by J. B. Markes
“If it’s any consolation, you handled the Trials much better than I did. I couldn’t stop hiccupping during mine. I sounded like a frog the whole time.”
She pushed me and gave a weak laugh, then took me in her arms and wouldn’t let go for almost a minute. I hugged her and tried not to cry. It was nice to have my old friend back again. When she finally pushed back from me, her clear eyes were misty, and I couldn’t hold back my own tears any longer.
“You’re going to be a great wizard someday, Regina,” I said. “I hope I can help you get there.”
“We’ll help each other,” she said. “Promise?”
She pulled out her wand and crossed it over her heart, so I did the same. It was a silly gesture, but Regina always did care about the little things. Her kind words reminded me of my delicate condition, and I cried all the more in spite of myself. It was only a matter of time before I was dismissed from the Academy Magus forever. There wasn’t much need for wizards who couldn’t cast magic. Regina misread the situation and embraced me again, rubbing my back gently.
“Miss Ives.” Master Virgil had impeccable timing. “I’m so glad you and Miss Abernathy have had a chance to make up.”
“I’m not sure what you mean, Master,” Regina said quickly. “It’s just been a difficult week for all of us.”
“It has,” Master Virgil said, crossing his huge arms. “I hope the initiates are prepared for the games. They didn’t impress me the last time I came down to the training yard.”
“They’ll be ready,” Regina said.
“They’d better be. Now I need a private word with Miss Ives. Do you mind?”
“Not at all,” Regina replied, squeezing my hand one last time and heading off to chastise the orange-robes.
I turned back toward the ghostly Master Bartleby, still working feverishly at his quill and parchment. No doubt he had a lot of unfinished work to attend to. I’d never seen him up close before. He was much younger than I pictured an Archseer to be, but I could easily see where he favored his brother.
“I’ve heard some troubling rumors lately,” Master Virgil said without looking in my direction.
“About Master Bartleby’s assassination?” I asked.
“No,” he replied, jerking his head toward me as if I had challenged him to a duel. “And this isn’t the place for that discussion. You should attend to your own affairs and not speak of things you know nothing about. I’m talking about the company you’ve been keeping recently.”
“You mean Master Pitch?”
“That crazy old man isn’t a master, and he never will be. He’s dangerous. What is the nature of your relationship?”
“It’s hard to say,” I replied. “It all seems so random with him. He requested my help with—a project.”
“You shouldn’t even be speaking to him,” Master Virgil said. “It’s not appropriate for someone of your position.”
“What do you mean?” I asked with a sigh. “What exactly is my position?”
“Don’t play stupid. You’re my apprentice. It reflects poorly on me for you to be spending time with—a practitioner of the dark arts.” He shook his head to cut off my protest. “I’m looking out for you. He doesn’t belong here. He’s not one of us.”
“Master Virgil, you know I respect you and I am so grateful for everything you’ve done for me—”
“Then act like it,” he said, walking away to greet Master Warren, the headmaster of our discipline, without so much as a backward glance at me.
Disgusted, I moved away from the group and turned my attention back to the procession seated on the central dais. The third chair was empty now. I had missed Miss Sinclair’s eulogy. An old man in white master’s robes was now delivering a eulogy on the uncertainties of life and death.
“Ironic, don’t you think?” Gustobald had found me. “That’s Master Orden, the headmaster of the divination school, giving a speech on his own ignorance.” The necromancer had donned his best dress robes for the occasion, but he still carried the same old pipe. “How can we know when our time is done?” he asked in a surprisingly mocking banal tone.
I searched for my master, but he was still busy pandering to our headmaster, so I moved out of Master Virgil’s line of sight and showed Gustobald my least nervous smile. “We should be more careful, Gustobald,” I said. “There are some people who don’t like seeing us together.”
“Is that what Virgil was lecturing you about?”
I nodded, for fear the very mention of his name would draw his attention.
