by C. M. Hayden
Taro looked up, startled. “Sorry, what was the question?”
“I was asking what ink would you use for a zero-loss gravidic enchantment.”
“Up or down?”
Veldheim impatiently tapped his fingers on his folded arms. “Down.”
Taro’s mind cycled quickly. “Two parts Architeuthos Magnus, one part akreaon, one part charcoal.”
“That’s correct.” Veldheim seemed surprised at his answer. He glanced down at the symbols Taro was copying down. “Eyes to the front, Mr. Taro. You can dabble in your ancient Helianic later.”
“Yes, Magister,” Taro said. The fact that Veldheim recognized the symbols on sight gave him a bit of hope. The next hour of instructions went by like a blur, as Taro tapped his foot and waited for the lesson to end.
As the others left for the Conservatorium, Taro approached Magister Veldheim as he was wiping the blackboard clean with a rag. The little man had trouble reaching some of the higher up areas of the board and had to step onto a small stool to get to them. “Sir?”
Veldheim glanced over his shoulder, his thin eyebrows arching curiously. “Need something?”
“I wanted to apologize for being so distracted.”
“Doesn’t affect me, other than having to see your face in here for another term.” From his tone, it was hard to tell if he was joking.
“I was wondering,” Taro began, setting the compass onto the table. “You recognized these symbols earlier, I don’t suppose you know what they say?”
Veldheim set the rag down and snatched the compass, then held it to the light. “Oh, my ancient Helianic is rusty. I only dabbled in it for a few months some years ago. I lived there, you see. Dreadful place. The heat alone is enough to make it unbearable, but the people—gods below, they’re thick. My guide was an odd one too, a burly, massive man, he was.”
“Why did you go?”
“Ah!” Veldheim said. It seemed like he’d forgotten about the compass and shuffled Taro over to the metal shelves in the corner of the room. Each of them had a lock on the front, and Veldheim flipped through and enormous keyring until he found the one he needed and opened the third shelf from the bottom. Inside were four vials of red liquid that glowed with their own inner light.
“This,” he said, shaking one of the bubbling vials, “is one of the rarest ink components in the world. It’s called arkfire.”
“What is it for?”
“Explosives and weaponry. Fetches outrageous prices, too. A single drop can run a magistry cannon for months.” He placed it back into the drawer and locked it. “Getting it from the fire eels was no picnic, let me tell you. Nearly lost an eye. I swear, I’m never going back to that godforsaken desert if I can help it.”
Taro subtly nudged toward the compass, and Veldheim glanced at it with a mote of surprise. “Oh, yes, the language,” he said, giving it another once-over. “Something, something, ‘direction’, something, something, I think that’s ‘dowse.’ In the tracking sense, not the getting wet sense. I reckon this is a dowsing compass.”
“I thought dowsing compasses were a myth.”
Veldheim raised one of his thin eyebrows. “Who told you that nonsense?” He put his hand up and stopped Taro from answering. “Never mind, a lot of people think that. It’s not something that exists in Endran magistry. I’ve seen them work before, but damned if I know how.”
Veldheim handed the compass back. “It’s worth quite a bit, don’t lose it. I’m sure there’s some Helian, somewhere, who could tell you how it works.”
“You’re right,” Taro said as he motioned toward the door. “There is one.”
As Taro left the Magisterium and passed through the Midway, his mood was bitter. His mind was full to bursting; and despite his best efforts, he couldn’t arrange his thoughts into a coherent structure. At first, he began the walk home, but paused after a few steps, and headed south instead. Walks weren’t something Taro did often, neither in Ashwick nor in Endra Edûn. Even though the restored runes in his wooden prosthetic took most of the pressure off the stump of his leg, walking any long distance caused him a great deal of pain.
After so many years, it had become akin to a toothache—something he could live with, but which he couldn’t get away from, and when he was alone with his thoughts the pain always seemed more pronounced.
