The Scion of Abacus, Part 2

by Brondt Kamffer

  Hero hurried off to class, a great deal less worried than I felt she should have been, seeing she could not sense her ether after having drunk the false juice from my last vial. I stood in my room for some time, surveying the destruction of my bed and knowing I was going to have to tell somebody about the mess. There was no way I could keep this hidden for long. The bed was ruined for the most part, and there would be no sleeping on it, though it seemed that the mattress was sufficiently preserved for me to use once I’d cleared away the shattered wooden frame.

  I shut the door behind me and proceeded to gather up the wood fragments, careful not to get splinters in my fingers. I piled the scrap near the door, all the while turning over ideas in my mind of how to get rid of it.

  Also very much on my mind was the sudden unleashing of my ether that had caused this destruction. When I had been confronted by the older student the previous year and had beaten him down in a sudden outpouring of power, I had felt nothing different about myself in the aftermath. However, as I worked at clearing the debris of my bedding that morning, I searched my inner parts and became convinced that there was something different about me now. This second use of my ether had left a rift in my soul, a hole that I could sense if I set my mind to exploring it.

  This is a difficult thing to describe, and I have found nothing in all of Abacus’ books since that day to help me do so. I suppose at one time the awakening of ether in the fashion I had experienced was a common occurrence and so nobody thought to record it in some beautiful metaphor for posterity.

  Anyhow, suffice it to say, I worked for several hours cleaning the center of my room as best I could, and when I finally stepped back, everything looked roughly as it should, barring the large pile of wood beside the door and the mattress that sat squarely on the floor.

  I sighed as I leant over and picked up one of the larger fragments of my bed, one of the carved and lacquered legs that were over a foot in length. I sat down on the mattress and turned the wood over in my fingers, losing myself in thought. I supposed myself lucky that nobody had come seeking me so far, as the day’s lessons were well under way. Hero would likely have told Kynaston Lornis that I was ill this morning, and so perhaps I would have a few hours peace before somebody looked in on me.

  Of all the Hymanni, I was the only one who could get away with such an excuse. This will not seem so odd once you recall the powers granted the Hymanni over the elements of his body. Is not sickness and disease but an imbalance of the four elements? Hymanni, who control all four elements, unlike the simple Synths, could then rather easily restore the balance within themselves. Indeed, many theorists hold that Hymanni simply couldn’t get sick at all, for the body naturally righted itself so long as the Hymanni continued in his daily regimen of the hyma.

  I sat on my mattress studying the wood in my hands. Wood, of course, derives from trees, which means it was composed of three of the five elements. Again, only humans among all creation had ether, a spirit. All thinking creatures, though, also possessed the element of fire. Trees, being non-sentient living things, lacked fire but still contained earth, water, and air in their composition.

  All this turned over in my mind as I continued prodding at the rift left by the stirring of my ether earlier that morning. I tried to sense the elements within myself, but aside from that tiny gap in my soul, I felt nothing.

  I did, however, sense the elements in the wood. As soon as I realized this, I dropped the bed leg in surprise. For a moment, I thought I had been imagining things, but the more I turned it over in my mind, the more I convinced myself that I had sensed the three distinct elements in the wood.

  I reached out a hand and plucked the leg from the floor. There it was again. The earth element was strongest, of course, but even in dried, lifeless wood I could sense the remnants of water and air that had once coursed through the veins of the tree from which the bed’s leg had been carved.

  I was still sitting on my mattress, transfixed by the wood in my hand, when the door opened and Hero entered. I looked up with what must have been a worrying expression on my face, for she asked, “Toven, are you all right?”

  I nodded. “I’m fine. Is it lunchtime already?”

  She furrowed her brow and shook her head. “No. Toven, classes are done for the day. It’s after five already. Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “After five, you say?” I answered distantly. A part of me knew I was supposed to be surprised to learn that it was so late, but my mind was still so wrapped up in the elements of the wood in my hand that I failed to see the significance of it.

