by Danny Macks
“What is it?”
“I’m missing the right Sparian word, so, for now, I’m calling it a vácuo pump. It pulls all the air out of the jar.”
“What does it put in the air’s place?”
“Nothing.”
Was this another language problem? You couldn't have a jar full of nothing. That was impossible. When Silva dreamed Kate would change the world, he’d imagined more items like the Janos cannon and the shock absorber.
But it was more than that. Kate didn't think like other people in Sparro. He considered asking her what the sigil was for this nothing … this vácuo, but he knew the answer before he asked. Kate didn't need sigils.
Among the papers in the corners, a ribbon stuck out of a scroll. “You shouldn't have that.”
Kate picked up the mage scroll. "I was told simply owning a mage scroll isn't illegal."
"Well …" Silva drawled, "simply having one isn't illegal. But, since you don't wear the robes, let's say possession of a mage scroll is frowned upon. Socially."
Kate ignored Silva's hints about her questionable social status and unrolled the scroll on her desk. It wasn’t master level, but it was a mage scroll: a series of sigils around a central completed rote with no notes or explanations. “It doesn’t matter," she said. "The person who sold this to me lied. The foundation sigils are wrong.”
Silva looked over the scroll. “No, everything is right.”
Kate tapped the action sigil. “This one is wrong.”
A cold shiver went down Silva's spine. This was exactly why Kate shouldn't have the scroll: the temptation to learn it. No matter how brilliant, Kate was a drudge. He shouldn't even be discussing this with her. He schooled his features.
“I hate it when mages shut down like that! Always, right before they tell me I can’t learn something. I thought you were different, but I guess you are a mage.”
“You make it sound like mages versus others. Our society isn't like that. Let’s talk about something else,” Silva said, trying to be diplomatic. “Father asked me to talk to you about the yellow.”
Kate scowled at the poor attempt at misdirection. “What about it?”
“He wasn't free to talk, but he said he once told you something about the yellow. You didn't believe him, but you listened. He said to ask what he told you.”
Kate sat down behind her desk and gestured to the scroll. “Sounds like barter to me.”
“I’m serious. Understanding the yellow is important.”
She tapped the scroll with a finger. “So is this. Secrecy is wrong, Silva.”
“Secrecy is necessary,” Silva said, quoting the University maxim automatically. “A mage is responsible for what he creates. Remember Mother’s sigil? I haven’t told anyone about it, because I am responsible for what they do with it. Thousands of rotes exist with the foundation sigils unknown by even journeymen mages like me.”
Why did he have to justify himself? This was basic information every child knew. Why was she treating him like he was in the wrong here?
“And you don’t think I can handle the responsibility? I know Muriel's Sigil. I'm the one who taught it to you. And I've told no one else, not even Drudge.”
“I know you can’t handle the responsibility,” Silva snarled. “I've seen the damage inflicted by one of your inventions.” When Silva saw the shock on Kate’s face, he knew he had gone too far. He started to school his features, then stopped himself. She needed to see his scowl, needed to see how she had hurt him by making him say such hateful things. He wasn't supposed to be hateful with Kate. This was her fault.
Oh honey, that’s not how relationships work.
I’m a little busy to be talking to a hallucination right now, Mother.
“What are you talking about?” Kate didn't look chastised. She looked … hurt. She didn't understand.
“A little over twenty miles southwest of here is a mine using a gigantic Janos drill to rip apart a hillside for mining. The mud from the contraption is fouling the water in the stream which feeds the entire county.”
“I had nothing to do with that.”
“It’s called a Janos drill, Kate. The only reason you haven’t already been arrested is because no one has invented a law against non-magical disasters, yet.” Silva took a deep calming breath. His heart was thumping like a racehorse. Kate scowled as if the meditative breath had been a derisive sigh, but let him continue without interrupting. “Every graduating student at University has a signature next to his name. That signature says, ‘I accept responsibility for this person.’ It has never been legally enforced, but when the Winterhaven disaster happened, the University headmaster and head of the doctoral program committed suicide.”
Kate scowled down at the open scroll. “Do you think one of Drudge’s companies–”
“It’s called a Janos drill, Kate. I’m certain the Delan family will remind the court of that when somebody gets around to creating a law. They employ excellent barristers.”
“Drudge helped me get this office. Hired my secretary–”
“Is his name on any of the paperwork?” Silva asked, rhetorically. “Drudge isn’t your friend.”
Kate glanced up. Her eyes glistened, but the corner of her mouth quirked. “And you are?”
“Always.”
Kate pushed the scroll forward. “Prove it.”
Silva rubbed a hand across his beard. Yes, this was wrong, but this was also Kate. She didn't have anyone else. “Since it is illegal for me to simply tell you, how about we try this from the other end and you teach me? Why do you think this sigil is incorrect?”
Kate gestured to the scroll. “If the rote is a sentence, then these sigils are words. Words have a role.” She pointed to the various foundation sigils and slipped into her own language. “Sentença equals substantivo plus conjunção plus adjetivo plus …” Then she pointed at the action sigil. “Verbo.”
“You used álgebra on rotes.” Silva leaned back and ran his hands through his hair. How could he explain?
