The only class we had on the day of the party was runecrafting, in the afternoon. Five of the most advanced students were absent. Four of them were probably at whatever celebrations Magistus and Magista were having that we had mercifully been able to skip out on, and the fifth was Max. Maybe he’d decided to go to his girlfriend’s party after all? It seemed out of character to use it as an excuse to skip class if he wasn’t going.
The class was rather more relaxed than usual, missing the top tier students. So much so that halfway through the class Instructanto Animus tossed back the dregs of his no doubt heavily caffeinated drink, slammed the cup on his desk with a thud and said, “Everyone stop doing magic for a moment. You want to see something really cool?”
We did want to see something really cool. With glittering eyes, he announced, “I’m going to show you a rune you’ll never need, because only madmen use it.” He pulled out a piece of paper and very carefully began to etch out a complicated chain of tiny strokes – in ink, I noticed, not ichor. I guess he wasn’t a ‘madman’, although it was hard to credit that, looking at him. The tip of his pen was extremely fine, and he worked with great care for several minutes before thrusting the paper t the nearest student.
“Pass this around,” he said, “and take a good look.”
We passed it around. We all dutifully took a good look.
“This,” he explained as I waited for the paper to make its way toward me, “is a mirror rune. What’s the purpose of a mirror rune, you ask? Well, the theory is extremely fascinating. A line of ichor can cast the magic contained in that ichor. A well-designed channel of ichor can be replenished by magic; you can make it, and then cast your spell through it, to reuse the rune. Or check if there’s magic in something, if the spell casts.”
I found myself nodding. I’d seen Alania do this, making a rune sigil to test if there was any magic left in the Fiore’s damaged ring last semester. And she’d drawn me a sigil, once, that was supposed to light up if I could channel my spell through it. This wasn’t new to me.
“But a channel of ichor can only take so much power before the substance itself is destroyed. You can increase its stability with additives and soforth, but this reduces its power. So what do you do, if you wan to force a truly massive amount of power through a sigil? You draw it in mirror runes.”
The paper landed in front of me. Instruktanto Animus had drawn two thick, straight lines across the page, with about a millimetre of space between them, except… he hadn’t. Each ‘line’ was a complex chain of tiny interlocking runes, a repeating pattern, the runes in one line a mirror image of the other. It was careful, delicate work, the two lines close but never touching; far more precise than I’d expect any human hand of being able to produce, and certainly not the hand of the jumpy, pacing man before us.
“The secret of mirror runes is that they channel the power between the two lines, rather than down a single line drawn in ichor. This means your rune lasts a lot longer before it burns out. But it also means that you lose a massive amount of power in sheer resistance; if your spell isn’t already too powerful to put through a normal rune, there’s no reason to use mirror runes, because it’s just now going to be enough power to do anything. It’s also difficult, precise work, because you have to keep your mirrors extremely close together. One and a half millimetres is about the limit for the absolute most powerful spells, and any spell you’re likely to encounter needs half a millimetre or less. If the two sides touch at all, the rune is useless, and if they’re too far apart, the power dissipates. But if you find yourself unlucky enough to be saddled with a truly powerful spell, this is an important skill to master. Or if you craft runes for a living and want to show off your skill. Or, of course, if you become an enchanter; mirrors are very useful in enchantments. But don’t bother with that. Most of the time, enchantment is a waste of time.”
I passed the paper on and tried to look very impressed by this tidbit of information, and not like I had been hoping that the ‘really cool’ thing would involve explosions, while I got back to rune practice.
My runes were getting better. They’d never be ‘mirror rune’ good, but they weren’t embarrassing any more. I counted that as a win.
I received a message from Alania on my way back to my room, titled READ IN PRIVATE. Hmm, ominous. It was addressed to me, Kylie and Max, though, so it couldn’t be too private. Checking that I was alone in the hall, I gave it a look.
Students,
I am currently leaving the school and will be uncontactable for the immediate future. Clara got herself caught spying overseas and I need to deal with the situation. There is a very good chance that I will survive so don’t worry, but do not expect to see me for at least a few days. If you do not hear from me for two months, tell Malas Aksoy that the Faith of Fionnrath is missing. Tell NO ONE about this unless you don’t hear from me.
Best of luck with your education,
Alania Miratova.
I stared. She was talking about possibly dying on a spy rescue and ended her message with ‘best of luck with your education’? Really?
I quickened my pace.
Kylie was in our room, stretched out on her bed and reading her tablet. “Hey,” she began as I came in, “did you see the message from – ?”
“I know, right? Spying? ‘There is a very good chance I will survive’? What the hell kind of James Bond shit is this?”
“Well, if she’s right about the Faith of Fionnrath, it’s not surprising. I mean, they’re obviously keeping it a secret, so they do not want it getting out. This is… big, politically.”
“It is? What is it?”
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“Um. You might’ve heard it called Fionnrath’s Destiny?”
I shook my head.
“Kayden, I know you’re not political, but have you taken any magical history classes at Refujeyo at all?”
“I think you already know the answer to that.”
“It’s a spell. A powerful spell. As in, a poster child for the old apprenticeship and inheritance system used by mages who don’t come to Skolala Refujeyo. It’s a prophecy that’s locked to a specific bloodline, a family that helped found the town of Fionnrath and has been there ever since. It’s one of the most powerful and flexible prophecies in the world, too powerful to work properly just inside a mage; it needs a locus. You know, like the kuracar? But its locus is the town of Fionnrath, and it sees the future and advises on their fortunes, specifically. Making it a rich town and, in the magical world, politically very powerful. If Fionnrath’s Destiny is missing, that’s… not good news.”
“Does it affect us?”
“You and me? No. But all the legacy mages we know, probably. I can’t wait to hear what Max has to say about this. Where is he, anyway? Didn’t you guys just have runecrafting?”
