We didn’t actually go and get an animal to turn into a familiar for a random experiment with no professional input or oversight, of course. That would be wildly irresponsible.
We made a fetish.
“I should warn you,” Max said as he guided my hand through scrawling the symbols on a piece of paper, “that this is in fact the world’s worst fetish. As in, it’s taking far more power to actually make than it can hold for you. If this works at all, I expect it to just catch fire the moment it absorbs any magic whatsoever.”
“Good,” I said. “The whole point is to see if it’ll take the magic, and that’ll make it really easy to tell.”
“Yes, that is the idea; I’m just saying. Don’t judge my skills based on this thing.” He screwed up his face in the sort of embarrassed, apologetic expression that, say, Magista might wear turning up to a party with a gift of very cheap supermarket cupcakes. “Okay, it’s done.”
“It is?” I frowned at the runes on the paper. They were, indeed, complete. “I don’t feel any different.”
“Of course you don’t. You’re not channelling anything; you can’t channel anything. So it’s not doing anything. Are you two ready?”
Kylie and I exchanged nods.
“Brace yourself,” Kylie said.
“I think I know by now how to – gnuh!”
Kylie didn’t pull any punches. She simply started channelling, her expression going slack while she stared into the middle distance, and I was engulfed in a sudden rush of full-body pins and needles. I took a deep breath and adjusted. I knew how to do this by now; it was sort of like forcing yourself to calm down mid-freakout. Difficult and uncomfortable, but I could mostly do it, tamping down on the magic as it flowed through me.
The paper fetish did absolutely nothing.
I tried touching the runes. Fetishes, like familiars, just sort of worked automatically; you didn’t have to do anything to make them work. But proximity was one of the factors that dictated their ability to help, and I rarely saw somebody use a fetish without touching it. In this case, the physical contact had absolutely no effect; the fetish just sat there. Being a piece of paper.
After about two minutes, Kylie stopped channelling and looked at the paper. Still nothing.
“Huh,” Max commented. “Well, I guess that answers that.”
“I expected you to be disappointed,” I said. “Wouldn’t it have been really cool if we could chain it? Scientifically?”
“Yes, but I wasn’t expecting to be able to. It’s nice to get an expected answer for once. If this had worked, it’d mean I understand even less about familiarity than I currently think I do, and what we understand now already isn’t nearly enough. You should burn that paper, by the way.”
“Why? It doesn’t do anything.”
“It doesn’t act as a fetish for Kylie’s magic. It’s still linked to yours. Your spell is inert right now, but having it linked to things out in the world for no reason is just asking for some kind of trouble in two years when something happens to that paper long after we’ve all forgotten it existed.”
I recalled Alania’s old staff, which she’d linked to her spell to absorb her magic in case of an accident, and which had caused her such control problems when the Guardian Ring had become embedded in it. “Good point.”
I burned the paper. Then I went to the gym. I’d just spent three days unable to leave a bedroom; I needed some air.
There were a couple of wizards out on the climbing cliff, and we traded polite little waves before proceeding to ignore each other. I didn’t climb, I just sat on the crenellations at the edge of the balcony and looked out over the vast space below. I used to come out and climb this wall all the time. Nowadays… more important things kept distracting me, I supposed.
“Hey, Kayden!”
I didn’t bother turning around to greet Magistus; I just gave a little wave and waited for him to come and sit next to me.
“Hey,” I said. “How have you been?”
“Oh, fine. You? We missed you at Magistus’ party.”
“Yeah, sorry. Busy. I did say I couldn’t come.”
“Busy? Or overwhelmed?”
I shot him a puzzled look. “What?”
“I can see why you wouldn’t want to hang around a lot of politicians if people are still giving you trouble about…” he tapped his arm, right where my familiarity mark was. “With the amount of people pestering Max, I’m sure it must be ten times worse for you.”
“A lot of people are pestering Max?” Very few people pestered me; I’d assumed that they were just less interested than I’d expected. Apparently they’d just gotten the message pretty fast that Max was the one to talk to. Now I was feeling even worse about ‘plan: divert everything to Max’; I should find some way to double-check that redirecting his family to Alania instead of him had actually worked. “He hasn’t said much about it. Is he alright?”
“Oh, yeah.” Magistus shrugged. “If anyone pisses him off he sics Magista on them. She’s having the time of her life.”
“Ha. Sounds about right.”
“So you’ve got your first pit comp coming up, huh?”
