Infinite Regress

by Christopher G. Nuttall

  Emily frowned. She’d taken the chance to study her schedule the previous evening and it had been packed with classes, including several that were likely to take up half the day and leave her exhausted at the end of it. Her weekends were free, as normal, but she rather suspected she would be occupied with both mentoring and working for Professor Locke. Indeed, she wasn’t sure when she would have time to get down to Dragon’s Den. Even getting there required half an hour in the coach...

  No, it doesn’t, she thought. I can teleport.

  “We can go on Friday afternoon,” she said, after rechecking her schedule. “I need to meet someone there.”

  Caleb didn’t look pleased, his expression furrowing. “Can we go for dinner afterwards?”

  “I think so,” Emily said, after a moment. “I just don’t know how long this will take.”

  She wrote out a brief letter to Mistress Danielle, then signed and sealed it with a charm. Only Mistress Danielle would be able to read it, she hoped; anyone else would watch helplessly as the letter turned to ash in front of them. It was against both law and school regulations to try to interfere with the mail, but she had a feeling that Gordian might try to read her letters. If nothing else, she was certainly evading his refusal to allow her to continue to study martial magic.

  The thought nagged at her mind as she rose. What was Gordian doing? He’d seemed encouraging, the first time they’d spoken; he’d even urged her to consider her future career and given some very good advice. And now he seemed reluctant to allow her anywhere near his school. Refusing to allow her to study combat magic wasn’t just interfering with her education, it was leaving her vulnerable to enemies.

  At the very least, she thought, I could retake Martial Magic classes with the other students.

  Caleb caught her arm as she walked past him and gently pulled her onto the bed. Emily tensed automatically, then forced herself to relax. She knew he meant her no harm, yet her body didn’t agree. Or maybe it was her mind that worried, because her body wanted to go further and further every time he kissed her. She cursed her stepfather under her breath as Caleb’s lips touched hers. It was so hard to just let herself go.

  “My father wanted me to pass on a message,” Caleb said, nervously. “He wanted you to know that he isn’t minded to forbid the courtship.”

  Emily blinked. “Pardon?”

  She ran her hand through her hair as she looked up at him. General Pollack—Caleb’s father—hadn’t raised any objections when she’d visited him in Beneficence, even though his oldest son had neither completed his apprenticeship nor brought home a prospective partner. What had changed? It wasn’t as if she was a different person...

  It struck her a moment later. “Cockatrice.”

  “Yeah,” Caleb said. “You leaving, in the manner you did, concerned him. But he isn’t minded to forbid anything.”

  Emily sighed, tiredly. “Did he think you were going to be married to a baroness?”

  Caleb gave her an odd look. “Of course.”

  Of course he did, Emily thought, crossly. She wasn’t sure if she was more annoyed at herself or General Pollack. I was a baroness when he met me.

  She rubbed her eyes. “I’m not going to be going back there,” she said, firmly. “I know Alassa patched together a face-saving scheme, but I’m not going to be going back. Imaiqah can have it for the rest of time, if she wishes.”

  “That’s an attitude my father won’t understand,” Caleb said, gently.

  “I know,” Emily said. “But he assumed his role willingly.”

  She swallowed, then met his eyes. “Did you want to marry me because I was a baroness?”

  Caleb looked hurt, hurt enough that she regretted her words instantly. “Of course not,” he said, sharply. “I fell in love with you during our time together in Cockatrice!”

  Emily lowered her eyes, feeling a flicker of bitter guilt. “I’m sorry,” she said, quietly. “That was wrong of me.”

  Caleb said nothing for a long moment. “I’m sorry too,” he said. “But I will stay with you, whatever rank you hold.”

  “Thank you,” Emily said.

  She leaned forward and kissed him briefly, feeling oddly daring. He normally kissed her, not the other way around. It made her feel as though she was in control. And yet... she pulled back as her heart began to race. She wasn’t sure she trusted the feeling yet.

  “Did your father raise any concerns?”

