” he said, as if passing up an opportunity to study wasn’t wildly out of character.

“That easy, huh?”

“Well, it’s a points system. Score high enough competence in enough areas and you pass. I didn’t need to do any theory.” He scowled at his mage mark. “Demonstrating extreme competence and control in at-will spellcasting gets you almost enough to move up on its own.”

“How did you demonstrate extreme competence and – oh.” I shut up. It had only been a week ago that he’d used his spell to save a life by taking another. No wonder he wasn’t all that proud or enthusiastic over moving up a grade.

I should probably just not say things ever again.

“Yes,” Max said, “well. If I work hard at it, maybe I can graduate apprentice and craftsman levels before Sekura Refujeyo get around to actually letting me know what they plan to do.”

“You’re innocent,” I pointed out, because he seemed to keep forgetting that.

“Mm. Oh, hey, I updated my school map.” He opened a notebook and showed us a really complicated diagram of… something. “I think what we have here is a series of layers built around a place of power. You can think of it like a, a line of power, a shaft of magic jutting down through the earth, with everything built around it. Like a support pillar for a building.”

“Like a magical shish-kebab!” I said, understanding.

“Erm. Yes. That is, quite unfortunately, actually a good analogy. So on the surface we have the actual building at Duniyasar, with the tower and its associated affiliations. They say that Duniyasar is interconnected with the power of the astral signs and draws power from the heavens and soforth, being the geological World’s Crown, but I don’t know how much of that is just spurious myth. Some distance below Duniyasar, we have the Pit, by which I mean the actual chamber where spells are channeled for the Initiations, and for sports and soforth. According to my maps, this is the centre of the school map; the halls we walk every day to get to lessons and the cafeteria and all of that form their runes around the Pit, so I think that’s our centre. Which means that it must be directly above that lake of empowered water, because that’s the centre of the empowered river network that we think is probably a magical power sink, for safety.”

“How do we know the lake’s the centre?” Kylie asked. “There could be lots of little lakes.”

“We know, because that lake is directly above the centre of the bottom layer, where the spells are. What the Destiny calls the ‘labyrinth of dreams’. Remember? Kayden found his mountain climbing equipment down there, which confirms it. Which means the empowered water network sits between the magic we generate at school and the spell storage below, like insulation. In fact, with… hmm.” Max frowned at his own diagram.

“What?” I asked, already accepting that I wouldn’t understand the answer.

But Max was considerately vague, and didn’t use any big words at all. “Explaining all this, it… it’s probably nothing, but in an abstract way, this sort of looks like the structure of a battery. If the water is the, the ion barrier, so to speak… then with a ‘wire’ to conned the centre of the Labyrinth to the Pit, and we know they’re connected, because that’s where the Pit’s spells come from… hmm. Not a battery if it’s generating power, though; more like a fuel cell. Excuse me, I have to get somebody to google something for me.” He turned and strode right back out of the room.

We stared after him for a bit. “Huh,” Kylie said, and went back to her tablet.

“Should we try to move up to apprentice level?” I wondered. I hadn’t even looked all that hard at the test requirements, except for ensuring that I’d be able to move up without being able to cast at will. They were fairly flexible like that; so long as I could demonstrate that my spell wasn’t dangerously out of my control (an automatic pass for me, since it was completely dormant), I could make up the points in potions, runes, and normal history and maths and whatever. I just didn’t know how much of that other stuff I needed.

Kylie shrugged. “Is there any point? Being stuck at school is an advantage for us, right? Refujeyo have to protect us, unless they expel us, and Fionnrath can’t do anything while we’re here.”

Except try to kill you, I didn’t say. “Yeah, but we’re going to want to leave eventually, and putting off all of our school requirements until then would be a massive hassle, especially since you need to spend at least six months at every level. We’re stuck here until craftsperson level; that’s six months as an apprentice and six as craftsperson, minimum. Even if we ace every test and move up as fast as possible, we’re here for at least another year, and I think we’ve seen how much things can change in a year. Maybe we should test up to craftsperson as fast as we can and just hang out at that level until we’re ready to leave, then take the final test? Anyway, if Max if getting through fast and might leave before us – ”

“He wpn’t,” Kylie said. “He’s Max. He could discover this place is powered by innocent human sacrifice and start a blood feud with every mage in Refujeyo and he’d still grit his teeth and stick around until he became a Master. That kid was born to achieve peak academic success and you know it.”

“That’s true, he is a massive nerd.”

“And achieving Master level takes years, even for massive nerds, so he’ll be here longer than we are no matter how lazy we are.”

“Hey, that’s not fair. Maybe I’ll be here forever because I also want to be a master mage. Did you ever think about that?”

Kylie’s only reply was a snort of amusement. She brushed a long dark curl of hair back over her shoulder, and I saw a faint scar on her neck catch the light.

“Hey,” I said. “How long have you had that scar?”

“Hmm?”

I tapped my own neck to indicate the spot.

“Oh. Since I was about six? I fell out of a tree.”

“Huh. I never noticed it before.”

“Good to know that you don’t stare creepily at my neck and memorise all my scars, then,” she said, not looking up from her tablet.

