The Apprentice's Path: The Alchemist #1

by Stacey Keystone

  "I just never want to be drafted," I said. "War is stupid. Dying at war is stupid. Alchemists don't get drafted. It's a priority industry."

  "Sure, but you'd be exempt as an alchemist even if you become a mage."

  "I don't want to, and that's final," I said, hoping he would leave it at that.

  Then I noticed him moving his hands. He was measuring my magic. It was the same gesture that the tester had used. Testing magic levels was one of those universal aspects of magic, as I'd found during my search on all aspects of universal magic.

  "Stop that!" I ordered. He stopped the gesture. But I could see pity in his eyes. Something I never wanted to see. It's not like I expressed a desire to become a mage. Why did everybody assume I wanted to? I'm strong, I can fight with almost any man and win. I was one of the best alchemists of my generation. I knew that. The fact that I was a very weak magical wasn't something I would dwell on. There is no point anyway. It's not like I can do anything about it.

  "You know," he said. "There are ways to increase your magical level. Sometimes magic increases during Initiation. It usually grows after Initiation."

  I knew all about that. My mother certainly gave me an extended lecture on ways magic could grow. But it's not like anybody knows how to do it. And the level of growth after Initiation is usually bound by the initial level of magic at Initiation, anyway. No point in becoming a weak, bad mage, when I could be a great alchemist. I certainly wasn’t going to gamble my pride and reputation on the possibility my magic would grow. It almost never happened.

  "Don't mention it again," I said. "Don't ever use your spells on me. Or I'll stop coming."

  I'm not sure whether he was afraid of my threat, but he got quiet.

  "So let's try the spell you wanted me to do again. What does this," pointing at the drawing I made, "mean?" he asked.

  "Well," I said "in applied magic that is the spell used for cooling water. I translated it into light magic."

  "That's not how a cooling spell looks," he said. He took a pen and a new piece of paper and drew the spell for me. "This is how it's supposed to look like."

  The two spells didn't seem to have anything in common.

  "Try to use the one I made anyway. I want to see how it works. We'll keep changing it until it works like the one you made."

  "That seems pointless. To create a new spell, when we have a perfectly functional one. It's not like it will help with mental magic."

  "I told you," I said. "Creating a universal language of magic, and translating all spells into it, will be very helpful to find ways to destroy spells. If we can do that, then we can destroy those other spells. Now, please focus."

  The housekeeper, who had been actively observing the girl that claimed to be her master's granddaughter, knocked on her master’s office door.

  "Come in," she heard. She brought a tray of tea with some scones. There were two cups. Although she was quite happy that her master seemed engaged, and had stopped drinking, she was still worried and determined to say what was in her mind.

  "Mr. Bedwen," she said. "I've been working at your house for years. I helped with Billie for the whole time he's been sick. So I'd like to say some things."

  Her master seemed surprised. She didn't try to assert her opinion frequently, but she worried about this family, which she had served for decades.

  "Everybody in this house seems to feel entitled to just say things to me now," he said. "So go ahead. I'm starting to get used to this bluntness."

  "Well, Mr. Bedwen," she paused. "I know that girl claims to be your granddaughter, but she certainly doesn't look at all like you, or your daughter, bless the soil she lays in. Why haven't you confronted her about that?"

  "Now, Bettie," he said. "I know you have been listening and observing Miss Dana. She is certainly an odd girl, not unlike Claire. And she absolutely wants something from me. But she's good for Billie. And she isn't lying."

  "So is she your real granddaughter?"

  "That's not your business. The only thing you should know is, you should keep cooking meat dishes. And make sure they're tasty. I'd like this house to be welcoming."

  The housekeeper nodded. She hadn't expected an answer, and this was the best thing she could get, anyway.

  When the housekeeper left the room, the man took out of the desk drawer the results of the lab tests he had done as soon as he obtained the girl's blood. The four lab tests he made, one after the other, desperately hoping to get a different result. The answer stayed the same in all four tests. Not a blood match.

  He took out the photo he kept in his desk drawer, caressing it with his fingertips. This scam was the most elaborate he'd ever seen. So real, he desperately wanted to believe in Sam, Billie and Mikey's existence. His daughter's sons, who looked just like him. A mirage, a delusion. A welcome lie.

  The girl, whoever she was, really seemed to believe what she was saying. And, although her revenge plans were silly, she took them seriously. He laughed, with real amusement this time. The naivete expressed by this hatchling! He may have left the Inquisition, at his family's request, when they thought the family's sake required severing the ties with the Society. But he had still been trained as a prosecutor and had absorbed the values of his family. Nobody could touch his family and survive. Not even the Inquisition. The feeling that the institution put itself before its members was the reason his father had ordered him to leave them. He certainly would not forgive or forget. He hadn’t.

