Chapter 62 Baz #2
He’d slashed a ceremonial knife across his palm, then the student’s, to combine their blood in the bowl, creating swirling trails of red amid the cloudy drink. Just like during the Selenic Order rituals.
Then he’d grabbed hold of the student almost lovingly, whispering in his ear, “Now fight for your life.”
Thames had watched, heart pounding with a hint of remorse and a grim sort of hope, as the student flailed against Cornelius’s hold, head thrashing in the shallow bowl.
Eventually he’d stilled. Air bubbles had risen to the surface.
And Cornelius had waited, waited, waited, desperate for his theory to be proven right.
The student didn’t rise.
Next had been the two Aldryn boys, Wulfrid’s acolytes. A different method for each. One strangled. The other stabbed. “Since drowning doesn’t seem to work,” Cornelius explained.
Neither of them survived.
Only Wulfrid now remained. His eyes were wild with fury and fear as Cornelius approached him. This one was personal, Thames could tell. “You remind me of my first kill,” Cornelius said to Wulfrid. “He was a bully too. Maybe if I give you the same death he tried to give me…”
Thames didn’t see the Reaper magic. He only saw the light leave Wulfrid’s eyes. Dead like the others, never to rise.
“What do we do with the bodies?” Thames asked.
“The Treasury,” Cornelius said. “I have an idea.”
Thames panted with the effort of hauling the body up the stairs. Every breath he took made him want to gag; they had left the bodies down in the Treasury for too long, and now the stench of wet, decaying flesh spoiled the air.
“Almost there,” Cornelius said ahead of him, grunting with the effort of dragging Wulfrid’s body.
The first two bodies they’d hauled up were waiting for them at the top of the stairs. “Wait here,” Cornelius said, hand braced against the wall. “I’ll ensure the coast is clear.”
Thames watched him disappear behind the silver door. His heart nearly stopped when he heard Cornelius say, “This isn’t what it looks like.”
A familiar voice exclaimed: “Really? So you haven’t found a way around the very wards we’re trying to break through?”
Thames’s mind raced. That was Baz—and there, that was Kai’s voice that followed soon after.
They’d been caught, and now everything would come to light.
Remorse churned in his stomach, making bile rise in his throat.
Or perhaps that was the stench of the corpses.
He suddenly wanted no part in this. But then he heard Cornelius’s smooth voice, and Luce’s, and after a moment the voices disappeared altogether.
Thames’s shoulders relaxed ever so slightly. They’d been given an out. And now it was up to him to see the rest through.
He got to work hauling the bodies through the door.
The library, thankfully, was empty. Thames laid the bodies out at the foot of the arch, following Cornelius’s instructions down to the letter.
We’ll make it look like the wards did this.
They had already drained them of their blood, just like the wards had nearly drained that Ilsker student of hers.
The apparent signs of drowning were an added flair of mystery, easily blamed on the deadly wards.
When Thames was done, he fled the scene, welcoming the cold bite of night air in the quad. He spilled his guts on the lawn and proceeded to break down into tears.
Thames watched Cornelius’s nightmare unfold as they always did.
But something felt different this night, as if Cornelius’s guard were down where it usually stayed up even as he slept.
Cornelius’s veins rippled silver, then black, before he transformed into a veritable monster.
A dark, deadly power blasted from him. It turned everything and everyone around him to ash.
The world was dark and bleak. Lifeless. And it was Cornelius’s doing.
In the great expanse of ash, a light appeared.
At first Thames thought it was Luce, bursting into the nightmare like a dream, a shining star.
But this girl was not Luce. Light emanated from her as she stood against Cornelius, and when Thames looked at her, he felt a great sense of hope wash over him.
Cornelius turned to him then, noticing his presence in this bleak dream that was not quite a dream but a memory, a vision. Something not easily forgotten. His mouth formed a grim line. “Now you know, dear Thames,” he said in a small voice. “This is the fate that awaits me.”
Thames shook his head, refusing to believe it. He grabbed Cornelius’s face between his hands, willing the darkness of Cornelius’s nightmare to seep into him. “We have time yet to change it,” he said fiercely.
A promise. A vow. Whatever it took to keep Cornelius from this fate.
Cornelius kissed him softly, then said, “Perhaps, if we can create a Tidecaller synth like the kind that Baz and Kai described…” He cut himself off. “But no. That would require silver blood.”
They kissed among the darkness of the nightmare, Cornelius’s words making an idea bloom in Thames’s mind.
Another nightmare. The worst one Thames had been able to find. Umbrae flocked toward him, called by the heaviness of this person’s dreaming. Thames didn’t know them, and he never wished to, given the twisted nature of their mind.
Thames wasn’t adept at pulling things out of nightmares the way Kai was. He knew how, but even the smallest things brought him too close to Collapsing. But now he needed to Collapse. So he let the umbrae overtake him, and willed himself to wake—
He was in the Treasury, having gone to sleep here knowing he would Collapse.
Knowing the blast would be contained behind the Vault’s wards.
The umbrae screamed in the shadows around him, as if to contest their strange entry into reality.
Thames glanced down at his hands. Silver rippled in his veins.
And then he was Collapsing, the force of it burning through him so brightly he screamed in agony.
He had to do this. He could weather the pain. He must—
Thames came to in a daze of confusion. His Collapsing had stopped, yet silver still swirled in his veins.
