NOVEL WEB 18. Links/Chains 2/3
The entrance clerk of the tower told me to climb ten flights of stairs and knock on a door made of frosted glass to find Master Devaus. The stairs were a chore after I’d already walked through seven miles of swamp, but I did have a deadline. I forced myself to climb them, using trickles of maja to suppress the aching.
When I reached the doors he’d described they were already open.
The room beyond them was high up in the tower, with a long open arch in the outer wall that looked out over the mountain. Wooden arches criss-crossed the vaulted ceiling, with red banners hangings hanging between the pillars. Each banner depicted the same symbol, a hollow circle crossed by a black vertical bar. The bar could have been a staff, or an obelisk, or the pupil of a reptillian eye. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen the symbol of the Reeves. It wasn’t prominent down in the academy, but I’d seen it a few times within the tower.
Positioned around the room were odd items of furniture, stone plinths, large crystal bowls, brass and silver braziers, lecturns supporting oversized books, even a small wooden gallows with a noose.
As I stepped into the room a giant bird flew in through the archway and landed in a shallow copper tub full of clear water. It was some kind of parrot, not at all at home in the cold slopes of Windshriek, with white and purple plumage and a curved beak that looked like it had been dipped in blood.
It turned after landing, the water at its feet sloshing as it paced in a half circle. It stopped when it saw me, peering at me with a round yellow eye before turning away. It could only be some kind of corporeal spirit.
The only person in the room, an androdgynous black-robed Master with gray skin and long white hair, moved over to the bird and began to speak with it. The Master said something, then the bird’s beak opened a fraction for a few seconds, then the Master spoke again.
I stood quietly by the door. I strained my ears to hear what they were talking about, but the wind blowing in through the open side of the building was too loud.
After a few minutes the spirit had finished giving its report. The Master bowed to it, and it turned away, stretched its wings, and took off. It seemed to fly out through the arch without ever flapping its wings, as if it moved by the mere idea of flight.
The black-robed Master turned to me and gestured for me to approach.
“Master Devaus?” I asked.
“Yes,” he or she replied. I couldn’t tell from their voice. “Are you Dorian Tisk?”
“Yes.”
“How did you get on with the spirits?”
“I dispelled them,” I said. was pretty sure dispelled was the right word. “Three were the spirits of runaways, one of an initiate sent to hunt them.”
“You dispelled them? How?”
“I used a sword coated in my blood.”
Devaus considered that for a few seconds before shaking their head. “Foolish. Destroying a spirit is the act of a brute.”
I grimaced. It was the first time in my life I’d ever been called a brute.
“I wasn’t sure how else to handle them,” I said.
“It would have been more productive to recruit or dominate them,” Devaus said, becoming animated. “The spirits of human mages are powerful, flexible, and quite easily molded. You could have ended this task with three new spiritual servants or soldiers, instead of merely passing the assignment.”
“They weren’t really in the mood to talk,” I said.
Devaus was quiet for a second. They looked off around the room, as if they’d lost focus.
“Then you should have forced your will upon them. Put them at your mercy, until they break and submit! Spear them with your maja, and control them from within! To simply destroy a spirit is disgustingly wasteful.” Devaus trailed off, seeming to calm down. “Still, you have accomplished the task, in your own way. What would you like for a reward?”
It took a second for the question to register. I was used to just accepting whatever the academy Master wanted to pass off as a reward. Now I was being asked what I wanted? I wasn’t prepared. I hadn’t even imagined what I’d ask for in principle.
What would be too much to ask for? What would be too little? I didn’t imagine I could ask to go home, but I didn’t want to waste this chance.
What would most benefit me today? Knowledge? Equipment? Training?
“I could pick something, if you prefer…” Devaus said flatly into the silence. I realized I was taking too long.
My empty core had to be the top of my priorities. Without a maja reserve, I was barely a mage at all.
“I recently lost my accumulated maja…” I started, hoping Devaus would jump in with a suggestion.
“Oh yes, I heard,” Devaus said. “Master Sectus was laughing about it all afternoon.”
In dropped my eyes to the floor. A pain in my teeth made me realize I was clenching my jaw.
“The best treatment for depleted maja would be to accumulate directly from a concentrated source,” Devaus went on. They rubbed their dry, gray hands together. When they pulled them apart a small steel disk was sitting between them.
Devaus held it out to me. I took it carefully.
