Traitor Savant (Second Seal of the Duelists)

by Giacomo, Jasmine

  Eward rubbed his nose. “I can’t figure why he picked our hex, though. We started a class behind him, and he’s always rubbed that in our faces.”

  Bayan shrugged. “Isn’t it obvious? He sees Kiwani return from a long absence that could have ended her training for good, but instead she gets stronger. Whatever he thinks we have, he wants us to rub it in his face, too.”

  “I’m not rubbing anything in his face, or anywhere else.” Tarin shivered with dislike as she too glanced after Taban.

  Bayan managed to keep a straight face despite the indecent images that popped, unbidden, to his mind. “Not what you’re looking for in a hexmate?”

  “He’s competent enough with his magic. He’s manifested all six avatars, even, like us. He’d be a good fit for hexmagic. I just don’t care for his attitude.”

  “I think there’s more to Taban than attitude,” Bayan said. “If we work with him for a few classes, maybe let him eat with us, we may see a different side of him. It’s not like you would have to borrow him for stress relief, Tarin.”

  “I hope not. He’s clearly not the sort that needs such reinforcement, and I’ve already found someone to help me.” She frowned and crossed her arms. “I don’t think he’ll blend well, but as you like.”

  “Any other objections?” Bayan asked. No one spoke. “I’ll let Taban know.”

  ~~~

  “Oh, sints, look at Breckan!” Eward's cry reached Bayan’s ears only a moment before Eward’s tegen, Tarin, drenched him with icy gouts of water from her spinning Water avatar, Twizzy. Bayan laughed at the spluttering Eward, but the laughter died in his throat, taken over by amazement, as he noticed Breckan across the Water Arena.

  Taban’s hexmate was controlling two avatars at the same time: Crestatic, an eternally falling wave that splattered onto the shells of water-formed crabs, and Petrichor, a wet slab of slate hovering a few inches off the pebbly arena floor. Together, they formed a glorified fountain, like those Bayan had glimpsed in town squares on his few journeys around the empire.

  Spontaneous applause erupted among the students. Bayan clapped too. Seeing Taban training nearby with Kiwani, he called, “Sure you won’t change your mind?”

  Taban merely shook his head. Despite Breckan’s prowess, the bald fact was that her hex only had four members. Standard Academy procedure involved breaking smaller hexes to fill gaps in more populous ones, not the other way around, no matter where anyone’s skill level was.

  “Oi! Can I freeze you now, or do you want a written invitation?” Calder rested his hands on his hips.

  Bayan prepared for the incoming ice spell from Calder’s giant ice-prism avatar, Fogbreath, by readying his boggy Muckling to defend. His hexmates were all strong duelists. With the benefits forced Savantism already gave their magic, they too might soon be able to manifest two avatars at once. He made a note to mention it to them at their next secret practice. If they had time between completing their Savantism practice and their Avatar tests, they could try it.

  But as Fogbreath’s Slivers spell melted in the face of Muckling’s Steambath, a new thought made him forget to counterattack. The sint in the forest shared the knowledge of how to force-bond an emotion to magic. What else does it know?

  “Bayan? All right, there?” Calder called.

  Thinking quickly, Bayan faked a twinge in his knee and hobbled over to a bench at the side of the arena. A young healer named Vespos trotted over, but Bayan waved him off, saying it was just a muscle cramp. When he was gone, Bayan leaned toward Calder and explained his sudden epiphany.

  “You want to ask a sint if there are any other lost tricks to being a duelist? Is that what I’m hearing?”

  Bayan massaged his knee for show. “Exactly that.”

  “How would they know? They’re sints, not duelists.”

  “But they’ve lived here for centuries. Who knows what they saw, what they’ve been asked? If they moved up here when the Academy did, then they could have millennia of knowledge to share. And no one is asking.”

  “That’s because sints are for… you know… important stuff. Like healing, and love, and whether you should apprentice to the baker or the tanner.”

  “The baker. Every time. No one wants to smell acorns and brains all day. Just ask Taban—he used to be a tanner’s apprentice. Since when is duelism not important to duelists? Don’t you want to be the best duelist you can be? Isn’t that why we’re here in this arena right now, beating each other’s guts out?”

  “Well… yes… ”

  “I’m going to ask one of the sints. That’s how much I care about being an imperial duelist.”

  “Hero to the bone, aren’t you?” Calder grinned.

  Bayan stared across the arena at the battling students. “I used to hate this place, but it grew on me—thanks to you and our hexmates. I had a moment when everything mattered, and in that moment, I chose this life. I still choose it. I want it to be everything I can make it. I don’t want this to be some half-arsed, lazy existence. I gave up everything I had to be here, to train with you. That has to be worth something to me. That has to be worth everything.”

  Calder stood and offered Bayan a hand up from the bench. Meeting Bayan’s dark eyes with his blue ones, he said, “Then you’d better tell me every detail when you get back.”