The Arclight had restored the parks on the outer edges of the walls to pristine conditions. Many of the trees had been dead so long and exposed to such intense cold that they would never recover, Arclight or no, and were crumbling and rotting into the ground. However, the ones that did recover came back more beautiful than ever.
Long, colored willow trees with curved branches that grazed the ground lined the footpaths and bright flowers seemed to burst from every inch of soil. It reminded him much of the Conservatorium, and were it not for the tips of towers in the distance, he would’ve forgotten that he was in the city.
He walked for what seemed like hours until he came to a wide clearing peppered with flittering blue and white butterflies. Tired, he laid against a hill and unlatched his prosthetic.
The grass prickled the back of his neck, and he stared up at the wheeling wisps of clouds in the blue sky.
“There’s no other way,” he said softly. His eyes felt heavy, and he laid for a long time in the heat of the sun.
CHAPTER TEN
Decisions
WITH THE FOLLOWING DAY being the start of the weekend, Taro had no scheduled lessons and slept in. Even though he’d awoken nearly an hour ago, he remained in his bed, listening to the patter of feet in the downstairs rooms.
As it was always daylight it was difficult to tell the time based on sight alone. There were variances in how bright or warm it was; for example, when it was ‘night’ and only the Arclight illuminated the sky it was notably cooler and a few shades darker. In the midday when both the sun and the Arclight were in concert, the light was much more intense.
In any case, magistry glass was a common feature in most homes and buildings. As with the glass in the Librarium, it adjusted its tint depending on how bright it was. Taro groggily flung his legs over the side of his bed, stretched his arms, and peeked through the curtains and out the tinted window. Based on the sun’s position, hesupposed it must’ve been around nine in the morning.
Still in his tattered sleepwear, he pushed open his bedroom door. The smell of sizzling smoked sausage, fried eggs, and freshly baked biscuits struck him. His mother was on her feet in the entranceway between the kitchen and living room, shooing Decker out. The boy kept peeking around the corner to catch a glimpse of what was cooking.
The sight and smell of good food snapped Taro fully awake. Trying to avoid the same treatment as his younger brother, he nonchalantly entered the kitchen and kissed his mother on the cheek. She smiled warmly, and her bright eyes lit up.
“Hello there, stranger,” she said as she hugged him with one arm and flipped a smoked sausage with the tongs in her other hand.
Despite all the horrible things that’d happened with Nima and the Arclight, Taro took solace in the fact that his parents—especially his mother—were back to their old selves. And while the subject of Nima was a touchy one with his father, his mother didn’t bring it up very often, and when she did it wasn’t in an accusing way.
“Are you going to stay for breakfast?” his mother said with a warm smile.
“If I’m welcome,” Taro said carefully.
His mother gave him a crooked look. “Bite your tongue. You’re always welcome. Go get your brothers under control before they make me drop something; they’ve been circling around like a pack of starving wolves.”
Taro walked past Decker and ruffled the boy’s hair. “Hey big guy.”
Decker lowered his head sheepishly and smiled. “Taro!”
Enam apparently heard this from the next room and ran out to meet him. The tiny boy practically jumped into Taro’s arms, and Taro swung him for a brief moment. It hurt his leg, but Taro didn’t
let them see him wince. To them he was a god, and he wasn’t going to let them think any less.
He kissed Enam on the forehead, and the boy wiped some orange paint onto Taro’s cheek.
“Hey now,” Taro said, trying to rub the paint off with his sleeve.
“You look better that way,” his mother said with a laugh. She flipped another sausage over. “His teachers say I’m supposed to ‘encourage his artistic side.’”
“I’m gonna be a famous painter one day,” Enam exclaimed. He ran back into his bedroom and retrieved two crumpled paintings. The colors on them had begun to run and drip from not being left still.
One might’ve been a tree, and perhaps the other one was a dog? Hard to tell, but regardless, Taro told him just how well-made they were. In all fairness, both were probably better than anything Taro could do.
Taro set Enam into a chair and wiped the boy’s hands down with a wet rag. “An artist, huh?”