The disk was about the size of my palm, etched with a strange cantogram shaped like a spiked circle, broken by straight lines in eight places, each leading to a more complicated sub-diagram.
“This trinket is a spirit siphon. If a spirit is placed within the circle, the device will slowly its maja, cleansing it and releasing it for accumulation. This particular siphon is quite low quality. It will only work on very minor spirits, those no larger than the disk itself. But from the feeling of your presence, that may be enough.”
I ran my thumb along the lines of the cantogram, trying to memorize it then and there, as if it would suddenly be snatched away.
“Thank you,” I said.
It might have been the first time one of the Masters had ever been genuinely helpful to me.
“It’s your due,” Devaus said.
A few seconds later a new spirit arrived at the window. This one was incorporeal, faintly translucent, in the shape of a swollen four-armed humanoid with an elongated head.
Devaus abandoned me completely, heading straight for where the spirit was settling down on a woven rug at one of the room’s station.
Thankful that I was getting out without being exposed to any unhinged Reeve behaviour, I left quickly, heading for the tower’s exit.
I was just passing through the main ground floor corridor when I caught sight of Master Antonyx.
He was fifty feet away and had his back to me, but his dusty robe with scrolls bulging out of the pockets couldn’t belong to anyone else.
He passed out of sight a moment later, rounding a corner at the far end of the corridor.
I hadn’t seen him since he’d given me the book Adventures in Thought. After solving the author’s riddle and picking up the Thought aspect I’d gone back to try and deliver the real results of my search at Fort Msiesetr. But he hadn’t been there. Or at least, he hadn’t answered my knock at his door. At least now I knew he was still alive.
I rushed after him.
By the time I reached the corner he’d disappeared, but I headed for stairs down and then towards his office.
This time when I knocked on his door I got an answer.
He didn’t open the door for me, just shouting a clipped “Enter.”
I opened the door and stepped inside.
Antonyx was there, standing towards the back of the room.
He was inspecting a row of identical incorporeal spirits, six tall human-shaped shades, with cowled silhouettes and bodies that billowed out like wind-blown robes. They each had distinct arms and hands, with long claw-tipped fingers, but no other features.
The sight of them standing amongst the shelves was almost enough to have be bolting back through the door. Only the fact that Antonyx was standing right next to one, his hand buried in the shadow-stuff of its flesh, kept me in the room. If he was aware of them and invited me in anyway, there had to be a limit to how dangerous they were.
“Master Antonyx?” I said cautiously, as much to announce myself as get his attention.
“Come in, scribe’s apprentice,” he said, not looking away from the spirit. “I’ll get to you in a minute.”
I took a few steps deeper into the room.
Antonyx was moving his hand through the spirit, from its head, to its heart, then its hands. I could feel his maja working through the process. It gave off a quiet fluttering sensation, like papers blowing around in a wind.
While I waited, I took Adventures in Thought out of my bag. I’d got everything I could from it, and most of it wasn’t worth much anyway, just the rambling of its author. The entire thing could have been condensed into a two-paragraph scroll as far as I was concerned.
“I brought back your book,” I said.
“Yeah. Give me a minute.”
He gestured within the body of the spirit, turning his hand like he was tying a knot, then withdrew his hand. He brushed it against his robe as he turned.
“Alright little scribe, tell me what you found.”
I took a breath and thought back to Lectuou’s riddle, and my personal answer to it.
Thought aspect didn’t take much maja to use, which was lucky, because I had almost none.
I gathered up what I had, the product of several evenings of accumulation, and brought it into my gaze.
I fixed the answer to Lectuous’s riddle in my mind, the image of my reflection staring back at me in the pool. The trick wasn’t just looking at my reflection. The memory was also colored by the riddle. It was a moment of looking at myself and seeing a stranger, of looking at a stranger, and knowing that my thoughts ran behind their eyes.
I pushed the feeling onto the maja and pushed it out with a thought.
I thought at him.
The effort all but drained my maja. I might have another sentence in me, but I hoped he didn’t want to try and carry on a conversation this way.
He just waved his hand at me.
“No need for that any more. I dealt with the watcher. Just tell me. What did you find in the records?”
I let the book fall limply at my side. I let out a sigh before I answered.
“You just want me to come out and say it?” I asked.
“Yeah. Good job learning Thought aspect though. Not everyone can. Even some Masters never manage it.”
