Infinite Regress

by Christopher G. Nuttall

  “I don’t know what to suggest,” Professor Lombardi stated. “You are not failing deliberately, yet you cannot progress.”

  “I have an idea,” Emily said. “I assume that partnering with you is out of the question?”

  “Quite,” Professor Lombardi agreed. “I need to supervise.”

  Emily wasn’t surprised. “Then I would like to ask a Sixth Year student to serve as my partner,” she said. “She would have far greater control over her magic, as well as experience working rituals. I believe she would find it easier to cope.”

  Professor Lombardi studied her for a long, cold moment. “There are people who would say that was a selfish suggestion,” he said, finally.

  “I would be happy to pay for her time,” Emily said. He had a point. Aloha was already badly overworked. She could ask another Sixth Year, if Aloha refused, but she didn’t know any of them very well. “Or trade something for it.”

  “It may well work,” Professor Lombardi said. “Do you have someone in mind?”

  “Aloha,” Emily said.

  Professor Lombardi stroked his chin, thoughtfully. “She was a good student,” he said, after a moment. “And she has considerably greater power reserves than your compatriots. I will ask her myself.”

  Emily frowned. “I can ask her...”

  “And she will be alarmed,” Professor Lombardi interrupted. “I will ask her personally, confirming to her that any rituals will be carried out under my supervision. However, it will also be made clear to her that this is not compulsory. If she is not inclined to assist you, she will not have to do so.”

  “I understand,” Emily said.

  “And if I cannot find a Sixth Year to assist you, or you are unable to work with the student I choose, I will have no choice but to dismiss you from the class,” Professor Lombardi added, warningly. “You cannot proceed.”

  Emily scowled down at his desk. She wanted to protest, to insist it wasn’t her fault, but she knew he had a point. If she couldn’t practice sharing magic with a fellow student, she didn’t have a hope of moving on to the more complex rituals. She wondered, briefly, if she could ask Mistress Danielle or Lady Barb for private lessons, but those would have to wait until the summer holidays. Professor Lombardi would be furious if he caught her studying rituals outside the school and Gordian would use it as an excuse to expel her.

  “I understand, sir,” she said.

  “Good,” Professor Lombardi said. “It will be through no fault of your own, Emily, but time is no longer on our side.”

  He nodded towards the door. “We’ll discuss the matter further tomorrow afternoon.”

  Emily rose and walked out of the classroom. Caleb waited there, talking to Cirroc in a low voice. Emily cringed inside, wondering what Cirroc might have told him, then reminded herself that Cirroc was unlikely to discuss rituals with her boyfriend. Caleb gave her a hug as soon as she closed the door, then took her hand and led her down the corridor.

  “I booked a workroom,” he said. “And I want to hear about everything that happened yesterday.”

  “Well,” Emily said. “I got up in the morning and...”

  She grinned as he rolled his eyes, then slowly detailed everything that had happened, doing her best not to miss out a single detail. Caleb listened, opening the door to the workroom and waving her to a chair as she told him about the statue. He was a good listener, she knew from experience, one who reserved all questions for the end. It was a pleasant change from talking to some of her friends.

  “It was a statue of you?”

  Emily nodded. “It was me,” she confirmed. “I suppose it could have been my identical twin...”

  Caleb shrugged as he fiddled with the tools on the workbench. “And it vanished when you looked away,” he mused. “It could have been an illusion.”

  “Professor Locke said the same thing,” Emily said. She shook her head slowly. “But it was really too close to me to be an illusion.”

  “It would depend on how it was spelled,” Caleb pointed out. “Your own imagination might have added details to it, if the spell was cast properly.”

  “But it wouldn’t have added a scar,” Emily countered, dryly. She rubbed her cheek meaningfully. “Why would it add something I don’t have?”

  “Point,” Caleb agreed. He looked down at the bench thoughtfully. “But if the statue was real, where did it go? Did you even go back to the right chamber?”

  “There were footprints in the dust,” Emily said.

