“Enough!” Deryn Lhopri held up her hand. “You will leave me with Master Aimis. Alone. I shall have the truth from him.”
I could see Kerinis wanted to argue the point, but he finally nodded and withdrew. The pair of warrior Synths followed him out the door.
Deryn Lhopri turned her back on me, knelt before the fallen door, and lifted it from the floor, setting it somewhat unsteadily against the open portal in order to block off the room to the crowd trying to discern any bit of information that could serve as gossip.
She knelt beside the body and reached out a hand to turn it over. It was not Hero. I sighed in spite of myself. Regardless of whom it was, I was still in a very tight spot, as I had no way to explain the girl’s presence, nor how I had managed to sleep through her scream and yet awake when the door had been broken down not too long after. The professor continued to examine the entire body for a few minutes, and I turned my head as I saw her inspect the girl’s groin area.
Finally, I heard Deryn Lhopri sigh deeply, and I looked back to see her standing again and casting her eyes about the bedroom. Kerinis had been right: there was no way in or out other than the door, none at least that I was aware of or that eyes could see.
“You did not do this.” It was a statement rather than a question, but I felt inclined to respond nevertheless.
“No, I did not. I was asleep.” I told her my version of events, which you have already read. The professor nodded as I did so.
“Locking the door was the hard part, and I suspect that whoever did this must really hate you. The girl has been raped and suffocated, and for some reason you have been singled out for special notice. But I know you did not do this. Convincing the others, well, that will not be easy. It may in fact prove nearly impossible.”
“But can’t you just tell them?”
“What? And leave everyone in a panic that there is still a monster in our midst?” She laughed, a half-mocking and half-pitying sound. “You have a long way to go yet. You and your girlfriend may think you have the Dominion all figured out, all of our secrets unraveled, but you don’t understand the half of it. People believe what they see, and they see only what they want to see. It has not escaped the eyes of many that you are abnormal. This makes you an easy target for others to hate, though they don’t know why. It is so much easier for the likes of that self-important fool Kerinis to believe that you are guilty than to do the hard work of finding the real criminal.”
“Do you know who—”
“Who it was?” she interrupted. Her lips curled ever so faintly upwards. “No. But I know how to find out.” She pointed a long, slender finger at me. “You, Toven. You will find out who did this. Consider it part of your education. I keep telling you that you’ll have to learn to see beneath the surface, to see what others, who are below you, miss.”
For the faintest of moments, I thought there was a shimmer of glee in the professor’s eyes, as though she had been waiting for this moment. But it passed so quickly I could not be certain of what I had seen. I realized I was still tired, and I hurt all over from the beating I’d taken to my head and chest.
“Untie yourself,” Professor Lhopri said suddenly.
I stared at her.
“Untie yourself, I said. You are not helpless. You only think you are. Use your ether on the ropes. I will not always be here to undo knots for you.”
She turned away and took a blanket from my bed to drape over the body of the girl. I tried to focus on the task I’d been given, shutting out the unnecessary elements from my consciousness, focusing on the earthen element comprising most of the rope’s makeup. I isolated the knot that bound me to the chair and sent my ether to explore the ins and outs of it.
I cast my mind back to the previous day in Deryn Lhopri’s office, thinking how it had felt to throw my weight behind the stone as she tried to lift it from the table. This task would require the reverse, I knew, but how exactly to pull, I did not yet understand.
“Use the walls,” Professor Lhopri said, breaking in on my thoughts so abruptly I almost lost my concentration on the rope. “Don’t try to use your body to untie the knot. You are too close to it and not heavy enough either. Use the walls opposite to pull against the rope.”
I furrowed my brow but dutifully allowed the walls’ presence to return to my ether’s consciousness. I chose the wall opposite the thread of the knot and lashed my ether to it, anchoring myself to the ancient stone. I felt suddenly cold, cold and old, sensing the weight of its centuries in a way few other students had ever done.
