The source of magic, p.12
The Source of Magic, page 12
Gretchen eyeballed him for a moment and then having made her mind up, extended her hand to shake. "Okay, let’s see what we can fix you up with.”
John gave some thought to what they should choose.
“Are there any laws about carrying weapons in the city?” He asked.
“Not as such, though some of the fancier places won’t let you in if you have anything obvious like a sword. And you won’t make any friends if you go swing a blade in people’s faces,” answered Gretchen.
John picked up a long sword and was surprised by its weight. He went to swing it and realised that there really wasn’t a lot of room to move in the store. In very large rooms or wide streets were the only places in the city swinging a long slashing weapon would be possible. He needed something that was good for tight spaces and didn’t take a lot of skill.
At the end of a row of knives he found just the thing. The blade straight and sharp on one edge and slightly triangular coming to a thick flat spine. The cutting edge was eighteen inches in length, only narrowing to a point at the very end. The grip and wide guard were both blackened steel and other than a winding of leather for the grip, lacking in any particular embellishment.
Melanie had found herself two shorter stiletto daggers that she was currently trusting at the air with quick punching motions. With her lighting-quick reflexes, John could see her turning any opponent in to a sieve in short order.
“We have some blades and we have the totems to heal ourselves when we realise we don’t know how to use them," John said, handing over the coins for their purchases.
“If you don’t get a chance to use the knives, you can always try cutting your enemies with your sharp wit,” said Gretchen dryly, dropping the coins noisily into the cash box.
Stepping into the street, John took a few steps and experimental twists which the new weight on his hip. It was a little different to the weight of a firearm and its length was a new dimension to get used to.
“I think we should wait until night to do our snooping. I don’t know if they work shifts but it’s our best bet of avoiding any wizards working," John said.
Melanie nodded her head, only half paying attention. She was also busy testing out her new acquisitions.
“Well, we have time to kill and we need to find something for us to deliver to the Academy. Let’s go see what we can find.”
They spent the rest of the day window shopping and generally making free with their time. When twilight came, the crowds began to thin as people were either heading in for dinner or making their way to the main city gate to watch the attack. John stopped a fruit seller as he packed up his cart and made him very happy by buying up the last of his stock.
“I don’t imagine there are too many orchards inside the city walls,” said John, lifting the crate of apples, "Where do you get your supply from? Is there a secret tunnel through the Egg or something?”
The vendor chuckled while he counted out the coins he had been given. “Hah! No way through the Egg, everyone knows that. All us sellers go up to the keep, to the servants’ gate, and there’s an auction by the wizards, they have everything we need to keep selling. They say their goods aren’t magic, they just use magic to get it in.”
The fruit seller trundled off with his empty cart whistling a happy tune and John and Melanie headed for the servants’ entrance of the Academy.
Night had come and the explosion from the attack had started by the time they were at the gate.
There was a guard and porter on duty checking the comings and goings. John hoped that neither of them recognised Melanie. He needn’t have worried, though. Both of them were too busy staring at her cleavage to study her face too closely. It was hard not to stare: when they stopped to hide their new weapons under the apples, she had grabbed the sides of her shirt and shimmied it down as far as public decency would allow.
“Which way now?” John asked still carrying the crate.
Melanie led the way and they moved with purpose towards the greater dome. Late working wizards were strolling around the grounds, and there were some acolytes sitting on benches and squares of grass under gas lamps, studying and talking. John noted the lack of vigilance of the guards regarding the monitoring of people who were inside the walls. And guessed that their assumption was that anyone who was inside had already passed a rigorous check by guards to get in.
The statue of Kinman was so generic it could have been of any wizard or scholar. A middle-aged man with a beard wearing flowing academic robes, with a book in one arm and the other held aloft as if making some grand point.
Kinman himself had been a great wizard who, at the end, was so overtaken by corruption that he would switch from casting devastating weather bending spells to a gibbering fool and back again several times a day. He had died when, walking in the woods, he had been casting lightning at anything that moved, convinced that he was being watched by hidden forces. The lightning had caused a fire in the brush and flotsam of the forest when he had switched back to his mentally feeble state. Confused and unable to reverse the calamity he had caused moments before, he perished in the forest fire. The plaque on the statue simply read, ‘CONSUMED IN THE FIRES OF GREATNESS’.
The statue was on a tall marble plinth just over six feet tall, and around the back was a steel door.
John set the apples down and pulled on the door. It didn’t budge. There was a keyhole and without the key they were stuck.
“Now we wait,” said John.
They took up position against the side of plinth around the corner from the door. They were as hidden as possible from anyone approaching the door but could spring into action if it were opened from the inside. Melanie was a ball of pent-up nervousness and energy, and she was fidgeting from one foot to the other.
They retrieved their new weapons and then tried to look as nonchalant as possible.
“If we don’t get in tonight, can you carve a totem with a spell to unlock doors?” John asked.
