At length, after we had been dismissed from our classes for the day and we’d been to the mess hall to eat supper, Hero and I made our way back to the dormitories and into the room I shared at the time with four other boys. They would not be in until later. They never were, preferring to spend time in the common room playing games or outside in the cool summer evenings. Before finally settling down next to my bed, Hero and I made a quick study of the dormitory to ensure we were in fact alone and could look at the book undisturbed. We sat on the far side of the room, well away from the door and suitably hidden so that I could stow the book under the bed should somebody enter unexpectedly.
“Odd that Professor Animis did not punish us,” I said to Hero as we’d been inspecting the place. “Why do you think that is?”
She shook her head. “Perhaps he was just being lenient, it being his last day and all.”
I don’t think either of us believed that for a second. Feril Animis did not show mercy to anyone. If he refrained from punishing us—me specifically, for he had only called out my name and not Hero’s—then it was because I had in fact broken no rules at all.
And that was a realization more frightening than any other possibility. But I pushed the thought from my mind as we sat to study the book I’d found.
I brought it out, running my fingers slowly over the ancient leather binding. Hero examined it closely, looking to see if there was any hint of a title scratched onto the cover and now faded, but just as I had failed to find anything when in the mage’s tower, she now failed to find any indication that the cover had ever been marked with a title.
With an unspoken agreement that it was time to stop delaying the inevitable, I set the book on the floor between us. We leaned over it, and I reached out my hand to turn back the cover. I cannot adequately describe the feeling of opening that book. Hero’s trepidation was born out of my own anxiety, for she told me that there seemed nothing odd about the book to her, nothing in the touch to indicate it was anything other than an ordinary leather codex. What we found inside, though, proved otherwise and gave rise to a certain level of fear in her.
By contrast, I was afraid of the book from the beginning. Truly, truly afraid as I had never been afraid of anything, even Feril Animis’ disapproval. The book, before ever I opened it, was apparently far more than a simple codex. It was a gateway to something I did not yet understand, something I was uncertain I had a right to understand. But the fact was that I also felt curious, as curious about the book as I had been about the tower that housed it before. So it was that I could stall no longer and must open it.
I reached out for the top corner and lifted the cover open. The leather came away from the leaves within with an audible crack, for it was a book, I reckoned, that had not been opened for many hundreds of years, and the leather had dried out considerably. And yet the cover did not break, nor did it prove brittle as its age promised. After that initial creaking sound, the book opened easily enough, the spine remaining firm and strong, and the interior showing no signs of coming apart.
As I laid eyes on the script inside, I heard Hero suck in a hard breath.
“Well, that is odd,” she said. I looked up at her. “Somebody went through all the trouble to hide an empty book.”
I know I must have looked an absolute idiot staring at her as she spoke, for she stifled a laugh at my expression and asked me what was wrong.
“Can you not see it?” I asked her.
“See what?” I distinctly remember that her face belied the fact she did not believe me. She thought I was playing some jest at her expense, but the sternness of my expression as I waited for her reply soon convinced her otherwise. She took another glance down at the open tome, my eyes following hers to the front page, and then she shook her head. “I see nothing,” she declared again. “What do you see?”
“Writing,” I said. “Let me read it for you.”
I picked up the book from the floor, cleared my throat, and read her the words on that first page:
The Confession of Abacus, Grand Master of the College of Mages of Aaria, and last of my brethren.
I write these words to my true heir, my scion. I do not know when he shall be born, on what distant day and in what distant hour he shall take up this volume and read these words, but I write against that day.
I write, also, because I must confess a great weakness. I have failed my brethren. I did not go to sleep with them as I swore. More than this, I thought to see out my days as an ordinary man, and in so doing I fear I have left the world with a gift it did not look for, a gift that is likely to prove a curse in latter days.
The hymaberry is made, it reproduces abundantly as it was meant to, and men at last know peace in the kingdoms of Aaria. Here, in my home of Ilion, I have retired when I aught to have slain myself. If I can make amends for that now it must be in this, my memoire, a letter to my scion to save the world from the fate I have made for it.
I left off reading at the bottom of the page and looked up at Hero. Her face was frozen in terror, for she recognized very quickly that I was not making it up but that I was truly reading what I saw. Only, she could not see it.
Furthermore, the history laid out in that text ran contrary to everything Professor Animis had told us over the past five years, and I think that as much as anything took its toll on my friend, for she was ever a stickler for the truth.
“Write it out for me,” she said at last. Her voice was almost a whisper as it escaped her lips. I think she was on the verge of fainting but managed to compose herself enough to put this to a thorough investigation. We both knew, as soon as I had read that page of script, that we could speak nothing of this to anyone else, least of all to one of the professors of the University. We had discovered something that would likely result in our deaths should it become known. Even at our young age we knew that the words of the Dominion and the Hymage were gospel, and Feril Animis had relayed them to us—and they ran counter to this supposed confession of the last mage Abacus.
