This difference is best illustrated with two brief stories, which I will relate before I get to the telling of the most important day of those first five years: our visit to the mage’s tower.
Almost from the first time I saw the mage’s tower in the early days after I arrived at the University, I was curious as to what lay inside. We had been forbidden from entering unaccompanied by a Synth or Hymanni, and since I was nothing but an ignorant thirteen-year-old at the time, I would not have been able to find anybody to guide me inside had I sought such a person. But the fact is that I did not seek out a Synth because I felt my interest in Abacus’ tower to be a sort of guilty longing that should not be indulged, at least not publically. I did eventually get around to telling Hero, after a good many months of yearning had passed and I was sure she would not mock me or report me, and she merely looked at the tower and said, “I find nothing interesting in it except that it is old.”
I let the matter lie, but as months turned to years, I felt the draw in my heart towards that place growing, almost daily it seemed, until it began to become an obsession that kept me awake at nights.
Now, to explain that this was no mere childish obsession with a forbidden object, let me attempt to describe what the desire felt like. There is an old proverb that runs The desire of a man’s heart is worth more than the gold he shall give to possess it. I would have given up the nine years of my life in the University for just one hour inside that tower. I do not think a childish obsession is quite so compelling a thing. For one, the above proverb speaks of the value of the desire only in terms of its desirability. In other words, as soon as the desired thing is in fact possessed, it is inherently less desirable than it was before possession. But it becomes more precious precisely because of everything he gave to possess it.
This is the crux of my desire to enter the mage’s tower. For when I finally entered it, I found in its walls far more than I had sought to find there, and I gave up more than I thought I would willingly pay. Finally, I no longer felt quite the same yearning any more to be inside it, though that did not keep me from returning whenever chance permitted.
But more of this anon.
The second indication I had that my ether was stirring has to do with a series of three stone statures in the University courtyard before the main structure. These statues were evidently of a great antiquity. They bore no plaques telling whom they commemorated, and the style of their carving was rather different than the contemporary technique. But despite all this, it was not their appearances that bespoke their age, for to look at them they appeared almost newly carved, with only the barest of erosive damage from centuries of exposure to the elements. What was perhaps more odd was that I remembered seeing such statues in the precinct where I had lived as a boy. Asking around, I learnt from my classmates that they were fairly common throughout the city, ancient monuments of the mages, Feril Animis finally told us in class one day.
In the same way that I was drawn to the tower, I was drawn to these statues. Well, that is not so true. The desire was not the same, though it was just as strong. My need to sit beneath the statues and gaze into their ancient faces was similar to the need of a master craftsman for a newly invented tool that would help him make the next stride forward in his trade. This too shall be made clear in time.
Again, Hero failed to understand my fascination with these statues, though as they were not off limits to us, she would indulge me by sitting beneath them on sunny days and completing our homework in their austere shadows.
When I was seventeen, I began to sense something a bit odd in the stone of the statues and, perhaps, in myself when I touched them. I called Hero to my side and asked her to set her hand on the place I had just now been touching.
“I feel nothing. Just cold stone,” she said.
“Does it not feel warm to you at all?” I asked.
She left her hand there a while longer. “Well, it warms a little, but that is no more than the heat of my body transferred to it.” She removed her hand and frowned at me. “Are you all right, Toven? Maybe you have a bit of a fever.”
“Hero, you know that I would feel warm all over if that were the case.”
I touched the stone again, seeking validation of my point. The statue was cool to the touch, initially, but then a slow warming began to spread from the place where I touched it, an almost pulsating, soothing warmth barely discernable beneath the cold weight of centuries since the formation of the rock from which the statues were carved, but it was there nonetheless.
At one time, I even imagined I felt the statues thinking, as though some sort of soul rested within. As soon as I told Hero about this, she forbade me to go near the statues again, and her prohibition lasted nigh on three months before she finally relented and we took up seats under their shadows once more.
I was more furtive in attempting to touch them now, afraid that Hero might write me off for a freak and leave me altogether alone. But when I did caress the stone, I felt the same hidden warmth and, sometimes, sensed the same near-consciousness of the statues as well.
So, to say that my ether had not awakened is at once correct and inaccurate, for I felt nothing like what my classmates claimed to feel, but as I learnt later on, my ether was not as their ether either, so it was no surprise that this should prove to be the case.
Of course, of all these things that Hero and I discussed between ourselves, I never breathed any word of them to others of my classmates—nor indeed to any Synth, let alone to Feril Animis, who I feared would term me some sort of disgrace and have me cast from the University. This, as it turned out, would not have been far from the truth, though the end for me would have been far more terrible than I could possibly have conceived. As such things fell out in my favor over the years, my unwillingness to divulge secrets and to trust anyone besides Hero was a saving grace in a very dangerous world.
* * *
It was on Midsummer’s Day of my eighteenth year, five years to the day since I had joined the University, and the day when several hundred new thirteen-year-olds would enter those same ancient halls, that Feril Animis finally took us on the long-promised tour of the mage’s tower.
