I had looked up sharply at her mention of “being true” to myself, for they echoed the words of Abacus, albeit offering me a far darker path to tread. I wondered whether she knew what was in the mage’s journal, that her previous confusion over the book had been feigned. But I shook my head. No, she could not possibly have known what passages I had read, even if she in fact knew the nature of the book.
“Why do you shake your head?” Deryn Lhopri asked, her voice hinting at a latent anger.
“I’m sorry, professor. I was thinking.” I breathed deeply, steadying my nerves. “I will do what you ask. I will discover who killed the girl and see that he is brought to face justice.”
She looked at me long and hard, her eyes boring deep into my own. She had not missed the ambiguity of my declaration, but at that moment, before I’d ever begun the task, even I did not know what I would do when the time came. I desperately wanted to return to the University, to see Hero again, to know that everything was all right.
How naïve we can be when we willfully blind ourselves to our own natures.
* * *
Deryn Lhopri left me soon after, satisfied that I’d learnt something that day. I sat in the chair before the mage’s desk, staring at the wall, searching for some hidden source of strength to drive me forward—even simply to stand up.
I felt sick again, but not the sickness of the previous days. This was a sickness of the spirit, for every moment that passed convinced me more and more of what it was the professor wished me to do about the girl’s murderer. She had, in no uncertain terms, given me license to kill the guilty party, and I knew deep down that Professor Lhopri would be disappointed with any other outcome. I had no idea how I was even going to find the perpetrator, let alone take his life, for despite the distance I’d come in my training just recently, most students at the University my age—or even a year younger—were much more advanced in the use of their ether than I.
My head began to throb, and I massaged my temples with my fingers, seeking to relieve the pressure. It did not take long before I realized that my head was not in pain; in fact, the throbbing was sending a pulse of wellbeing through my body. I stopped massaging and lowered my hands, concentrating on the sensation as it grew ever stronger.
I became convinced a few moments later that what I sensed was the pulse of the tower, the same pulse I had known in the past, only this time the pulsations had entered my very mind as though seeking to become a part of me. I sat quietly for a while, attempting to understand what was happening, thinking perhaps that the building itself—still held together, against all the laws I knew of magic, by the ether of the dead mage Abacus—was trying to communicate with me.
As soon as I realized this, I rose from my seat in surprise. The pulses intensified, but they also suddenly gave off a directional pull. I spun about and gazed where I felt prompted to explore. There was nothing before me save the ancient wardrobe of the mage.
Closing my eyes to further concentrate, I determined the pulse may be coming from beyond the room itself, and I quickly hurried to the door, my weariness forgotten as I was drawn on magically towards my goal.
When I opened the door of the room, Deryn Lhopri having shut it when she left, I felt an explosion of force in my mind, driving me back into the chamber. It was not painful, but it was adamant that what it wanted me to find lay within the confines of the bedroom. I spun about a second time, looking towards the wardrobe.
I have said already that I have never rummaged through the private storage of the mage’s tower, deeming such an act an invasion of privacy. However, it now seemed that the tower itself was giving me permission to do just so, indicating that it wished me to look inside the wardrobe.
Slowly, and with mixed feelings, I moved across the room, feeling the tower’s pulse intensify with each step I took towards the closet.
It was a beautiful piece of artistry, like so much in the mage’s tower. Abacus had obviously been a wealthy and respected man in life, for everything he had owned was of a quality one would struggle to find in the modern age, when so much was mass-produced by relatively unskilled Eikos workers. Synths and Hymanni deemed such craftsmanship beneath them, despite the fact that a hand magically guided by ether could easily produce artwork more intricate than that of any skilled artisan, no matter how many years he’d been practicing his trade.
The carvings that adorned the wardrobe were magnificent, and I paused momentarily to study them again, as I had on the day I’d first explored this room over a year before. The scenes depicted moments from the mage’s life, I assumed, or perhaps moments from the lives of other famous mages. There were images of entire city walls being torn down by a single man’s ether. Carvings of men, giants they seemed, being brought to heel. There was even a relief of an enormous lightning storm ravaging the countryside, while behind it, directing its path, stood a lone mage with arms outstretched to the heavens.
