At lunch in the Magisterium Commissary, Mei told Fran what she’d worn to last night’s dinner.

Fran took it well. “That knave!”

Mei shrugged. “It is not an issue.”

“Not an issue?” Fran got to her feet. “Not an issue! I spent hours searching for the perfect pattern, the perfect dressmaker, and the perfect fabric, and, after I’ve done all that and had the perfect dress made for you, that reprobate pawns it off like it was a cheap knockoff for frontier farmers.”

“Don’t forget,” Maggie leaned back in her chair, “that he did that without Mei’s permission.” She frowned at Mei. “Is that normal?”

“He looks out for me.” Mei’s hands curled under the table. “It is not an issue.”

Fran sat back down and leaned over. “Mei. Darling.” She took Mei’s hand. “It is an issue, a big one. Your brother has no right to just trample over you like that. Do you still want the dress?”

Mei, not trusting herself to speak, nodded.

Fran patted her hand. “Then we’ll find it and you’ll wear it for the Autumn Session.”

Maggie crossed her arms. “And if Huan pawns it again?”

“What was it you used to say? ‘Good timing presents good opportunities?’” Fran smiled a wolf’s grin. “He won’t have the chance.” She clapped her hands. “Now that that’s settled, let’s talk Session. I heard that Her Majesty plans to make a big announcement.”

“She’s always planning something.” Maggie’s concern still leaked out in nonchalant glances at Mei. “Remember last year? When she announced that that big tax reform was coming this year?”

“She announced it?” asked Mei, glad they’d moved on from her brother. “Why did she announce it?”

“Because we merchants require some warning before the Throne roots around in our coffers,” replied Fran.

“And we nobles like to think our opinions have been considered,” said Maggie.

Fran snorted. “As if you lot care. None of you had to suddenly complete a full audit in just three months. After weeks of soliciting our captains for their books, my mother threatened to move our business to Vanuria. Aunt Livia just barely talked her out of it.”

“Oh?” Maggie rested her chin on her hands. “Didn’t your family gain like eight percent profit in the end?”

“Seven and three eighths percent after expenses and time lost,” corrected Fran, “but only because we Lucchesis keep excellent books. The Giordanos barely came out even, and the diVidas had to reorganize to make up for their losses.” She sighed. “At least the Queen got what she wanted: complete knowledge of every merchant guild’s finances.”

“What do you think she’ll announce, Mei?” asked Maggie.

Mei poked at her meal, still feeling full from breakfast. Maybe she shouldn’t have eaten so many of those delicious wraps.

“Mei?”

Mei blinked and looked up at her friends, who were both waiting for an answer. When she managed to summon up the question in her memory, only one thing came to mind. “The murder?”

Maggie’s eyes widened. “Murder? What murder?”

“A windsong was killed last night. I examined his body.” Mei walked her friends through the case, up to and including Dwayne’s interest in it. “I’ll talk to Charlie about it when I get the chance.”

“Charlie?” asked Maggie.

“The scrytive.”

Fran’s hand kneaded her chest. “Who’d kill a windsong messenger?”

“Didn’t it used to happen all the time down in Adhua?” Maggie speared a vegetable with her fork. “Maybe it’s mercantile espionage?”

Fran froze. “If it is, then Her Majesty and the Magisterium must put a stop to it. With recent developments in the Ilyon Sea, we merchants need all the mages we can get.” She shuddered. “Maybe it’s connected to all those recent burglaries.”

Maggie tilted her head to the side. “Burglaries?”

Mei answered before Fran could. “Someone is using magic to steal magic stuff.”

“What stuff?” asked Fran.

“What kind of magic?” asked Maggie.

Mei shrugged. “Family birthright stuff and the kind of magic that lets someone go through a hole this size.” She pointed at her palm.

Maggie glanced at Fran. “That’s impossible.”

“And a very convoluted way to get at family secrets.” Fran picked up her glass of water. “Although it would be worth it to learn something on par with Lady Pol’s lightning.”

