CHAPTER XV (15)- Seeking Answers
By morning, his sketches were starting to look quite a bit better. Kizu felt significantly more confident about the divination spell’s progress before he fell asleep. As per usual, he slept straight through the early morning hours. Another missed breakfast resulted in another hungry dash to his first class of the day. Thankfully, it was dark enough in the astronomy tower that nobody noticed his tardiness as he slipped in. He managed to take his seat next to Harvey without interrupting the lecture.
Professor Grove kept on speaking. Her bobbing blue light in the near pitch-black room reminded him of how she had looked last night. His thoughts once again turned to hypothesizing about the box's contents. Who would bury a box of potent enchanted items under a flowerbed like that? Would they be coming back for them, whoever they were? And what were those footsteps that had seemed to chase him to the spot?
He had no answers, and no means of finding them. For the thousandth time he cursed the fact that his divination class was scheduled for the second semester. The most useful class in the academy, and it was three months out of reach.
In Music F, the professor supplied a piano for him in the back of the class. He set Kizu up with scales to practice and then left him to address the violinists who had begun fencing with their bows. Kizu went through each tedious scale a few dozens of times before giving it up and spectating the chaos around him.
Nobody in the class seemed committed to any particular pattern of noise. They all just clashed together in a cacophony of random sound. It reminded Kizu a bit of all the noise in the basin at night. Except, this sound was far more intrusive.
When they were all dismissed, the other percussionists dragged him along with them to the bustling lunchroom. Tara complained about how her parents were already trying to get her to plan out her life after the academy. The others nodded along empathetically as they ate.
“What do you plan to do next year, Yon?” Tara asked the quiet boy that looked like a quiet man.
He shrugged. “Get a job, probably. I really wanted to join the archeology digs in the south, but my history score isn’t up to the standard required.”
“Damn, that’s a shame. Those digs sound exhilarating,” Gregor said. “Last week they uncovered a dungeon filled with statues made of solid gold. I heard they had diamonds for eyes! Slip one of those in your bag and you’d be set for life!”
“And two weeks before that,” Tara interjected. “Twenty-three people were petrified in that exact same dungeon. Four more were partially petrified and still have to lug around stone limbs. Those guys last week are lucky that the statues weren’t cursed.”
“High risk, high reward.”
“This is your last year?” Kizu asked Yon.
“Yeah.” The older boy sounded a bit glum.
“Are you worried about your music placement?”
“Nah,” Gregor answered for him. “Music is our dump class.”
“Dump class?”
“Oh, that’s right, you’re new. I keep forgetting,” Tara said, considering him. “See, there are thirteen classes at the academy,” Tara explained. “You only need to rank in the top three hundred for ten of the thirteen classes to graduate from the academy. The other three you can get dead last in, it doesn’t matter.”
“Do you get expelled if you’re unsuccessful?”
Gregor snorted. “Hardly. You just don’t graduate.”
“What sort of things could get you expelled, then?”
“Who knows. Probably something really destructive?”
Kizu watched Yon as Gregor explained. Nothing. Yon appeared completely disinterested in the subject. If the fifth year knew anything about a mysterious expulsion from a few years back, he didn’t show any sign of it.
Grabbing a honey bun, Kizu stood up and excused himself. He munched on the pastry as he wandered the halls towards the Elemental F courtyard. Ione was already there, hands laced behind her head, sleeping in the sun beside the little creek. Besides her, the courtyard was still empty. He followed her example and found himself a nice patch of grass under the sun.
After the rest of the class had trickled into the courtyard, their fowl professor waddled up to address them. He clucked a few orders and sent them back to their same positions from the other day. The sapient turkey seemed significantly more on edge today, though. He didn’t even spare Ione a glance.
Kizu was proud of his result when he managed to make the water steam around his fingers, but Professor Oasaji appeared unimpressed. He simply instructed him to work on freezing it next.
Trying to freeze the water felt like starting back on the first steps of making it steam. He found himself doubling back and undoing everything he’d previously focused on before pushing forward again. By the end of class, though, he’d managed to get a bit of frost built up from the droplets on his hands. It was a start, at least. As he left, he turned the frost to steam, warming up his fingers.