  Hero knelt before me, her eyes slipping down momentarily to the bed leg I held. “Did you go see Master Mennis for your week’s supply of juice?”

  The mention of the hyma snapped me back to myself. “No, I didn’t. After five, you say?” I muttered. My heart began to race within my breast. “Hero, I don’t feel sick. The last time I went without my juice, I barely made it past midday before I got so sick I couldn’t stand. Yet here I am feeling perfectly well.”

  She looked at me skeptically. “Are you sure that you weren’t just ill before? I know you think you were being drugged, but I drank your last vial this morning, and while I’ve had to make excuses for not using my ether today, I haven’t felt anything odd. Not like I’ve taken a drug.”

  I shook my head. “No, the juice in those vials of mine is definitely tainted with something. I came back here that day I got sick and drank a vial and suddenly felt much better. And remember, a Hymanni’s body should heal itself. If that were the case—” I slapped a hand to my forehead as a sudden realization washed over me. I had not felt sick all day, but in that moment I felt my stomach churn over and bile surge into my throat.

  “Toven?” Hero asked with a measure of panic in her voice. “What’s wrong?”

  I fought down my discomfort. “Hymanni don’t get sick, Hero, because their bodies heal themselves. We already know that my vials do not contain real hyma, for you could not sense your own ether after drinking it, which means that it was not the hyma that helped heal me the day I did not drink.”

  “Where are you going with this?” Hero asked, her eyes narrowing. I could see she was trying to follow my thinking, and though she was far more intelligent than I, I could also see that her loyalty to the Dominion was clouding her ability to reason in this instance. She would not like where I was going, and her own devotion to our way of life meant that her mind had walled off that avenue to her.

  “Don’t you see? You said you felt nothing different today after drinking my false hyma juice.” She nodded, confirming once again that it was so. “Well, there can be only two reasons for that: Either the juice I’ve been given is as powerless as water or your genuine hyma is laced with the same drug I’ve been given, and therefore your body was already used to it.”

  Hero drew back, scrunching up her face in disbelief. “What are you talking about? Why would anyone put something in the hyma?”

  “Why would I feel instantly better after drinking a false juice if it were as powerless as water?” I asked by way of reply.

  Hero shook her head fervently. “No. There has to be a third option. I accept that there may be something strange about the juice you’ve been given. Perhaps I could go so far as to accept that you are being drugged. But I can’t make the leap to all of us being drugged as well on the basis of me having no reaction to whatever they’ve been giving you”

  “Well, clearly I’m not just drinking flavored water, and I do recall experiencing a general feeling of wellbeing when taking my first doses, but over time my body became immune to the effects, only crying out in agony when I tried to do without. If your hyma wasn’t being drugged in the same way, you would have felt something. At the very least, you’d have sensed your body reacting with pleasure to the drug.”

  “I can’t believe that, Toven. For one thing, how far does this ‘conspiracy’ of yours spread? Is it just my juice that’s being drugged because I’m a known friend of
yours? Are all of our classmates being drugged? All students at the University? All Synth and Hymanni in Ilion? In Aaria? Where would it end, Toven? Surely, if this were any bigger than a handful of students, word would get out. Somebody has to juice the hymaberries after all and then mix the drug in. In all the hundreds of years Synths have existed, surely somebody would have revealed the secret by now if what you say were true!”

  I let her rant, for there was no stopping Hero once she got going on a subject. All I could do was hear her out. What she said made sense too, and yet some deep part inside of me, down where the seeds of constant doubt had been sown by Deryn Lhopri, refused to accept the obvious truth of what Hero was saying. The conspiracy I had claimed to exist was indeed enormous in scope and scale. It would have to be. And it is true that such a widespread phenomenon would be inordinately difficult to keep concealed for any length of time.

  Yet I could not dismiss the idea as easily as Hero did. Just because I did not know the agent by which such a conspiracy was kept secret did not mean that the agent did not exist.

