Amnesia: The Book of Maladies

by D. K. Holmberg

  “Such as when there is an unknown poisoner involved,” Aelus said.

  “And you think you should be the only poisoner, is that it?”

  “It didn’t work,” Alec said, stepping between his father and Master Eckerd. “The eel flesh didn’t make a difference. I’m better, but I’m not well.”

  “That shouldn’t happen,” Master Eckerd said. “We know the benefit of eel flesh. That’s the reason that it’s limited, restricted to—”

  “I know what it’s restricted to,” Aelus said. “And it didn’t work.”

  “It’s possible that you didn’t give him the right amount.”

  “I fed him an entire eel.”

  Master Eckerd’s eyes widened. “Then I don’t know what to say.”

  “That’s why we’re here,” Aelus said. “I wanted to see whether there was anything here that would explain what happened to him. The paper Alec was attempting to make shouldn’t have done this. There wouldn’t have been anything in the pulp mixture that would be dangerous to him.”

  “We evacuated this level. The fumes were too irritating to most.”

  “That’s good,” Bastan said.

  “And who are you?” Master Eckerd asked.

  “I’m someone you don’t need to worry about.”

  “You’re in my university. I think I will worry about whoever I choose to worry about. Tell me what you are doing here.”

  “I have come with Physicker Stross and his Kaver friend.”

  Master Eckerd’s breath caught. “Stross. You should have been more careful with who you share with.”

  Alec flushed, and Sam patted him on the arm. “It doesn’t matter. Bastan isn’t going to say anything about us.”

  “Bastan?” Master Eckerd asked, glancing from her to Bastan. “The Bastan?”

  “You’ve heard of me. That is good. Then you know what I will do, and what I’m willing to do.”

  “I’ve heard of what you have done. I’ve heard of the people you hurt.”

  “Then you’ve only heard rumors,” Bastan said.

  Master Eckerd glared at him before shaking his head. “We can’t get any closer. The room is dangerous, and with whatever fumes are there…”

  Sam flashed a smile. “This is where I need to come in.”

  Alec turned to her. “I don’t know that it’s safe for you to do it,” he said. “I think that if you try to get too close, you will end up like me.”

  “I won’t end up like you. I just need to dispose of the liquid.”

  “Not all of it,” Aelus said. “We need a sample so that we can test it. Most of it needs to be covered, or better yet, countered. I don’t know that there’s any good place to dispose of it.”

  “How can I counter it?” Sam asked.

  “You will need some way of thickening the solution. If Alec was making paper, then it would be quite thick already, but you will need some way—”

  “Flour,” Bastan said. When they all looked at him, he shrugged. “If you’re looking to thicken a mixture, add flour. I imagine even the university has supplies of flour?”

  Master Eckerd frowned and finally nodded.

  “Good. We will need as much as you can give us. Samara, when you take it in there, you can dump it into the mixture,” Bastan told her.

  “I need something to put the sample in,” she said.

  “There should be a jar. It would be kind of like the one that we used to hold the eel venom, Alec said.”

  Master Eckerd stared at him. “Not just eel flesh, but you have harvested eel venom?”

  “Had you been around, I would have shared that with you, but I haven’t been able to talk to you about what I’ve been doing.”

  “Because I’ve been pulled…”

  “Pulled where?”

  “Pulled by the”—he glanced from Bastan to Aelus to Sam—“the palace. They have had assignments for me.”

  “A Scribe?” Aelus asked.

  “Can we have this conversation later,” Sam said. “I’d rather just get this over with so I can get away from the stench that’s in the hallway. Then again, I’m not sure I’ll be able to get away from that until Bastan leaves.”

  He glared at her, and she flashed a smile.

  “One of us needs to go get flour,” Sam said.

  “I think Eckerd here knows the way,” Bastan said. “I will go with him.”

  Master Eckerd’s eyes widened, but he nodded to Bastan. They hurried off, leaving Sam, Alec, and Aelus alone in the hallway.

  “Those two…” Alec started, but he took a deep breath, his strength fading.

  Aelus glanced over at Alec. “I don’t know how long we can wait. I don’t have any more eel flesh, and until we figure out what has happened, there’s no good way of keeping him well.”

  “I could go in and get a sample, and we could begin trying to understand what happened to it a little sooner.”

  Aelus glanced from Sam to Alec. “I think it might be necessary.”

  “No,” Alec said, but his voice was weak.

  She couldn’t wait. Waiting any longer would end up with Alec back in the same condition he had been in before. And maybe that would happen regardless, but she wasn’t willing to do nothing, not while Alec suffered.

  She focused on an augmentation. This time, she focused on how she wanted to feel, letting the sense of the augmentation wash through her. She needed an ability to resist illness, and she needed an ability to move quickly, and she might need skin that was impervious, all things that she wasn’t sure she could manage at one time. Had Alec the ability to augment her, maybe she could, but without him, and with him in this state, she didn’t dare risk him getting weaker by trying to place an augmentation.