“Why did I need to learn it in the first place?” I asked.
“I had a rival spying on me. I had to take a hand off my personal projects. But he’s gone, you’re free to speak.”
“There was an astronomical event, like you thought,” I said. “Two red stars in the sky above the mountain.”
“When?” Antonyx asked, suddenly focused.
“The spring of 1585, two hundred and twenty-five years ago,” I started.
Antonyx turned away and paced towards the bookcase next to his desk and started hunting along a row of books. He waved his hand for me to continue.
“An Antorxian officer called Ewart was in command of the fort at the time. On the sixth day of spring that year, his guards reported the appearance of two red stars in the sky above the academy, in the Mephit constellation.”
“In Mephit?” Antonyx said. “How long were they there?”
“From the sixth to the eleventh,” I said, poking my memories of the commander’s log with a mental stick until they yielded more information.
“Five days,” he said to himself.
He found the book he was looking for and took it off the shelf. He opened the cover and started paging through it. I shifted to the side so I could read the spine. The Geography of the Near Stars.
“I’m pretty sure the academy attacked the fort around the same time,” I added, taking a step closer. “The mage officer there thought it was a Dark Smoke Gut demon. All the surviving troops left for Fort Serakas.”
Antonyx was ignoring me, reading through the book. I tool another step closer and caught a glimpse of an annotated diagram. A set of concentric circles surrounded a black dot. Each circle was marked with a character from an unfamiliar script and annotated with words and numbers in Old Irisian.
“What were the stars?” I asked,
Antonyx stared at the book for a few seconds before snapping it shut.
“Conventional wisdom would say that they were comets, but normal comets wouldn’t be red.”
“So they were unusual comets?” I asked.
“Very unusual,” Antonyx said, half to himself. He dropped the book on his desk and snapped his gaze to me. “Keep this one to yourself. There’s more knowledge that can get an Initiate killed than there is that can’t, and this is the former. Don’t tell anyone what you read, and don’t tell anyone I was asking for it. Especially don’t tell any of the other Masters.”
I nodded.
Antonyx let out a tight breath, then turned back to his spirits.
He made no mention of any additional reward. He’d already given me access to Adventures in Thought, but I kind of thought my unofficial work warranted something more.
Maybe by not banishing me from the room he was giving me an opportunity to pry information out of him.
“What are those spirits?” I asked, looking over the shadowy figures he was working on.
Antonyx did something with his hand, making a circular motion, then waggling a finger as if he were writing in the air.
“My servitors,” he said, not turning from the figure. “They’re artificial spirits. Hand made. These ones are going to be my librarians.”
“For the archives?” I asked, looking around at the messy, chaotic shelves that filled the chamber.
“For the library!” he answered. “Raphas is out. Now it’s my turn. I’m taking it over. It’s going to be something new. Organized.”
He said the last word almost reverently.
“Maybe some lights?” I asked, thinking of the perpetual darkness down there.
“No,” Antonyx said bluntly.
Oh. “Why not?”
“The shadows force students to learn to see in the dark. To a sorcerer, darkness is an old friend, not a barrier. Its only a problem for the unskilled, and they really shouldn’t be getting into the deeper sections in there anyway.”
“How does someone learn to see in the dark?” I asked.
Antonyx had been surprisingly free with his answers so far, and I didn’t know if it was an implicit reward for my report, or whether he was just distracted by whatever he was doing with the servitor. Either way, I felt like I was pushing my luck.
“Fleshcrafting of the eyes is one way. Internal manipulation of the Sift aspect is another. There are cantograms that can do it.”
“I’d very much like to see one of those cantograms,” I said.
“Try the library,” he replied, without humour.
I decided I had to just come out and say it.
“Am I going to get anything for my report?” I asked.
Without pausing his work, Antonyx flicked his hand behind him. I felt his maja surge, and a whip of force tore one of the sheets of paper from his desk and slapped it into my face.
I reached up and pulled it away, finding that it was one of the notes detailing a filing system.
“Take an index. It’ll help you navigate the library, after the changes.”
I didn’t bother suppressing my sigh.
I folded the paper slowly and slipped it into my pack.
I stood there in silence, watching him work, building the courage to bring up the other thing I wanted to ask.
After a couple of minutes he noticed that I hadn’t scurried off with my reward and spoke over his shoulder.
“Still here?”