“The magic to shrink oneself is more valuable than even that, at least if it’s Qe magic…” Maggie’s eyes widened. “Oh, it has to be Vanurian.”

Mei leaned in. “Why do you say that?”

“Because whenever we hear of an impossible magic, it’s usually Vanurian.” Fran took another sip. “My sister, she commands one of our ships, recently heard a rumor that a Vanurian count had suborned a powerful foreign mage and forced her to work dark magic. Total nonsense of course, but we mages do love intrigue.”

Mei and Maggie gave each other a look. Considering what had happened down in Walton, that didn’t sound like nonsense.

“You’re doing it again,” said Fran.

Mei frowned. “Doing what?”

“That ‘We’ve seen things’ look.” Fran sighed. “Just because you two have gone on exciting adventures together doesn’t mean you can leave me out of the conversation. It’s rude.”

“Oh?” Maggie raised an eyebrow. “Would you have joined us on said adventures?”

“No, of course not,” Fran admitted, “but it’s still galling when you two do that.” She smiled at Mei. “I apologize. I’m still getting used to being one of Maggie’s friends, instead of her only friend.”

“I have other friends,” huffed Maggie.

“Who aside from Mei, Dwayne and myself?”

“Saundra.”

Fran flushed. “And her, of course, but no one else, just ex-lovers who refuse to speak to you ever again.” Leaving Maggie flustered, Fran turned to Mei. “Back to the Autumn Session. Mei, what are your plans for it?”

“Escorting Dwayne to the Privy Council,” answered Mei. He’d told her about it last week.

“And afterward?”

Mei thought about it. “Probably hanging out alone.” Since Huan hated official functions.

Maggie’s eyes flashed. “Oh, is that so?” She turned to her roommate. “Fran, do you have an escort for the Autumn Session?”

“As it happens, I don’t, Mag.” Fran grinned. “Mei, darling.” She fluttered her eyelashes. “Will you escort me to the Autumn Session?”

“What?” Mei shot up in her seat. Fran was into girls, but Mei had assumed she was exempt. “I…uh…”

“Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry.” Fran guided Mei back into her seat. “I just want you to hang out with me. Nothing more and nothing to it.”

Mei watched Fran. “Really?”

“Really.”

Maggie leaned in. “We know where the good food is going to be.”

Mei smiled. “What about you?”

Magdala winced. “Before the actual Session, I’ll have to do some mingling, but you and Fran will be sitting with me afterwards.”

Mei drew her eyebrows together. “Do you have to?”

“We’ll stop by and give her as much support as we can stand.” Fran winked at Mei. “I can’t promise we won’t have our own ‘We’ve seen things’ looks by the time we do though. Oh, we should practice!” She turned away. “How’s…this?” She turned back to Mei and Maggie, one eyebrow raised. “Wasn’t that… amazing?”

Mei giggled. “We don’t do that.”

“Obviously not. We have to have our own unique look or else it wouldn’t be fair. Now you.”

“Okay.” Mei turned away, feeling silly and loving it. She turned back, raised her chin, and smirked. “That was amazing, right?”

Fran giggled. “Perfect.”

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

Maggie struggled to keep a straight face. “You’re spending too much time around her. Keep it up, and you’ll be fighting off lovers with a stick.”

Hopefully not. Mei shook her head. “Then I won’t do it with anyone other than you two. And maybe Dwayne.”

Maggie’s eyes widened. “W-why Dwayne?”

Mei frowned. “Because he needs to laugh too.”

“Don’t bother explaining.” Fran hid a smile in her glass. “Mag should figure out her own ‘special look’ for him.”

“They don’t have one already?” Mei asked. “She’s known him longer.”

Maggie’s face was bright red. “You two are incorrigible.”

Fran thumped the table. “How dare you impugn Mei? She’s pure and honest.”

“Yes, I am.” Mei kept her expression still. “After all, I do not know why Maggie can’t keep her eyes off Dwayne when he takes off his shirt.”

Maggie mock-glared at her. “You said you wouldn’t tell.”

Mei grinned back. “I said I wouldn’t tell him.”

