Scammander went rushing past me with the fragmented aegis and hurled himself into Neoptolemus just as it fired its cannon. The machine’s arm blew off as the remains of the shield fractured and exploded into dust. Scammander pinned the machine down and I leapt on it. With Scammander still holding him down, I slowly bent Neoptolemus’s arm towards his head.
“Wait,” it said, realizing its own destruction was near. “Wait, I have last words.”
I kept its cannon pointed at its temple as it recited a programmed message.
“The Academy is on the verge of a tremendous breakthrough, a Scientific Revolution! Think before you destroy this marvelous invention of the sciences! The Scientific Revolution is summing up thousands of years of dense and elegant philosophical and mathematical thought. A new age is going to be created—an age where knowledge is free, where science has made all enlightened and healthy and happy!”
The promise of universal happiness and health was a nauseating falsehood I was tired of enduring, so I clicked the button on Neoptolemus’s wrist and shot a burst of incendiary light into its head. The light faded from the lenses of the skinless machine as grey smoke drifted out of its melted head and mixed with the swirling cobalt steam above.
“Well, as usual, the academic’s defined the problem too narrowly. He was programmed to kill only me.”
“I thought it had a nobility or altruism algorithm in its clockwork,” I said.
“The problem with Ethics is it presupposes anyone else has them,” he said over his shoulder, walking toward the corpse at the desk.
Scammander lifted a leather book off the table and brushed the cobalt soot off. It was dyed a rich purple, the color of summer evenings just as the first stars appear, and in the center of the cover were the words “Cor Cordium.” Scammander looked at it for a second, the way he might have looked at a summer lover he never expected to see again, but did, and she had somehow grown even more beautiful—and he had simply grown old. Another emotion began to bubble up, but he suppressed it and looked at the book as though he were expecting something. Next, he slowly tilted his neck and put his ear on the tome. Nothing. Scammander looked at it again disappointedly.
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s not alive,” he said turning it over and flipping through the first few pages.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said and sighed.
“It’s not beating,” he said, closing the book and gently resting his palm on the leather cover. He held it differently from any book I had ever seen him pick up, like he was holding his own heart in his hand, or the hand of the first girl he ever fell in love with.
“Too bad you can’t take it to that braggart cleric Bertram, or one of your old school friends,” I laughed through the muttering voices and blurring vision. Everyone seemed to be trying to bring something to life recently. “Regardless, is there a spell in there to stop all this whirling?”
“We’re not going to put some petty spell like that in here,” he said looking at his own corpse. He began scouring his old desk and muttering about how he could never remember where he put the potions that worked and potions that didn’t work, and potions that didn’t work at the moment but might work later.
“Here, drink this,” he said pulling two phials out of the rack. “Black one first, green one second.” He stumbled around a little then held them out to me. I reached out for them but he lurched back, dropping the phials. They shattered across the hard skull floor and the glass hissed and popped as it dissolved in a bubbling onyx puddle.
We both looked at each other. “Maybe it was green first, black second,” he said holding his forehead.
I looked down at the puddle as it dried and watched my best chance at getting out of this labyrinth evaporate.
I heard some more screaming and gnawing as I stumbled backward against the bonewall. Scammander zig-zagged back to the desk and began digging through more slender glass phials with neon, bubbling liquids.
“Pink, then yellow,” he said. I snatched them from his hand as I stumbled past him into the opposite bonewall, and sank down to the ground. I uncorked the potions and drank. Nothing happened.
Scammander was looking at me.
“Nothing,” I said, trying to stand up. The maze was spinning too fast now.
More rummaging.
Then Scammander lifted Scammander’s corpse up, and tilted his head back. There were two blue bottles where his eyes should have been. He grabbed them and stumbled over to me. “Here, just drink one.” I noticed that he was watching me, waiting for me to drink first.
I closed my eyes and threw my head back. Some of it went down my throat, but most of it spilled onto my robe. When I opened them again I was still dizzy and things were still blurry, but less so.
“Yes,” I muttered.
He nodded, then turned around to head back to his desk and fell on his face.
“Drink it you showoff,” I said, still sitting in the corner.
The mage slowly got up to his knees, then pulled himself up, using the desk to help. He wobbled as he stood in place, then guzzled the potion. He pushed the table across the ground and took a couple steps back as sand and dirt started pouring down below until a giant chasm in the middle of the floor appeared.
I dragged the mechanic’s body to the opening and threw him on the ground. “What’s down there?”
“My personal library,” he said staring into the abyss.
When I waited for him to go down, Scammander looked up to me. “You go first. I’m almost certain I laid some terrifying traps before leaving the last time. Another great opportunity to die, and quite miserably I might add.”
“Not to a magical trap,” I huffed. I shoved the algorithm man’s body down the stairs with my foot, and waited for a series of devastating magical traps to ignite. Nothing happened.
When I stepped forward Scammander grabbed my shoulder. “Wait,” he said, smiling in anticipation. He slowly leaned forward and squinted his eyes, waiting for something terrible to occur.