“There was something else,” I said. “I wanted to ask about the failure’s fate.”
He must have noticed the edge in my voice because he paused then withdrew his hand from his spirit. He pulsed his maja, shaking his hand as if flicking water off it then turned to face me directly.
“So you found out about that already,” he said.
“Last week,” I said.
Antonyx didn’t follow up. He turned awkwardly back to his spirit, continuing to poke at it.
“They took eight of us. To be turned into monsters.”
Antonyx waved a hand at my dismissively. “They’re gentled. They’ll enjoy being monsters.”
His words were flippant, but his tone was grim.
“They shouldn’t have been gentled at all,” I said.
I could feel my cheeks getting warm. I forced myself to relax, leveling out my thoughts. Having a temper was a completely new experience to me and I didn’t like losing it.
“I agree. They should have passed their tests,” Antonyx said.
“They didn’t even know what was going to happen if they failed.”
“They knew our reputation. They probably thought they were going to get killed. It turns out what they get was a little bit better than that.”
“Better?” I said. “Is it better to be turned into a monster?”
“Yes,” Antonyx replied without hesitation.
“And you’re okay with it?” I asked.
I’d obviously misjudged Antonyx. The impression I’d got of him being halfway to a normal person was clearly wrong. It must have been that the Reeves were all so awful that the first one to seem merely unpleasant looked like a hero.
“It’s one small evil in the world,” he said. “I didn’t start it. I can’t stop it. It just is. I’ve never run a warbeast project, but that’s as far as my conscience goes.”
“I didn’t expect you to be able to stop it,” I said. “Could anyone?”
Antonyx at least did me the favor of humoring me. He thought for a second.
“Grandmaster Korn. He’s the academy head. He’s powerful. He could stop it by edict. Master Sectus could refuse to cooperate, that’d stop it in practice, until his apprentice killed him or got promoted over him. There’s a few legal scholars around here who might be able to litigate it.”
“Litigate it?”
“The Reeves are a society of laws,” Antonyx said. “We have a code. If one of them demonstrated that gentling was against the code, it’d be stopped.”
“The code? You mean the Sovereign’s Path?”
“That’s the core of it.”
“I don’t even know all of it,” I said.
“It is not to receive, but to take.”
“I know that part.”
“What we take adds to our strength,” Antonyx added.
That part was new to me. The next line.
“That seems like a code designed to let anyone do absolutely anything,” I said.
“Not really,” Antonyx said. “There’s a lot I could take from you. Your sandals, your bag, that little sword you’ve got hidden in there. But none of it would make me stronger. It wouldn’t be protected by the code.”
“So if you did, I could complain to someone?”
“Great spirits, no. But it wouldn’t be protected by the code. It’d be a personal dispute. And I’d be looked down on for it. If it was a big enough disparity, someone could call me on it and accuse me of straying from the Path. They might even get me stripped of my rank.”
“How does the failure’s fate fit into the code?” I asked.
“Gentling them takes their free will, but turning useless recruits into fighters makes the order stronger. What we take adds to our strength.”
“So if the gentled students couldn’t be used, they wouldn’t add to your strength, and gentling them would be against the code?” I asked.
“Well… I’m not a legal scholar,” Antonyx said.
He finished his work with the servitor and withdrew his hand. The spirt shuddered in place for a few seconds, then turned and started floating towards a nearby pile of books. It bent down, picked the top one off the pile, and moved to sort it into a nearby shelf.
I thought for a minute about what Antonyx was saying. To me the code of the Soveriegn’s Path just sounded like a convenient fiction, a self-aggrandizing justification for theft, murder, and whatever else they wanted to do. The idea that any kind of legal principle could get the Reeves to stop doing something they otherwise wanted to do was ridiculous. It was another hollow hope. It was probably just another method of control. Unfortunately, now I knew about it, it wouldn’t stop nagging me.
“What’s the rest of the Soveriegn’s Path?” I asked.
Antonyx screwed up his face. “You don’t get to know it yet. Steps on the Path are rewards for different milestones. You’re due the second step for passing your first fortnight, but the rest has to wait.”
“So we don’t even get to know the laws we’re living under?”
“No.”
I had no good response to that. Antonyx had told me more than anyone else at the academy so far, but now that he was clamming up I didn’t have any way to pressure him.
He seemed to realize I was at a loss, since he turned away and started working on the next spirit along the row.