“See,” Fran was giggling, “she’s honest.”

As the three of them giggled, Mei caught sight of a black and blue uniform skulking in the eastern arcade. She jumped to her feet. “I should be getting back to my post.”

“What, really?” asked Maggie. “We still need to figure out how to get your dress back.”

“We’ll use the most flexible material known to humankind.” Fran rubbed her fingers together. “Money. Will we see you tomorrow, Mei?”

“Maybe.” Mei smiled. “But I will see you in two days.”

With a bow, she excused herself, and left Fran to gently scold Maggie about her treatment of Colin. She crossed the tiled floor and rounded a pillar in whose shadow Huan lurked.

Seeing her, he flashed a smile. “You looked like you were having fun in there.”

Mei’s jaw stiffened. “What are you doing here? Why aren’t you at Sanford?”

“I needed to talk to you.” He gestured down the corridor. “Walk with me?”

Sanford was a long way to come from just to talk. “Okay.”

“Excellent.” Huan started down the corridor.

Mei followed. “What did you want to talk about?”

“You know I’ve never been here? Rodion and Dwayne haven’t let me out of their sight in days.”

“Sanford needs a lot of work.”

“No, that’s not it. I think it’s because they don’t trust me.” Huan’s expression darkened. “I know that steward doesn’t. He only let me come here because I said I was meeting you for lunch. You’ll say that you did, right?” He gave Mei his widest smile. “You’ll back me up?”

“Yeah, sure.” Mei’s chest felt tight. “Is that all?”

“No, I need you to do something for me.” Huan led her out of the Commissary and into a wooded square, where students rushed to class under branches weighted with rain and dew. Once they were alone, he turned to her. “Meet me at the Slipped Finger tonight. It’s a tavern in the Bilges.”

Mei resisted the urge to step back from him. “Are we celebrating something?”

Huan paused. “Yeah, sure. The area is a little rough and tumble, so you do that thing you do when you wake me up in the morning. It’ll keep people from bothering us.”

Mei glanced at Huan’s uniform. “Is that why you were gone this morning?”

“Always with the…” Huan swallowed a snarl and grinned. “I just went to Sanford early to make time for this. Trust me.”

Even though Rodion hadn’t mentioned Huan coming to the estate and, when she’d left, his uniform had still been on the floor, Mei said, “Okay.”

“You’re a life saver, little sister.” Huan bowed. “See you tonight.”

After a jaunty salute, he turned and jogged away.

When he’d disappeared around the corner, Mei sighed. If she was going to the tavern, she’d have to make up her study time elsewhere. It was a pain, but her brother needed her. Maybe Dwayne would let her study on duty.

An apology for last night would have been nice though.

***

When he searched the Tower’s second floor for any texts detailing Emittance Theory, Dwayne found nothing but mere speculation. While the nature of magic was a topic the Golden Age mages had been fond of, they hadn’t actually created any coherent theories on how magic worked. From what Dwayne could tell, the term “Emittance Theory” had been specifically coined to rebut Resonance theory, a reality that begged the question: who’d coined the term?

Abandoning the search, Dwayne turned to Lord Kalan’s old correspondence, he’d brought copies from Walton, for any hints. He’d expected the term’s first use to be either Lady Pol or Professor Corns, they had both defended Emittance Theory in public and in private, but the first real use of the phrase “Emittance Theory” that he could find lay in an eight year old water-damaged letter from a “C. Rionnutte”.

He didn’t know who Rionnutte was, but eight years ago rang a bell. Once, Magdala had mentioned that Lord Kalan had arrived at a Consortium eight years ago on the arm of a Wesen mage. That could have been the same woman Thadden had mentioned at dinner, and the Ri mage who’d given Lord Kalan Na’cch, Chika. The first letter-

A reverberating bong filled Dwayne’s ears, shattering his chain of thought. “Argh!”

Dwayne covered his ears and had just risen from his desk when the wave of heat hit. He collapsed back onto the desk, and for an eternity, sound and heat hammered him.