At their mother’s request, Decker went to the cabinet and began to set the wooden plates and cups onto the dinner table. “Taro…” he said. Decker was a few years younger than Nima, and usually a quiet boy. He seemed to have put a lot of thought into what he wanted to say. “What age do you have to be to become a wizard?”
Taro grinned. “I don’t know any wizards.”
Decker quickly corrected himself. “Sorry, I mean ‘magister.’”
“It’s all about whether you can pass Admissions. They test to see what kind of magic you know.”
“You have to already know magic to join?”
Taro nodded. “That’s right.”
Decker finished setting the last plate. “Then how did you get in?”
Taro gave a wry grin. “I’m just that good.”
Decker pulled up a chair. Their mother turned off the burners and brought a platter of food to the dinner table and placed some on each individual plate. She gave Taro two slightly overcooked sausages, fried eggs, and a few cut potatoes with a flaky biscuit. The others got a bit less, and everything else went to his father’s plate.
Just as he was about to ask where his father was, Talthis exited the bedroom wearing his old warder armor. His right shoulder plate was crooked, and his mother stopped him on the way to the table and straightened it.
He seemed a bit restricted in the armor, probably due to the fact that he hadn’t worn it in years. Still, he’d taken good care of it while he’d been ill, shined it often, and the seven-pointed sun crest in the center glimmered like silver. Talthis glanced briefly at Taro before he began to tear into his food.
His father was like a bear in the room. All the laughing and talking ceased, and they ate in silence for a good long while. Taro sipped some water from his cup, wiped his mouth, and tried to think of some small talk to break the tension.
“First day back?” he asked.
His father nodded, his mouth full of egg.
“I saw General Gavin yesterday,” Taro said conversationally.
His father tapped his fork on the side of the plate. “Oh, I see. Friend of kings, magisters, and generals. That’s quite a lineup.” His tone was mildly sarcastic, but not overly confrontational.
Taro picked at the last biscuit on his plate and smothered it with blackberry jam. “I might be going away for a while.”
All eyes were on him. His mother wiped her lips with a cloth napkin, while his father just stared with a slightly aggressive demeanor. He looked as though he were analyzing Taro.
“How long is a while?”his father said.
“Maybe a few months. Maybe longer. Just thought you ought to know,” Taro said. He pushed his chair out and went back to his bedroom without another word.
Upstairs, he got dressed and sat on the foot of his bed for several minutes as he fished through some of his Magisterium supplies. There was a crack on his inscriber that needed to be fixed, and his astrolabe’s frame was so loose that it wobbled when he touched it.
While he was idly trying to tighten the frame by hand, a tiny knock came from the door. It creaked open a few inches, and Decker peeked inside.
“Taro?” he said in almost a whisper.
Taro set his things down and ushered Decker inside. The boy’s eyes were red and puffy, and when he was close enough, Taro wiped them. “What’s all this crying?”
Decker looked down at the floor. “You’re gonna leave again.”
Taro pulled him into a hug. “I have to find Nima.”
Decker wiped his eyes. “You know where she is?”
“I have an idea,” Taro said. He lifted Decker onto his lap and squeezed him tightly. “You want to see her again, right?”
“O’course. But…you won’t die will you?” Decker asked with a new bout of tears.
“Why would you think that?”
“Dad said he thinks you’re going to get killed. He’s just being mean, right? You’re not going to die. You’re magic, you can’t die.”
Taro’s expression was stuck somewhere between a half-smile and tears. “That’s right. If anyone tries to hurt me, I’ll just throw a fireball at them, right?”
Decker’s eyes lit up. “Can you?”
Taro tilted his head and stretched his arms. “Of course, all magisters can,” he lied. “I can’t show you around here though, too much wood. I might set the whole house on fire.” He retrieved a few scraps of metal from his pack, one of which was a short bar of solid Crissom steel. A leftover from some of his work in the Artificium. He handed it to Decker and told him to try to bend it.