  He made sure everybody involved in his son’s disease died. Those who provided the drugs, those who used mind magic, those who made an attempt on his daughter’s life. Slowly and methodically, he found everybody, and hunted them down. The government had tried to stop him, to prosecute him for those murders. But they could never prove anything. He hadn’t been the best student of the Inquisition College for nothing.

  And then, he came to Ashford, the place where his daughter’s grave was. The empty grave, where he buried some of the remains found on the train. He had arranged everything, for Billie to be in the care of his friend, Craig Derwen, and had slowly started to drink himself to death. That is, until he saw that photo. He threw away all the liquor in the house after that. The results of the test were a disappointment, but the photo seemed so real. Maybe she had obtained it somewhere. He would have to observe to learn more about it.

  Billie seemed attached to her, and his situation seemed to improve. For as long as that was true, he would tolerate her, with her silly and naïve plans for revenge, which she took way too seriously for a scammer. So he would welcome her at his house, allowing her to believe she managed to fool him. For as long as she thought that, she would keep coming, and he could learn more about her.

  So he'd behave like a real grandfather. If she asked for his money, connections, or help, he'd give her that. Within reason, of course. But he didn't want to scare her away. He needed to know what she was really after. Because the money, and connections, and status he had couldn't buy the mirage she was offering him. Hope.

  By the time the Captain gave me access to the Inquisition Archives, I'd almost forgotten that I had asked for it. It took him much more than a week, and every time I reminded him, he gave me vague excuses. There were so many things I was doing anyway, the experiments with grandpa, the microscopy work with that stupid button, the books I was studying, that I just stopped bothering him at some point. I was becoming an expert in theoretical magic, in both light and dark branches of it. Maybe the first such expert in Kalmar, since theoretical magic is such a useless field anyway, used more by philosophers and armchair academics than practical mages.

  The Captain took me to the outskirts of Ashford in his government-assigned car. The Inquisition building, which held the Archives, had originally been in the middle of the countryside, but now it was within the city limits. It had been used for interrogating and holding prisoners originally, and mages are dangerous prisoners. Which is why it was as far as the city authorities dared to force Inquisitors out back
then.

  I had to sign a huge stack of papers promising I would keep everything I learned here secret, stating that I wasn't allowed to take any documents outside or take any copy of them. All notes I took would have to be checked before I could take them outside.

  I was escorted into a big room with many feet of shelving, all full of folders. There was no dust, as magic spells protected all the documents here, but other than that, the room smelled strongly of old paper. When I asked the archivist that was escorting us which system of organization they had here, he just laughed at me.

  "Everything that has been organized, has already been classified. The information approved by censors was taken to the National Library, in Ecton, where it is widely available to the public. The classified information is in the Ministry of Magic. These are the documents that haven't been reviewed by the censors yet, which the Inquisitors didn't hold in the special section."

  I turned towards the Captain.

  "You promised that you would give me access to the classified Inquisition Archives, so I could work," I accused him.

  "I did. You just didn't say which ones. You already have access to the National Library, if you want to go to Ecton. As for the classified information, our censors have reviewed it, and there is nothing relevant to our project there. And these archives are also classified. They just require a lower security clearance."

  Great. I wasn't doing this just for work; I was also looking for information on mental magic, but I didn't want to share that. Interest in banned magic is not something I want to have in my government file. So I would have to swallow it. It hurt my pride though.

  "If they looked properly, that is. They could just not know what to look for."

  "Actually, the secret archives were reviewed first, before this project was started. Nothing of relevance was found."

  I heard a polite cough. I turned my head; it was the archivist, avidly listening to our conversation.

  "Excuse me," the archivist said. "But what project are you talking about? If I could know a bit more about it, maybe I could help."

  "Classified," the Captain replied, with an angry look towards me.

  "What?" I asked innocently. "It's not like I said anything, and he certainly knows I'm looking for something. He's not stupid."

  The archivist nodded and winked at me. I guess he didn't like all this stupid secrecy either, a kindred spirit. I winked back. The Captain noticed my wink and sighed.

  "Since I see you two are getting along, Miss Bedwen," he said. "I'll leave you here. Just remember you swore an oath and signed a contract to keep this project secret."

  And with that, he left, leaving me in the archives. I hope there are coaches back to Ashford. It would take a couple of hours to walk back otherwise. If there weren't coaches, I would take a cab and charge it to the project, I decided. They should certainly pay for that. I turned towards the archivist, a middle-aged man with a twinkle in his eyes.

  "Is there at least any kind of naming system here?" I asked.

  "Well," he said, "the folders carry the name of the year and the inquisitor in charge of the investigation."