Again, after class he returned to the nook he’d found previously to work on studying. Just as the previous day, other students continuously poked their heads in, looking for a quiet place. Eventually, it became such a consistent interruption that he created an illusionary door in front of the nook with the words dangerous do not enter branded into the wood. For good measure, he created a small trail of blood trickling from under the door. Nobody bothered him again.
That out of the way, Kizu refocused on practicing the divination patterns. Whenever he needed a change of pace, he worked on antimagic shields. He practiced condensing and stretching them out. He also tested how far he could send the shield away from him before it winked out. Only about two meters, and it felt significantly weaker after moving one meter away. He remembered what Arclight said about being capable of covering the entire academy in a thin shield. She must be an absolute monster.
After a brief break for dinner, he brought some fruit to his room and picked up Mort. The owl monkey perched on Kizu’s shoulder as he exited the dormitory. They narrowly managed to avoid detection by a group of loud third years by the fireplace. Kizu let out a sigh of relief once they exited the painting into the academy’s hallways.
This time when he returned to his nook, he found it occupied. His cheeks burned as he hurried away from the two students. He’d need to find a new spot. One that was less… popular. Wandering around the academy halls, he eventually found himself at the foot of a familiar spiral staircase. After giving it a bit of thought, he recognized them as the steps that led down to the molten caverns where blood samples were disposed of. That gave him an idea. He descended the spiral stairs, but at the very bottom, he turned back around. Sure enough, behind the stairs there was the little nook where he’d changed clothes before. The lighting was obscured by the steps and very dim, but his bond with Mort meant he didn’t need much light to get by. In fact, the darkness made it even more appealing because that meant fewer people would want to go there.
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He sat down on the dusty stone floor and opened up his book. After a dozen more sketches, he decided to attempt the divination. The book said locating someone worked better if you had an object belonging to the person in question. Hair could also work well. The absolute best option would be to use the target’s actual blood as a conduit, but Kizu had none of that from his sister. He didn’t even have a memento. However, if he performed the rite correctly, he should still be able to get at least an impression of where she was.
Taking out a piece of chalk he had filched from the enchanting lecture hall, he drew carefully on the stone floor. The real thing was larger than his practice sketches, and so the proportions were skewed a fair bit by the time he was finished. Still, the bones of it were there. He set a hand on the edge of the pattern and channeled into it like the crone had taught him.
He waited.
He could feel his energy draining out of him so he knew it must be working at least to some degree. Just when he was about to give up, he felt it. A tug, pulling him slightly downward and to the left.
“Did you feel that!?” he asked Mort. “She’s out there. My sister is alive!”
Jubilantly, he and Mort grinned at one another.
“Now we just need to get our hands on something of hers. That should help us get a better impression of where she’s at.” He paused for a second. “You ready to check out the villa?”
Mort hummed.
“Okay, let’s go pay Finn a surprise visit.”
He didn’t bother wiping up the chalk from the stone. If the dust was any indication, nobody else had gone behind these stairs in decades. Maybe even since their construction. It was his spot now.
They encountered their first obstacle at the academy’s gates. They were locked up tight. He saw a James golem standing watch nearby. Professor Grove had told him the previous night that students weren’t supposed to be out late, so he decided against approaching the golem directly and asking to leave. Better to ask for forgiveness than permission in this situation. Or, better yet, avoid detection and questions altogether.
Scaling the wall proved more difficult than he’d expected. Unlike a tree or a natural rock wall, the smooth masonry lacked any real hand or footholds. In fact, as he first started to climb, he soon began to slip back down the wall, as if it was coated in fish oil. His only validation was the fact that Mort couldn’t seem to scale it any more efficiently than him. The monkey looked exceptionally irritated as he continued to throw himself at the wall in his attempts to scramble up, only to slide right back down to the dirt.
He paced along the wall’s perimeter, looking for something he might be able to prop up against it like a ladder. The best thing he found was a rain barrel. He pushed it up against the wall, but even climbing up on top of it, he was still several meters short of the top.
“I could throw you,” Kizu suggested to Mort. “Then you could tie a rope up top for me to climb.”
Mort did not look amused. Instead, Mort used Kizu’s head as a springboard to leap onto the wall, only to slip right back down once again. Not that it would have mattered if he’d gotten up - Kizu didn’t have rope anyway.
