The Scion of Abacus, Part 2

by Brondt Kamffer

  Part Two

  of

  THE SCION OF ABACUS

  otherwise called

  The Narrative of the Life

  of Toven Bakkis

  a serial novel

  by

  Brondt Kamffer

  * * *

  Copyright 2011 William Brondt Kamffer

  Synopsis of the story so far

  “My name is Toven Bakkis, and this is my official apology to the world.” Thus begins The Narrative of the Life of Toven Bakkis, who in his youth was known as Toven Aimis, and who in time became the most powerful individual the world had seen in a millennium.

  Toven Aimis is a young man living among the subjugated Eikos caste in the city of Ilion, capital of the Aarian Dominion. At the age of thirteen, he is given a test, which he passes, to become one of the privileged caste of Synths, magic workers who manipulate the four elements of the body (earth, water, air, and fire) by means of the fifth and most powerful element, ether.

  Having passed the test, Toven goes to the University of Ilion, where he begins training to hone and control his powers. There, he meets Hero Landri, a girl his own age who quickly establishes herself as the most talented student of her year. Toven finds himself drawn to an ancient tower on the campus grounds that belonged to the long-dead mage Abacus, the last of the true mages, magic users who could manipulate the elements of the world around them in addition to those of their own bodies.

  After five years of study, Toven and his classmates are put through a sequence of trials to determine their more specialized abilities. Hero Landri passes all tests and is declared a Hymanni, a special class of Synths who are able to work with every element in their bodies, whereas the typical Synth can control only one of the four lower elements. Toven, however, mysteriously fails all four tests, an outcome that should be impossible. To further complicate matters, a mysterious woman named Deryn Lhopri tells Toven that he has in fact passed a far greater test, and she begins to give Toven private instruction as he waits for his own ether to awake.

  In the aftermath of the trials, the students are given access to the hyma juice, a powerful potion brewed from the berries of the hymaberry bush, which legend says was created by the last mage Abacus himself to prevent the extinction of magic from the human race. The hyma amplifies the natural abilities of the Synth, allowing him to utilize his ether, which would otherwise have lain dormant. Toven begins to suspect he is being given a drug instead of the hyma, as he continually fails to sense his ether.

  As Toven and Hero grow closer together, they are granted special access to explore the depths of the old mage’s tower, where Toven had previously discovered a magical journal left by Abacus. The journal appears unreadable to anyone save Toven, as though the mage had sent a special message across time directly to him alone.

  One day, Hero asks Toven to share his final dose of the hyma juice with her as she accidentally spilled her own. He convinces her to drink the entire dose, and when Hero remains unchanged, Toven knows he was right to think he was being given a false, ineffective drug. In anger, he kicks at the base of his bed, causing the wooden frame to shatter. Toven is unhurt, though, for the fury has stirred his slumbering ether at last—and without the aid of the hyma drug.

  -VIII-

  I stood staring at the destruction I’d wrought on my bed. I neither blinked nor breathed as I remained stone still in the center of my room.

  I heard a whimper then, a pitiable sound emanating from the far side of the chamber, and I forced myself to raise my eyes from the broken bed to seek out Hero. She was huddled pathetically in the corner, her arms hugging her knees as she nestled her head protectively between her legs.

  “Hero?”

  She sobbed lightly, and as my wits returned to me, I suddenly began to fear that I’d hurt her, that some splinter from the exploding bed had flown across the chamber and struck her a blow.

  “Hero, are you all right?”

  I approached her, and she looked up at the sound of my footsteps, tears running down her cheeks. She did not appear to be in pain. Rather, she seemed frightened and betrayed, a look I have seen on her face—much to my shame—several more times in the years since then.

  She tried to speak, but words failed to issue from her lips as her jaw worked around her shock. I knelt before her trying to show concern on my face, but I am not sure even now whether she really saw me. I suspect that her mind was replaying what had just transpired, watching over in her memory the way the bedposts shattered at the contact of my foot. She knew I hadn’t drunk any of the hyma that morning.

  We both knew that the juice had no effect on me at any rate.

  And now our suspicions were confirmed that what I was being given to drink was in fact not the hyma at all but some other drug fed to me for a purpose neither of us could yet fathom.

  I waited for her to compose herself enough to force audible words through her teeth.

  “What—are—you?” she asked around her sobs, each word requiring so much strength that I could see she was exhausted after three simple syllables.

  My mind quickly latched on to the fact that she’d asked me what I was and not who. Truth was, though I had begun to have some serious questions of my own about my nature, I had forced the issue from my mind for the past few months, not willing—or perhaps even afraid—to recognize myself for what I was.

  And so I took the coward’s way out and said, “I don’t know, Hero. Honestly, I don’t. I don’t understand what’s happening to me or why the juice won’t work, though it seems now that I wasn’t even drinking genuine hyma to begin with.”

  She wiped at her tears with the back of her sleeve, summoning the strength to still her sobs and sighs. “You are different somehow. I have seen you changing, little by little. I don’t know if it’s something that Lhopri woman is doing to you, or—” Her voice trailed off into a sobbing silence, inviting me to give my thoughts on the matter.