  Caleb nodded. “Interesting,” he said. “But I have no answer.”

  Emily sighed as she sat down facing him. The mystery had puzzled her as she wrote out her report, then handed it in to Professor Locke. She couldn’t think of anything that accounted for the statue, unless it was a very odd illusion indeed. And yet, something had definitely been there. Her fingers should have gone right through an illusion when she tried to touch it.

  “We need to make some more tiles,” Caleb said. “Impressing the new Grandmaster might be a little harder than before.”

  “True,” Emily agreed. She had a feeling that reserving the workroom hadn’t been easy. There was simply too much demand for them, even on the weekends. “Let’s see what we can do.”

  Her mind wandered as she got to work, carefully carving out the tiles. Judging by what she’d seen, below Whitehall, there was far more than one spell embedded in the crystalline structures. Indeed, she was sure she’d seen something like it before. Not one spell; dozens, perhaps hundreds, of spells. And they were all interacting constantly, fed by the power of the nexus point. Logically, the whole edifice should have collapsed into nothingness long ago...

  Whitehall is over eight hundred years old, she thought, and no one went into that chamber for decades. How did it last so long?

  She yelped in pain as she cut herself, her blood staining the table. Caleb put down his tile and hurried over to help her heal the cut, then wipe up the blood for later disposal. Emily cursed her own carelessness as she dumped the ruined tile in the bin, knowing that she’d been distracted from her work. If she did that in Alchemy, even with the protective wards surrounding the classroom, she’d be lucky if she only blew off her hands.

  “Wait for a while,” Caleb advised. “You need to relax before you go back to work.”

  Emily nodded, watching in private admiration as Caleb bent his head back over the desk. His hands remained scarred, but he’d grown better—far better—at controlling them. She’d been right, she suspected; the twitching and shaking had been psychosomatic, rather than signs of injury the healers had been unable to fix. It was odd, by Earthly standards, but there was something about watching him use his hands that appealed to her. He was actually creating something tangible with his labor.

  And something handcrafted would cost thousands of dollars, back on Earth, she reminded herself. All those eras where handcrafted work was the norm rested on the backs of countless workers...

  She realized, a moment later, precisely where she’d seen such spellwork before. The Mimic hadn’t been a creature, the Mimic had been a spell—no, a number of fiendishly complex spells working together. She’d seen the network of spells that made it work—that gave it everything from limited intelligence to near-unstoppable power—seconds before throwing herself out of a window in a desperate bid to escape. And the spellwork below Whitehall had to work along the same lines!

  The Mimic must have used a form of necromancy, she thought. It was the only way to account for how it drained its victims, using them as a source of power. But Whitehall draws on the nexus point.

  Her mind raced. The Mimic had possessed a certain intelligence, quite apart from whatever it had drawn from its victims to allow it to impersonate them. And she’d often wondered if Whitehall had some limited intelligence of its own. The school had allowed her into the nexus point, when Shadye had been patiently hunting her down. Had it known she needed to use the power to kill the insane necromancer? Or had it merely recognized her as a stu
dent and allowed her into the chamber?

  Caleb finished the tile and looked at her. “Emily?”

  “I’ve had a thought,” Emily said.

  She reached for a sheet of paper, then stopped. Did she dare tell Caleb what she knew? Only a handful of people knew the truth about Mimics. The previous Grandmaster had believed that others would try to duplicate the spellwork, once they knew it was possible; he’d ordered his staff not to talk. And yet, unlocking the secrets behind the Mimic might also unlock the secrets behind Whitehall. Emily didn’t share Professor Locke’s enthusiasm for pushing buttons, just to see what they did, but she had to admit she was fascinated. The prospect of uncovering magics from the distant past was very attractive.

  Caleb frowned. “What sort of thought?”

  “It’s... complicated,” Emily said. She swallowed. Etiquette was hardly her forte, but what she needed to ask was a serious breach of custom. “Can I ask for your oath of silence?”

  Caleb looked hurt, deeply hurt. His voice, when he spoke, was angry. “Do you not trust me?”