Again, nothing happened.
The wizard recoiled, disappointed and grimacing. “Well I’m not sure I want to go down there at all now, who knows when the trap might go off? We could be buried alive. It would take days to suffocate to death down there. Or what happens if only part of it goes off and we are horribly maimed, left to suffer slowly until we finally die? Or we could become food for the deranged cannibals that roam this maze.”
“You really are so very clever and enticing with your words,” I snickered as I placed one foot on the sunken staircase.
Scammander pulled Scammander’s body off the chair and rapped him across his shoulders.
Then we entered the gloomy subterranean chambers.
In the darksome silence twin beams of rolling, wild colors sliced through the opaque gloom before suddenly disappearing. Scammander released a sigh then spoke the consecrated lyrics of some fairy song in plangent tones, like he was by a graveside: “In this interminable wilderness of worlds, at whose immensity even soaring fancy staggers, here is thy fitting temple.”
Quiet, trembling light rose up from clusters of thick candles and tapers. Soft flames waved in iron braziers and old brass lanterns, unignited for centuries, hanging from the ceiling, resting on stacks of old books, and lining the wall. Argent tripods with smoking silver bowls cast a calm luminescence and intermixed with old shadows as the ancient mana spread across the study.
I first noticed Scammander’s desk, sitting in a shimmering wizard’s circle the color of fresh wishes and unicorn’s breath. The circle of undulating light pulsed and throbbed like an evening star that rests above the ocean’s rolling waves. Surrounding the glowing circle was a large circle of green laurel leaves, shaken from the crowns of various assassinated playwrights.
Moving closer I saw that there were actually three circles. Etched in the sharp white light within the outer band of the magical circle were invented shapes, new geometries unfamiliar to sagacious mathematicia
ns. Within the second ring were planets, and in the third inner circle were animals.
I looked at Scammander.
“Foxes, great harts, unicorns, owls, and the involved serpent: these animals are sacred to me,” he said, then pointed to the second phosphorescent circle. “These planets and their satellites influence my magic the most. The outer circle contains fresh axioms strange to this place,” he said pointing to the outermost ring. “The leaves are shaken from a poet’s crown to ward off bad thoughts.”
In the middle of the glowing sorcerer’s circle was Scammander’s desk, with a tremendous phrase etched in the color of daring sunbeams: “Knowledge enormous makes a god of me.” On each corner was a golden serpent curled in the sign of infinity, which I immediately recognized from his great ancestral hall.
To my left was a crumbling ornate frieze of skeletons dancing under a blood moon. They were trailed by a nervous figure in a black robe with a tall pointy black hood that had two small slits for his eyes. The robed mage was slightly bent, like he was silently creeping away from something, and looking over his shoulder. In his hand was an hourglass with the sand flowing back up.
“What’s he running from?” I asked.
“Life and Death,” Scammander replied. “He’s a necromancer, neither of them like what he does.”
That explained the mask I guess. My eyes went back to the enormous moon. “I’ve never once seen a blood moon,” I said turning away from the gilded wall.
“That’s because there are no necromancers left,” Scammander said. “Necromancy is lost. It was the first kind of magic to be forgotten.” He spread the robe from his other body out in front of him and took a deep breath before slipping into it. The robe was sewn from the splashy ocean. It seemed not so much to clothe him, but to flow over him, to wash along the contours of his body. It was dark and seemed to flow and ripple with tidal insouciance, then meander and splash with the oozy rhythms of the great stream of temporality. Countless currents and streams comprised the flooding liquid fabric, from the shore-greeting calm tumbles to the wine-black waves that break ships and awaken deep slumbering leviathans, and even disturb the massive sea turtles as they swirl their way through the washy ocean.
It shouldn’t have mattered much but the robe made him look different. It made him look regal and sly and daring—like a prince of philosophy steeped in tremendous knowledge who had spent a lifetime—maybe more—striving for forbidden things.
“Here, hold this,” he said pressing the book against my chest. “Just don’t open it. I have no idea what sort of traps I’ve laid within for the eyes of others.”
The chance of a strange death was too alluring, so when he turned around I opened the old, soft leather book.
Of course nothing happened and life went on.
On the first page Scammander had copied a passage of poetry that I had never seen before:
“Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,
Scatter, as from an extinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!”
Persi
The rest of the book was marked with strange and elegant runes.
“What are all these symbols?” I asked as I flipped through the pages.
“They are called ‘breaths’ or ‘breathings,’” he said coming over to me again and pulling the book from my hands. He felt inside for a moment, then slipped his spell book inside near his heart and patted his chest. “Finally, that’s the right one.”
“So that’s what all that patting was all about,” I said thinking back to Hexameter’s.
“Every wizard carries their book of spells in a different pocket of his robes.”
“Where does Johannes Dubitandum carry his?”
“I’m quite sure he lost his spell book a long time ago.”
I looked at Scammander, all liquid and wrapped in his splashy robe and I remembered Stunt’s story about the poet of becoming. “Are you…are you Persi?”