  ~~~

  Bayan rounded the corner on the windswept cliff and caught a glimpse of long, dark hair and a student’s uniform ahead as someone else slipped into Sint Koos’s woods. He paused on the narrow trail, hearing the cool breeze moan through the pine trees. “Kiwani? Is that you?”

  “Bayan?” She paused and turned to face him, her face blending into the shadows beneath the trees. “What are you doing here?”

  He raised his eyebrows at her, then glanced around the sint wood.

  She ducked her chin. “I mean, what did you come to ask?”

  “I want to know if there are more tricks to being a better duelist. What if forcing Savantism is just the first course of a long-lost banquet? What about you? What’s your question?”

  “I promised Odjin I’d ask one of the sints about the potioneers for him. I decided to ask Sint Koos because he gave you such a vivid image when he taught you about forcing Savantism.”

  “Well, you were here first. I’ll wait for you to finish.”

  “I thought we were doing a Savant training later tonight.”

  “We are, but—”

  “No buts. I need that training to catch up, Bayan. You ask your question. I’ll ask mine another day.”

  “No, you made a promise to Odjin. You’ve been back for a while now. We shouldn’t make him wait any longer than he already has.”

  Kiwani hunched her shoulders. “We shouldn’t.” She glanced up with a speculative look. “Do you think Sint Koos would mind if we asked at the same time? He’s a sint, after all. He should be able to answer both of us.”

  Bayan paused. He hadn’t been raised around sints and knew little about their mythology. What fragments he’d managed to collect seemed to indicate that sints were generally benign and could be extremely helpful if you managed to ask the right question. In his limited experience with sints, he had found them frustratingly obtuse, but they had yet to mislead him. He had to admit that he was curious to see what would happen if they asked their questions together. Would the sint answer? Leave?

  “Bhattara na,” he said, invoking the Bantayan phrase of accepting one’s fate. “Let’s find out.”

  They knelt in the thick pine needles and hummed together. Bayan feared they’d be made to wait for twice as long as when he had come alone, but Sint Koos brightened the area with his presence in just a few moments.

  “Is that a good sign?” Kiwani murmured.

  Bayan could only shrug in response. He directed his attention to the light and spoke in greeting. “Sint Koos, forgive our haste. We came together with our questions because, later tonight, we are practicing the lesson you taught me last time I was here. It’s working very well, an
d I want to thank you for your help.”

  The sint brightened further, then split into two distinct areas of lightness. One hovered to Bayan’s left, and the other moved to Kiwani’s right.

  The two students shared a glance. “Ask away,” Bayan murmured. Turning to his half of the sint’s presence, he began. “I want to know more about how duelism is really supposed to work. Are there more techniques I can learn? Maybe things my instructors don’t even know?”

  As he waited for the sint’s response, he heard Kiwani’s question. “Sint Koos, how are potioneers made? Why is it a secret? What is their true purpose in the empire? Are they really so dangerous? My friend Odjin is a potioneer, and he’s unhappy in his new life. He’s bitter, and he questions the empire. What can I tell him to ease his mind?”

  The sint didn’t move. His lights didn’t change in intensity. Only the wind soughing through the trees hinted that time was passing. Finally, Bayan’s bright spot rejoined its other half. As they reconnected, a blinding light shot through the trees, and a low hum vibrated out through the ground. The glow felt… excited.