Standing on the barrel and staring up at the wall, Kizu started to believe that maybe he’d just have to go down to the villa in the morning. He supposed it wasn't really urgent. But, on a whim, he decided to go through his shoulder pack first, hoping to find something there that might help him.
In it, he found the small clay cup he had been using for elemental practice the previous day. He turned it over in his hands, an idea taking root.
Kizu hopped off the barrel and pried it open. Sure enough, it was full of rainwater. He scooped it into the cup, then pressed the cup against the wall. He channeled into it, attempting to change the temperature. There were a lot of inconvenient factors that made it extremely unlikely to work. First, he had never actually been more successful than a few icy flakes when in class earlier. Second, he couldn’t physically touch the water while he pressed the cup against the wall. And third, he’d need to work fast enough that the hand holds stayed in place.
But still, he tried. He focused entirely on it. And when he removed it from the wall, the water splashed down to the dirt. At the very least though, Kizu did notice a speck of frost caked on the edge of the wall. A start.
Mort purred with amusement.
“I’d like to see you do better,” Kizu said to the monkey.
He tried again. Not with any more strategy, but with more fervor. He felt his bond with Mort tighten. The awareness between the two of them heightened and his vision even doubled for a moment. Kizu blinked rapidly, clearing his sight. The owl monkey smiled up at him. Then he crawled across Kizu’s arm and pressed his tiny hand against the cup as well.
When Kizu tried to remove the cup this time, it remained in place. He put a foot to the wall and yanked on the cup. When it slid off, a small block of ice remained stuck to the wall.
“What did you do?” Kizu asked his familiar quizzically.
Mort just cocked his head and hummed.
Kizu grabbed a hold of the small ice pillar with both hands to hoist himself up.
It snapped.
Tumbling backwards, Kizu’s head slammed into the ground. It took him a minute for the world to stop heaving and shifting around him. Once he regained his bearings, he glared at the remains of his foothold, shattered across the ground. Then he noticed that not everything had broken off the wall. About two centimeters of ice still protruded. This wasn’t going to work. But going along that same route, a new idea occurred to him.
He gathered up a small pile of flat stones. Then he enchanted each of them in turn. It was the same enchantment he’d used on his first day of Enchanting C. This would keep the object stuck to whatever he pressed it against.
It took him some time, but he managed to create a ladder of handholds all the way up the stone wall. Once on top, he looked down and appreciated his handiwork. The stones dotted the wallside in an off-kilted pattern. They weren’t permanent and he doubted they would stay in place for more than an hour before the enchantment wore off. Soon, the only evidence of his escapade remaining would be a small pile of stones.
The tips of his fingers ached fiercely from the climb, but he’d made it. He swung his legs to the other side and hopped down, breaking his fall with a roll.
After that, they encountered no further obstacles as they made their way into town. It was eerily quiet in comparison to the hustle and bustle of the previous weekend. Cemeteries had more life in them. But Kizu didn’t mind. It just made his stroll more peaceful. The moonlight let him see perfectly.
He recalled that, as a child, Anna had never let him out at night before. The town seemed different, basked in starlight. Even as he approached his family’s villa, it felt subtly off. Like a twisted sense of deja vu.
When he finally arrived at his family’s villa, he tried opening the front door. Locked, of course. He looked over the building, mapping it out mentally. If he remembered correctly, his parents’ bedroom was on the left side of the building. He and Anna had slept in the next room over, back then. Though Anna would often slip away at night and sleep in the loft above the living room.
Mort leapt into action. He scrambled up the tree beside the house and slipped into a little ventilation hole on the roof. A moment later, the door clicked open and Kizu stepped inside.
As his foot touched the floor, a BOOM of noise followed simultaneously by a jolt of blue lightning blasted him backwards, sending him sprawling into the street. Black spots obscured his vision, and a sharp ringing overwhelmed his hearing. His brain felt like it was dancing in his skull.
It all happened so quickly that Kizu struggled to process everything as he lay there on the cobblestone. His consciousness kept fading in and out, blurring time for him.
He was dimly aware of lights turning on in buildings up and down the street. He tried to sit up but promptly collapsed again. People crowded around him. He tried to wave them away, but his arms felt like jelly.
Something metallic cinched itself around his left wrist. Then the right one, too. Try as he might to get his bearings, his vision kept fading.
Kizu blacked out.