He shook his head. “No, just someone who has lived long enough to become lost.”
Like everything that Scammander said, I wasn’t entirely convinced.
“If that is Scammander over there,” I said pointing to the other Scammander’s corpse and preparing myself for the next part of the statement, “then who are you?”
He grinned. “I that seem not I, Scammander am.”
“I’d like to meet the Scammander that knows all the old magic,” I muttered.
“I shed my skin from time to time,” he said looking at the corpse. “It’s just some body I found in the vaults and cast a spell on to look like me.”
I looked around. “You really are mad, bad, and dangerous to know.” Who puts their personal library in a labyrinth which just happens to be the secret jail for the world’s most dangerous criminals? “Why in the world did you ever want to come down here?”
“So I wouldn’t be bothered by the rest of the world,” he said. “So I could get some thinking done.”
“Except for the possibility of going insane every time you need to go read, or get killed before you even get down here,” I said. “Or forget the way.”
Scammander had moved over to a small bed with a stack of books and was looking through them until he drew back the covers. Resting on the sheets was a pair of platemail leggings, glowing like the fluorescent grass of the fairy fields. Wildflowers and poppies were embossed and painted down the edge of each leg.
“Turn around,” he said.
I waited for a knife in the back.
“They are soft and pliant, just like fairytales and love,” he said as he stretched and walked around in them.
“I’d want something a little harder for when Selwyn shoots you in the crotch next time,” I shot back.
“It’s narrow in here for a study,” I said walking over to his desk.
“Well that’s because it’s not a room, it’s a hall. Before this labyrinth was a criminal’s dungeon it was a necromancer’s palace—and no one would come near it. I still have no clue how many stories deep it goes, but I think these are only the upper levels.” He looked down at the floor. “There must be untold terrors and treasures in the vaults below.”
“What do you think is past the wall behind you?”
“Resurrection chambers,” he said pointing to the painted wall. “That is a glimpse into their dark rites. They would have wanted to be close to the strange mist, so there’s no way they would have buried a sacred room like that in the bottom of the skull.”
I turned my gaze back to Scammander’s desk and to the odd artifacts adorning it. There was a shrunken skull of a dark elf, inked red with a poem concerning suicide, an unhatched dragon egg, a black leather book with golden pages, and nine poet’s crowns, most with dried blood on the leaves, hung around a wand.
“It’s a wand made from the boughs of a tree where I had my first philosophical thought; one fleeting, shifting phantom that I could call—mine.”
I continued my survey of his enchanting desk. There was a quill of purest white, made from a feather plucked from the wing of a pegasus, spangled with ocean spray and starlight and the dust from clouds and the aerial zone not familiar to tellurian sandals; brushed with the masterless winds that rush and roam amidst the drifting continents that by dawn are and by evening are not. Beside an open book were scattered shards of some philosopher’s stone, the gleaming urim. At the edge of the opened book was a marble bust of a sly grinning elf with his head tilted slightly to the left, much like the living elf that was sitting beside it. Scammander’s enkindled, iridescent eyes met mine when I looked up from the bust.
“A prominent thinker from my family,” he said.
“Do you all tilt your head like that?”
He grinned. “A family trait. Acquired from too much time spent in thoughtful campaigns.”
He pointed to the quill. “That has also been handed down
for generations, and this thinker, Florio Flavius Philostratus once wrote with it, just as I have.”
“Exactly how old is your family?”
Scammander shifted his feet a little, not replying immediately. “The history of my family is the history of the Elven race,” he said as quiet as quivering candle flame. He swallowed hard and picked up the small marble bust, locking eyes with his illustrious ancestor. “Florio Flavius Philostratus, the author of many learned treatises that served as foundational texts for students with uncanny talents in the art of philosophy.” He leaned back and tapped one of the notebooks. “But what he did not submit to his peers is far more interesting and has been stored safely in our family vaults.”
“Not too safely, it seems,” I joked.
“These epigrams and verses are as sprightly and inventive as the treatises are logical and thorough; it has always been surprising to me that he withheld these from publication.”
“And what are you doing with them?”
“I was forging them and was going to donate them to the twerps in the Academy.”
“It doesn’t look all that thick, what was taking you so long?”
“I couldn’t invent a spell devastating enough to destroy the entire place and contain it in the opening line of the text.”
I grinned. “So what are some of the alternatives to a devastating first line?”
“Well, the forgery makes immense promises to secret knowledges within the opening line, but at the end of the line, I had thought to make the reader go blind.”
I grinned again.
“But now I think it should make them forget everything they knew and only be able to remember and quote this book at will.”
I nodded slowly. “That would probably create more enemies.”
“Another family trait, I think,” he said turning the statue over in his hand. “My ancestor here took part in a pamphlet war that raged in the academy between the poets and philosophers.”
Splatterism: The Disquieting Recollections of a Minotaur Assailant: An Upbuilding Edifying Discourse Page 30