  Tingling, Bayan shot a glance at Kiwani. She looked as uncertain as he felt.

  An image coalesced before them in the center of the gleaming light, which dimmed until the object itself seemed the only light source in the wood.

  Kiwani rose up on her knees for a better look. “It’s a book. It looks very old.”

  Bayan couldn’t read the ancient script on the cover. It seemed vaguely related to the Waarden alphabet, but it was ornate in design and faded in appearance. The cover itself seemed ready to flake into fragments. A distinct pattern on the cover was still discernible, though: an archaic version of the elemental seal, sans its outer golden border. The six element-hued teardrops had nearly lost their color, appearing only as shades of gray and blue. As the large book rotated slowly before them, Bayan saw that its broad spine held dozens, maybe hundreds, of thick yellowed pages.

  The image faded, leaving the two alone in the woods on their knees.

  “Did we just see the same thing?” Bayan asked. “How can one book answer both our questions? They’re not even remotely related.”

  “I don’t have any idea,” Kiwani admitted. “It’s possible the book only answers one of our questions. But there’s only one way to find out.”

  “What’s that?”

  “We need access to the oldest section of the campus library.”

  The Temple Exile

  Doc Theo shifted the small pack on his back and gazed along the rising trail, over the tops of narrow pines and golden-leaved aspen trees. Noon had always been the best time of day to view the Temple of Ten Thousand Harmonies. The sun struck the front wall of the temple compound, which was patterned after a castle’s curtain wall. Its surface was carved in bas-relief images of song magic growing crops, bringing water to the desert, and changing the course of battles. Doc Theo knew all the stories behind the images. That last battle mural on the right had always smacked of hubris to him, considering that the battle in question had been populated by imperial duelists on the empire’s side. To be fair, though, their opponents had been comprised of steelwielders from Karkhedon, so it was likely that the Full Choir had, in fact, had some kind of impact on the battle’s outcome. Still, claiming that the Temple had single-handedly decided that battle, and by extension the entire War of Steel, was typical of the First Singer’s pride. It was also one of the reasons Doc Theo hadn’t minded wandering the empire for the last two decades.

  Beside him, Doc Theo’s constant companions trod along, puffing in the thin mountain air. Doc Theo hadn’t minded their company. Both Wilm and Henk were young Kheerzaal guards, eager for an exciting change to their daily routine of guarding palace doorways. They’d made a willing audience for his decades’ worth of adventure tales.

  Ignaas had been kind enough not to tell them why they were escorting Doc Theo all the way to the Temple on foot. That Doc Theo had been denied the use of a portal was a personal shame, and not one for the public to hear. Far from being outraged at the Temple’s refusal to let him transport directly to its grounds, he had been grateful for the many days of walking. His body hadn’t been in the shape he’d thought it was, and the aches and tenderness he’d endured as he strengthened had been welcome, reminding him of his past journeys and encouraging him that he was not, in fact, dying of enfeeblement.

  He’d felt clear-headed for all but the first few days of his journey, in fact, and had spent many an hour trying to puzzle out the reason for it. He didn’t believe Ignaas’ story about being allergic to duelism. That story seemed a pie baked entirely out of poppycock. Still, he had to admit that he had no better explanation—in fact, no explanation at all. He concluded—as he had dozens of times already—that coming back to the Temple of Ten Thousand Harmonies was probably the best thing for him.

  Doc Theo and his two escorts slipped through the tall, narrow Southern Gate and, after traversing a long, dark tunnel through the thick wall, they stepped onto an overlook that presented a breathtaking vista of the inner Temple. The darkness and the echoing of three pairs of footsteps were replaced with song and light. As Doc Theo drank in the sight of his long-ago home, lilting melodies and counterpoint tunes drifted on the air. He could almost see the magic in them, and his heart wrenched once more around the old sorrow that he would never be able to sing magic.