The tower’s heartbeat thrummed excitedly, pushing back into my thoughts, telling me that what I sought was not the images themselves but what lay beyond them, inside the wardrobe.
I reached out a hand and opened the doors.
Without knowing what sort of world will arise from the ashes of the one I helped destroy, I must take a moment to restate something I have not mentioned for many, many pages. Color is extremely important in the symbolism of the Dominion. I have alluded oft to the various colors Synths and Hymanni wear. I have mentioned the drab browns of the Eikos, as well as the ornate reds of the Consuls and the purple of the Hymage. But I do not know how long knowledge of this structure will endure in the new world—especially, I do not know how long the stigma surrounding the color black shall endure.
I have mentioned before that black clothing is forbidden, for black is considered an evil color. The origins of this superstition—for lack of a better word—are ambiguous, for like much of the Dominion’s propaganda, the truth has long been covered over with a veneer of lies. But I have found hints and shadowy phrases in ancient texts, enough so that I can state with some amount of certainty that in the old world of the mages, prior to the creation of the hymaberry and the subsequent foundation of the Aarian Dominion, black was the color most commonly associated with the mages themselves. This does not, however, seem at all to indicate the quality of the men’s souls who wore the color, as the Dominion seems to imply by its prohibition on black as a symbol of evil. Rather, the color black seems to have operated in much the same way as the color symbolism of the Dominion now works: simply and purely to distinguish one class of men from the rest. It was the mages who introduced the cassock to general wear, and it is therefore not altogether surprising that the cassock remains the regulated uniform of the Dominion’s Synths and Hymanni. The black cassock, furthermore, would have been a rather striking outfit, especially in a society that did not consider the cassock to be so fashionable as our own seems to think it.
As I write this, my mind roves back to Deryn Lhopri’s parting words on the fourth day of my stay in the mage’s tower: “If you cannot be both loved and feared, be sure that you are feared.” There are few more imposing sights than a man in a black cassock, a fact I can attest to on the basis of what I found in the mage’s wardrobe.
For I opened those carved wooden doors and stumbled back in pre-conditioned horror as I saw a row of black cassocks hanging in the very place Abacus had left them a thousand years before. On that day, I had not yet learnt the history of the color as a symbol of the old mages, and I was instantly driven to denial that the man I looked up to above all others could be so vile as to possess numerous black articles of clothing.
But I fought down my revulsion, for I also noticed that the pounding in my head, the pressing urgency of the tower to reveal these cassocks to me, had ended, leaving behind only the dull, familiar thud of the building’s heartbeat.
My hands were shaking nervously as I pulled out one of the mage’s black robes, noting with a familiar sense of wonder that a thousand years had done no
thing to deteriorate the quality of the cloth. Indeed, as I have already mentioned of the excellence of the work from those ancient days, the quality of the ancient fabric was far superior to anything I had ever seen—and no expense was spared on the students of the University. My own white cassock felt threadbare beneath my fingers by comparison to Abacus’ clothing.
A sudden impulse came over me, and I held the black cassock against my body, noting that the size was a near-perfect fit for my own height. I could not be certain, but even the waist and shoulders seemed exactly cut to the proportions of my own frame.
I was hesitant, but I knew that my curiosity would eventually win. I had done so much in the past years to defy the teachings and lies of the Dominion that my revulsion for the color black was quickly replaced by an intense desire to see whether the cassock did indeed fit as a cursory inspection seemed to indicate it would.
I laid the cassock on the bed, crossed to the doorway, inspecting the outer hall in case Deryn Lhopri was still about, and then shut the door. There was no key, but I was not about to risk the professor stumbling in whilst I was robed in the compromising color.