What I did next can best be explained by analogy: the mage’s ether is not like a rope that I tie to one point and then to another. That was how I might have thought of it before that moment in time when faced with the puzzle of escaping that chair, but it is a very ineffective image. Rather, the ether is somewhat like a spider’s web that fans out from the center point: me. There are lines of sensitivity that shoot straight out, and then there are lines that connect those like the spiral of the spider’s web, tightly woven near the center and spaced farther apart the farther I send my ether roaming.
This is what I sensed when I attempted to tie the “reverse” end of my ether to the rope knot at my back. As soon as I did so, I realized that the ether still flowed to me, through my body, and not in a straight line between the two. I did not fully understand the connection I’d made, but it was enough for me to realize that I could now pull my ether inward, toward the center that was myself, and that in so doing I would be untying the knot by actually using the opposing wall as my counterweight.
The rope slid through the thread of the knot, but I did not feel the rope slacken. I sensed the double nature of the knot itself and quickly shifted my ether to a different wall to create a new angle. I soon had the rope lying loose about me.
“Well done,” Deryn Lhopri said, and again I heard a real sense of pride in her words. She was pleased, and that was far more comforting than I might have expected. I suppose the nature of the moment meant any praise was a great relief.
“Now, I am going to have to ‘punish’ you,” the professor said. “I will take you away for lock up, but you will in fact be confined to the mage’s tower. That is the best I can promise for now. If you wish to return to your room here, you will need to exonerate yourself, though with the chance to sleep in Abacus’ own bed, I don’t think you’ll be too eager to come back soon. Besides, your education can continue as smoothly there as it can inside these walls, as you were never likely to return to Professor Lornis’ classroom at any rate.”
“What about Hero?” I asked.
“What about her? Come, pack a few things in a bag while we talk. We must be going.”
I obeyed, and set about retrieving the mage’s journal, my vials of the hyma, and some clothes. As I worked, I clarified my earlier question. “This girl here looks quite a bit like Hero, at least from behind. Is that a coincidence?”
Deryn Lhopri smirked. “There are no such things, Toven. I’ve told you that. It seems that you have at least found a place to start looking for a resolution to this crime. If Hero was the intended victim, then you had best keep an eye on her.”
“But you said I would be confined to the mage’s tower.”
The professor gave me a pained expression. “Don’t be dense, boy. To the eyes of those few who will know where you are, you will be confined. In the eyes of the majority, you are being expelled and sent to the secure prison where the Dominion keeps its enemies of state. But there is no wall in existence that can keep you in if you want to get out, or keep you out if you want to get in. Now, enough questions. You took your hyma juice, I see.”
I nodded.
“Leave it.”
I blinked stupidly at the order.
“You have to leave it or else somebody will realize yours is still being delivered. Besides, as I’m sure you’ve realized, you don’t exactly need the hyma to use your ether.”
“It’s not even real,” I blurted without thinking
. I’d grown far too easy in the professor’s company for my liking, and I chided myself for letting a secret slip so easily.
Deryn Lhopri grinned wolfishly. “I had wondered whether you would figure it out. Why, though, if you know it is fake do you continue to drink it faithfully?”
I was not about to make the same mistake twice, and so I shook my head ruefully, hoping to convey a sense that I had caught myself in a contradiction that I’d just been freed of rather than reveal that I had learnt yet another of the Dominion’s secrets by myself. “I guess I drank it out of habit. For comfort, too, as it made me seem a bit more normal.” I wouldn’t let slip that I knew it was addictive.
“Indeed.” I could see I didn’t have Professor Lhopri entirely convinced, but she was satisfied enough to let the matter rest for now. I set the box back on the dresser—hesitantly, I might add, as I knew the pains of withdrawal I was about to face—and then nodded that I was ready. The professor pointed out that I might wish to dress myself as well.
I tucked the bag of possessions into the waistband of my pants and then dropped a fresh cassock over my head, not bothering to remove my nightclothes.
“Now, hands out, please.” I followed orders, and Deryn Lhopri used the Synths’ rope to bind my wrists for appearance’s sake.