  Emily cursed herself, again. Merely asking for the oath was proof enough that she didn’t trust him, even though she’d let him hold her and kiss her... he had every right to be angry with her. Questioning the honor of someone on the Nameless World was practically a challenge to a duel. She didn’t think Caleb would issue a challenge, but she might just have blown their relationship out of the water.

  “This is delicate and dangerous,” she said, silently pleading for him to understand. “The... the former Grandmaster was reluctant to discuss it at all.”

  Caleb studied her for a long moment. “Very well,” he said, reluctantly. “You have my oath of silence until you release me from it, as long as you remain alive.”

  Emily winced. She supposed she deserved it. Oaths were tricky things, particularly when they weren’t phrased very carefully. Caleb would not want to be oathbound to her even after her death. She could hardly grant him permission to forget the oath after she died, if he outlived her.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “But this could lead someone towards creating a Mimic.”

  She ran through the whole story as quickly as she could, starting with her close encounter with the Mimic impersonating Sergeant Bane and ending with the handful of charred runes that had been left behind, after the Mimic had finally been destroyed. Caleb listened in silence, his eyes going wide as she outlined some of the implications. A Mimic was almost completely unstoppable, save for a spell so simple that hardly anyone would think to cast it when it was useless in a duel. And it had been sheer luck that she’d realized the Mimic’s true nature in time to deduce how to stop it.

  “That’s... weird,” Caleb said. He didn’t sound annoyed or hurt any longer, which relieved her more than she cared to admit. Instead, he sounded fascinated. “It was a spell?”

  “Yeah,” Emily said. She put the piece of paper down on the workbench and started to sketch what little she recalled of its spellware. “Each spell was perfectly balanced amidst the others, keeping the structure in place. It was an order of magnitude—perhaps several orders of magnitude—more complex than our spell tiles.”

  “Clever,” Caleb breathed. “Who came up with this?”

  Emily shrugged. Very little was known about Mimics. There was no way to find one unless it resumed its natural form—and no way to force one to resume its natural form, as long as it had mana to spare. She could vaguely grasp the complex entanglement of the necromantic and soul magics that allowed Mimics to function, but it wasn’t something she dared write down. If Lady Barb had thrown a fit at the prospect of magical batteries, Emily hated to think what she’d say if Emily built her own Mimics.

  And yet, there are possibilities, she thought, looking at the notation. I wonder...

  She cleared her throat. “Our main problem here is channeling magic through the tiles, right?”

  Caleb nodded, impatiently. They’d gotten better at channeling the magic so it formed a makeshift spell, but every so often a tile would burn out or explode anyway, no matter what they did. Emily suspected that there were limits to how much mana could be pushed through the tissue-thin layer of Manaskol. If only she could put it together with a battery... but without a conscious mind governing the flow of magic, the result would probably be an immediate explosion.

  “The spellwork here is solid,” she said, picking up one of the tiles for him to inspect. “What if the Mimic’s spells were virtual spells, built out of magic? If the spells have no real substance, and they don’t, can they overload?”

  She frowned as Caleb looked doubtful. There was no way she could explain the concept of holographic computing to him, all the more so as she wasn’t sure she understood it herself. A computer could generate a virtual operating system, rather than something built out of firmware. She wished, again, that she’d spent longer studying computer programs while she’d been on Earth, but if she’d known she would be kidnapped by Shadye she would have memorized hundreds of thousands of other pieces of information.

  And made sure I was carrying a couple of textbooks, she thought, ruefully. Even a copy of The Way Things Work would be very helpful.

  “I suppose it could work,” Caleb mused. “But there would still be a great deal of leakage, wouldn’t there?”

  Emily studied the spell diagram for a long moment. “Not if you tune the spells to reabsorb the mana,” she mused, finally. Mimics didn’t leak. If they did, they would be detected easily by magicians. She’d stood next to Sergeant Bane after he’d been replaced and sensed nothing wrong. “It should be possible.”

  “You’d have a major leak,” Caleb protested.