  I sighed as Hero continued to turn out reason after reason why there could not possibly be any conspiracy, though I admit that I stopped listening halfway through and merely waited for her to run out of words.

  “We should go get our weekly supplies from Golpin Mennis,” I said eventually, breaking into her ongoing speech as she paused for a breath. Hero looked at me suspiciously, as though attempting to gauge how much attention I’d been paying her. I smiled and shrugged my shoulders. “Maybe you’re right,” I said, placating her. “I need to think about this more. Besides, now that I think about it, I am not feeling too well.”

  She could tell I was patronizing her. She was too smart to miss that. But she was also smart enough to know when she’d said enough and that to continue now would be to drive a wedge between us that did not need to be there. Hero smiled back. “All right. Let’s go see the Master of the Juice then. Do you still want one of my doses?”

  I thought about it for a moment. The fact that I had felt no withdrawals this day probably meant that my ether had awakened enough to a point where I would feel no withdrawals in the future, though I couldn’t be sure. Today was a special day, and perhaps my ether would fall dormant again soon. And it was true that I was beginning to feel a bit ill. Perhaps my awakened ether had only forestalled the onset of withdrawal symptoms.

  When Hero and I had spoken that morning, I’d had in mind a host of experiments I’d wanted to conduct on myself, but they all seemed irrelevant now. And the only one that mattered anymore—determining whether the genuine hyma was also drugged—might not be possible now either. The only way to test that would be to take one of Hero’s daily doses, but she could not risk this so soon after a day spent without her ether, even if she did measure out the remaining six doses across seven days. No, I’d have to bide my time, perhaps dig up some evidence in Abacus’ library, or wait for the proof to reveal itself in the ever-changing journal he’d left me.

  I shook my head. “No, I don’t think I’ll take one of your doses after all. It doesn’t seem important anymore,” I lied, not wanting to start another argument. “Maybe someday, though. We begin our fieldwork in six months, and it can wait till then. Are you still committed to helping me research what it means to be a mage?”

  Her mind played over our earlier conversation, and she nodded slowly. “But only if you take one of my doses tomorrow. I know you don’t think it’s important anymore. I don’t know what happened here today, Toven, but it will set my mind at ease if we can eliminate the possibility altogether that you are actually just a rather odd Hymanni.”

  “Very well. Let’s go see Golpin Mennis.” I looked past Hero to the pile of wood beside my door. “I’m going to have to do something about that, too.”

  -IX-

  There was an air of tension in the mage’s library that had never existed before between Hero and myself. After drinking a dose of Hero’s hyma juice that morning, I’d confirmed once and for all that I was no Synth, for I felt no new stirring of my ether. That Hero’s own abilities were restored to her upon drinking from another vial in her week’s supply proved that her bottles of the hyma were as genuine as they’d ever been.

  And yet this realization, far from unifying us in our quest, had actually widened the rift between us. Hero chose to believe that there was some mistake, that the professors were not hiding something from me, that perhaps I was simply confused. But it was all now confirmed and settled for me. I was not merely a Hymanni who had failed to develop as quickly as his classmates. No, I was something entirely different, something the world had not seen for a thousand years.

  At least, that was the conclusion I first came to. In the back of my mind I recalled what the mage Abacus had written about the necessity of his ether’s existence in order to preserve the magic that had created the hymaberry. Not to mention the other fact easily forgotten: The very tower in which we researched the mages was itself held together by a web of magic. I knew Hero had not entirely believed me almost two years earlier when I’d first spoken of this, but I felt it deep inside myself that the tower was alive in some way.

  That I had sensed the tower at all on that distant day under Feril Animis’ watchful eye was proof enough that I was more than any mere Synth or Hymanni, but those secrets had been dutifully kept from me for two years.