She walked me over to the door, shoved the broken wood aside, and then marched me into the outer hall, where I faced dozens of students as a criminal.
I confess that I have done many cruel things in my life, even committing murder as you shall soon read, but I have never been happy to take credit for deeds I have not done. There are those wicked sorts of men who revel in accumulating responsibility for crimes, even claiming some that they did not in fact commit. But that has never been my way. When I act, I have generally done so for a reason and so have never wished to have my name sullied with senseless wrongdoing.
In latter days, when they found a body, the Synths knew for certain that it was one of mine or that it was not. And that is the way it should be.
* * *
I was sick for three days, so sick I felt it would have been a greater mercy to be executed for the raven-haired girl’s murder, as many had desired. But Deryn Lhopri’s mercy was often more cruel than her cruelties, for I was saved in order that I might become who I was meant to become. But as the next few passages of this narrative will begin to attest, even the meticulous planning of Professor Lhopri went awry on occasion.
I was alone all that time, floating in and out of states of delirium, never once seeing the professor or Hero or any other soul in those three days. But each morning when I awoke, I would find bread and a thin soup waiting on the table beside the bed. A jug of water and a cup remained there the entire time, and I would drink greedily during my more lucid moments, the heavy sweat of my illness threatening to dehydrate me every time I lost consciousness.
I did manage during my three days of convalescence to open Abacus’ confessions and discover a new passage therein. It had been several days since I’d read from the book, so busy had I been studying at the feet of Deryn Lhopri. As was often the case, the message left to me by the long-dead mage was a timely one, as though his spirit were gazing across the ages to judge which of his words would be most helpful or encouraging to me at any given moment.
These are the words I read:
The human heart is a black thing. Who can fathom its depths?
And yet, the human being is capable of extreme goodness, acts of kindness that overshadow the shadows of his nature. Even the vilest criminal may endanger his life to preserve the life of a child, who represents to him the innocence he has forsaken.
And what is innocence? Is it merely the state of not being guilty of some crime or another? Or is it something deeper? Is it a condition of the heart? Can a man who has lost his innocence ever regain it?
These are questions for the philosophers, and I, my heir, am no philosopher, but a mage of terrible power, a man conflicted by his choices, who bears the weight of many actions whose repercussions have proven ill though the acts themselves were done in the name of good.
Herein lies the lesson: be true to yourself. All else is a lie. The God who sits in his ethereal realm, who granted us such power over the elements, who has likewise withdrawn the general use of that power, this same God is your lodestone. He will guide your conscience, as he has mine on many occasions. This then is innocence.
Admittedly, as I gaze on this passage now, writing these words out so many years after I first read them, I see that the mage is far more ambiguous than I initially understood him to be. But the words were a great comfort when I needed them.
The students of the University, the professors, even my dear Hero, may all have wished me to suffer punishment for the murder of that girl, but I knew in my heart I had not done the deed, though all evidence pointed to it. In time, I would come to do things more terrible than this, and the first of these is indeed the focus of the next portion of what I write, but in that hour of darkest and deepest need, I felt hope. Hope that I could survive the machinations of Deryn Lhopri. Hope that I could clear my name of the crime leveled against it. Hope that I did not need to become a villain in my own right.
But the hope of men goes oft awry, and we all too easily become monsters against our will.
-XIV-
Deryn Lhopri appeared on the fourth morning, bearing with her the copy of The World Belongs to the Strong that had rested on her office bookshelf. She set the text on the table beside the bed, leaned over me to gauge my health, and said, “You are on the mend. Your body is strong, Toven. Your ether is strong. With the remnants of the hyma leaving your body, you will finally become reliant solely on your own ether, and therefore we must resume your lessons.”
Though she had acknowledged previously that the liquid I’d been drinking was not the juice others imbibed, Deryn Lhopri had slipped back into the pretense, a move that startled me somewhat. I did not reveal the depth of my knowledge on the subject, instead choosing to let the matter drop. In the back of my mind, I hoped to find a use for knowing that some form of foreign substance was being used to make the hyma addictive, to keep the Synths and Hymanni dependent on the Dominion for their power. Instead, I simply nodded to the professor that I understood.