I traced my fingers over the semicircular scars on my arm. I knew it was a stupid, random thing to worry about, but I’d gotten caught out by so many ‘stupid, random’ little things turning out to actually be super important that I wasn’t taking chances any more. “Do you remember when Saina gave Duniyasar to you?” I asked.

“Vividly.” She frowned. “I suppose I should be looking into giving it back now, shouldn’t I?”

“Probably. Do you remember the advice your spell gave everyone on that day?”

“Uh, no. You know I don’t remember anything the Destiny does. But you’re bringing this up now so I’m guessing it said something horrible.”

“It said a lot of things. It… it told Max that if he kept on the path he was on, he would break the world. He brushed it off, saying maybe he’d invent something cool and revolutionise magic or something, but then the, the thing with Lydia happened. And now people are worried about a war.”

“We all know that Fionnrath doesn’t have nearly enough power to actually declare war on Refujeyo.”

“Not alone! But Refujeyo tries to maintain good relations with all those little scattered societies, right? At the very least, they try to be left alone by them? So together, they must be some kind of threat. If this gets out, and Fionnrath gets the support of other small groups, there… there have to be some out there with really powerful spells right? Or something. “

“Maybe? But I don’t think my spell could’ve been warning Max not to save me, because it also warned us that I was in danger, allowing him to save me in the first place.”

“So what? It gives advice to people you care about to help them be safe and prosperous, right? That’s what it’s for. The advice that helps one person might cause problems for another, so that person gets different advice. There’s no proof that it has long-term plans.” I hesitated. “But I’m more worried that it does. That its warning to Max wasn’t saying ‘don’t do this’. That it does want things, and this is what it wanted.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Did Max… did Max ever tell you his theory about why your spell is here?”

Kylie narrowed her eyes. “Have you guys been talking about me behind my back?”

“Not maliciously! But your spell is going to come up in conversation! Anyway, awhile ago, we had a talk. About how the Destiny’s primary motivation is ensuring the safety and prosperity of Fionnrath, but about how spells don’t really think in the way people do, the really smart ones just kind of simulate it. Meaning that they can do things that just make no sense, because we can’t see the logic.”

“Okay. And?”

“And he pointed out that your great-grandfather escaped Fionnrath ages ago, and he couldn’t have been the only one. And that Fionnrath’s Destiny clearly didn’t tell Fionnrath that he’d escaped. And that this is the first time it picked a host outside of Fionnrath, and that it just happened to give a prophecy that killed people you loved right when you were the right age to come to Refujeyo, and that that’s really a lot of coincidences, isn’t it?”

“Not really,” she shrugged. “You can point to any endpoint of anything and say that a lot of coincidences got you there. Everything that happens is going to have improbable stuff in its history of cause and effect, but something has to happen.”

“He speculated that your spell came to Refujeyo on purpose.”

“Why?”

“It can see the future. It… probably saw Refujeyo as a threat.”

“You and Max think I’m some kind of Fionnrath sleeper agent?!”

“Maybe! I mean, it’s logical, right?”

“No! Fionnrath had no idea I was here! Lydia tried to kill me, they clearly didn’t – ”

“I’m not saying the people of Fionnrath knew or did anything. I’m saying that their future-predicting spell that’s trained to ensure their prosperity by predicting events they can’t see ended up here as part of a sequence of weird and unlikely events and maybe, from the spell’s point of view, that’s not an accident. Yes, I know it sounds ridiculous, but ever since we got here, stuff keeps happening and we keep being like ‘oh, this probably means nothing, we don’t want to get all paranoid and overreact’, and we’re always wrong!”

“Hey, most of the stuff we decide is probably too weird to be happening turns out to not be happening.”

“Yeah, because something even weirder happens! We always waste time freaking out about something, then convincing each other it’s probably nothing and we shouldn’t freak out, and then having to scramble to catch up when shit happens anyway! Well, I’m done not overreacting. Way too much weird stuff is happening, and for once I’m gonna be ahead of the curve. This place is weird, we’re all in deep trouble, and nothing is okay.”

Kylie put her tablet down and came over to put a hand gently on my arm. “Kayden?”

“Mm?”

“Is this about the Child and the Hero thing?”

“It is me, isn’t it? I’m the one that prophecy warns about. I can’t be saved, and if we try, more people are going to die. You said it’s not me because of the way the prophecy was phrased; you said you know the, the quirks of how your prophecy communicates, but you don’t. You used to know, but there are so many exceptions now. The prophecy only predicts short term things… except for in high energy environments, when it doesn’t. It only predicts for people you’re close to… except that it told you I was going to drown on the very day we met, when you didn’t even like me. It only predicts in rhyme… except for at Duniyasar, where its power is enhanced enough that it gives relatively coherent advice and can even sort-of hold a basic conversation. Ignoring the worst case scenarios isn’t going to stop making them come true.”

“And your inevitable dramatic death is somehow connected to me actually being a sleeper agent this whole time?”

“Maybe! I don’t know. Maybe they’re separate things. I just… look, none of this is even what I wanted to talk about. Your prophecy gave me some advice awhile ago, and I… I guess it’s time to stop ignoring it.”

She frowned. “Ignoring what?”

“Ignoring what happened in the Labyrinth of dreams.”