  "Just to make it completely clear," I said. "These are the files of the day-to-day investigations of Inquisitors, right? So the more interesting ones, the ones for necromancers and telepaths, the things the Inquisition cared about, have been removed, either classified or to the National Library."

  "Correct," he said. "It seems you had a different impression before, Miss Bedwen. I'm sorry for disappointing you."

  "Thank you, but it's not your fault. I let myself get fooled by that slick guy." I said, nodding towards the door the Captain left through. "But I'll try to find something interesting. Which are the oldest files here?"

  He pointed me to the darkest corner of the room and instructed me how to use the gloves and spatulas they used for turning pages.

  "All the files here have been conserved with magic," he explained. "The Inquisition tended to like to keep as much information as they could, even if it was useless. But you should still be careful with the documents, as they are quite old. And, Miss Bedwen, since you are going through the files anyway, could you sort them, please? Just make a pile of the ones that are related to magic, and the ones that aren't. The censors will go through the magic-related piles."

  I nodded, feeling more and more cheated by the minute. Still, there was bound to be something interesting in the files. There had to be, or why weren't they declassified?

  Turns out, the government likes to keep things secret just because. As I started going through the files, I realized the sheer amount of petty crimes the Inquisition investigated. Sure, at first, the accounts of bigamy, incest, orgies, all kinds of scams, fake magic, and rumor-mongering seemed interesting, but after hours of reading exhaustive accounts of each crime, it started to be really boring. And some Inquisitors had terrible handwriting. But I had to find something here. If I didn't find something within the next couple of months, I would ask the Captain to fund a trip to Ecton. Maybe the National Library had more interesting things. But before going through archives that have already been searched, it probably made sense to search through one that hadn't been as extensively cataloged. But still, it felt like drinking milk with all the cream taken out. Always hated non-fat milk.

  14

  The search in the archives wasn't yielding me anything for work, but I found quite a few descriptions of mind magic. Turns out, jealous spouses and masters unhappy with their cheeky apprentices liked to use mind magic quite frequently. To correct the behavior of those below you wasn't considered much of a crime back then, so the Inquisitors tended to just annotate it in their reports of the questioning. Still, I was learning a lot more about how this specific magic worked than I did from the public library.

  I couldn't take any notes, not while I was inside, but I memorized everything I could and wrote it down as soon as I came home. It was just small nuggets of information, details, hints. By the end of the week, the information I had found could fit a page and a half. In comfortably big handwriting. I still thought it would be a good idea to show it to grandpa. Yes, the information was classified, and I wasn't supposed to show it to outsiders. But I wasn't supposed to be researching mind magic, either.

  I presented him with my notes, in the privacy of his office, after asking him to activate all the privacy spells.

  "I see, Miss Bedwen," he said, "that you are quite serious about that silly revenge plan of yours. I won't ask you where you got this — but it's not information that is publicly available. I checked everything related to mental magic, and while I already know most of the information contained here, a few details are new to me. Knowing these things, let alone looking for these things, will put you in great danger."

  "I can protect myself," I answered. "And why did you think I was trying to formulate a universal language of magic?"

  "Trying to find a universal language of magic is safe. The only risk you carry is to your reputation. And you don't have much of a reputation yet."

  "You don't think it will work. You don't think we can find a cure, nor protection against mind magic."

  He seemed uncomfortable.

  "Well… Miss Bedwen, the only thing that can protect you against mind magic is having a strong mind and great control of your magic. There are no other ways."

  "Wait a minute," I asked. "Great control of your magic? Is that why you're so invested in convincing me to become a mage?"

  "You would be safer if you were a full mage," he acknowledged.

  "But, as a level one, there's no much use, right? It's not like a weak mage like that could protect themselves from mind magic, not more than the natural protection dark arall already have. Which is why we need to focus on figuring out how it all works — and creating an artifact."

  "While artifacts are great for non-magicals," grandpa started lecturing, "they are just so indiscriminate and primitive. Only a mage can use the appropriate level of force and the right tools. The blu
ntness of artifacts means they always have easily exploitable loopholes. Mind magic cannot be done with an artifact; the subtlety and nuance of each person's unique personality mean they have to tailor spells to each individual. Thus, having a magical artifact won't protect you from that. Besides, anything that can be stolen or taken away from you is a questionable protection against those wishing to control you."

  "Good point. People who won't stop at illegal acts to do something won't be shy of kidnapping a person, that's for sure. But at least they wouldn't be able to do what they did to Billie."

  "Miss Bedwen…"

  "Don' try to convince me to go through Initiation again. I don't want to. It's no use."

  "OK, Miss Bedwen, I won't. Just promise me you won't be putting yourself into danger trying to get more of this information. As a frequent visitor to this house and association with you could put all of us in danger."