  “He said you should probably resolve the issue one way or the other,” Caleb said. “But he isn’t too concerned about your rank.”

  He’s probably relieved, Emily thought. His son won’t be marrying into high nobility. He won’t have to lift his own social pretensions in response.

  She cursed herself for her insensitivity a moment later. It wasn’t a pleasant thought at all, one unworthy of her. General Pollock had struck her as loud and bombastic, but she’d never thought he didn’t care for his children. Or, for that matter, that he wanted to get Caleb married to her just so he could take advantage of the connection. But then, he might have had second thoughts after seeing firearms used in Zangaria. Magic was powerful, far more versatile than anything available to commoner mundanes, yet firearms placed a hell of a lot of power in anyone’s hands. And the secret of gunpowder was out and spreading.

  “I’m glad to hear it,” she said. “And your mother?”

  “Thinks you should come and stay with us again,” Caleb said. “It used to be traditional, in some houses, for the prospective wife to live with her husband’s family for a few months prior to the wedding.”

  Emily shook her head. She liked her privacy, she liked her alone time... one of the reasons she liked Caleb was that she knew he wouldn’t trespass on either. Living with Void for a few weeks had been all right, she supposed, but she wasn’t sure how well she’d cope with a whole family. They’d never give her any peace!

  “No, thank you,” she said, hastily.

  “I told her you’d say that,” Caleb said. “And I don’t blame you either.”

  “Thanks,” Emily said. She leaned into his arms, feeling his warmth slowly seeping into her body. It was hard to escape the impression that she didn’t deserve him, that he deserved someone with fewer problems... she shook her head, reminding herself—sharply—not to be self-pitying. “I... I’ll definitely try and visit over the summer.”

  “Casper will probably be released from his apprenticeship this year,” Caleb said. There was a hint of amusement in his voice. “That’s a mere fifty years in harness.”

  Emily laughed. Casper had been apprenticed to his master for three years, while Jade—admittedly a brilliant student—had been released after one. It didn’t bode well for Casper, she knew, or for his family. People would wonder why it had taken him so long to complete his apprenticeship. And then they would start questioning his competence.

  “Better not point that out to him,” she said.

  “I did,” Caleb said. He rubbed his cheek, looking rather shamefaced. “We had a colossal fight over it. Mother finally threw us both out of the house and threatened bloody murder if we showed our faces for a few hours.”

  “Ouch,” Emily said. “And then what happened?”

  “Oh, we stalked off in opposite directions,” Caleb said. He shrugged. “But enough about him, anyway. What do you want to do the rest of the morning?”

  Emily glanced at the clock on the wall. “Go for a walk,” she said. She’d read too many history books over the last few days and she needed to relax. Cabiria and she would be facing Professor Locke in three hours. “And then we need to go for lunch.”

  “You’ll be fine,” Caleb said, reassuringly. He gave her a tight hug, then gently kissed the top of her head. “It isn’t as if you’re being apprenticed to Professor Thande.”

  “I suppose,” Emily said. She pulled back and stood. “He’d have us drinking all sorts of alchemical mixes, just to see what happened.”

  “Exactly,” Caleb said. “It could be worse.�
�

  Sure, Emily added, in the privacy of her own thoughts. But it could be better too.

  Chapter Seven

  DESPITE HERSELF, EMILY WAS ACTUALLY QUITE curious to see Professor Locke’s office. Lady Barb had encouraged her to follow the grand old Whitehall tradition of breaking into various offices, pointing out that it was good practice for later life, but she’d never actually seen Professor Locke’s office as a challenge. No one really expected the history tutor to be a capable magician, let alone ward his office as thoroughly as Professor Lombardi or Mistress Irene. And neither of their offices, as far as Emily knew, had been cracked by anyone.

  She knocked on the door, which opened to allow her to enter. The office should have been large, easily twice the size of her bedroom, but it was absolutely heaving with books and bookshelves. There were piles of books on the shelves, piles of books on the floor, scrolls and parchments positioned neatly on chairs and tables in a manner that looked haphazard, but probably made sense to their owner. Emily was charmed, despite herself. Professor Locke had enough reading material in his office to keep a dozen students going for years.

