He gazed at their faces one by one. “The second change is a new rule. Anyone caught lying will have to leave the School and not come back. For this School to succeed in its mission, people have to know they can trust wizards. I won't let anyone endanger that.”
He paused. “I hope you understand that I want every one of you to become a wizard. I don't want to lose a single student if I can prevent it. But the School comes first.”
Chapter 72
Lester: smoke and mirrors
“Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile.”
– Albert Einstein
He took a bite out of the apple and pulled the bandage off his head to check the cut in the bathroom mirror. The wound was closed up; there was no blood seeping out from the scab. It itched something fierce, though.
I need you to come up to the School floors right away.
The voice spoke in the middle of his head. Without knowing how, he knew it was Xander.
The senior wizard met him at the lowest floor of the School, just inside the stairwell.
“Did you just call me?'
Yes. Don't waste time asking how, Xander sent. It's something I discovered I can do with apprentices and other wizards, but I don't know how to teach it to you. You'll either pick it up on your own or you won't.
A memory surfaced. “You did this before, when you first met me, didn't you? I thought it was ventriloquism but you said it was something else.” Another though occurred to him and he tried concentrating silently. Can you hear thoughts as well as send them?
Yes. Maybe if you practice that, you'll learn how to send and I'll be able to hear you when I'm not listening.
Is there a reason you don't want to talk out loud?
We have a serious problem, Xander told him. Wordlessly, he told him about the fire in the stables, caused by a hidden everflame.
So ask them and find out who did it.
That's the problem. I already did that, and I was using this mind thing to listen to their thought when they answered me. None of them felt the slightest fear of discovery or guilt about lying to me.
What? But you're sure one of them did it?
I was. Xander hesitated. But either I'm wrong and we have a new intruder from outside...or one of them did it and then found a way to not think about it when I ask them. Almost as if they managed to forget it completely.
Is that possible?
Anything is possible, Xander thought.
What are we going to do about it?
The first thing we do, Xander sent, is move the teacher's desk right next to the stairwell door. From now on no one uses the stairs without permission or an escort. We'll have to take turns guarding the door.
Arrgh. Then when am I going to be able to get more lessons in spinspace if one of us is always on guard duty?
I hadn't thought of that, Xander admitted. We'll have to promote Carolyn as soon as we can, so she can fill in for us on guard duty sometimes.
Great. So she gets extra tutoring and I get less.
Only for a little while. She already has the inviso and swizzle weaves. A little more work and she'll know as much as you do about pathspace. Then she puts on the gray robe and the two of you take turns learning spinspace from me and guarding the door.
Lester scratched at the beard trying to grow on his chin. Sounds like a plan for now. But how do we catch a saboteur who can fool us mentally while he sits here learning more tricks from us every day?
Xander had no answer to that.
Chapter 73
Xander: teacher's pet
“No crime is so great as daring to excel.”
– Winston Churchill
His scowling face reappeared in the mirror. Enough invisibility practice. It's good mental exercise, but it won't solve our problem. He was not entirely happy with his new black robe. Part of him detested the idea of higher “ranks” having darker clothes. Not to mention the fact that it showed dust a lot faster than his gray robe had.
Someone knocked on his door. “Yes?”
Carolyn entered in her white robe. Xander's scowl evaporated. Attractive young women always made it hard for him to stay grumpy. “What can I do for you?”
She sank into a chair. “There's no one else I can talk to.”
He lifted an eyebrow. 'What's that supposed to mean? Talk about what?'
“Anything.” She hesitated, then continued. “I think the other students resent me. It's clear I'm the only one not under suspicion. Are you sure that whoever is causing the problems is one of the boys?”
Xander sat down on the sofa and pulled out his pipe. A glance confirmed that the last bowlful was not dead yet, so he re-ignited it with a brief tonespace pinch and took a puff before answering her. “Carolyn, I don't know a .more diplomatic way to phrase this, so I'm just going to say it. Even in a robe, under starlight, I don't think there's a man in Rado who wouldn't notice you on a roof with him, even if he was on message sentry duty.
He knew it was an old man's vice to enjoy the way she blushed. “Sorry to embarrass you, but you know how we men are. The guard doesn't know who he saw talking to Kurt, but he's sure it wasn't a woman.”
“They all know that,” she said, “and so now I'm an outsider. Instead of a fellow student, now they see me as one of the watchers, one of the people suspecting them, judging them.”
“I see.” He puffed in silence for a moment. “There are two ways we could handle this. The first way is obvious: catch the troublemaker.”
“How is that coming? “Do you have any idea who it is?”
“I have my suspicions, but that's all they are. If we lock up the wrong one there's the danger we'll relax and let the real perpetrator do even more damage.”
She sagged in the chair. “Then what's the second way?”
“We push your training and promote you to journeyman as soon as we can. That will make things worse in the short run, though. There'll be whispers of favoritism until the rest of this first class earn their gray robes, but once they get up to the second level with you they'll probably get over your making it there first.”