Kate turned in her chair and grabbed a bound notebook. “I’ve puzzled together a collection of them in the last few weeks. Reverse engineering the foundation sigils is basic stuff. A school child on my world could figure these out.”
“You taught me álgebra, Kate. Symbols that mean something, but don’t mean something, or can mean several different things. For me as a twelve or thirteen year old, it was only a game, but we don’t have anything like that here. Here, mage training is — always — learn the sigils and learn how to put them together. How many other mages, no matter what their education level, have actually figured one of your equations out instead of bribing the secretary? We aren't trained to start with the solution and go backwards. We don't 'reverse' anything. That’s why placeholders for action sigils work as a code.”
“Placeholders,” Kate said, trying out the new word.
Silva tapped the ♦ symbol on his equation ♦ = 29 , then the 'action' placeholder on the scroll. “Placeholders.”
Kate had taught him figuring out a problem in álgebra with multiple variables required multiple equations. And Kate had encyclopedias full of rotes to pull from. Given time, and a library card, she could figure out any sigil. Wait. “Did you say you had collections of action sigils?”
She opened the notebook filled with foundation sigils, including dozens of action sigils. “Don’t tell me nobody has written these down before?”
“On chalkboards only. Teachers always write sigils on chalkboards and erase them as soon as they are written. You can get arrested for writing action sigils down in permanent form.” He'd worried about Kate committing a crime, but — in her ignorance — she had already broken the law. This notebook would be all the proof an inquisitor needed.
There was a brittle edge to Kate's smile. “What will they do? Kill me? It’s not like they can make me unlearn something I know.”
No, instant death was reserved for necromancy. “It’s called a mind wipe.”
Fear
. Finally, she was starting to understand. “How much would they force me to forget? I thought mind rape was illegal.”
“Not when a judge orders it as part of a conviction. Mind wipes are not subtle. How much of your life would you like to forget? How old were you when you learned álgebra? Twelve or thirteen, like me?” Silva closed Kate’s notebook. “Find a fireplace and burn that. Today.”
Kate raised her hand to her mouth as her gaze considered all the piles of papers cluttered in the corner of her shop.
“And, for me, it would probably be good idea if you didn’t use the term ‘action sigils’ either. I tried to be circumspect, but I still said more than a mage should to a commoner.”
Kate’s eyes focused on Silva's robes and her jaw clenched. “This is wrong. I get what you’re trying to say, but the criteria for who learns and who doesn’t is based on birth.”
“And money,” Silva agreed. “But that’s the way things are. Did my question get you thinking in the right way?”
Kate slowly nodded. Her gaze shifted back to her notes.
“And my question? What did Father say about the yellow?”
“They’re alive.”
“I know that.”
“And something about what they eat.”
“They eat ley energy. Everybody knows that.”
Kate frowned. “That doesn’t make any sense. Do the math. If the yellow ate ley energy, why aren't there any here?”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Kate let Silva take her vácuo pump home. She said she had a much simpler demonstration in mind, involving thirty-five foot long glass tubes full of water. She sketched it out, the concept seemed simple enough, but she also said she could use it to predict weather. He didn’t understand that part. Kate called it pressão barométrica. The glassblowers had already completed construction.
Back at his office, he set the vácuo pump on a table by itself, out of the way, while he worked on the riddle of the wemyds. He leaned back in his chair, steepled his fingers and considered the pump. Instinctively, he knew something must be inside that jar after the air was pumped out, but he couldn't see it. It was like one of Kate’s equations: a placeholder were a number belonged.
As so often happened when he thought about the wemyds, his mind shifted onto the necromantic scroll. The more he thought about it, the more convinced he became that the yellow was the original target of the spell. Although bloodsuckers, prober insects were not a great enough threat someone would risk being executed for necromancy to kill them. The prober sigil on the scroll Dr. Delan had given to Silva had been a placeholder, when the foundation sigil for wemyds — Muriel's sigil — was unknown.
But the scroll had not been written in Dr. Delan's hand. Why had somebody incriminated themselves that way then turned the scroll over to the professor, before they had the one piece the scroll required? Would he ever know?
Silva set aside any useless conjecture about the motivations of the unknown author of that scroll, and considered the other parallels between probers and the little diatoms which made up the yellow.
Probers spawned in water and lived on blood. Anyplace near Winterhaven which had both: they spread. Only the dryness of the lands east of the Capstock mountains prevented them from spreading across all of Sparro. What did wemyds need to live? Unlike the prober bugs, wemyds did exist in the capital, if only in the bodies of his patients. If they ate ley energy directly, why weren't they spreading?
Out of the corner of his eye, he caught Doris leaning against the doorframe. There had to be a trick to simply appearing like that.
“Has Miss Janos snared you with her little toy, too?” Doris asked, a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. “She gave one to the University and almost every professor has suspended their own research while they fiddle with it. As I understand it, it’s as much a philosophical question as a magical one. How do you find out what is in a box without opening it?”