Taking a step back, I closed my eyes and began to focus my ether on the door, shutting out the various elements of the room around me until I had isolated the earthen element of the wooden door itself. I knew at once that my own weight would be insufficient to block the entrance against a determined person, and so I flung out my ether to snare the weighty bed, binding its mass to the door with myself as the fulcrum.
Satisfied that nobody would be able to enter until I released my concentration and ether, I returned to the bed and excitedly stripped off my nightclothes. With a nervous glance about—an impulse I was simply not able to control—I dropped the black cassock over my head, allowing its folds to fall naturally about my body.
I lifted my arms and swung them about easily. I took a few strides around the room as well. My early surmising was confirmed, for the black cassock fitted me even better than the white cassocks I’d been assigned by the University, which were tailored to my measurements. I cast about for a mirror, my absolute delight at this discovery now augmented by the need to see what I looked like. But despite the marvels of the wardrobe’s art, it bore no mirror, nor did the room itself, and so I realized I would have to risk leaving the chamber in search of some reflective surface.
I crossed to the door, still keeping the threads of my binding ether in place—though my excitement made this an increasingly difficult proposition—and flung the remaining strength of my ether out into the hallway beyond. The sudden strain on my soul was so great that I nearly collapsed beneath the weight of my magic, and I was forced to release my hold on the door and bed lest I crush myself between their elements. But I was certain, at least, from that moment of exploration that there was no one about, at least not on this third floor of the tower.
It took a moment or two for me to catch my breath and steady myself. I was still only a day out of bed after three days of terrible sickness, and I ought to have considered the weakened state of my body before trying such ethereal acrobatics, but such was my desire to find a mirror that I was quick to forget. (It was a mistake—allowing myself to be distracted—that I would be guilty of several times in my life, often incurring much graver consequences than on that morning.)
Satisfied that I was strong enough to continue, I opened the door, glanced out into the hallway to confirm with my eyes what my ether had told me, and hurried out. I moved furtively, still fearing discovery, but my ether roved about, detecting no signs of life other than the heartbeat of the building itself.
I moved in the direction of the magically operated lavatory, a marvel of engineering if ever there was one. The ancient spell that converted waste into its base elements for easy and sanitary disposal continued to operate like all the other spells in this building. But I went to this room now because I knew there was a washbasin and mirror there too.
Again, I shut the door behind me, this time binding the wood of the door to the stone of the opposite wall—a taxing operation as the walls were magically knit together, and so they functioned as one body, unlike ordinary stone walls. I nearly suffocated myself beneath the weight of the entire tower, but I managed to cast about a few more strands of my ether onto different parts of the room’s stone walls and floor and so distribute the weight a bit more evenly.
As a brief side note, I look on that moment with an immense pride, for it was the most complicated use to which I’d ever put my ether, and I accomplished it without killing myself—as, I gathered from later studies, I should have done given my then-current skill level and depth of fatigue.
Once I had myself steadied, I moved to face the mirror. My blond hair and pale skin looked ghostly with the deep blackness of the cassock beneath them, and my gray eyes seemed freakishly white and milky. But I recognized at once the power of the outfit.
I was terrified of myself.
And yet, I was completely mesmerized.
I could imagine a foe looking on me, half-paralyzed with fear for the evilness I represented thus dressed, and half-paralyzed with wonder at the striking effect of the black cassock.
But another more practical truth presented itself to me then: Deryn Lhopri had told me to seek out the killer whose actions had placed me in this solitary confinement under the pretense that I had been taken away to prison for judgment. I had supposed all along that I’d never be able to move about freely in the day, but now the black cassock would provide me with the ability to move about in the shadows of night—and with winter fast approaching, the nights would be very long indeed.
The combination of fear and awe I inspired in myself, along with this realization of the advantages of wearing black, served to convince me for the first time that I may actually prove successful in hunting down my wronger—and when I did so, I began to suspect I may actually be able to confront him with confidence as well.
* * *
The story continues in
THE SCION OF ABACUS
Part III
The Scion of Abacus, Part 2 Page 10