“He wasn’t there. Probably decided to go to Magista’s party. Are we allowed to make fun of them yet, now that the party’s over?”
“I think the exact terms of the promise were that we can’t make fun of them on her birthday, so we have to wait until midnight.”
“Pity.”
“Anyway, we – ” Kylie stopped speaking and stared blankly forward, the tablet slipping out of her hands. I was able to set mine to record just in time to catch the start of the prophecy.
“Wreathed in secrets, if not lies,
Staffbreaker sneaks into his mind.
Seeking out forbidden runes
He walks, unflinching, to his doom.
He moves to the centre of truth
But trapped and blind, there’s naught to do
But wither away, unheard, unseen
Deep in the Labyrinth of Dreams.”
Kylie blinked, and came back to herself. “What did it – ?”
I played the prophecy.
“What does it mean?” I asked. “What do we do?”
“I don’t know! Get help? It’s referenced the Staffbreaker before. That’s Max.”
“Poking around and trapped somewhere,” I said, tapping at my tablet. “Somewhere dangerous, or you wouldn’t have prophesied. Where is he?”
“I don’t know! There’s so little information… is anywhere here full of secrets but not lies? The first line – ”
“Found him,” I said, showing her the school map. “Or at least his tablet. He’s… in here?”
We both looked to his bedcurtains, behind which we’d heard nothing. Dangerous dreams, huh?
Kylie knocked on his forcefield. “Max! Max, what’s going on? Wake up!” But if he was going to ‘wither away’ ‘deep in the labyrinth of dreams’, I didn’t think calling his name was going to do much to wake him. I was scrawnier than Kylie, so I slipped under his bed, pushing a thick stack of paper out of the way to crawl into his room.
When we’d first come to Refujeyo, Max had pointed out that the force fields on the beds weren’t safe, because they stopped people from providing medical attention. I’d thought he was being way too cautious. Joke was on me, I supposed.
Pushing past the paper under the bed led me into a room of… more paper. The last time I’d seen behind Max’s curtain, his little area had been very neat, but now it looked like a bomb had gone off. In fact, I’d seen Max’s area after a bomb had gone off, and this looked significantly worse.
The desk and chair he’d broken that night he’d roused me from my dream hadn’t been replaced. The chair was scrap, and the desk leaned at an unusable angle, drawers shattered. If I’d had to guess, I’d say that the desk had been broken by the sheer weight of the frankly absurd number of books now stacked in columns about the space, leaving very little room for movement. One of the stacks was almost as tall as me.
Piles of paper were littered about the room, too, covered in notes I didn’t understand at a glance. And his walls were covered, not with neatly pinned-up bits of paper, but with lines of chalk scrawled directly onto the stone, making shapes that could’ve been runes or could’ve been diagrams or could’ve been mathematical equations using symbols I’d never seen before.
On thing the room did not contain, was Max. Just his tablet, sitting on his bed.
I pulled back the curtains. “He’s not here.”
Kylie’s eyes widened, taking in the chaos behind me. “What the…?”
“No idea. I’m coming out.” I took the tablet and slid my way back out from under the bed, impatiently kicking the paper blocking my journey into the room ahead of me.
“I don’t understand this,” Kylie was muttering, pacing the room. “Why would he go anywhere and leave his tablet behind? If he was, I don’t know, abducted, or lost, or had some kind of accident, he’d have his tablet. Or it wouldn’t be here, anyway.”
“Maybe he didn’t want to be tracked?”
“Then he could turn off his location on the map!”
“Maybe,” I said, thinking of mobile phones. I didn’t know much about how they worked, but I did know that the phone had to tell the network where it was in order to make calls and connect to the internet and things like that, no matter how many privacy settings you enabled. The tablets connected to a network, too. Just because you told it not to put an icon for you on the school map, not allowing other students to find you, was no guarantee that whoever ran the network couldn’t; if I wanted to be absolutely certain I couldn’t be tracked, I’d leave the tablet behind
I was being paranoid. This was a distraction. We needed to find Max.
“We need to find Alania,” I said. “She can – ”
“She’s overseas and out of contact, remember?”
“Fuck.” Who else? The school had security, right? Should we just call the janitors?
Kylie had stopped pacing. She was eyeing the stack of papers I’d kicked out from under the bed, and in the light it was clear that it wasn’t a stack of A4 paper as I’d assumed, but a few larger pieces of butcher’s paper, folded to a stack that would fit inside one of Max’s now-broken desk drawers. And the pieces weren’t neat; it looked like he’d cut and torn them into chunks, and then crudely taped them back together at random.
I unfolded the top sheet, and wasn’t remotely surprised to see Max’s old map of the corridors. I didn’t understand a lot of Max’s mapping method, but I was familiar enough with his colour-coding to realise that this particular map, drawn in dark orange, was of corridors that I had personally paced out during our initiation semester. It was a map of my motion through the school.
And the cutting and taping wasn’t random. Max had clearly rearranged chunks of my progress into new shapes, trying to make sense of them. In several places, there was overlap, paper taped over paper where I’d walked the same pattern, some of these stacks being five or six paper fragments high. In others were swathes of blank space, missing data, which Max had filled in with faint grey pencil predictions, conscientiously marked with question marks.
He’d done it. This map, of all his attempts, was accurate, or accurate enough that it made no difference. I knew it was accurate, because I recognised what I was looking at. Not every line, every corridor, but the general shape of it.
Kylie caught my expression, and frowned. “What is it? What are we looking at?”
“This is my movement through the school last semester. The bits of it we recorded, anyway.” I traced one finger around the complicated, vaguely circular network of lines making up the centre of the map. “And this… this is the holding rune.”