“How do you know?” I asked innocently. “Stalking me? I understand why, given how fascinating I am.”
“Of course. You’re the second most fascinating person in the school.”
Obviously I was more fascinating than Magistus, but there’s no arguing with people who refuse to see the truth. I glanced at the rock wall. “Want a race? I’m so out of practice, you might actually stand a chance.”
“Excuses, excuses.” He offered me a hand up and we headed for the wall. I won the race, of course. Entirely due to skill. A few bad rocks slipping under Magistus’ grip and giving me a lucky lead had nothing to do with it. We kicked ourselves off the wall and let the safety spell carry us back to the balcony.
“Hey,” I said as casually as I could while we bobbed in the open air, “how well do you know Peter Potter?”
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“Uh… scrawny redhead, right? Isn’t he on your pit comp team?”
“Aha! He’s the leader of our pit comp team, so if you knew I was on it but you’re not sure about him, that proves you’re stalking me. Most fascinating person.”
“Well, I can’t just stalk myself. That would be narcissism, and I’m too cool for that.”
“You don’t know him well, then?”
“Not really? Magista might. Why? Trouble in the ranks?”
“No, just curious,” I said in what I hoped was a convincingly casual way.
“… Uh-huh.”
I could talk to Magista, but if I couldn’t be convincingly casual about this with Magistus, I had no chance of fooling his sister. She lived her life like a soap opera character, always on the lookout for conspiracies, sudden changes in allegiance, and dramatic social reversals, and it annoyed me to no end that we lived somewhere where that was actually a sensible thing to do. I had no chance of going up to her out of the blue and asking about Peter without her immediately wanting to know why, and she wouldn’t ask up-front like Magistus had. She’d find a way to get the information out of me peripherally. If I wanted to ask her, I’d need some red herring reason I might be wanting to learn about Peter, and that was just way too much drama to go digging for. Maybe a good excuse would present itself later on.
Anyway, I only suspected him a little bit of wanting to kill our mutual friend for political gain, so it probably wasn’t that urgent. I needed to keep my eye on other people, too. Look for other suspects.
I had promised myself I wouldn’t do this kind of thing with friends any more. But Peter wasn’t really a friend; I barely knew the guy. I’d probably barely know a lot of the suspects; the overlap between my social circle and Saina’s wasn’t very big. Me being a paranoid arsehole couldn’t ruin relationships that didn’t exist; I just needed to keep Saina out of it. And this was important.
I was about to come up with a really cool and smooth way to change the subject when a strangled scream from the cliff face did it for me. The two wizards had finished up their climbing session awhile ago, and now a lone Initiate was clinging to the cliff wall, higher than I usually climbed, a red stain creeping across the right arm of his white robe. I’d caught sight of him in time to see a few rock fragments still falling down the cliff; he’d slipped a little, and hurt himself.
“Alright there?” I called.
There was no response. It was a bit hard to be sure when he was so far away, but he didn’t look to be moving at all.
Magistus cupped his hands around his mouth and called, “Let go and kick away from the cliff! The safety system will catch you!”
To this, there was also no response. No movement.
“Dumbarse,” I muttered, and started making my way back up the stupid cliff. Magistus made as if to follow for a few seconds, but two pairs of hands weren’t going to be more useful than one. I pulled my way up, stone by stone, while the obviously panicked initiate just stayed there and panicked. I took my time with each handhold. I was kind of in a hurry, but if I fell and had to start over, that wasn’t going to help anyone, and the initiate was high up on a pretty tricky bit of cliff.
So long as I could reach him, everything would be totally fine. There were only two ways in which things wouldn’t be fine. The first was if he’d cut himself up quite badly on the rocks and was bleeding more than I could tell from my limited view; the second was that his muscles would just tire and give out before I got there. In both cases, he could very well fall straight down the cliff without kicking off first, bashing himself to pieces on every outcropping on the way down. All the idiot had to do was kick away from the wall before that happened, but he obviously wasn’t going to do that, so I was in a hurry.
I was also starting to thing that this cliff was less safe than I’d always treated it. Like everything else in this school, I supposed.
When I reached him, I realised I needn’t have worried. He was crying a lot, but not bleeding all that much, and his grip on the stone was so tight that I had trouble prying his hands off and wrapping them around my shoulders. Then unwrapping them and moving them to my waist, because he was strangling me. I should probably have been reassuring and talked him down, but it takes me about a year to learn how to be tactful or sympathetic with someone and we didn’t have that kind of time, so I just used force.
