Wasting: The Book of Maladies

by D. K. Holmberg

  The man sighed and turned to her. “Such death. This is why I have hidden for so long, and now you’ve brought Alec into this.” He took a deep breath. “As to me… I am his father.”

  32

  Unexpected Help

  Sam helped Alec’s father carry him to the remnants of the apothecary. From the expression on his face, it seemed he hadn’t known his shop had burned until now. Sam hadn’t noticed before, but he wore a long brown cloak, and beneath it looked to be a canal staff. Other than her mother and Marin, she hadn’t known anyone else to carry a canal staff.

  “How do you know me?” she asked.

  “I don’t know you. I know of you.” He grunted as he said the last, lowering Alec to the ground. He seemed to make a point of keeping Alec away from the fallen brute, and for that, Sam was thankful. As she had feared, Ralun was gone.

  After defeating him, she had still lost.

  “You know the secret of the paper,” Sam said. “You know of the Thelns.”

  He nodded as he began looking through the apothecary, shaking his head every so often as he went, making a soft whistling sound from time to time. “I know of a great many things.”

  “You’re a Scribe.”

  He paused and turned to her. “I am no Scribe. I understand the power of the paper, but that is all.”

  He began sorting through the ash, as if he would find the page that was missing.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “The same as you,” he said, moving a hunk of charred table out of the way. When he set it back down, ash drifted up into the air, and he waved it away with his hand.

  “The page isn’t here. It must have burned in the fire.”

  “It could not.”

  Sam smiled. “It’s paper. It would have burned.”

  Alec’s father looked up at her and met her eyes. “Why do you think the Thelns used fire here? They’ve been granted access to the book, and they would have held that responsibility almost sacred.” He kicked at a pile of debris, sending it flying across the room. “Fire will not harm pages from the book. So that is what I’m looking for.”

  “How will we destroy it then?”

  He paused again and looked over to her. “The pages in the book are powerful, and the magic used to hold that power protects them, but there are other ways to destroy them than fire.”

  “What is the book?”

  Alec’s father sighed. “A relic of a time long past. A reminder of a war that should be over.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “And you shouldn’t. For now, help me search so we can be done with this.”

  Sam used the canal staff to sort through the remains of the apothecary, but she didn’t expect to find the page here. If it were here, why wouldn’t the brutes have seen it before? How would they have missed it?

  “Will Alec be okay?”

  Alec’s father looked back to where Alec lay. He hadn’t moved since they’d brought him into the apothecary. Even destroyed, it seemed better to have him here than lying on the street. “He will recover. The Thelns would have wanted to use him. They could not have done that were he dead.”

  “How would they have used him?”

  “The same way you used him.”

  Sam blinked a moment as the accusation settled. “I didn’t use him.”

  “No? You didn’t draw him into a battle he was never meant to be a part of? You didn’t drag him into a fight that has been over for years?”

  Sam laughed bitterly. “Over? Whatever it was doesn’t seem to be over. From what Marin said, the Thelns continue to attack. What makes you think the war is over?”

  Alec’s father shook his head and a troubled expression crossed his face. “The battle was over. The attempt to steal more paper changed that.” He watched her for a moment, the way he did reminding her of the measured stare that Alec managed, before turning his attention back to searching through the debris. “There is nothing here.”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “Then the Thelns have it.”

  If the Thelns had recovered the page, then it meant that the princess and Marin would die. There wouldn’t be anything they could do to stop it. Alec had slowed their decline, but the effect faded.

  “Why can’t we reverse the effect permanently?” she asked.

  “The book—”

  “The Book of Maladies?” she asked. He nodded. “What is it?”

  He sighed. “A rumor that turns out to have been real.”

  “Rumor?”

  “The Thelns have long been rumored to have such a book but none has ever seen it. It is power. Written on pages of power, the book details ailments. Many are real, but many are imagined, horrors that could not be possible without the book.”

  “Why can’t you use the paper and reverse it? Why does it have to fade?”

  “What is written in the Book of Maladies is etched with more permanence. There is something about the writing Scribes have not discovered, though they have tried.”

  “But Alec healed me.”

  His father glanced to where Alec lay before answering. “You were not afflicted by the book, so the healing is different. There is a connection between the Kaver and the Scribe. That connection grants him the ability to heal you.”

  “But he augmented me, as well, and that didn’t last.”

  “Augment. An interesting term.”

  “What would you call it?”

  “I suppose augment would work. They fade, though, because sustaining them would require too much strength otherwise.”

  “The Thelns don’t seem to fade.”

  “No. They do not.”

  “Why is that?”

  “The Thelns have a different connection to power. They do not have need of Scribes.”

  “Alec was able to slow Ralun.”

  “He slowed him?”

  She nodded, thinking to the attack in the princess’s room. “I don’t know what he did, but it gave me a chance.”

  “I don’t know what he would have done. I have not seen an attack like that work on the Thelns, though I admit I haven’t faced them myself.”

  “If you’re not a Scribe, how do you know all of this?”