By then, my desire to walk the corridors and see the rooms of Abacus’ venerable home had begun to drive me mad with obsession. I still managed to keep this yearning quiet from all but Hero, who was wonderfully good at keeping secrets.
Feril Animis lined us up outside the great stone tower, which was roughly square in shape at its base, perhaps as much as fifty yards long each side, and some five stories high. Our professor seemed at once more gruff than usual and more eager than ever. The reasons for this strange mixture in his disposition became clear at once. This day was an annoyance as ever to him, but it was also a final annoyance.
“Silence, you lot. For five years I have tolerated your lack of self-application to my lessons. I have lamented the fact that I have had to live daily with such miserable charges. And I have cursed the day that saw such pathetic recruits to the ranks of Synth and Hymanni as you. But, as you will be moving up in the world beginning tomorrow, so will I. I will no longer have to deal with snotty thirteen-year-olds and turn them into rebellious eighteen-year-olds. No, that task, thank the Hymage, is now someone else’s to perform. So, it would please me immensely if you could behave yourselves one last time so we can get this tour over with.”
Hero and I exchanged looks. Teaching at the University was already a prestigious position, we had learnt, for Feril Animis held the future of the Dominion in his hands as he guided us through our early theoretical studies. That he could be “moving up in the world” must mean he was taking the next step for a Hymanni such as himself. Could it be any coincidence that he made this announcement to us only days after our beloved Consul of Ilion had died in his old age? Had the Hymage elected our very own professor to fill this even more illustrious position in the hierarchy of the Dominion?
As he led the class past a pair of Synth guards and into Abacus’
stone tower, Hero and I hung back so that we were among the last of our group to enter. I felt a shudder of anticipation as I stepped across the threshold, and the world about me seemed to transform in an instant. I began to see things as I had never seen them before. The network of stones that held up the tower was revealed to my eyes to be anything but natural.
“Hero,” I whispered, “have a look at how these stones fit together.”
She had been taken with something else, I suspect, for she glanced at the masonry and simply shrugged her shoulders, finding nothing special therein. “It looks just like normal to me. Perfect engineering and architecture, like the buildings of the University. I hardly see anything special.” She furrowed her brow. “Are you all right, Toven?”
“You two in the back, silence!” Professor Animis roared. The words echoed off the walls, and he launched into a lecture as we entered the enormous ground floor study.
“Here is where we believe the hymaberry bush had its birth. This room is well-known as the place where Abacus and his mage friends would sit and discuss the finer points of their magic, and we have it on some authority that it was here they conducted the rite that created the bush.”
He continued to drone on and on about the glories of the Dominion that had its founding in this room, but I stopped listening. I was too excited by what I’d sensed in the stonework to focus on anything else. I dared to whisper to Hero again. “The stones are not strong enough to hold up this tower,” I said to her. “There is something else here. I can feel it. A living heart beats in this stone. It is magic that keeps it from crumbling, magic of the true mages. How else could it have remained standing in such perfect condition for so long?”
“Master Aimis, would you like to lecture the class for me?” Feril Animis spoke in a threatening hiss. “You are hardly the most gifted of your peers, so I should think you’d be inclined to lay your whole attention at my feet. Miss Landri there, perhaps, has some license for freedom of thought—being the best student of a bad bunch—but she, too, disappoints.”
I hung my head dutifully, and our professor grunted dismissively before leading us from the room and towards a set of stairs up to the second floor. The higher we climbed, the more convinced I grew that there was something almost alive about the place, and I determined that I had to take the chance presented me and find the source while we were here. I was not sure how long it would be before I was permitted to return.
* * *
It was while touring the mage’s private laboratory on the fourth storey that I at last realized we had come to the heart of the building, for here the throbbing that had begun to fill my ears reached a near-crescendo so that I knew I had to remain behind as soon as Feril Animis led the class up to the final floor.
As he concluded his lecture on the virtues of science as an exploit worthy of the truly gifted among the Synths, I whispered to Hero for the first time since our ground-floor experience. “I need to stay behind. Will you keep a lookout at the door for me?”
Professor Animis glared at me as he passed, and I managed a faint and compliant smile. Hero and I followed him out the door, but as the professor disappeared upstairs, we dropped off the rear and dashed back to the laboratory.
“What’s this about, Toven? You know we’re going to be in such trouble when he realizes we haven’t followed the rest of the class.”
“I know, but it’s here, Hero. Can’t you feel it?”
“Feel what?”
“The heartbeat of the tower. This is the room that is keeping the building upright. I must explore it.”
She looked at me as though I had gone completely mad, but she nodded her head and went to keep an eye out against somebody coming.