Hero passed me a scrap of parchment from her bag, and I took down my fountain pen from where it sat on the table beside my bed. Setting the book and parchment on the floor, I began to copy out the words of Abacus letter by letter, but I’d barely reached the end of the third word when Hero stopped me.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“What do you mean? I’m copying out the text like you asked.”
“Look at what you’ve written.”
I did look, and my gasp echoed her earlier one, for I saw as soon as I looked at what I was doing that I was not writing in the familiar script of the Dominion we’d been taught in our first years at the University. I was writing in an alphabet that was entirely foreign to me, and yet I formed the letters perfectly as though practiced in them from my youth. I had also read those same signs with an uncomfortable level of familiarity.
Hero pushed herself away from me, and the act stung my heart. I looked at her, saw the fear in her eyes as they slid from the book to the parchment to my face and back again.
“Who are you?” she asked in a whisper.
I tried to smile but it must have looked ghastly, for she recoiled visibly. “I am Toven Aimis, your friend. You know me, Hero.”
“Do I? Do I know you, Toven? I don’t think I know you at all.”
She got up and ran from the room, leaving me to sit there staring at the place where she had been sitting.
I sighed and turned my attention back to the book. Who was I? I suddenly did not know the answer myself, but I felt that I owed it to Hero to find out before I saw her again, to be able to give her something to grasp. I did not fear that she would betray me to the professors, not yet. If I did not come up with an answer soon, though, I might be in trouble.
I studied the first page of the book again for a moment, and then slowly reached out my hand to turn the page.
It was blank.
As was the third page and the fourth. I took up the tome and began flipping randomly through it, but eac
h page was as empty as the one before.
Finally, I turned back to the front and found a new sentence that had not been there earlier. It was scrawled at the bottom of the page beneath the last line I had read to Hero, written as neatly as everything else was and not squeezed in, as though the space had been reserved for that specific line. It read:
You are not yet ready.
* * *
The next morning we were roused so early and set in motion so rapidly that I had no chance to talk things over with Hero after she’d run off the previous evening. The day after Midsummer’s was an important one for us, for today the classes we’d been divided into for the past five years would be brought together again, all two-hundred-and-thirty students, and divided anew, this time not by something so arbitrary as a surname. No, just as we had been chosen five years earlier from among hundreds of Eikos our own age, so now we would face a trial again intended to separate the Synths from the Hymanni.
We filed into the main hall of the University of Ilion and were made to stand at attention while the specifics of the day’s tests were laid out for us. I saw the familiar faces of several professors standing before the student body, but Feril Animis was not among them. I was not to find out for several months, but the rumor proved to be true that the man who had terrorized my classmates and me for five years had indeed been elevated to the heights of the Consulship of Ilion. Only later on did I understand how truly powerful Professor Animis had been, and this gave me ample reason to sigh with relief and chide myself for having angered him as often as I did. A man like him could have broken every student in his class like dried twigs. But he was an incredibly complex person, a troubled man, and when I learnt this, I learnt finally that humans should not be judged entirely on outward appearances—nor indeed on the basis of their gruff demeanors.
But he was gone then and we were not. We lined up, as I said, and were addressed by an elder woman wearing the white cassock of a Hymanni. Her blonde hair was clean and tidy, though it was beginning to appear tired like the rest of her, and her petite face and frame—what I could make out beneath the concealing cassock, that is—spoke of a woman who must have been strikingly beautiful in her youth.
And yet I was every bit as terrified of her as I had been of Feril Animis, though in a quite different way. My last professor was openly cruel, a great disliker of young people and bearing the grudge of his assignment openly. This woman, who introduced herself as Deryn Lhopri, had a quiet authority about her, and the threat was always hanging in the background that one would be severely punished for failing her expectations. I could see that some of the professors were puzzled by her presence and especially by the way she took charge of this occasion.
At any rate, Deryn Lhopri stood before us and said, “For five years you have studied the theory of the Synths. You have heard of the hymaberry and the juice we make of it that is the source of our strength. Now, at the midpoint of your journey through these halls, you will be initiated into the most closely guarded secret of the Dominion. Today, you become Synths. Today, you begin to set your feet on the paths to what you were born to be. You will no longer wear these drab, brown cassocks that mark your status as initiate students, children plucked from the Eikos slums. Today, you will take upon yourselves greens and blues. As many as twenty of you, perhaps, shall even be privileged to don the white of the Hymanni.”
She turned and waved to a wise Synth waiting in the wings of the hall. He bore a large wooden chest that clinked as he set it on the ground before her. He then receded into the background once more.
All eyes were on Deryn Lhopri as she undid the clasps on the chest and pulled back its lid. Inside were, near as I could tell, two-hundred-and-thirty vials, one for each of us standing in that hall. She reached in with her long, slender fingers and drew out one of those same bottles. Inside was the familiar blood-red juice I had not seen in five years. She held it up before us, and we could all see that the vial was half empty.
“This is a half-dose,” she said, “adequate for training. In time, when your bodies can bear it, you shall receive full vials just as each of your professors do. As you have been told, the drinking of the hyma juice is a daily ritual, one which no Synth or Hymanni can do without, for the effects of the juice, and the potency it grants, are soon lost to the body as it is metabolized.”