  “Sam…”

  “Alec just rest. I’m going to go in there and—”

  Alec shook his head. “I don’t know what the fumes might do. I didn’t ingest anything, so it had to have been the fumes. You can’t breathe when you’re in there, and if there’s any way of sealing yourself…”

  Alec sank to the ground, and Aelus crouched next to him, quickly examining him.

  “Is he…”

  “He’s alive. His heart is regular. I think he’s simply exerted himself too much.” He stood and looked over at Sam. “The eel meat should have been enough to have restored him. It troubles me that he is like this so quickly after consuming it.”

  “What does he mean by sealing myself off?”

  Aelus sighed and ran a hand through his hair, scratching his head for a moment. “He’s right. If there are fumes that are toxic, you don’t want it reaching any of your inner tissues.”

  “Like my nostrils?”

  Aelus nodded. “Your nose. Your mouth. Everything must be covered. You can’t breathe, which means you need to move quickly. And…” He looked down the hallway, toward the classroom. “We’re going to have to be somewhere else. As soon as you open that door, the fumes are going to escape. If they are dangerous and more than simply irritating, we need to make sure that we aren’t nearby. I don’t know how much more Alec can withstand.”

  “You take him. I will move as quickly as I can,” Sam said.

  Aelus lifted Alec, scooping him off the ground with a grunt. He started along the hallway, and when he reached the stairs, he veered off into a nearby room.

  Hopefully, that would be enough.

  It left her with no choice but to get moving.

  She needed some way of covering her mouth. Her cloak would work, but not in this way. She pulled it off, twisted around, and arranged the hood so that it could be pulled up and tied around her mouth and nose, leaving only her eyes visible. She could breathe through it, though if Aelus was right, she didn’t want to breathe at all.

  And now she needed to hurry.

  Sam ran toward the room. She focused on her augmentations, feeling them wash over her as she ran, and reached the door at the end of the hallway.

  When she pulled it open, the smell nearly made her gag. That would hav
e been a mistake, and she thankfully had enough presence of mind to keep from gagging. She hurried inside, closing the door behind her, trapping the fumes and with her. Where was the jar?

  Alec claimed there would be one here, and she needed to find it.

  She spotted it on the corner of the table.

  Sam grabbed it and reached for the pot. It was boiling, and she realized that a flame still burned beneath the pot, continuing to cook whatever Alec had been working on. She turned the flame off, tamping down the oil, and then lifted the pot, her augmentations making that easier than it should have been, and poured a little bit into the jar.

  She was running out of breath. Eventually, and much too soon, she would need to take a quick breath, but she didn’t dare, not yet.

  Was there some way she could cover the pot? Was there some way she could protect anyone else from getting exposed to this?

  She needed something large enough to place over top of the pot.

  But what?

  The tabletop.

  She set the pot on the ground and ripped the top of the table free. It came with the tearing of wood, and she grunted unintentionally, expelling almost the last of her breath, and kicked, splintering the wood. She slammed it on top of the pot, covering it and trapping the fumes inside.

  Sam scooped up the jar and raced out.

  17

  Searching for a Master

  Alec rested on his bed, leaning against the wall. His gaze drifted around his room, settling first on his desk, and then on the people in the room with him. Fatigue overwhelmed him. He was tired and wanted nothing more than to go back to sleep, but he couldn’t. Not while they still were trying to understand what had happened.

  “We will find her,” Sam said.

  Alec was shaking his head. “Beckah shouldn’t have been gone this long. She was looking for Master Helen…”

  “We looked in the masters’ section,” Sam said. “We have looked everywhere. She’s. not anywhere in the university.”

  Alec frowned. “She wouldn’t have left. She would have been just as worried about me as anyone else.”

  He tried not to meet Sam’s eyes when he said that.

  “I know she would have,” Sam said. “And we’re doing all we can to find her.”

  But it wasn’t all they could do. Sam wasn’t looking for Beckah herself, which he understood. She wanted to be with him, should he need her help. But it meant more really could be done. But Sam wasn’t the one who should be doing it. It should be him, but he was too tired, too weak, and didn’t feel he had the energy he needed to go after her.

  When was last time he had seen her?

  It was a while ago. Sam told him that Beckah had been there when he was sick, waiting by his bedside, but she had gone after Master Helen to find out what she might know, and then… Then she hadn’t returned.

  As much as his mind tried to refute the idea, he had a growing fear that Master Helen was somehow involved. How else could he explain the fact that the fumes had worsened after Master Helen had come in and stirred the mixture?

  “What is it?” Sam asked.

  Bastan looked over from the row of books he’d been looking through. All of them were notes that Alec had taken since coming to the university, all of them documenting illnesses he had treated, and people he had worked on, integrated with his notes from lectures. Nothing there was secretive, at least not so much that he cared whether Bastan looked at it.

  “It’s Master Helen,” Alec said.

  “You worry that she’s involved,” Bastan said.

  Alec nodded.

  “You should. It’s the only thing that seems to make any sense. It’s the only part that connects everything else. You said she had come in shortly before the fumes became unbearable. What you need to determine is what reason she would have to poison you.”