  He looked around the street before turning his gaze on her. “You don’t have to seek power to desire understanding.” He sighed and tapped his staff on the floor. “We will lose the princess now. I had thought…”

  “Were you at the university?” Alec asked.

  Both Sam and Alec’s father looked over when he spoke.

  “Mrs. Rubbles gave me the note you left her that told me you once trained at the university. Were you there?”

  His father hurried over to him and ran hands along his neck, and then listened to his heart and lungs before leaning back. “You’re unharmed.”

  Alec coughed. “That’s all you can tell me?”

  “I had been harvesting, but when I heard the princess was sick, I went looking for a different kind of help. I… I failed.”

  “What do you mean you went for help? Why won’t you tell me more?”

  “Because at this point, that’s all that matters.”

  Alec looked to Sam, and his eyes narrowed. “How did you escape? He was coming for you.”

  “Your father augmented me.”

  “My father?” When Alec turned his attention to his father, he looked away. “How is it you know how to do that?”

  “I was the one to write the words, but I was not the one to create the augmentation. The ink I used belonged to another pair.”

  Alec stared at him for a long moment. “Another Scribe and Kaver?”

  His father nodded. “They left me with a gift, a powerful one. Were there ever a need, I could use their blood—their ink—if only I had the proper documentation.”

  “Who were they?” Sam asked. Could it have been her mother?

  “Someone who was lost long ago.”

  “Were you going to share any of this with me?”
/>   “There wasn’t the need. I intended to protect you from all of this as much as I could.”

  “But you must have the ability to serve as a Scribe!”

  His father sighed. “Perhaps I did once. Now… now I have a different task.”

  Alec stared at his father a long moment and turned away from him.

  “Where are you going?”

  Alec didn’t bother looking back to him. “To find the missing page, so we can save the princess.”

  Sam hurried up to him as he reached the street, and Alec’s father followed behind. “You know where it is?”

  “I have an idea.”

  “I thought you said it was here?” she said.

  “That’s what I thought, but there’s another possibility.”

  “We need to find it,” Sam said. “Not only for the princess.”

  Alec paused a moment and looked over to her, nodding. “Marin? I know you care about her. We’ll find the page.”

  “It’s not so much that I care about her. It’s the answers she might have.”

  Though, now that she saw his father, she wondered if he might have answers of a different sort. He had known enough to use the paper, and he had blood ink stored, even if he claimed he was no Scribe. Who would he have taken it from?

  “It seems we all have questions,” Alec said.

  33

  Finding a Page From the Book

  Alec hurried along the street, still shocked that his father had helped Sam. Not only had he helped her, but he had seemed to understand the trick to the paper before now. How much suffering would they have been able to avoid if only his father had shared what he knew about the paper?

  All these years, he’d been taught that everything he needed to learn could be done through observation and study. Now, for him to learn that there was more—that there was magic he could tap into—he struggled with why.

  None of his anger and frustration mattered. Not right now, anyway. What mattered was finding a way to destroy the page, and to do that, they had to reach it and then save the princess. They had thought they would find it in the burned husk of the apothecary, but maybe there was another place it could be. How would it be possible for the paper to survive the fire?

  “Rubbles?” his father said as they turned a corner.

  Alec nodded, not wanting to share anything more than he had. Would it matter if he told his father about Mrs. Rubbles and her interest in ink? Was it possible, as he suspected, that she had likely found the page within the ashes of the shop? If she had, and they got ahold of it, would his father know of a way to destroy it when fire could not? If so, then maybe it would help the princess. Maybe she would survive.

  He knocked on the door.

  Waiting was the hardest part.

  Moments passed. Then more.

  Alec knocked again.

  Finally, Mrs. Rubbles appeared in the door and slowly pulled it open.

  “You went to the shop after it burned,” he said to her without preamble.

  “Alec? What are you—”

  “The paper. Did you find it when you went to the shop?”

  She looked from Alec to his father to Sam. “After the fire, I was sorting through the remains looking for what could be salvaged. When I saw it…” She looked at each again before motioning for them to enter. She breathed out heavily and went behind her counter and pulled out a leather-bound book, sliding the page out from within.

  Alec took it, recognizing his writing and the marks in the two corners. Reluctantly, he turned to his father for answers. “How will we destroy this?”

  “Destroy?” Mrs. Rubbles asked, clearly surprised by the idea. “Alec, paper like this should be preserved. That’s why I went after it! This is a quality sheet of parchment. If I had another sheet—”

  His father took the marked page and held it. “To think that I would hold one of the pages from the book…”

  “We need to destroy it, Father. Do you know how? Fire didn’t do it and”—he lifted the page and attempted to tear the sheet, and was unsurprised to discover he couldn’t— “we can’t simply rip it. What else can we do to destroy it?”

  “Only a Scribe can do it, but in order to do so, we need to know what was originally written on it. Otherwise, anything we do won’t last.”

  “How will we know?”