  Emily grinned at him. “Not if you told them you couldn’t,” she said. “It’s like pushing water down a straw.”

  “When the water is part of the straw,” Caleb countered. He shook his head doubtfully. “The Mimic would be burning power just to keep its assumed form. Even keeping a trap spell suspended in time would be costly.”

  “You’d need a constant loop,” Emily reasoned. She doodled on the paper for a long moment, trying to see how the spell might work. “As long as the cycle remained unbroken, the spell should remain in existence without much input.”

  “There would still be some decay,” Caleb said. He gave Emily a long look. “This is dangerous.”

  Emily sighed. “That’s what the Grandmaster thought.”

  She met his eyes. “We could make something like this,” she said. “But it would have to remain our secret.”

  Caleb looked at her for a long moment. “Until we actually made it work?”

  Emily shrugged. If the virtual spellware could handle a surge of magic, all she’d need to do was hook it up to a battery and let the power flow. Indeed, there was no reason why the spellware couldn’t handle such a surge. The only real danger would be accidentally destroying the spell components and she was sure she could handle it.

  “I’m not sure if we would ever want to release this,” she said. “But we could always cite the Sorcerer’s Rule.”

  “Not if we wanted to prove what we’d done,” Caleb said. “We’d need to say how we’d done it too.”

  “We can cross that bridge when we come to it,” Emily said, tiredly. She gave him a sidelong look. They’d need to reread the rules, very carefully, just to see how much detail they were required to provide. “We could keep working on the tiles instead and tackle the virtual network later.”

  “But the virtual network would be much more flexible,” Caleb pointed out. “We should concentrate on that.”

  Emily frowned. Changing their joint project now wouldn’t get them in trouble. It wouldn’t be hard for her to write out a project outline that would conceal the nature of the Mimic, not least because the Mimic had been fantastically complex. But there would also be a great many hard questions to answer. Professor Locke would probably accuse her of trying to duplicate the ancient magics...

  “I suppose,” she said. She could always as
k if Caleb could join them. “I...”

  She glanced up as someone banged on the door, then hastily hid the paper she’d scribbled on as Caleb waved a hand, opening the door. Dulcet stepped inside, her face pale.

  “My Lady,” she said. “Can you come now? Tiega is very upset.”

  Emily frowned. “Upset about what?”

  “I don’t know,” Dulcet said. “But she was crying.”

  “Maybe she went to see the Warden,” Caleb said.

  “She didn’t,” Dulcet insisted. “I was in class with her all day.”

  “I’m coming,” Emily said, rising. She glanced at Caleb. “See you at dinner?”

  Caleb smiled. “Why not?”

  Chapter Nineteen

  EMILY HADN’T BEEN SURE WHAT TO expect when she entered the First Year dorms, but they seemed reasonably normal. Unsurprisingly, there was hardly anyone in sight. Most of the students would be trying to catch a nap before dinnertime or studying books in the library, assuming they’d already learnt the value of hard work. Or perhaps they’d be down on the playing fields, watching the games and hoping to be spotted by one of the captains. It was unusual for a First Year to play, but it had been known to happen. She glanced into the common room and frowned as she spotted Adana and Julia, sitting on chairs, then headed down to their room. At least they’d left their roommate alone.

  She stopped outside Tiega’s door and hesitated, then knocked gently and pushed the door open. The wards would allow her into their bedrooms, although she’d been warned—along with the other mentors—that she wasn’t supposed to use the permission without extremely good cause. A crying student might not be considered good enough, she suspected. Tiega might be upset because she’d been insulted or upset because one of the tutors had told her off in front of the entire class.

  The room was brightly lit—and deserted, save for Tiega. Emily closed the door, glanced at the other two beds to make sure there was nothing wrong with them, then walked slowly over to Tiega’s bed. Tiega lay on the mattress, curled into a ball. There was something about the sight that grabbed at Emily’s heartstrings, even though Tiega seemed to veer constantly between being a despicable bully and a pitifully abused child.