Obviously, Decker’s tiny hands couldn’t affect the metal. Taro took it from him and focused his templar into his hands. He exhaled hard, and strained until the tiny bar of steel bent at a ninety degree angle. He handed it back to Decker, who was dumbfounded.
Decker tapped the metal bar on the bedpost. “How’d you do that?”
Taro wiggled his fingers in the air. “Magic. Now, you see, nobody can mess with your big brother, right? Or they’ll end up just like that bar.”
Decker nodded appreciatively. “Can you show me one more?”
Taro retrieved the inscriber from his pack and scratched some simple transmutation runes into the bent metal. When he applied his templar to it, the runes glowed white and the metal molded into a round coin-sized medallion. On the back he etched a levitation rune, and with one hand he guided the medallion through the air into Decker’s hands.
“Wow!” Decker said, bright-eyed. “You can make things fly.”
Taro knelt eye-to-eye with his little brother. “Not without the proper rune. The rune provides a link between my templar and the object.”
“What’s templar?”
Taro laughed at the enormity of the question. “That’s complicated.” He thought about it. “Templar is everything inside you.” He pointed to Decker’s heart. “It’s like your soul. It’s where the Arclight’s magic lives. It can only be given to you by another templar. Kind of like lighting a candle with another candle. And the Arclight is the bonfire.”
“So you can make me magic too?” Decker said innocently.
Taro shook his head. “Not me, but some magisters can. When you’ve got your templar open, you can do all kinds of things. It’s basically channeling the power of the Arclight through your body. That’s called templary. When you imbue a device or machine or whatever with your templar, that’s called magistry.” Taro pointed to the runes on the bar of metal. “That’s part of what they teach us in the Magisterium. Which runes to use, and how to use them properly. I’ve seen a few people powerful enough to move things with only their templar, but I’ve never been able to do it.”
Decker clenched the medallion in his palm. “It’s warm.”
“It’s your very own aurom. It tells people that you’re going to be a magister one day.”
Decker beamed. “You think I could?”
“I think you could be anything you want to be.” He patted his brother on the back. “Anytime you miss me, just hold on to your aurom and remember that your bi
g brother’s coming back.”
_____
Taro didn’t think of himself as a stupid or impulsive person, but the thoughts in his head didn’t quite measure up to this view. Running off to the Helian desert alone with only a vague sense of Nima’s whereabouts was suicide. And he would be alone; neither Ven nor Suri would be willing to sacrifice their apprenticeship on some fool’s quest for someone who was likely dead.
More than that, just getting to Helia was an issue. There were merchant caravans that frequented through there, and perhaps he could book passage on one for the right price. But deep in his heart, he knew this was folly. A boy’s foolish dream about rushing to a valiant rescue. He had a good life here in Endra; his family was well cared for, his parents were alive and vibrant, he needed to think about them.
These were the thoughts that ran through Taro’s head as he approached the Magisterium. When he noticed the smoke rising from the adjacent Librarium building, and the throngs of recruits and warders gathered around, it jostled him back into reality.
The smoke was coming from one of the lower Librarium windows, and a few warders stood beside Magister Briego and Moira examining the damage. Based on the glass littering the outside pavement, it appeared as though someone had broken it from the inside.
“Was anything taken?” Magister Briego asked.
“Nothing of importance,” Moira said with a grimace. “Whoever it was rummaged through some old Helian texts and a page was torn from my ledger. But…”
“But who could’ve gotten passed the security enchantments,” Briego finished. “I’m wondering that myself.”
“You don’t think the perpetrators were Magisterium personnel?” the warder-captain said.
“It’s possible,” Briego said, his bushy eyebrows narrowing into a scowl. “Were there any witnesses?”
“A few runners were present, but none of them saw anything.”
Briego put his hand to his forehead. “See the damage is repaired, and I’ll assign Magister Kyra to assist you with some heavier enchantments.” He sighed. “I’ll have to explain this to the Sun King somehow. Amín have mercy.”