“Yes, it's not too difficult. I have my own tools now so I would just need to find the right kind of stone.”
“So you can’t just use any stone?”
John was happy to wait in silence but hoped that distracting Melanie with conversation would help her to relax a little.
“You can use anything to make a totem, but quality does make a difference. If you want to carve from stone for example, you want to find a stone that is in tune with he type of magical energy you want to use. The stone will also have parts of it that are more in tune than others, it’s sort of magically denser in those parts. So if you have a spell in mind where the totem has a particular shape, the quality of your totem will be better if you find a stone where its density has that shape and you’re just carving away the rubbish bits.” As Melanie explained, there was a lot of hand waving and pauses as she tried to think of a way to explain concepts she had been learning her since childhood.
They were in luck. The door opened from the inside and John sprang into action. Taking his dagger in its hard sheath he ducked around the corner and wedged it into the doorway preventing the door from closing fully and locking. The wizard who had just left was so used to the door swinging shut behind him that he didn’t even stop to check and simply strode of to his destination.
John and Melanie quickly moved inside and down the stairs the stairs that led to the secret experimentation area for the Grey School.
Their way was lit by strange lamps which were affixed to the stone walls and gave off blue-tinted light. When they had reached a hallway at the bottom of the stairs Melanie took a moment to examine one of the lamps.
“There’s a small totem in here. They have carved it so it is syphoning magic from the nearby convergence prime, and these lines here mean it’s continually casting a lighting spell. That’s quite smart really.”
Along the hallway were a number of closed doors at irregular intervals. John tapped Melanie on the shoulder to draw her attention away from the inventive approach to underground illumination and pointed to the first door.
John’s movement was a compromise between speed and silence resulting in an odd, bent-knee, heel-to-toe step. Melanie was naturally gifted at both and no compromise was needed; rather she was focusing on not speaking out loud, which was a third gift of hers.
After listening at the first door John turned the handle and it swung open to reveal large storage room. The space was mostly shelves filled with measures and weights, glassware, copper tubes and wire, unfashioned stones and crystals, blank scrolls and ink. It looked like the kind of store room more suited to Edison than Merlin.
The next room was set out with benches with a wide range of chisels, hammers, rasps, files and sanding blocks. Bins of chipped stone and black dust sat around the room with the odd dustpan and broom leaning against a wall.
Moving on they found a room of blackboards covered in chalk diagrams of totems alongside complex mathematics. On a table sat a number of totems arranged in increasing size. They were all carved for the same spell. Next to the line-up were rulers and callipers for measurements. On another table were totems of the same size and carving but made from different types of stone rock and crystal. Cross sections of each material used was on display behind their corresponding totem.
The third room so far fit with what John would have expected in the study of totems. The fourth room was a different matter. Runes and shapes and complex occult diagrams were drawn on floors and walls. Charts and scrolls were strewn about with instructional markings and corresponding explanatory text. Some of the markings were going faintly, while others sputtered and fizzed like a faulty neon sign in the rain.
“Do you know about this sort of magic?” John asked.
“I know a little about runes and symbology but Grandma forbade me from asking about it. It’s supposed to be the first way our ancestors accessed magical energy and cast spells. Grandma said it wasn’t magic for Nekovolk, that it was the path that humans took which led to channelling magic directly and eventually, corruption.”
John noted the wistful tone to Melanie’s voice and he had to pull her away so they could move on. Room after room showed evidence of one sort of magical experimentation or another. Much of it didn’t have anything to do with totems. Melanie’s guess was as good as John’s when it came to identifying what the were looking at half the time. They could have been staring right at the smoking gun that would prove the Grey School was working against the king and then moved right on looking, none the wiser.
Finally they found a room that made sense to John. It was full of paperwork and filing cabinets. In the great tradition of evildoers through out history the Grey School kept meticulous records of their work.
“Let's start looking,” said John, moving to the first cabinet and pulling it open.
Most of what John found was documentation pertaining to the experiment in magic that they had seen in previous rooms.
Going through other people’s paperwork was a slow process, and John was painfully aware of the amount of time they had been trespassing and the possibility of being discovered by a night watchman doing their rounds or a wizard who liked to work at night. He started searching at high speed, quickly pulling open drawers looking for obvious signs of valuable information like a big red folder with TOP SECRET stamped on it.
The contents of one drawer rattled when he opened it. The draw was shallow and partitioned into small squares, each containing a communication totem. They were labelled and ordered chronologically. John grabbed the last of the blinking totems that had a date label. He drew circles in the air as Olga had instructed, and the totem glowed brighter and a voice began to speak.
“In accordance with your last communication regarding the increased intensity of attacks by the savages we have begun testing more vigorously. We have not het been successful in gaining insight to how the savages draw their magic from their great ones; however, I am confident that our renewed efforts will soon produce results.”
John replaced the totem and picked up and activated the first totem in the series.