Then as suddenly as it came, it was gone.

Dwayne hauled himself upright. “What was-”

Again, the sonic and heat assaults slammed into him, but he endured it this time and stayed on his feet. If this was an attack, he hadn’t seen anything like it, hadn’t even heard stories about it, and, if it was an attack, what, or who, was the target?

When the latest assault ceased, Dwayne dove for the staircase and had made it halfway down to the first floor before another hit. Sweaty and deaf, he pushed through it, reached the first floor, and stumbled through the foyer and out of the Tower.

When he collapsed on the ground next to her, Mei looked up from her studies. “What’s wrong?”

“You didn’t hear that?”

Dwayne tensed, ready for another assault, but the air felt cool and the forest was rustling softly in the wind. He frowned.

Mei looked around. “Hear what?”

Dwayne got to his feet. “You didn’t hear ringing?”

She shook her head.

“That’s… strange.” He looked back at the foyer, where the white shrouds fluttered in the breeze the open door let in. “Let me check something.”

He walked up to the door, took a deep breath, and then stepped back into the Tower. Again, sound and heat hit him like a punch in the gut.

Bracing himself against the door, he shouted back at Mei, “You can’t hear or feel that?”

Mei put down her writing pad and stepped into the foyer, just as another assault hit. She frowned and said something.

“What?” shouted Dwayne.

“I hear something!” Mei shouted back, ironically just as the assault stopped. She put her hands up to her ears. “It’s gone now. But it was faint.”

Dwayne opened his mouth to correct her, but then recalled that she never used hyperbole, not with him, and so he nodded instead. “Lead the way, please.”

“Wait.”

Mei turned this way and that and then towards the staircase. Without a word, she walked towards it. Dwayne followed her, gritting his teeth through the periodic assaults. It was clear that they were having no effect on Mei, who hadn’t sweat a drop. That felt unfair, but at least she could track the noise where Dwayne couldn’t. They made their way downstairs, and it immediately became clear what was causing the assaults.

At the back of the room, the sunken pedestal had risen to a standing height, lifting up a book of crawling green and shimmering purple light that was rippling into being. The book pulsed, letting out a bone-shaking bong sound, a fresh wave of summer heat, and a single softly spoken command: “Come.”

This had to stop, and so, hoping that this wasn’t a massive mistake, Dwayne ran past a dumbfounded Mei, charged the pedestal, and did the first thing he thought of. He slapped his hand onto the book, and it snapped into being with a blast of frosty air.

“This Tome,” a dry, fluttering voice whispered in Dwayne’s ear, “this Terminal to The Queen’s Own Collection of Magical Tomes and Scrolls, acknowledges you as Most Senior Adjunct Librarian and releases its License Key to you.”

The book, its cover now merely purple and green leather, shook, and a dark quick silver substance oozed out of it and hardened into a metal plate covered in glistening foreign script, arcane symbols, and intriguing pictographs. Dwayne peeled the plate free. It was warm, like a mug that had been placed close to an open flame. He peered closely at the script and symbols, which faded in and out of the metal as if they were flakes of kota leaves in hot water. This was amazing magic, on par with the wonders of Yumma.

Before he could marvel further, the Tome flopped open.

“It’s blank.” Ignoring Dwayne’s startlement, Mei flipped through the Tome’s pages. “Nothing is written here.”

Dwayne slid the Key into his pocket. “Strange.” He flipped through the book’s soft white pages himself. “That was a lot of fanfare for- whoa!” Spiky script scrawled itself across the pages. “It’s Souran.”

Mei raised an eyebrow. “What is?”

“You can’t see anything?” Dwayne asked.

Mei shook her head.

“Huh.” Mei had been nearly insensate to the earlier assaults too. “Maybe you have to be a mage. Or a Librarian.” He ran his fingers over the words. “It says it’s an access point? For the Library. This is… This is an index. It has entries for history, magical artifacts, even spells that past Royal Sorcerers have created!” He turned more pages and found more index. “How do I access something specific, like past experiments?”