  I sighed. “I don’t think Professor Lhopri has much to do with this. But I do think that she suspects something.”

  “No, not suspects. You wouldn’t be singled out for private lessons on a suspicion. She knows, Toven. She knows the truth. She could tell you why you have no ether, or why you haven’t had any until now.”

  “Hero—”

  I had started to tell her some of what I’d discovered about myself, but as I opened my mouth to speak, I found my courage wavering again. I knew that the moment I involved Hero in this particular problem of mine there would be no escape for her, no deniability. She would become wrapped up in my life, bound to me in a manner more exacting, more demanding than our friendship had ever asked of her. As things stood now, she still had the right and the ability to withdraw from me and sever all ties. That would not be the case the moment I opened my mouth and began to divulge all I’d discovered. There would be no separation apart from the total separation afforded by death. This much, at least, Deryn Lhopri had succeeded in teaching me of the nature of one’s deepest secrets.

  Hero was watching me as all these thoughts raced through my mind, and I was again startled and amazed by the depth of her perception. “You’ve used your ether before, haven’t you?” she asked.

  I nodded slowly. “Once before, about a year and a half ago, just after the professors separated us according to our ethereal abilities.”

  I proceeded to relate the incident of the older student who’d come to demonstrate his superiority over me, to put me in my place, only to find me choking him half to death from across the room. At that point, all anybody knew was that I had failed all four tests and was, by the evidence of everyone’s eyes, neither Synth nor Hymanni. And yet my ether had responded in a moment of panic to his threat
and protected me from harm. I still bore no memory of the actual summoning of power. To this day, my mind remains blank on the whole thing. But there was no denying that I had called on my ether and that I had reached out with my ether in a way that should not have been possible for even a Hymanni—and certainly not for a student who had yet to imbibe any of the hyma.

  I saw fresh fear flicker in Hero’s eyes as I narrated the story, but she did not weep anymore, and she did not retreat into herself as I feared she might. I suppose I had lived with this knowledge about myself for so long that I’d begun to believe it was no longer interesting, but to Hero this was all a fascinating new subject.

  She was, as I’ve mentioned before, rather an engaged student, and whenever she met with anomalies, she would not rest until she had ferreted out the truth of things. So it was, with a measure of trepidation still evident in her eyes and movements, that she slowly picked herself up from where she sat huddled in the corner and began the conversation that would change our friendship forever. I’m not sure she realized what she was getting herself into, but I know Hero, and she must have at least suspected that things could never be the same once the conversation began. I admired her then for her courage, and sent up a silent prayer of thanks to God for giving me such a friend.

  “We’ve dodged the subject long enough,” she said, “but I suppose we aught to go back to the beginning, back to the day you found that book in the mage’s tower. You said you could read it, though, as I recall, there wasn’t anything in it—at least nothing beyond the first page. Why don’t you begin there?”

  I nodded but first crossed the room to the door and shut it. Thankfully, by the time Hero had arrived in her state of panic, most of my dorm mates had left for breakfast, and though I had no idea how long I’d stood stupidly staring at my destroyed bed, it seemed that the dormitory had emptied out as nobody had come running at the sound of wood splintering or Hero screaming. Nevertheless, I wasn’t going to take any chances that some wandering body would pass by and see—worse yet, overhear—what I had to say to Hero.

  With the door shut and locked, I proceeded to rummage through the ruined pile of wood and bedding to find the mage’s book, which I usually kept stashed beneath my mattress. I had not opened it in six months, but as I held the ancient leather in my hands and cracked the cover, it felt as though I’d never set it down.

  “There is more. Much more. Though less than a quarter of the entire text has revealed itself to me. Still,” and here I looked up from the book’s pages and into Hero’s expectant eyes, “I have learnt a lot of dangerous things. Things that could get me into a great deal of trouble.”

  It was a faintly disguised last chance offer for Hero to avoid becoming involved, but her face and posture were resolute. “Tell me.”

  We sat across from each other in the middle of the floor, and I began to recount for her all that I had learnt from Abacus. At certain stages I paused and read directly from the mage’s confessions those same passages I have recorded in this confession of my own. I told her what the mage had to say about God (here she frowned deeply), about the nature of magic and ether (here she nodded slowly), and about the fact that the magic of the hymaberry would have failed had the mage died as he should have done (and here she screwed up her face in confusion).

  I read finally of the ineffectiveness of the hymaberry on the mage himself. I did not yet voice my own thoughts on the matter as they related to me, hoping instead that Hero might reach a different conclusion, one that would be more comfortable to accept. Perhaps she would corroborate Deryn Lhopri’s constant assertions that ether did indeed awaken late in some people and that I was merely one of those unfortunate souls.

  Hero remained silent throughout, not interrupting to ask so much as a single question, but patiently and attentively absorbing every sliver of information I offered up. When at last I’d finished telling her of all I’d learnt in the past year and a half, I feared by her silence she’d retreated into a protective shell, frightened again of what I might be.