“We have arrived and begun our investigations how the savages are able to draw on the power of their great ones. The army is intrenched and providing protection. It appears that our attempt to relocate the experiment from the Capital undetected has been a success. I wish you luck in defending against the coming onslaught of the savages,” came a voice from the totem.
Melanie replaced the scroll she was examining and asked, “So what does that mean?”
“I think we’ve found what we were looking for. These messages contradict the offical version of how the war started that Chifly laid out for us in his letter. It sounds like Lord Detier stole some sort of magical item from the savages and it was important enough for them to go to war over it. In the mean time they have been keeping most of the people in the capital happy and calm with mind control spells.”
John grabbed the two message totems he had listened to and slipped them into his pocket.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said.
They closed all the draws and replaced the stacks of paper and scrolls back to their original places as best as they could remember to delay the discovery of their theft when the wizards returned to work in the morning.
John led the way back into the hallway and came face to face with Lord Detier, Norman and three Academy guards.
John reached for his dagger and began drawing it from its sheath. At the same time Lord Detier brought his hand up holding two totems pulsing angry red light and moved his hand in two tight circles releasing the totems spells.
Crackling red beams of light shot from the totems and struck John and Melanie. As waves of debilitating pain rippled through them, John and Melanie fell to the ground, unable to move. Just before John lost consciousness, he saw Lord Detier bend over his body with a thin-lipped grin playing across his mouth.
“I said I never wanted to see you again, remember?”
Chapter 8
When John came to, he noticed the stone floor under him and, thinking he had only been unconscious for a moment, bolted to his feet. He pushed the feelings of dizziness down and focused on planting his feet and bracing up for a fight. But when he looked around, he noticed that he was no longer in the hallway.
John was in a large room. He could tell it was part of the secret underground research department of the Grey School by the stone walls and blueish totem lit lamps. The room had been segmented by the addition of iron bars running from floor to ceiling. The majority of the room had been split into two cells by the bars, leaving a gap of two feet between them. Anyone entering the room would be able to observe the cells from a partition running the length of the room into which the cell doors opened.
Lowering his arms, John took a closer look at his surroundings. The cells had a bed at the back that had more in common with a medical examiner’s table than a lock-up’s cot. Other than an obligatory bucket in one corner, there were no other furniture or objects in the room.
Sitting on the bed, however, was the Grey School acolyte Chloe, who he immediately recognised from his first night on his new world. She was sitting cross-legged, arms resting on bent knees, and staring at him with angry green eyes. Her whole body was tense, exuding animosity and rage. She appeared slightly dishevelled: her hair was sticking out in random patches and her makeup looked gritty and a few days old. She was wearing a robe made of very light white cotton that put John in mind of a medical gown. The gown had one-size-fits-all look to it and it swam on Chloe’s athletic frame.
In the cell next door, Melanie was lying on the floor, still unconscious. Kneeling down next to her was Selphie, who was feeling Melanie's forehead with her hand. Selphie seemed more relaxed than her sister, and the long plait kept her blond hair neater, but she still had the same grime of a few days showing. She was wearing the same cotton gown her sister was but she filled it out far more with the fabric sighing across her breasts.
“How long have you two been here?” John asked.
Chloe just snorted and turned her head to look at the wall.
“Since the night we summoned you,” answered Selphie leaning back on her heels to look at John. "We were sent to our dormitory after we left with Lord Detier. We had just gotten to sleep when Academy guards burst in, waking everyone up. They grabbed us and brought us down here.”
“Have you been charged with a crime? Are they keeping you here as a punishment?” John asked.
“We don’t even know where ‘here’ is. There haven’t been any charges, from the Academy’s disciplinary board or the magistrates. And we’ve only seen two people since we’ve been here. Someone came and gave us a basic medical. They wouldn’t answer any questions speak to us except to do things like take our weight and height. Then there is a guard who brings us food and water and brought us these clothes.”
John didn’t speak for a moment. Instead he paced slowly around the cell, rubbing the muscles in his neck and shoulder with his right hand. A few puzzle pieces fell into place and he didn’t like the picture they made. He made a small promise to himself that he was going to find everyone who was involved in this place and hand them over to the magistrate, starting with Lord Detier, right after he had seen to it that Lord Detier had accidentally fallen down some stairs.
“Do you know anything about secret experiments that Lord Detier oversees in this place?”
Selphie shook her head, and Chloe was looking at him now with interest.
“I’ve got bad news for you. If we don’t get ourselves out of this place – all of us – we won’t ever be getting out.
“This is a secret branch of your Academy that does experiments that the Grey School doesn’t want anyone to know about. They do work with totems, but they are also trying their hand at runes and glyphs, and possibly other types of magic.
“We came here looking for something to show the Academy isn’t being honest about the war. We heard communication totems that prove that they have stolen something from the savages and that started the war. The are experimenting on it somewhere far away from the capital.