  Eight curving, broad-bottomed towers, bowing like barrel staves, arced up around the very heart of the Temple, where the Full Choir assembled. The towers’ inner-facing surfaces curved and their roofs drooped in graceful swoops over top-tier balconies, all for the purpose of reflecting as much sound as possible, so as to lend as much strength as possible to the Full Choir’s spells. Surrounding the eight towers, and all other structures within the Temple grounds, rose the high, curving wall through which he had just passed. The acoustically perfect bowl-shaped arc was responsible for creating the most powerful song magic in the world.

  Landscaping was not allowed within the Temple, as the surfaces of leaves would disrupt the intensity of spells, so the singers had decorated their stone home with vivid colors in the stonework. Some bands glittered, others were pearlescent. Swirls and stripes and interlocking patterns gleamed everywhere, yet the overall color scheme produced a feeling of power and unity.

  Doc Theo smiled at the twin exclamations of astonishment from the young men. He glanced at them, taking pleasure in their first view of the Temple. Before the First Singer had found him to be flawed and cast him out into the world, he had gazed at the Temple with new, eager eyes too.

  But no more, and certainly not on this trip.

  “Where shall we escort you, Chanter?” one of the guards asked.

  “No need, Wilm. Someone’ll come along soon enough.” He didn’t mention that someone should already have been here to greet them. The Temple had known of his return for some while. Surely his unmet arrival had been no accident, but rather a subtle reminder that Doc Theo was even more of an embarrassment to the First Singer than he had previously been.

  Moments later, a hole opened in the air near the overlook’s railing, and a stocky man in white robes with gold embroidery on the hem stepped through. He gave Doc Theo and his guards a nod. “Greetings. What is your business with the Temple of Ten Thousand Harmonies today?”

  Another slight. Pretending not to recognize the shamed one. Doc Theo eased a smile onto his face.

  “Greetings, Singer. Choralist Harmaas, isn’t it? I’m Chanter Theo Willemsen, fresh from the Duelist Academy. I’ve returned for a bit of recuperation.”

  The singer’s smile didn’t even try reach his eyes. “Of course, Chanter. If you’ll follow me, I will show you to your quarters. The First Singer will wish to speak with you at her convenience.”

  Doc Theo bade his two companions farewell and thanked them for their company. While they would get to spend the night in a cozy inn down in Alini, the village at the base of the mountain, Doc Theo had no doubt that he’d b
e forced to huddle under thin blankets in a room whose windows always faced the prevailing winds. After all, any singer worth his notes could sing the room’s air warm for the night.

  He followed his new guide down a curving staircase—still not letting me pass the threshold of a portal, then—and down the roughened stone path that gave traction on the sloping curve of the Temple’s parabolic floor. Much of the very bottom of the curving bowl had been formed of green jasper, giving the illusion of a grassy sward. Here and there, gemstone flowers glittered upon the stone’s flat surface, or two-dimensional squirrels and birds cavorted, fur and feathers gleaming, eyes bright. Doc Theo had been fascinated by the Temple artwork when he’d arrived as a teenager. He had high hopes for contributing to it one day, until he learned that not only did one need to be able to sing, but one needed to excel with the Akrestan scale, which was used for all physical transmutation songs. His failures at singing even the most basic spells had earned him mockery and humiliation.

  Blinking away bitter memories, Doc Theo followed his guide into one of the towers. Sure enough, they climbed the curving stone staircase all the way to the penultimate floor, where the stocky fellow wordlessly slid a black stone door into its recess in the wall.

  “Thanks much.” Doc Theo stepped inside and unshouldered his pack. “I await the First Singer’s summons.”

  Choralist Harmaas gave him an unreadable look and left. Doc Theo pulled the door shut, dropped his pack on the narrow bed, and walked across the curved room to the angled window. Wider than it was long, the room occupied about a sixth of the tower’s full circumference. Near the window, the ceiling extended out like an overhanging shelf of rock. The wall curved up to meet it, and the leaning window gave Doc Theo a grand view of the Choral Hall and a lovely sense of imbalance, as if he were about to topple out over the sill. His window had no shutters, but the location of his room, one story below the singers’ platform atop the tower, provided shade and shelter from any rain that might fall. It could easily be worse, he told himself, as he leaned on the sill and let his gaze wander across the brightly colored stonescape.