  Instead, she asked a question I should have been asking myself a long time ago.

  “Who are your parents?”

  I suppose I can be forgiven for not thinking to question my parentage before, given my past, but based on everything I’d read in Abacus’ book, it was a question that needed answering. The text was addressed to the mage’s “scion,” even as the false copy of this book I’d been studying in Professor Lhopri’s office beneath her watchful gaze had been addressed to the mage’s “son.” There was a connection there, and the connection was one of blood.

  But I could offer Hero no better answer to her question than to say, “I don’t know. I know who raised me, and whom I called my parents throughout childhood, but on the day of the Choosing, they told me that I was adopted. I’d been left on their doorstep by a mad woman, a woman who gave them no further information than that she was in great danger and that her son—me—had to be hidden. That’s all I know. Where she came from, what her name was, all of it is lost to history. Not even my foster parents know.”

  Hero nodded thoughtfully, her agile mind dodging around the problem, seeking the best angle to approach from next. “Well, if we can’t find out where you come from, perhaps we can figure out where it is you are going.”

  I furrowed my brow in confusion. “Excuse me?”

  “Oh, come on, Toven. Don’t tell me you haven’t figured out what all this means.” She sounded excited all of a sudden, her earlier fears and trepidations melting away in the face of the conundrum set before her, the mystery that even then I could see she would not let alone until she’d unraveled it entirely. “You passed the Choosing, so obviously the hymaberry is not poisonous to you, which means you are definitely a Synth at least. Today’s episode confirms the evidence, and the evidence is clear that your ether is tangible and strong. Based on what you read for me from the mage’s book, however, there is one class of people that, while immune to the berry’s poison, gains no effect from it. And yet, how can we know whether you’ve even been given the chance to try the real hyma? For all we know, you’ve been receiving this false juice from the very beginning. While it will have been difficult, it is not outside of the realm of possibility that the juice you drank on the day of our trials last year was also false, so that you only appeared to fail all the tests of the Synth and Hymanni.”

  I still wasn’t quite following her. It had seemed that she was initially going where my greatest fears lay, but then she’d grown all logical of thought again and thus veered off that path. “So, what does that mean?” I asked cautiously, like one who is afraid of bad news.

  “It means that the first thing we have to do is get you some real hyma to drink. We have to conduct our own experiment. Abacus, after all, was a man of science, so why shouldn’t we follow the last mage’s example?”

  “But where am I going to get hyma juice aside from those vials I’m given? Golpin Mennis guards his storeroom closely, so there’s no chance of me stealing any.”

  “You are forgetting, dear Toven, that you know somebody willing to risk her own life to help her friend.”

  “You?”

  She laughed softly. “Of course. If you could get in trouble for what you’ve learnt in Abacus’ book, just think of how much more trouble I could get into, I who have never been so indulged by the professors as you are. Besides, all things considered this morning, if I am unwilling to share my hyma with you, then it wouldn’t really be fair after you were willing to do so for me.”

  “Hero, I can’t ask you to do this,” I said sternly. “You’re going to have a hard enough time as it is today explaining why you can’t perform your lessons.”

  “You forget, Toven, that we get a new seven-day supply of the hyma this afternoon. I’ll just ration my six other vials out so that I don’t miss too much on any one day over the next week. But you need to do this. We need to find out whether or not the juice you’ve been drinking is genuine. Best case scenario, you’ve just b
een singled out for some reason we don’t yet understand and the hyma does in fact work for you.”

  “That’s the best case scenario? Sounds to me that to be the object of some—uh—conspiracy is nothing that could be described as ‘best case.’”

  “You could be a mage,” she said flatly.

  My jaw snapped shut with an audible click of my teeth. Hero had said it at last—that which I’d been denying to myself for months—and she was right. It was bad enough being the center of Deryn Lhopri’s attention. Being a mage, however, was going to be far more difficult to handle, given everything I’d read in Abacus’ book, but the evidence certainly pointed to the possibility—the impossibility—of me being a true mage.

  Hero pushed herself up from the floor. “I’d better go. I suppose you’ll want to call in sick today.”

  In the midst of everything, I’d forgotten about the fact I hadn’t had my daily dose of the hyma—or whatever drug it was they were giving me—and that meant I’d be in a great deal of discomfort later on.

  “I suppose so. Though maybe I can get to Golpin Mennis for my weekly dose before I grow too ill.”

  Hero nodded thoughtfully as she stood at the door. “Be careful, Toven.”

  I told her I would be, though I did not know what I had to be careful about.

  * * *

  Thankfully, it being Sixth Day, I was going to be able to avoid the attentions of Deryn Lhopri for almost a week. That would hopefully give Hero and me time enough to begin finding answers to the many questions we had raised that morning. One thing was for certain: Professor Lhopri was adept at reading me as though I were an open scroll. If my mind had not begun to settle sufficiently by next Fifth Day when I was to meet with her in her office, she would interrogate me until I either went mad or broke down and told all. The professor had been too thorough in her lessons, for I did not trust her in the slightest and knew I must keep my recent discoveries a secret from her for as long as possible.