The pages cleared, and new words scrawled themselves on the page. Speak and it will appear.

Dwayne’s heart pounded. “Oh, damn.”

“I should go back outside.” Mei had already made her way to the staircase. “Let me know if you need anything.”

“Oh, sure.” Dwayne smiled at her. “Thanks for your help.”

“You’re welcome.”

As Mei ascended the staircase, Dwayne turned back to the book. “Past experiments.”

The pages cleared and a new index with titles and dates appeared. Dwayne reviewed it. Most of the experiments had tested ideas currently listed as fact in Magisterium textbooks, but a few had been labeled “Forbidden Crafts.” With a word, Dwayne accessed their abstracts and found mostly normal, albeit modified for wider area of effect, offensive Qe spells. Interesting to someone like Magdala, but not worth the trouble the Tome had put Dwayne through.

He was about to close the book and return upstairs when one title caught his eye: “Seizure of Thaumaturgical Essence in Azade.” He summoned the full details. Apparently forty years ago, Henrietta Nithercott, the Royal Sorcerer at the time, had tried to “catch” magic in solid azade spheres using a simple methodology: she’d cast a spell at a sphere to charge it and then have a lay person use the charged sphere to cast the original spell. The dozens of result tables made it clear that for five minutes anyone, lay or mage, could use a charged sphere to cast a spell, although after that time, the spheres would lose both their charge and their ability to be charged, a fact that had disappointed Nithercott.

But Dwayne was ecstatic. This process produced a result similar to Huan’s old mask, which had held magic for an extended period of time, and it was very similar to how he and Magdala created spell shunts and vials. There definitely was something to the spheres’ inability to hold, and hold repeatedly, magical charge, but it was clear that Nithercott had been relying on a variation of Emittance Theory and had ignored the fact that lay people could cast magic with this technique.

This called for more experimentation.

“How do I put in experiments?”

The Tome’s pages cleared, and a step by step list appeared. Dwayne grinned. All he had to do was summon an empty page and write on it. First though, he needed more azade.

Leaving the Tome open, Dwayne rushed out of the lab and up to Mei, who’d resumed her studies. “Mei, I need you to get something for me.”

The hunter’s eyes stayed on her notebook, her pencil unmoving.

“Mei?” Dwayne crouched. “Is something wrong?”

Mei blinked and then shook her head. “No, I’m fine.” She looked him over. “What is it?”

“Are you sure?” Dwayne sat down next to her. “Is this about the murder investigation?”

Mei tensed then nodded. “Yes. I don’t know where to start.”

Ah, it wasn’t about the investigation, but she obviously didn’t want to talk about whatever she’d been really thinking about. “It’s like a hunt, right? But you’re finding the hunter instead of the prey.”

“Yes,” Mei blinked. “Like tracking down a grimbear after it’s eaten.”

If she said so. “Right like that. Where would you start?”

“Spoor. Footprints.” Mei bit her lip, “but I don’t know the area.” Her eyes lit up. “I should explore. Can I?”

Hoping that would stave off her dark mood, Dwayne nodded. “Yeah, go ahead. You can explore tomorrow too if you need to. Before you go though, can you please go back to Sanford and pick up some azade for me? You can ask Rodion where it is.”

“Okay.”

“Thank you.”

Mei got to her feet, paused. “You don’t need me to guard you tonight?”

“No, I’m good.” Dwayne stood up. “Just remember to write a report on what you find. I’ll probably need it for the paperwork I’ll have to file, and, ah,” he gave her a sheepish smile, “I haven’t exactly taken the chance to explore the city either.”

“I’ll remember. It will be good practice.” Mei began to jog down the drive. “I’ll bring you the azade too.”

“Thanks again.”

As Mei disappeared down the drive, Dwayne returned downstairs, his mind already designing an experiment to test one of the findings in the old experiment. What happened if he switched the magical components in the spell vials? It was a fascinating question, so much so that the small question of why the License Key had been granted to Dwayne now, and not weeks ago when he’d first arrived, slipped from his mind.