“That man missed his calling,” he continued. “He belongs in the Tower of the Mind, where he could befuddle the masses to his will and avoid the disappointments of free interaction altogether.”
“He knows about Master Bartleby’s assassination,” I said. “He wasn’t the least bit surprised.”
“It’s no secret anymore,” Gustobald said. “That’s part of their strategy.”
“What? Whose strategy?”
“The killer’s, of course. He’s hornswoggling everyone into thinking it was an assassination. Or she, of course.” He squinted at me suspiciously.
“How can you be so certain it’s not?” I asked.
“Assassinated? The greatest diviner of our time, who made it his duty to eradicate the Black Hand, waylaid and murdered by the very organization he is keeping tabs on? Bevlin was a great many things; incompetent wasn’t one of them.”
“I’m not really sure how divination works,” I said.
“Nor am I. I’ve never had much use for it beyond the usual. But I’ll bet my pipe Master Bartleby was killed by someone close to him. Someone it never would have crossed his mind to scrutinize.”
“Miss Sinclair?” I asked.
“His only apprentice. His appointed heir.” He puffed his pipe twice. “Very possible. Then there’s the brother Bartleby.”
“He seems quite the gentleman,” I said. “And he did come to you for help.”
“What better cover? He certainly felt slighted about being removed from his brother’s last will. Alas, it’s all conjecture now. A bootless errand, if ever there was.”
“What do you mean?”
“Our investigation has ended before it even began. I can’t help those who won’t help themselves.”
“What are you talking about? Master Bartleby can’t help himself anymore.”
“Bah! We’re late to the game. Most of the evidence is gone and the people who should be helping us aren’t.”
“That’s all the more reason to find out who’s responsible. A man is dead for no reason. If Mr. Bartleby is right—” I lowered my voice at the thought. “If the Archseer was murdered, we can’t let them get away with it.”
“On the contrary, girl.” Gustobald emptied his ashes onto the ground and blew out his pipe. “That’s most likely the only thing we can do.”
I felt another stomachache coming on and hoped I wouldn’t blackout in the middle of the service. I looked around the courtyard and I all could see were the most powerful men and women in the entire world, content in their mourning. One of their own had suffered a brutal death, and no one was doing anything about it.
“He was a friend, you know.” Gustobald was far away, perhaps talking to himself. “I really meant what I said about him. He was a great man. He made more contributions to the Academy Magus than any Archseer in remembered history. Without him, I wouldn’t even be here today.”
“You never told me he saved your life,” I said.
“No, not—I mean here. On academy grounds. I wouldn’t be here today. It was his decision to bring the necromancy school back into the fold, meager as it may be. When I heard the Academy Magus had instated such a progressive visionary as archseer, I jumped at the chance to offer my services. Truth be told, it still shocks me that he accepted in the first place. Of course, we were acquainted from my days in the Tower of the Heart.”
“You were a transmuter here?”
“An expert one, at that.”
/>
“Forgive me for saying so, but you don’t seem old enough to be an expert at two separate schools of magic. I mean you look old, but not that old.”
He raised his brow and gave me a cautionary squint with one eye. “Necromancy shares many similarities with transmutation, despite what those pompous panjandrums would have you believe.”
I might have asked about Gretel, the only other transmuter I had ever spoken to, but it was obvious Gustobald was already in low spirits, and it’s against my nature to curse a man when he is down. No doubt he already felt the sting of being ignored by her all morning.
“It’s amazing to see how far the academy has come,” I said. “I wonder where it will be in a hundred years.”
“We shall see,” he said with a wink. “Well, some of us, anyway.”
“Murderers!” The shout broke through my melancholy and brought the latest speaker’s eulogy to an abrupt halt. It was unthinkable that anyone would disrupt the hallowed proceedings, but there was Deblin Bartleby, struggling against two large men pulling his arms. The false image of his brother at the table—still scribing, despite the uproar—gave him a start, but he quickly recovered and broke free from his captors, sweeping a finger across the entire gathering and nearly falling over in the process. He was obviously far into his cup. “Murderers, all! You all let this happen! You let it happen and then covered it up! My brother’s blood is on your hands! A curse upon you, a curse upon you all!”