“Stand up,” Deryn Lhopri ordered.
It was a painful struggle, my body still weak from three days of violent sickness, but I managed to lift my weight onto unsteady legs, so long as I kept my balance with a hand on the wall or bedpost.
“Excellent,” the professor said at length. “Though this would be much easier if you had access to the elements of your own body. Still, we cannot have it all.” She grinned, took up the book she’d set down earlier, and led me over to a desk where she bade me take the single seat.
“This desk saw the hand of Abacus scribble many important notes over the long years of his life,” she told me. I had been in the mage’s bedroom on occasion during my exploration of the tower, a sparsely furnished room bearing only a bed, this desk, a wardrobe, and a chest of drawers. I’d never opened any of the storage space, thinking such an act an invasion of privacy, even though the mage had been dead a thousand years. The desk itself must have been present for the sole purpose of providing Abacus with a place to work in the dead of night, perhaps after waking from his sleep with some thought or other he wished to record before it was lost to slumber again. I have experienced the like on many occasions in my own life.
Professor Lhopri mistook my silence for disinterest, and she opened the tome in her hands, turning the book about and pointing me to a specific passage. I leaned in to read, my vision somewhat distorted from my recent sickness, making it difficult to focus for long. I was vaguely aware in the back of my mind that I’d had no such trouble reading from the mage’s journal in the past couple of days, the words seeming to imprint on my mind as though a scribe were inside my very head with ink, quill, and paper. Such was not the case with the mundane tome before me now. From Deryn Lhop
ri’s book I read:
If an offense has to be committed against a man, it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared. Men ought either to be treated well or be utterly destroyed, for if you merely offend them, they will seek revenge; however, if you injure them severely, they will be unable to retaliate. Thus we say that the injury done should be such that vengeance cannot be feared.
The truth is that he who wishes to act with virtue in everything inevitably comes to grief among so many who are not virtuous. The wise man, then, will determine all the injuries that he needs to inflict and will mete them out once and for all.
I furrowed my brow as I read the passage, finally pulling my eyes away without reading further. Deryn Lhopri was watching me closely, looking for some response.
“Well?” she asked when I remained unwilling to speak.
My mind was in turmoil, these words clashing loudly with those I’d read in Abacus’ confessions just the day before.
“Why do you make me read this?” I asked at last, my eyes dropping to the book against my will. I had an inkling of what the professor was trying to suggest I do, but I was unwilling to follow that line of reasoning without a struggle.
“You have been injured, Toven. And yet your enemy—whoever that is—has failed to silence you forever. You must understand that the rules of survival inside the upper echelons of the Dominion are as primal as survival in the wilderness: kill or be killed, disgrace or be disgraced; show mercy and you invite attacks because of perceived weakness. Have you no desire to know who killed that girl?”
“But—” my response stammered into silence. I thought for a moment and then asked, “Tell me clearly what you want me to do? Is this part of my training?”
The professor’s lips curled upward a fraction. “Yes, this is part of your training. As I told you before, if you wish to return to the University openly, you must exonerate yourself. That is the only way. You have the ability to solve this problem. You also have the ability to administer justice. Not only that, you have the authority. Finally, you have the obligation. People are less afraid to attack someone who inspires fear. So far, you have only shown people that you are kind in loving your friend Hero. You will understand that this will be viewed as weakness by everyone who is around you, and they will find ways to take advantage of it. I am giving you the opportunity to make yourself feared.” She tapped the book that lay before me on the desk. “The passage you were reading ends with the admonition, ‘If you cannot be both loved and feared, be sure that you are feared.’ You are different, Toven. And by now you should be beginning to understand just how much people don’t like those who are different from the norm. If you wish to survive, then you will do what is necessary. If you wish to be true to yourself, you will do what it takes to preserve your good name—or to make your name so terrible that no one will dare cross you.”
The Scion of Abacus, Part 2 Page 9