I wrapped an arm around him, and kicked off from the cliff.
Within a minute, Magistus was helping us up onto the balcony. The initiate really didn’t want to let go of me, but between us, we pried his arms open and I stepped back to let Magistus work some mage family diplomacy magic. Of course, Magista’s supposed to be the diplomat in their family, but there was something amazing about how Magistus put a hand on the boy’s shoulder, whispered something calming I couldn’t hear into his ear, and made him immediately relax.
“Are you alright?” Magistus asked quietly.
“Y-yeah.” The boy nodded. “Sorry. I guess I look like an idiot, huh.”
I did have enough tact not to answer that question. “What happened?”
“Nothing. I just slipped a bit. I’m fine.”
“You’re afraid of heights?” Magistus asked.
The boy jutted out his chin. “I’m fine.”
He was afraid of heights. “Why were you up there,” I asked, “if you’re afraid of heights?”
“It’s fine. I can conquer it.”
“What the fuck? That’s stupid.”
Magistus shot me a look that said pretty clearly that it sounded like something I would do. I crossed my arms.
“It’s fine,” the boy insisted. “It’s perfectly safe.”
Magistus didn’t comment on this. “Let’s get you to the kuracar to get that cut looked at, hmm?”
The cut was barely more than a little scrape on his arm, but the boy let Magistus lead him away. We managed to exchange an eyeroll over his shoulder.
It was nice, sometimes, to be reminded that other people also did stupid shit because of random bullshit personal drama that I knew nothing about. I silently wished the boy the best in whatever circumstances had convinced him that trying to conquer the cliff alone was a good idea.
Anyway, back to my random bullshit personal drama. Finding out who was trying to kill Saina before the next full moon, so Kylie wouldn’t put herself in danger again and Max wouldn’t work himself half to death trying to distract ad detect potential assassins. I was mentally running through my list of suspects (that is, mentally going in circles because I had no evidence and no leads) when I got back to my room, only for Kylie to look up from her tablet and announce, “I’ve arranged to work with Lydia at Duniyasar every full moon.”
I may have done some undignified spluttering at that. “What? But we don’t know what full moon an assassin might – ”
“Exactly.” Her eyes were back on her tablet, so apparently my objections weren’t all that interesting. She’d probably already had this discussion with Max. “Full moons are magical times for prophets, and Lydia agrees that that, on top of Duniyasar’s natural enhancement of prophecies, can only help with my training. And she’s surely powerful enough to notice and protect us from anyone who shows up, not to mention extremely protective of me, for obvious reasons. It’s the perfect cover to monitor the site every full moon, it costs us nothing since I need to train there anyway, and Lydia doesn’t need to know anything about the prophecy.”
“Lydia is your protection?” A fussy, dumpy woman with a pseudoreligious fixation on Kylie’s spell and appreciation for big, faded dresses? “Is she even a mage?”
Kylie looked at me like I was an idiot. “Of course not. She’s from Fionnrath.”
“Then how – ?”
“She’s the person that Fionnrath sent alone into dangerous enemy territory to retrieve their prophet after learning where it was from capturing an enemy spy.”
Okay, when she put it like that. “It’s dangerous.”
“Not compared to what you’re doing! We’re only guessing that ‘timeless sands’ means Duniyasar because it’s old, sandy, and relevant to Saina. For all we know, the actual ‘timeless sands’ could be on the other side of the world; I might not be near anything important at all. You’re the one who’s spending time with the target, at the time we expect an assassination, just kind of waiting for the assassin to show up. You’re in a lot more danger.”
“I’m behind multiple locked doors and force fields at full moon, bingeing Star Trek! That’s far less dangerous!”
“Oh? Which Star Trek?”
“We’re starting with the original series and working our way – don’t change the subject! You said this whole plan was a bad idea, anyway. You said we should work out something else for next full moon.”
“We should. But if we can’t, well, Duniyasar is covered indefinitely now.”
I huffed indignantly at that, but I couldn’t really object unless I had a better plan. So. Better plan, or catch the guy… same goals I’d had before this conversation. It was just kind of unsettling that Kylie had already given up enough to make indefinite future stakeout plans. No need to give up so easily – any minute now, some very convenient lead was just going to drop right into our laps.
That, or I was going to end up watching a lot of Star Trek.