I began to walk around the room, looking at the apparatus left behind by a man who had been dead for a thousand years. But it was in my searching that I began to have the first inklings of thought that the mages were not in fact dead, for I could see no way for the spell holding this structure together to survive so long without somebody to renew it. But, then, I had no experience with magic at all in those days, not even with the rather basic power the Synths practice. What my young mind picked up on, however, is something very much at the heart of all magical theory, that a spell only survives so long as the ether that created it remains strong enough to sustain it. Though I could not have put it in so many words at the time, it seemed logical to me that in order for the spell that preserved the tower to remain strong and extant, a mage was needed to maintain it, for as far as we had been taught (and this was one of the few instances when Feril Animis actually told us the whole truth) no Synth or Hymanni could link his ether to something outside of his own body—like the stones of the mage’s tower. Only the true mages had possessed that kind of power.
I made my way slowly towards a series of bookshelves in the rear of the room, aware by the time I was halfway there that the source of the spell lay on those shelves someplace. But though I had somehow determined this, I nevertheless did not neglect the study of anything in my path. I sensed traces of magic in everything I touched, much like I did in the great stone statues in the front of the University, a slight warming sensation that spoke of long-gone power once practiced on the object in question. But I could not have put such a label to the sensations at the time.
When at last I made my way to the books, I began to study the titles on their spines, until at last I found one called A Study in the Application of Magic to the Art of Architecture. As I touched my fingers to its spine, I felt an electric jolt, and the whole tower seemed to sigh.
I turned about to Hero, who stood quietly in the doorway of the room, humming something to herself. “Did you hear or feel that?” I asked her.
By the easiness of her stance I knew her answer well enough, yet she made a show of straining her ears and touching the wall before saying, “No, I feel nothing at all. What’s the matter?”
“I think I found the heartbeat. It’s a book.” I reached backwards and grasped at the tome in question, sensing it as I laid my fingers on it, but still keeping my eyes planted on Hero.
I saw as I brought my arm around that the book I removed from the shelves was not the book on architecture I’d looked at moments earlier. It was a plain leather-bound codex without title on the spine or cover.
I spun about quickly and saw that the book on architecture was still there. I reached out to touch it again, and again I felt the walls of the tower sigh in response. A quick survey of the immediate area surrounding that tome revealed no gap from which the book I currently held in hand could possibly have come. I had not disturbed anything at all.
“Hero, I think you’d better come have a look at this,” I said, growing increasingly uneasy with what I was experiencing and longing to have someone to share my ordeal.
I heard her footsteps as she padded across the room, but I could not remove my eyes from the book in hand. She came to a stop beside me, and her eyes settled on the simple codex clutched in my fingers.
“What is it?” she asked softly. There was something odd in her voice, a disapproval perhaps, or impatience. We had lingered far too long behind the class and were sure to get caught any moment now.
“Please tell me you see a gap on those shelves where this book came from,” I said in a hoarse whisper.
Again, without taking my eyes from the book, I sensed her studying the shelves intently. I knew what her answer was to be. “No, I don’t see one. Where did you get the book? Was it on a table here?”
I shook my head. “No, I pulled it off the shelf just now, right when I was telling you about the heartbeat of the tower. I reached for that one over there but wasn’t looking at what I was doing. When I looked at what I had taken down, I found this one in my hands instead of that one on magical architecture. What do you think that means?”
“I don’t know, Toven. You’re scaring me.”
“I’m afraid too,” I answered her.
Slowly, I reached out the fingers of my right hand
and peeled open the cover of the book. Before I got it a quarter of the way open, however, Hero’s hand slammed down over mine. “Not now, Toven. We have to go. I hear footsteps on the stairs. They’re coming back.”
I glanced at the bookcase, my heart racing now with desire, but I decided against forcing the book back into place. Instead, I pulled open my cassock and stuffed the book into the waist of my britches, against my belly.
“Toven,” Hero said.
“I’m not leaving it,” I replied. “Now, come.”
We raced to the doorway of the laboratory just as Professor Animis and the rest of our classmates appeared at the bottom of the stairs. Hero and I pulled back into the room quickly, hoping we had not been seen, and waited for our classmates to pass before slipping into the rear of the line.
We descended the flights of stairs down to the ground level again, and Hero and I began to believe we would escape unscathed from our little adventure. But we should have known there was no escaping Feril Animis’ watchful eyes.
As we stepped out into the sunlight of Midsummer’s Day, he said over the heads of our classmates, “Nice of you to join us again, Master Aimis.” My eyes grew wide but not because I was afraid of punishment. No, I was in complete shock at what I saw. For rather than scowling, the professor stood with a great smile, a knowing smile, an ambitious smile.
Feril Animis was pleased, and that was never a good thing.
-IV-
Hero and I had to wait almost until nightfall before we felt safe enough to open the book I’d taken from the mage’s tower. I’d carried it against my belly as we’d returned to the lecture halls where Feril Animis had given us the particularly cruel parting gift of another exam, threatening to remember those who failed it by name when he came into real power. We were terrified enough of him as it was without having to fear what he could do if made Consul of Ilion, or something comparable.
The Scion of Abacus, Part 1 Page 4