She paused and looked about, offering us in her silence a chance to ask questions. There were none. Deryn Lhopri continued, “You have all had the theory of practical magic. You know in your heads what it is to link one’s ether to the earth, water, air, or fire in your own bodies. You will each drink your vial of hyma juice today and then be put to as many as four tests, beginning with the test of earth. Though you have no practice yet in practical magic, your bodies will know what to do. In time, you will learn to focus your consciousness and target the use of the hyma juice and your ether. For now, let your natural abilities control your path. Every one of you will face at least two tests. Again, as you know, you have either the ability to link your ether to one or to all the elements. The most common ability, earth manipulation, shall be the first trial you face, and that shall begin now.”
Again, she paused for questions, and when none were forthcoming, she nodded to the wise Synth a second time. He took up the chest again, allowing Deryn Lhopri to reinsert the vial she held in hand, and then he began at the head of the line distributing one vial to each student. Given that my surname placed me near the front, I received my vial sixth of all.
There was a little cork stopper, which I pulled out dutifully and then threw back my head to swallow the juice. It tasted every bit as bitter as I remembered, and I coughed as it went down into my stomach.
The most curious feeling came over me then, a feeling of warmth and comfort unlike any I’d ever known. The world seemed to dilate as I looked about, and I caught the eyes of Deryn Lhopri upon me. I dismissed it as my imagination, thinking that all my classmates would likely feel the same expectant eyes upon them. Now that I have lived through these things and seen how it all ends, I know that I was rather foolish to think so—but this story must await its place. Deryn Lhopri was indeed looking squarely at me, but the manner in which she quickly glanced away as I caught her eyes, which should have unnerved me, was soon forgotten.
The feeling of supreme wellbeing continued to circulate through my veins until my head began to lighten on my shoulders and my mind to expand outward, taking in every sensory detail in the hall. I saw cracks in the flooring and the ceiling that no normal eye could have seen. I noted every hair on Deryn Lhopri’s head, all 93,217 of them. I sensed the subtle shifting of the air as everyone inhaled and exhaled, as well as when somebody shifted his feet, disturbing the currents of air at ground level. It was the most intoxicating moment of my life, and though I was to take that juice every day for a couple of years, I never again felt the same level of elation. Indeed, over time I came to learn that these sensations had nothing at all to do with the hyma, but that story too must await its proper place.
When the last vial had been distributed and its contents swallowed, Deryn Lhopri motioned into the wings again and ten warrior Synths entered, each bearing an enormous iron weight upon his shoulders. To them, it was as though they carried a light sack, but to our eyes, they seemed as giants to be able to bear such burdens.
They set the weights on the floor before us all, and then Deryn Lhopri summoned us forward, ten by ten, to attempt the lifting of those weights. I was in the first group to be tested, and out of the ten of us, five managed to lift the weight from the ground and into arms.
I was not one of them.
Twenty-three times this procedure was carried out, and nearly half of the total students lifted the weights. All names were noted down on parchment by a pair of wise Synths. When all students had tried the weights, the ten warrior Synths lifted them onto their shoulders once more and bore them away.
The same warrior Synths returned moments later bearing blunted throwing knives an
d wooden targets, which were again set up before the waiting students. In groups of ten once more, we were given one knife and told to cast at the targets. Those with innate mastery over the element of water would not fail to strike the center mark.
I should explain this trial as it seems somewhat unrelated to the element it was intended to test. Each of the four elements, as they are bound in our bodies, governs certain aspects of our minds or physiques. Earth governs strength primarily, whereas water governs dexterity, agility, and suppleness. Casting a throwing knife, especially when untrained in the act, requires a tremendous amount of dexterity. Those Synths with mastery over the water element of their bodies would therefore have the perfect aim of someone who had trained for many years, far better aim even, for a warrior Synth in mastery of his body’s water element could throw one hundred knives and never fail to find the center of the target.
Again, I was in the first group to be tried, and again I failed. My cast flew high and wide of the mark, thumping lamely into the wall behind the target.
Of the ten who went with me three found the center of the target, one of whom had also been able to lift the weights previously. She was the first of our year to be separated and declared a Hymanni. The four remaining students who had lifted the weights, as well as the additional two to find the center of the target, were led away to be trained as warrior Synths. The three of us who remained out of the initial ten were returned to the body of students, and the next ten led forward to be tried.
Of the two-hundred-and-thirty there, twenty-one were set aside as Hymanni and roughly seventy remained behind to continue the testing, having failed the first two trials thus far. The other one-hundred-and-thirty-nine were declared warrior Synths and led away from the hall. I felt a tinge of pride when I saw Hero selected as a Hymanni, but that pride in my friend dissolved into fear that I would never see her again, for in failing the first two tests, I had been shown to be no Hymanni at all. All I had left to hope for—indeed, it was now a certainty—was that I would be a wise Synth. All that remained to be determined was whether I had mastery of air or of fire.
The Scion of Abacus, Part 1 Page 5