“Lester was going to help me learn a couple more weaves while I'm waiting for the rest of them to pass the swizzle test,” she said. “But now he has to spend time guarding the stairwell door.”
“I already talked with him about promoting you. The price, for you, is you'll have to step up and take turns with us guarding the stairs until we decide it's no longer necessary.”
“I can do that, but how much more do I have to learn to earn my promotion? You can't just give it to me. That'll only make them all hate me even more.”
He groped around for a bowl and tapped the ashes from the pipe into it. “A fair question. Lucky for you we're still making this up as we go along. It's a good bet that years from now all of the curriculum, will be more firmly established and advancement will be harder than it is now. What can you do besides go invisible?”
“Lester described something called the 'telescope' weave the other day. To see things far away.”
“How are you doing on that?”
“I'm making some progress, but it's hard to keep it focused. He said it would be easier if I anchor it on a pipe or something, but...'
“...but you want to do it the way he did, unanchored.”
“Yes.” She looked away. “No telling how long it will take me to get it to a point where I can do it reliably.”
“It's not as important as other weaves,” he told her. “The Ancients solved the far-seeing problem with lenses to bend the light the way they needed. I'm not interested in replacing simple things like telescopes with metaspace alternatives. The swizzle weave is far more important, because it does something the Ancients couldn't do: pump water or air with no moving parts.”
“So what should I work on?”
“You should work on uses of the swizzle weave.” For a demonstration, he sculpted a brief pattern and a sudden breeze blew her long hair back for a couple of seconds. “Fi
rst you should focus on unanchored temporary swizzles. You can start with conjuring up breezes to cool down on hot days. That will come in handy when Summer gets here.”
He pointed at an empty chair ten feet away from them. As she watched, he swizzled up a gust of wind that knocked the chair over. “After you can get a mild breeze whenever you want, work on making it shorter and stronger, until you can knock over someone who isn't expecting it. That might save your life someday.”
“Than what?”
“After brute force comes fine control.” He picked up a piece of paper that had fallen to the floor and crumpled it onto a ball. Holding it out toward her on a an upturned flat palm, he made a vertical swizzle pattern over it that caused the ball of paper to rise in the updraft and float, wobbling, in the wind above his hand. “Start with light objects and work up to heavier ones that need stronger swizzle vortices to lift them and move them around.”
He smiled at how wide her eyes had gotten. “When you can move objects with wind like this, come back to me for more assignments.”
“You mean there's more?”
“Sure. But I don't want to discourage you by giving you anything too hard right now. When you can do everything I just showed you, you'll be ready for the next step.”
She climbed to her feet and thanked him for his time. As she turned to go, he spoke again. “One more thing,” he said. “Make sure that Lester and the students see you sometimes when you're practicing. It'll remind him to practice, and show them that you deserve your promotion when it comes.”
Chapter 74
Andrews: serving two masters
“No one can serve two masters;for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be loyal to one and despise the other...”
– Matthew 6:24
He closed the stairwell door behind him and watched the apprentices at their practice. The dark handsome one, Kareef, was scowling at a piece of iron pipe as if it were defying him. Kaleb stood in front of a full-length mirror fading away and reappearing, over and over. Carolyn was sitting at one end of a long table, a row of candles stretching down the middle from directly in front of her to the other end. As he watched, they went out one buy one, their wicks streaming curls of smoke until Xander re-lit them for her with his magic. Nathan, the youngest, was sitting at another table, staring at an apple that slowly became transparent.
When he felt a touch on his shoulder he nearly jumped out of his robes. “I'm glad you've come, Father,” said Esteban. “Can we have a talk in one of the empty rooms?'
Andrews nodded and followed Esteban into a room with nothing but a chair and a window. Esteban closed the door behind them, shutting off the weirdness of student wizards at work, and turned to him. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It's been two weeks since my last confession.”
Andrews sighed. He should have expected that, being the only priest in the building. “What is troubling, you, my son?”
“I need advice. It's not that I've had a lot of sinful thoughts or done anything really bad. But I might. I don't know what to do.”
“It might be easier to advise you,” Andrews said, “if you told me what specifically is troubling you.'
“Father, everyone has been kind to me, but I've come here under false pretenses. It's not like what I'm learning isn't fascinating, but I never wanted it.”
“Then why did you come here?”
“Because the Pope ordered me to.”
Andrews listened with amazement as the young man told of His Holiness's command to travel North and apply to the School. He knew of the official papal policy regarding the artifacts known as the Gifts of the Tourists. Rumor had it the Church had been confiscating them for decades. Any that still worked, that is. A papal ban had declared them “demonic tools”, even. Why on Earth would the Supreme Pontiff send one of his flock to the school?
After a moment's thought, however, he realized what was going on. The only thing worse, to the head of the TCC, than the school existing and training new wizards would be having no knowledge of what was going on here or influence over it.
“So he wanted you to spy on Xander's school for him? Why are you telling me this now?”
“I can't tell Xander. He might throw me out. But I had to talk to someone before Dallas manages to contact me. And I knew that you'd keep it to yourself, under the seal of the confessional.”