  I pointed out to Hero all the shelves in Abacus’ library that I knew held books on the ancient magic of the mages. As I’ve said, I spent a great deal of time perusing the shelves and pulling down random tomes to sift through. It had troubled me before that I, an eighteen-year-old student, had been permitted access to this room, let alone that I’d been allowed to bring my best friend along, but as Hero and I paged through books that day, two years after I’d first begun searching the library, I suddenly realized why I’d been granted such a privilege.

  It was another of Deryn Lhopri’s many tests, and one that proved to me that she knew exactly what I was, had known from the very first time I’d been seated in her office for our private weekly lessons. Feril Animis, too, must have known, for I saw in my mind’s eye the look he’d given me on the day of our tour of the tower. I’d expected reproach for having wandered off, but there had been a look of acknowledgment, even pride.

  Being permitted access to the library had been a means of funneling my attention and energy away from the classes on practical magic, classes I would fail because my ether had not awakened like my classmates’. The library had been a means of channeling that frustration towards learning as much about myself as possible without realizing what it was I had been studying. No doubt Deryn Lhopri had plans to reveal all this to me, perhaps someday soon, perhaps in a few years yet, but she probably did not expect me to discover what I really was until she finally chose to open my eyes, by which time I would be molded into a form she—or somebody more important—could control.

  Thinking back on things now, after all that has happened, I realize that this is not quite what was taking place—but I shall come to that in time. Nevertheless, that is the explanation that made the most sense to my mind in those troubled days.

  Now that I was searching the mage’s library for something specific, it seemed far larger than ever before. Abacus had owned about three thousand books, a collection that was only a fraction of the size of the main University library, but one that was rather large for single ownership, even for a mage.

  I paged through books without any real idea of where I was going, just hoping to stumble serendipitously on the answers I sought. I failed to pay Hero much attention, retreating into my own mind, content that my friend and partner in this quest would wake me from my private world if she found anything useful. So it jarred me somewhat to hear her angrily slam a book shut and begin to weep. I was so wrapped up in the tome before me that it took me several heartbeats to realize what had happened. When I finally looked up, tears were dripping from Hero’s chin as she murmured a single phrase over and
over to herself.

  “There is no God but Aaria. There is no God but Aaria. There is no God but Aaria.”

  I walked over to where she was seated, placing my hand upon one of hers. She looked to be in a state of shock, as though she’d just witnessed the death of a loved one. She was in a stupor, and the repetition of that single phrase from Feril Animis’ guiding mantra was all she would permit to escape her lips.

  I looked at the book she had been reading, sliding it towards myself until the light caught the faded gold lettering on the cover.

  The Way of Things.

  There was no author’s name to accompany the rather broad and unrevealing title. I looked to Hero again, my hand still resting on hers, and saw that while she was watching me from the corner of her eye, she was still overwrought with whatever emotion had taken hold of her as she perused this book.

  I seated myself on the chair next to her, uncertain of how to proceed. I wanted desperately to open the book then and there, discover for myself what was so disturbing it had put my friend into a mental fugue she looked set to remain in for some time. The more responsible part of me, though, whispered that I needed to be sensitive and help Hero recover her wits first.

  So it was with a great deal of personal strength that I pushed the old book away and pulled Hero into an embrace. Her weeping grew into heaving sobs, but at least she stopped mumbling. I’ve already related the fact that Abacus ascribed the power of magic and of ether to God, and I had come to accept as much, though in all honesty I had only shallowly subscribed to the official atheist philosophy of the Dominion. Hero, however, had seemed to believe the Dominion’s philosophy much more completely. Again my mind wandered to the book on the table before us. The Way of Things. Was Abacus’ faith in a God from whom the power of ether and magic flowed a faith common to all mages? It was a strange thing, something I’d never thought of until then, but I’d found no mention of God in any of the tomes on magical theory that I’d paged through in this library. There had been hints at some power behind the ether, but nothing definite. And yet Abacus had seemed absolute in his journal as he’d written of the connection between the mages and God. Could he be wrong?