  “Ah, Emily,” Professor Locke called. He was seated at a dining table, Cabiria sitting facing him. His eyes were glittering with suppressed anticipation. “Let me take the books off that chair, then you can sit down.”

  Emily nodded. Professor Locke looked fatter than she remembered, but otherwise he hadn’t changed much since First Year. He was a short elderly man with long white hair, wearing a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles. Two more pairs of eyeglasses were balanced precariously amidst his hair, probably spelled to remain there no matter how hard he shook his head. But he was spry enough, his manner energetic as he cleared a chair and then pointed to it. Emily sat, then watched with some amusement as a servant entered, carrying a large tray of steaming drinks. The fear in Professor Locke’s eyes, as the servant lowered it gently to the one spot on the table that wasn’t covered with pieces of paperwork, would have been amusing, if Emily hadn’t understood it perfectly. There were so many books around that a spill would be disastrous.

  “Please, pour yourselves a drink,” Professor Locke said. He rubbed his hands together as he sat, leaning forward to study them through his spectacles. “You are both welcome here, girls.”

  “Thank you,” Emily said. The Professor was brimming with enthusiasm. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad after all. “We’re quite curious to hear about your project.”

  Cabiria shot her a sharp look as she reached out and poured three mugs of... something hot and green. Emily took the mug Cabiria offered her and sniffed it carefully, catching a whiff of mint and something else she didn’t quite recognize. She took a sip and detected a hint of vanilla essence, mixed with peppermint. It left an odd tingling sensation in her throat as she swallowed.

  “I’ve been hoping to engage in this project for the last twenty years,” Professor Locke said, as he sipped his own drink. “Grandmaster Hasdrubal felt that the project was not a worthwhile use of my time or the school’s resources. Fortunately, Grandmaster Gordian thinks differently.”

  Cabiria smiled, thinly. “He does, sir?”

  Professor Locke smiled. “How much do you know about the founding of Whitehall?”

  Emily scowled. It was a trick question. “Very little is known, sir,” she said. “And very few points are corroborated by more than one or two sources.”

  “Correct,” Professor Locke agreed. He waved a hand at the collection of books and parchment scrolls. “For the past forty years, longer than either of you have been alive, I have made it my life’s work to collect information on Lord Whitehall and the Whitehall Commune. I have haggled and bargained to gain access to libraries closed to the general public, I have hunted lost scrolls in places long abandoned and I have slowly worked my way through the documents stored here, in Whitehall. And yet, I have frustratingly little to show for my endeavors.”

  “Apart from unanswered questions,” Cabiria said.

  Emily shot her a warning look. Professor Locke was a magician. There was no way he was stupid, if only because stupid magicians got themselves killed very quickly. Professor Locke might pick up on her sarcasm at any moment and react badly. Emily had no doubt that he could get them both expelled, if he wished. Gordian would probably be glad of the excuse.

  “Precisely,” Professor Locke said. There was no sign he’d noticed the insult. “Depending on which set of dates are actually accurate, Whitehall is the oldest school in the Allied Lands. Mountaintop and Heart’s Eye came later; Stronghold and Laughter are actually only five hundred or so years old.”

  Emily blinked. “Heart’s Eye?”

  “It was destroyed by the necromancers,” Cabiria said, quietly.

  “Occupied,” Professor Locke corrected. He took another sip of his drink. “Whitehall changed everything, girls. It was the first generalist school of magic to come into existence, the proof that the apprenticeship system was far too specialized. And yet, why are there so few records? An event so important should have left hundreds of thousands of direct and indirect records! Many of the most significant magical bloodlines owe their existence to changes wrought by Whitehall. Why do they have so few records?”

  “They wanted to hide something,” Emily guessed. “Maybe their ancestors weren’t as noble as they wanted to believe.”

  “Perhaps,” Professor Locke said. “Or maybe there was a deliberate purge.”