  “That’s the problem. We have to reveal the writing. We don’t have anyone who can—”

  Mrs. Rubbles grabbed the page from them and took it behind the counter. She pulled a vial of a thick liquid from beneath the counter and swirled it slowly. “This,” she began, “should help enhance the writing. I’ve tried using it a few times since I retrieved it from the ashes,” she told Alec.

  Mrs. Rubbles took a brush and started wiping it across the page. As she did, letters and words formed in a spindly script of black ink. As the liquid faded, so too did the writing.

  “Do that again,” his father said.

  Mrs. Rubbles brushed the liquid over the page again, painting it. The words formed once more, and remained while the page was wet. When it dried, the writing disappeared.

  “I don’t know what to make of it,” Alec said.

  His father’s face paled. “I do. Alec, we’ll need you to mix ink from your Kaver’s blood,” he said turning to Sam. “I think we can save the princess.”

  Alec turned to Sam, and she said nothing as she took her knife and drew it cross her palm, then held her hand out to him. As the blood pooled, he started to say something but caught himself. There was really nothing he could say.

  “Write these words,” his father said.

  Mrs. Rubbles handed him a quill and he began to write.

  Sam sat with Alec near the canal. Neither of them had spoken.

  “How is she?” he finally asked.

  “Marin? I haven’t been able to find her.” Sam had left him after they’d destroyed the paper, but hadn’t found Marin in her home. Sam hadn’t wanted to stay away from Alec for long, not until she understood what had happened and was certain Ralun wouldn’t return. She’d injured him, but now he knew about her—and Alec—and she was sure he would come back. And Marin needed to share with her why.

  “She’ll be fine,” a voice said from a distance.

  They turned, and she saw Marin watching them, leaning on a canal staff, but not quite as heavily as she had the last time they’d seen her.

  “You destroyed it,” Marin said.

  Alec nodded. “We did. I haven’t heard whether the princess…”

  “My sources tell me she will be fine,” Marin said. “She’s still at the university, but she won’t be for much longer.”

  “Ralun—the brute—escaped,” Sam said.

  “He would be difficult for you to defeat without any training. But you will have to learn. Both of you. Stealing the paper only renewed an old war.”

  It was more than that, Sam knew. “It was personal for Ralun,” she said.

  “Why do you say that?” Marin asked.

  Sam shrugged. “Something he said. He said that he wouldn’t have come himself if it were only about the paper. And he kept calling the princess his prize.”

  Marin’s brow furrowed, and she looked away. What was she hiding from them?

  Alec seemed not to notice. “What now?”

  “Now you will train,” Marin said.

  “No,” Sam said. “First, Tray—”

  Marin raised her hand. “Your brother is free. He’s at my place recovering.”

  “He’s free?”

  “After my recovery, I made certain to leverage my assets to see him freed. With the princess healed, there was no reason to hold him, and no proof that he was a Theln sympathizer.”

  Sam almost started crying. All of this, and now her brother was free. So much had changed while he’d been in prison. She wasn’t even sure she was the same person she’d been before. “I need to see him.”

  “You can.”

  “Does he know?”

  Marin
shook her head. “He’s never known. And he cannot.”

  “Why?”

  “There are things you don’t understand, Sam. Things you can’t.”

  “Marin…”

  “You take after your mother, Sam. You are a Kaver. Your brother, he takes after his father.”

  “And that means what?”

  “He’s different, as are you. Whereas you can work with a Scribe and perform great feats, your brother possesses a different ability.”

  Even before she said it, Sam thought she knew.

  “He’s a Theln.”

  She didn’t need Marin’s nod to know she was right.

  Whatever he might be, he was still her brother. And right now, after all the time they’d been apart, she wanted to find him.

  “Go,” Alec said. “I have questions for my father. You find your brother. We’ll talk again soon.”

  She sighed. What would she even say?

  After leaving Alec, she crossed the canals between this section and hers, and reached Marin’s home quickly. She hurried up the stairs and down the hall and through her door without determining whether it was safe. Everything she had gone through had been about getting back to him, about finding her brother. Instead, she’d found so much more. She didn’t know what to make of all of it—including herself—but there would be time for that later.

  All she wanted now was to see her brother.

  When she pushed it open, she found Tray sitting in the room, staring at the window.

  Sam raced forward and threw her arms around him.

  His face was gaunt and had a haunted expression, but he was still her brother. Of all the things she’d thought about saying, the only one that came out was, “Kyza, it’s great to see you again, Tray.”

  Her brother hugged her back, “You, too, Sam. You won’t believe what I’ve been through.”

  She hugged him again, laughing as she did, knowing that she’d tell him more later. For now, they were back together.

  Grab Volume 2 of The Book of Maladies: Broken.

  Decades of peace has ended. The real battle is still to come.

  Sam and Alec work to understand their connected magic, but the limited supply of easar paper limits them. Worse, Marin has again disappeared, leaving questions unanswered. How can they be ready for another Theln attack if they don’t have an opportunity to train with their abilities?