Rising to his feet, he quickly got to work extracting his blood and mixing it with one of the vials of Cornelius’s Tidecaller blood that they kept down here for experiments.
He infused the mixture into his veins, then waded into the glowing pool, heart pounding an angry rhythm in his ears.
He would not be another failed experiment. He would survive this and be reborn a Tidecaller.
Thames plunged into the water and let himself sink to the bottom as the air left his lungs.
Thames took a deep breath in. He was in Cornelius’s arms. He had done it! He had survived what the others had not!
But then Cornelius was whispering in his ear, telling him—no, commanding him—to take the blame, to hide the full truth of what they had done. Confusion wormed its way into Thames’s mind. Why was Cornelius using Glamour magic on him? Why was he pretending he hadn’t killed those students?
Thames wanted to rage, to claw his way out from under Cornelius’s influence, even as his betrayal shattered his heart into a million pieces.
After everything Thames had done for him…
He had to at least prove to Cornelius—to himself—that this had not been for nothing. Thames pulled on whatever magic he could think of, and suddenly he was wielding Lightkeeper magic, and surely the look of wonder and affection in Cornelius’s eyes was real, and—
Thames was Collapsing all over again. Power burned through him, rotting his flesh from within, turning his blood to ash, draining every drop of magic and life from him as it razed through him.
Someone help, he thought.
His last, before the end.
Baz gasped as he was again in his own mind, in his own body, in the infirmary he had never actually left. He tore the locket off his neck, tossing it at the foot of the bed. Polina watched him with sad eyes, handing him the second locket before he had a chance to say anything.
“I’m afraid it gets worse,” she said quietly.
Baz hesitated. He felt like throwing up. But he had to know the whole truth, and so he picked the locket up and braced himself for the onslaught of memories to come.
“I’m pregnant.”
Cordelia’s words made the floor pitch under Louka’s feet.
A joy so poignant he thought he’d burst soared through him, the feeling so clearly mirrored on her face.
He laughed. Kissed her mouth. In hushed whispers, they began to make plans.
Marriage. Trevel. A life full of beauty and art, far from Aldryn College, from the constraints of magic.
Leave her, an intrusive voice said in his mind. Do it gently, so that she doesn’t suspect.
“I… I must go,” Louka found himself saying against his will.
Confusion banked in Cordelia’s eyes. “Go?”
“There’s much to be done.”
“But you’re happy about this, right? This is a good thing.”
“This is a good thing,” he repeated, monotone voice so unlike his own. Of course I’m happy, he wanted to shout. But that other voice in his mind was telling him to leave. So he turned on his heel and left Cordelia standing dumbstruck before the door of her art studio.
Outside, Louka ran into Cornelius. He was still too confused by what just happened to realize how odd it was that Cordelia’s brother should be here. He never went anywhere near her studio, as if art was too far beneath him to bother with.
“Let’s you and I go have ourselves a little chat,” Cornelius said, his demeanor oozing deceitful ease.
Louka’s back went rigid. His feet began walking of their own volition. Was that magic that had been used on him? And that voice, so like the one that had been in Louka’s mind…
Before he could ponder it further, he found himself sitting in a private taproom with Cornelius.
“I would like for you to tell me the whole truth, tailor. All of it.”
The words came tumbling out of Louka’s mouth without his meaning, as monotone as before: “Cordelia is with child. We wish to marry. I have a business opportunity lined up in Trevel, where your sister wishes to study art. We will leave when the spring comes, after the school year is done. She knows how you value her education.”
“Does she now,” Cornelius said tightly, a storm brewing behind his polished exterior. “And what is the plan if I decide not to give my blessing?”
“Respectfully… I think your sister knows you won’t approve of this union, or the child we are to raise, or the kind of life we wish to live. She intends to leave with me for Trevel regardless of your blessing.”
Why was he saying all of this? It was meant to be their secret…
Cornelius pondered his words in an agonizing stretch of silence.
Then he said: “Here’s what I want you to do, tailor.
” He pushed a piece of writing paper and a pen toward him.
“You will write a letter to my sister breaking things off with her. You will say that you have reconsidered the relationship, that you are not ready to become a father, and so you have left for Trevel without her. You will end this letter by saying you never wish to speak to her or see her ever again.”
Tears formed in Louka’s eyes. His heart broke, but for the life of him, he found he could not refuse. His hand moved of its own volition, writing the very words he was told to write. He watched, powerless, as Cornelius sealed the letter. “That’s a good lad,” he said.
“Please,” Louka managed. “I beg you.”
“Begging will not help you, I’m afraid.” Cornelius tilted his head. “Though there may be something you can help me with…”
Louka was in a strange, damp grotto with a glowing pool in its center surrounded by stony thrones. Death clung to the air. He knew he would die here.
Cornelius instructed him to step into the pool. “I’ve yet to test the experiment on a blank canvas,” he said, talking to Louka in a conversational manner, “someone without magic. If you can survive it and emerge a Tidecaller, perhaps Delia might too.”
Louka tasted salt on his tongue from the tears falling in earnest down his face, the only thing he still had control of after being told not to speak or move without Cornelius saying so. When his head was shoved underwater, he did not kick, he did not scream, he did not fight back.
He only thought of his darling Cordelia, and hoped she would sail far from this place and the monster she called brother.