  He leaned forward. “There are very few surviving copies of anything dating back over six hundred years,” he said. “We know very little of how Whitehall was founded, how the Empire came into existence, how the first Faerie War was fought. The more I worked my way through what collections did exist, the more convinced I became that something had deliberately obliterated the records.”

  “It sounds possible,” Emily mused. “Why?”

  Professor Locke smirked. “Here is a question for you,” he said, “and it’s one you should be able to answer. What makes Whitehall unmatched among the other magical schools?”

  “Well, it has me in it,” Cabiria said.

  “It’s a little bit more significant than that,” Professor Locke said, dryly.

  Emily contemplated the question for a long moment. Whitehall and Mountaintop had similar curriculums, she knew; their students took the same exams. She knew very little about Laughter, but she assumed it was true of their students too. Stronghold was the only real exception, if only because it was the only school that took mundanes as well as magicians and taught them the martial arts...

  “I don’t know,” she admitted.

  “The nexus point,” Professor Locke said.

  Cabiria shook her head. “There isn’t a school that doesn’t have a nexus point,” she pointed out. “How could anyone host a magic school without one?”

  That, Emily knew, wasn’t true. Mountaintop didn’t have a nexus point—and what they’d done instead to power their wards still caused her nightmares. But Stronghold and Laughter probably had nexus points of their own. It wasn’t as if they were that rare.

  “True enough,” Professor Locke said. Clearly, he didn’t know anything different about Mountaintop. “But, you see, our nexus point system is vastly superior to anything known to exist outside Whitehall. The techniques used by Lord Whitehall to tame the nexus point are lost to us. We find it very difficult to replace the Warden, let alone repair the remainder of the older wards.”

  “How unlucky for the other schools,” Cabiria mused. “I dare say their tutors get worn out by repetitive arm movements.”

  Emily ignored her. The Warden was head and shoulders above any other homunculi she’d encountered, possessing a limited intelligence of his own as well as a strong tie to Whitehall’s wards and internal defenses. She’d read about more advanced homunculi, but almost all of them required incredibly advanced techniques to fool observers. The Warden was definitely in a class of its own.

  “Constructing a pocket dimension for a trunk is incredibly d
ifficult,” Professor Locke continued, in a deliberately mild tone. Emily was surprised he hadn’t told Cabiria off for her cheek. “Even experienced enchanters can run into problems—and all they have to do is expand a reasonably small region of space. Doing portals is far—far—harder. And yet, Whitehall is far larger on the inside than on the outside, seemingly without any effort at all! There’s nothing like it in the Allied Lands.”

  “Curious,” Cabiria said. “And no one has tried to duplicate it?”

  “Not to the best of my knowledge,” Professor Locke said. “I believe experiments were run at several places, but results were almost non-existent.”

  Emily was fascinated, despite herself. “What were they trying to hide?”

  “Whitehall itself isn’t the only wonder from the lost ages,” Professor Locke said. “There are references—vague, cryptic references—to works of magic that defy everything we know about the sorcerous arts. The Lay of Lord Alfred, in particular, refers to a number of magic spells that have been lost for centuries. But were they real?”

  Emily cast her mind back to Second Year. “The writer talked about plucking the moon from the sky,” she said. She vaguely recalled reading a fantasy story about something similar, back on Earth, but the heroes had thought better of it midway through. “How is that even possible?”

  “It isn’t,” Cabiria said. “And what would happen if you succeeded?”

  “You’d destroy the entire world,” Emily said. If a relatively small asteroid could tip the dinosaurs towards extinction, she hated to think of what something the size of the moon could do if it hit the world. It might smash the planet as easily as one might shatter an egg. “It would be utter madness.”

  “The story could be an exaggeration,” Professor Locke agreed. “Or it could be an allusion, a cryptic reference to something that would have been understood by its readers.”

  Cabiria shrugged. “We could argue over it all day,” she said, after a moment. “Are you expecting us to read our way through these papers?”