One of the mind mages from the enchanting school muted the intruder with a wave of his hand, but Mr. Bartleby continued to shout as if he didn’t notice the loss of his own voice. A sentinel stepped up to aid the men in escorting Mr. Bartleby from the ceremony, kicking and silently screaming all the while.
“Could it be true?” I whispered, afraid I might get silenced as well.
“It’s how it’s always been between magic-folk and non,” Gustobald replied. “One big unspoken conspiracy. In this case, he just happens to be right.”
“Mr. Bartleby has no one to speak on his behalf,” I said.
“It’s true.” Gustobald nodded. “Him or his brother.”
“No one to turn to in his time of need. They banish him because he’s not one of them.”
“Indeed.”
“They think he will disappear and they won’t have to—”
“All right, girl!” Gustobald retrieved his folded hat from his belt and tugged it firmly onto his head. “I get it. He came to us; we’ll help him. But don’t go running off on me when things get difficult. And they will get difficult. You mark my words.”
I glanced back to Master Virgil, who had spotted me sometime during the commotion. He had the look of a man ready to spellsling. Truth be told, I took it as a challenge. If I had only a month left to live—or a week, or a day—I was ready to live it on my own terms. Nevertheless, I suggested to Gustobald that it might be a good time to leave.
“Agreed,” he said. “I’d like to speak with the brother Bartleby one last time before tonight, if possible, if only to settle his nerve.”
“What happens tonight?” I asked.
“Conspiracy or no, they wouldn’t let us see the body,” he said. “So tonight we pay a visit to the Archseer’s tomb, and make sure you bring a shovel.”
Chapter 5
“What’s with the shovel?” Gustobald asked.
“You told me to bring one,” I replied.
“I didn’t mean it literally,” he said. “Of course the Archseer won’t be put in the ground. Didn’t you see the tomb they built for him? It’s huge.”
“I saw it,” I said, flushing over the hours wasted tracking down such a crude instrument in the magic city. “I’ve just never been inside one. I don’t know what it’s like in there. And you said to bring it.”
“All right, girl. Let’s not get held up on what I did or didn’t say. There’s work to be done.” Gustobald threw back the hood of his cloak and pulled a large duffel bag from his hand-cart, then tossed it roughly into my unsuspecting arms. I gave him a disapproving glare, but it would have been lost on him in the darkness even if he had been looking in my direction.
“This bag is light,” I said.
“It’s empty, save for a prying iron and a few blocks,” he said. “We don’t have a key.”
“Won’t the door be reinforced with an arcane seal?”
“Possibly,” he said. “But we could get lucky. It’s only the first night, after all.”
Gustobald had put more thought into this than I had. It seemed he had traded out his brown cape and buckles for the black ensemble of a master, but it might just have been a trick of the waning crescent. I was still in my yellow robes, which stuck out vividly in the low light, but it mattered little, as any novice transmuter with true-sight would easily be able to spy us both in the night.
“Follow me,” he whispered. “And don’t bang that shovel around.”
“Have you done this before?” I asked, sticking the blade upright in the soft earth and staying close on his heels.
“A silly question.”
“What do you mean? Silly because you have, or silly because you haven’t?”
“No more lollygagging, now,” he said. “Who knows when the sun will be up?”
“What?”
“Just come along.”
We went around the far side of the cemetery to the point where the brambles threatened to overtake the iron fence. The headstones in the graveyard cut through the blackness beyond, the slabs a stark bone-white in the monochrome. The bars were set too close for an adult to slip through, even one as slim as Gustobald or myself. I took out the prying iron and handed it to him.
“That’s for later,” he said. “We’ll need your magic to break the fence.”