  “She shouldn’t have any reason to poison me. She’s a Scribe, and she works at the palace.”

  “That would be the reason,” Sam said softly.

  “What?”

  Sam shrugged. “It’s possible that she’s working with Princess Lyasanna.”

  “Why would the princess want to harm me?”

  “Because it would harm me,” Sam said.

  Alec shook his head. “That doesn’t make any sense. The princess—”

  “The princess has already proven she’s willing to do things that others would disagree with,” Sam said. “And maybe Lyasanna learned that we know what she’d done. Maybe she knows we captured Marin.”

  “There should be no way Helen would have known,” Bastan said.

  “If she did, then we need to go after her.”

  Alec wasn’t sure there would be any way to find Master Helen. If she wasn’t in the masters’ section, and if she did have ties to the palace, how would they find her? All of this made his head swim, making it difficult for him to think what more he could do. He had no answers.

  The door opened, and his father entered. He was disheveled, his face gaunt, and his eyes had that look about them that warned Alec something was wrong.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s the poisoning,” Aelus said.

  “What about it?”

  “I don’t really understand it. There was something added, but I’m not able to isolate it.”

  Bastan stood and dusted his hands on his pants. “So now, it is my turn to try.”

  Master Eckerd had followed Aelus into the room, and a grin spread across his face. “You? You would have us believe that you are some sort of physicker as well? Have you been secretly training with Aelus?”

  “No. Mine is about finding information. If this Master Helen is still in the city, I will find her.”

  Bastan turned and started from the room. Sam glanced over at Alec, tipping her head, before hurrying after him.

  It left Alec alone with his father and Master Eckerd.

  “You shouldn’t have tried this, Physicker Stross,” Master Eckerd said.

  “I shouldn’t have, but I—”

  “Why shouldn’t he have?” his father asked.

  “He understands the danger of easar paper. If he understands that, and he understands attempting to make it has potential complications, then he should have involved—”

  “Involved what? Who? He’s already had Master Helen working with him, and somehow, she has disappeared. If she is involved in this, and if there is something more taking place because of Master Helen, we need to know and understand.”

  Master Eckerd took a deep breath and turned to Alec. “I shouldn’t have avoided you. I should have trusted my own feelings,” he said.

  “Why did you stay away?” Alec asked.

  “There were needs within the palace.”

  “What kind of needs?”

  He glanced over at Aelus before turning his attention to Alec. “Things I can’t talk about.”

  Aelus laughed. There was bitterness in his voice, a tone Alec was not entirely familiar with. With a sudden moment of clarity, he wondered if something had changed in his father after his poisoning. When his father had been subjected to the eel venom, had he become different? Alec had thought he’d cured him, but maybe the curing had been incomplete. Alec wasn’t entirely sure what it was, but his father seemed a different man. Maybe it was simply Alec who had changed. Maybe it was his interaction with his father that was different rather than his father having actually changed.

  “My son is a Scribe. My son has fought the Thelns and helped push back the threat within the city multiple times. My son has—”

  “I’m not talking about your son.”

  Aelus sighed. He tipped his head and flashed a tight smile at Master Eckerd. “Fine. I will give you a chance to speak to my son. Maybe you can reveal to him what he needs to know. Besides, maybe it’s time for me to return to my shop.”

  “You could stay here,” Alec said.

  His father glanced over to Eckerd. “I think… I think after seeing what everything is like at the university, it�
�s probably for the best I’ve stayed away.”

  He stepped from the room and pulled the door closed. Master Eckerd studied the door, a frown on his face as he turned to Alec, squeezing his hands together. He scanned the room before taking a seat in the chair behind Alec’s table. “All of this is unfortunate, Alec.”

  “What? The fact that you have to share with me what you know about being a Scribe?”

  “The fact that we have to have this conversation at all. There was a time when all master physickers at the university were trained as Scribes.” Alec turned his attention to the door, thinking of his father. “Yes, even him. He would have made a good Scribe, had he wanted to. He had the talent and the potential, and I suspect he still does, but there is more to it than that.” Master Eckerd shrugged. “I can’t really explain it. All I can say is that we once were more than what we are.”

  “What changed?”

  “There is much that has changed. It has been decades since we were as strong as we once were. Oh, the university hasn’t changed, not that much. Other than the fact that there are fewer and fewer who come to us with the appropriate skill set, but beyond that, we still train physickers, it’s just that training anyone other than physickers is less and less common.”

  “What about Master Carl?”

  “Carl… He is a unique case. He has the talent and the potential to do great things, but he has chosen a different path. It’s not that he couldn’t be a Scribe. He simply hasn’t chosen to apply himself in such a way.”

  “It’s more than simply applying oneself,” Alec said.

  “For the most part, it is. There is a certain level of choice that goes into it. And then, there is a certain level of experience that goes into it. There is exposure, and… We also only offer testing to those who have potential.”

  “How do you know?”

  “The bloodlines are quite clear.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We have records, dating back centuries, about the bloodlines of people within the city who would have potential to be Scribes.”

  “And that’s why most of the physickers come from the highborn sections?”

  “That’s…”