“Her world has a special kind of math based around that question,” Silva said. “And I think that’s why her world has invented so much without ley energy. They don’t need to see something to understand it. But no, that toy isn’t what I’m worried about. My father hinted my thinking about the yellow might be all wrong.”
Doris frowned. “Isn't your father supposed to be insane?”
Silva nodded. “That doesn’t make him automatically incorrect.”
“Then, from what I’ve heard, you’re the only one to think that.”
Silva swiveled his chair to look at Doris directly and sat fully upright. Doris was right about what people thought, of course, but that didn’t make hearing it pleasant. “I assume you didn’t come in here just to hear me mutter. What can I do for you?”
“Would you talk to Charlie Fenwick tomorrow? I’ve checked him and his parents over and their auras are still blue, but he insists he needs to talk to you. He stops by every morning before his classes.”
*****
“The problem with prophetic dreams,” Dr. Delan said in Silva's dream that night, “is they are only useful when the future is already known.” A classroom dream? Again? Silva was supposed to be a graduate. Why was his subconscious so fixated on bringing him back?
Dr. Delan coughed and Silva caught him staring at him. “Sorry, professor.”
The professor returned to his chalkboard and drew a scroll on it. In the way of dreams, he then reached up, sank his fingers into the blackboard and pulled out a solid, real scroll. “When presented with a real problem, you can’t rely on dreams to fix it for you. This is why the best seers are useless in a crisis.” He shook the scroll like a baton, emphasizing his words. The master level ribbons waggled in Silva's face. “You need to pay attention to your surroundings and think.”
Silva was still thinking about his dream the next morning, when his first patient was shown into the room. The dream hadn’t been clearly prophetic, but it worried him that the scroll waggled in his face looked a bit too much like the necromancy scroll he had burned. And the dream told him nothing about wemyds, what they ate or why they weren’t spreading out of the bodies they inhabited.
Doris coughed and Silva glanced up to see his first ‘patient’ was Charlie Fenwick. After showing him in, Doris remained in the room.
“Sorry,” Silva said. “I was distracted by a puzzle. What can I do for you, Charlie?”
Charlie started fidgeting as soon as Silva fixed his gaze on the boy. He tried smiling gently, which only seemed to make the intimidation worse.
Silva thought he was going to bolt out of the room, but Charlie swallowed a couple times and found his voice. “It’s my parents. I know Mr. Stone said to expect some atrophy, since they haven’t used magic in years, but they still can’t operate a sewing machine. Or anything.”
Silva glanced at Doris who nodded. “I tried to explain that recovery isn’t instantaneous, but they are clear of infection. I’ve looked. I’m starting to wonder if the problem isn’t psychological. I offered to refer them to someone for remedial magic training, but Charlie insisted he needed to speak to you.”
“They can’t afford it,” Charlie said. “Not unless I drop out of school.” Charlie took a deep breath and stood up straighter, as if summoning his courage. “But I don’t think that’s it. I don’t care what you see. There’s something wrong with the treatment.”
Silva leaned back in his chair and started to think, then yanked his attention back to Charlie. Pay attention, the dream had said. Slowly, a mad idea formed. He looked to Doris. “Do you trust me?”
Charlie nodded and relaxed, as if Silva was speaking to him, but Doris’s face went blank with suppressed emotions. “Why?”
“I want to do an experiment with the two of you and it won’t work if either of you run away screaming.”
Charlie’s awed face fell and Doris's expression, impossibly, grew even more still. “You aren’t filling me with confidence.”
Silva smiled. “I’ll take that as a yes. Charlie, please sit there off to the side.
Doris, please show in the next patient then join Charlie. Don’t leave until I ask you to.”
“That’s not an explanation. I’m still not confident about this,” Doris muttered as he left to get the next patient.
While Doris fetched the next patient, Silva cast the rote which caused the wemyds to glow. Not a single one shone in the room. He left that rote running and adjusted his vision. As Doris had said, Charlie was clear of infection and his aura was a clear blue, unlike the green aura of the new patient Doris ushered in.
“Thank you for seeing–” a feminine voice began, before Silva cut the new patient short with an abrupt gesture.
Weaving together sigils into a new rote, Silva pulled on the wemyds, tugging on them like an apprentice ley bender moving bricks. He smiled at the memory and the patient made a choked, gurgling noise.
Silva saw Doris’s aura start to rise and waved him back to his seat. “Sit. She’s fine.”
All three of the other people in the room gasped as several of the glowing wemyds left the patient’s body, but Silva didn’t see the room’s light change with his adjusted vision. He divided the wemyds into two bundles and shoved them inside Doris and Charlie.
The patient screamed, dove out of her chair and ran out of the room clutching her chest as Silva returned his vision to normal.
Doris leapt up from his own chair and rushed at Silva. “Are you insane!”
Silva resisted the urge to throw an absorption shield up. Would Doris punch him? He probably deserved it. But, although Doris was breathing as hard as if he had already been in a fight and his hands were balled into fists, he didn’t take his emotions out on Silva.
Silva was having a remarkably easy time keeping his expression calm. If his guess was right, he hadn’t done either of then any harm. “Please don’t leave the office for the next hour. Both of you. I’ll send my apologies to your professor, Charlie.”