“What are you talking about? I can’t use my magic to deface academy property.” After agreeing to help untomb the most respected wizard since Lynestra the Last, the excuse was a weak one, and Gustobald treated it as such. He took the duffel from me and repacked the iron rod, stepping back a bit to give me room to work.
“Two bars should do,” he said with a sigh, measuring out a space with his fingers.
I hadn’t used my magic for anything more than a cantrip since the day of my duel with Regina. It was an unnecessary risk, with each cast taking its toll. Nevertheless, I stepped up to the fence and put a hand on its smooth surface. It wasn’t rusted at all, thanks to whatever ward had been placed over it, most likely the same day it was forged. To my untrained eye, it looked as strong as any fresh piece of metal.
I began with a simple divination to confirm that the bars had been enchanted. When the bars shimmered with very faint energy, I knew there were no higher defenses in place. This was not to say there were no alarms, but it was unlikely someone would take the time and energy to renew such a ward each and every night, only to guard a place that would reopen to the public each morning.
“Aruum.” I traced my finger over the bar junction as I whispered the word of power. The iron frosted instantly. I gave it a quick tug to test its brittleness, but it wouldn’t budge. I could scarce feel the magic in my blood, so I briefly pondered whether a sustained weak stream would be less detrimental to my condition than a short blast. Gustobald’s impatient shuffling put an end to my calculations.
“Aejuaruum.” I opened my hand and let the magic flow, flash-freezing an entire section of the fence, crossbars and all. The iron whistled briefly as the ice spread, and my soul sang along in spite of my own self-destruction. I followed up with a minor force evocation and shattered a three-foot section of caging into strips and shards.
There wasn’t as much noise as I had expected. The shards were too cold to ring out, instead falling to the ground in dull clicks, as if they were nothing more than a shower of pebbles. I felt the magic calling me, as all mages do, begging me to continue—one more cast, one more spell, one more dose of ether to my yearning body. The magic sickness was taking hold much faster than usual.
“Well do
ne, girl!” Gustobald shook my shoulder roughly, turning my brief satisfaction into swirling nausea. I doubled over and spit on the ground, trying not to black out again. Would Regina laugh if she saw me now? Would she pity me?
“Easy, Miss Ives,” Gustobald said. “Just a minor case of the collywobbles. It’ll pass. But let’s hurry before the fence repairs itself.”
Indeed, the iron of the fence was already growing to cover the hole I’d made. With each strand of iron repaired, another piece of thawing metal disappeared from the ground. Gustobald stepped through the gap and waved me on, tossing the duffel at my chest as I made my crossing. It gave me quite a start, and I gave him my most shaming stare, but he was already on route to the sepulcher. I coughed back my wooziness and trailed behind at my own comfortable pace.
I made a determined effort not to walk across anyone’s grave along the way—not all who were resting here had a tomb. It didn’t seem to occur to Gustobald that there were actual people beneath his feet. Unaccustomed as I was to death in those days—and as spell-addled as I was at the time—the graveyard at midnight shook my nerve. Expecting to see some ghoul clawing its way out of the earth at any moment, I ignored my stomachache and rushed ahead to walk side-by-side with the necromancer.
A pair of pale-white eternal flames lit the entrance of the Archseer’s tomb. Gustobald stood motionless at the door with hat in hand. Chiseled in stone, in clean bold-face letters above the portal:
TO SEE THE FUTURE, ONE MUST FIRST LOOK TOWARD IT.
“Good words,” I said, to which he only nodded. I placed a comforting hand on his arm. “Are you okay, Gustobald?”
“He was a great man,” Gustobald said. “A good friend. We won’t see his equal in our lifetime. Get the prying bar.”
I removed the prying bar from the duffel and handed it to him, but he just stepped aside and nodded toward the door. He ignored my aggravated sigh, so I jammed the iron into the door stop. To my surprise, the door swung freely with no effort whatsoever on my part.