Andrews rubbed his eyes. Damn it! “You put me in an awkward position,” he said. “You realize that as an ordained priest, I'm supposed to obey the Pope, so I should report something about this to him. But as your confessor, I must keep your secrets.”
Maybe it was a good thing he was sworn to secrecy. Xander had saved his life by bringing him here. How could he help Esteban spy on his benefactor?
“Yes, Father. I'm sorry. But keeping the secret, and the guilt it causes me, has been eating me up ever since I began classes here. How can I keep my vow of loyalty to his Holiness and at the same time be fair to Xander and the school?”
“That is a hard question,” he admitted. Funny how Esteban's predicament reminded him of his own conflicted state. “have you prayed for guidance?”
“Can't you guide me, Father? Isn't giving good advice and counsel to troubled souls part of your Calling?”
Andrews thought rapidly. “Has it occurred to you that maybe this is God's plan for you...that His Holiness is merely an instrument, a sign post pointing you in the right direction? Maybe you are not here because the Pope wants it, but because God wants it.”
Confusion clouded Esteban's eyes. “But then why was I born in Texas? Why wasn't I born here?”
“Are all students here from Rado? They aren't, are they?”
“What difference does that make?”
“Are they all going to stay here in Rado when the complete their training?'
“I don't know, Father. I suppose some of them will be returning home eventually.”
“Then couldn't it be God's will for you to come and learn, and bring back what you have learned to your brethren in Dallas?”
“I don't know, Father. I suppose it could.”
“The Bible tells us that plans will succeed if they are of God, or are in accord with God's will. If God wants you to become a wizard, then it will come to pass. If not, then He will decided when you are to leave. It seems to me that maybe you should just trust in God's will and let Him do what he wants with your life.”
“But how do I even know what He wants?”
“Don't worry about that,” Andrews said. “He knows.”
Chapter 75
Kristana: the moderator
“They say that women talk too much. If you have worked in Congress you know that the filibuster was invented by men.”
– Clare Boothe Luce
When she looked at the two of them she felt the urge to duck. The darker-skinned Muslim and the paler Jew were like day and night, and like them, surely these men could not coexist. It would always have to be one or the other. The world is always in day or night, in light or darkness, she thought. Never both.
And yet, they never escalated to shouting. Perhaps in my council chamber we dwell in perpetual twilight.
“My esteemed colleague is entirely correct in pointing out that New Israel is more isolated than the Emirates,” Isaac said. “That is precisely why we need a trade agreement more than they do. They share borders with several countries: Kansouri, Arklou, and Florida.”
Qusay nodded. “Quite true, Ambassador. “But that is evidence, is it not, that we are easier to get along with? We do not hide behind a margin of Desolation.”
Isaac frowned. “Call me Isaac, please. We can dispense with formal titles in the privacy of these chambers, I'm sure. Just as I am certain you know that the Desolation was created by mutual agreement between our respective countries.”
Qusay smiled. “Indeed, Isaac, we can doubtless agree on many other things as well. Such as the fact that your country's ores are less crucial for Rado's gro
wing population than food and fiber crops, of which we in the Emirates have ample surplus for trade. Far more, in fact, than the products of your own farms, which, although adequate for your people's needs, are unlikely to move westward in any significant quantity. By all means, feel free to call me Qusay.”
“I hope you don't object if I remind you gentlemen that this is my country,” she said. “There is no reason why Rado cannot trade with both of your lands, is there? Unless you have been instructed otherwise by your governments. And when we are in private, there's no reason not to call me Kristana.”
“Well then, Kristana, new Israel has more to trade than ores.”
“Oh? Do tell.'
Isaac interlaced his fingers. “While none can deny the fertility of the Dixie farmlands, or that, as Qusay suggests, Rado is hardly in need of ore, there is still the matter of trees.”
Huh? “Trees, Isaac?”
“Paper, to be precise. Nyork was the center of the publishing world before the Fall. We have preserved the ancient arts of paper manufacture, printing, and bookbinding more than any other country, I believe. If I may be so bold, I submit that your new Union with Texas should mean a reduction in warfare, particularly, much as we achieve in the East long ago. Such peace will make possible the establishment and expansion of all kinds of schools...for which books will be necessary.”
Qusay beat her to the reply. “Your interest in schools is most commendable, Isaac. But is it part of your mission here, or something new occasioned by your son's matriculation in the Xander School?”
Isaac lifted an eyebrow. “Is there some reason why Nathan should not avail himself of instruction when it is available? I cannot imagine you really object, since your own boy Kareef was admitted to the School before my son and I even arrived.”
“Kareef and I are not related,” said Qusay. “But you are entirely correct. However, if, as you suggest, what New Israel offers is mainly paper and the books printed from it, then I'm obliged to point out that the Emirates do have large forests which regrew after the Fall of civilization. We also have many more mills than New Israel, thanks to our many rivers.”
Spinspace: The Space of Spins (The Metaspace Chronicles Book 2) Page 24