21. Arienne
21
ARIENNE
Arienne felt a chill as she looked down at the book. There was a subtitle on the cover, its gilt peeled off but the words still legible, revealing the full title. The Sorcerer of Mersia: The Grim King’s Fall. The prospect of Eldred’s memories leaking into her own made her skin crawl.
The book in her hand looked older than it had in the room of her mind. Arienne was exhausted from all that had happened since spotting the inquisitors that morning at breakfast, but her curiosity revived her. She had to know what this book was. As she carefully opened it, Eldred spoke with irritation in his voice.
“Where did you get that?”
His tone was different than she’d ever heard it. He almost sounded appalled.
“I brought it from the room,” she said, her voice casual, though in truth she did not know how she’d been able to take the book from the room. The thought had simply occurred to her that she could, and she had done it.
“You may not read it. Burn it. Now.”
“Why? It was in my mind, it’s mine.” She was enjoying his agitation.
“That book contains my private life. It is not for your eyes or for anyone else’s.”
Arienne blithely turned the first page. “Your private life? There’s a publication date here. And the name of an author.”
It had been published 170 years ago. No wonder the book looked so worn. The author’s name, Lysandros, was followed by his title: Inquisitor of the Imperial Office of Truth.
“That Lysandros man wrote this book?”
But if this was the same man whose lackeys had been following her up to the inn, he had to be about two hundred years old. The name wasn’t uncommon, so this must have been a different person. Right?
When there was no answer from Eldred, she quickly glanced into the room in her mind; the sorcerer was sitting on the edge of the bed with his head down again. Arienne turned to the first chapter.
And the printed letters began squirming on the page. Startled, she threw down the book. The spider-like letters continued to scatter across the ivory expanse of the opened pages, becoming illegible. Arienne realized that Eldred wasn’t merely bowing his head, he was reciting something.
“Stop that!” she shouted. Eldred stopped reciting. The letters returned to their proper positions.
“Since when were you able to do this?”
“Who knows.” Eldred’s withered lips stretched sideways, revealing the gaps in his smile. Even with no real answer, Arienne knew. It was the bandages. Unraveling the bandages around his head had loosened his power.
Arienne thought back to the skeleton below the Academy building. She had only a vague imagining as to how Eldred had thrown them down the stairs. How he must’ve blinded them, made them stumble, or pushed them— So this is how he did it. She felt her bile rise.
But that poor student never managed to bring Eldred’s body into their mind. He must’ve killed the student even while inside the lead coffin. Arienne had never learned of what might happen when a Power generator was inside a person’s mind. There probably wasn’t anyone who could teach her that, anyway. What if she had committed an irreversible mistake? The prospect frightened her.
Regret was useless, though. Living at the Academy only for the purpose of dying had still felt more terrifying than this new path she was on, even if she had not a single inkling of what might lie ahead. And no matter what did come from all this, she would always feel this way.
Seemingly oblivious to Arienne’s feelings, Eldred spoke.
“Must you do this, even when it is clear I protest against what you’re doing?”
“I’m doing it because you protest so much! Why shouldn’t I read the book?”
It didn’t matter if she was being unreasonable. No matter how trivial, if she wasn’t allowed to do something because Eldred said so, it was no better than being pushed down the stairs and breaking her neck.
Eldred, after a silence, spoke.
“Read it, then, if you must. It’s not any kind of pleasurable story.”
Arienne was taken aback. She had not expected him to relent. As she hesitated, Eldred continued. “But you must keep this in mind while reading that tripe. You are a sorcerer, just as I am. You are of my world, not theirs. You must never forget that. Before the Empire conquered the world, it was a wondrous time when magic was grand. And we ruled supreme under many strange names, alongside gods and monsters. You hold in your hands a version of history, the one written by a spear tip of the Empire as it spread over the world like a flash flood in the grasslands… destroying true power and wonder wherever it encountered them, whittling down the world into a paltry thing their ambitions could grasp and therefore control. Do not forget that it is to the Empire that you have lost your birthright.” Eldred’s voice was softer than ever, almost nostalgic. “But I recommend that you at least peruse it later and not now.”
“Why?”
“The inquisitors at the inn are near the tower. I can smell Lysandros’s stench from here.”
“How did they…?”
“Following your tracks, no doubt. He wouldn’t send utter incompetents all the way here.”
As careful as she was, Arienne was no expert in erasing her tracks in a forest. The only things she knew to do were what she’d read in adventure books. She might have fooled the custodian Duff, but the inquisitors of the Office of Truth were a different matter altogether.
“Why didn’t you tell me earlier?”
“What would you have done earlier? I, too, assumed they would search the highway first. That if we managed to stay hidden here for a day, the snow would erase our tracks overnight…” Eldred sighed. “What will you do now? If I’d known this would happen, I would have pressed you harder to learn my sorcery.”
“Shut up,” Arienne snapped, looking around the room. “I’ll have to make do.”
There wasn’t a suitable weapon in sight, aside from a rusty poker in the fireplace. It had a tine on its side. Would it be enough to defend her against the blow of a sword? Arienne almost laughed at the thought. These were inquisitors she was dealing with. Infamous throughout the Empire for hunting down sorcerers.
Outside the window, she could see the man and woman from the inn walking toward the tower. What did Lysandros smell like, that Eldred would have detected it? The man and woman now had weapons other than the knives on their belts—the man carried a bow on his back, and the woman held an axe.
Without hesitation, they disappeared into the entrance of the tower. There was hardly a likelier place someone would be hiding out in the vicinity, but it was also probably because Arienne’s tracks led right to the doorway. Their footsteps rang through the tower as they made their way up the stairs. They were in no rush. If they’d indeed tracked Arienne through the woods, then they also knew she was still in the tower and had no way out.
“What do I do?”
“Do not ask me.”
Eldred did not sound at ease either. Arienne looked inside her mind’s room again. There was no expression to be read in his parched face. The only thing she could be sure of was that he was not smiling.
There had to be a place to hide in the room, but nothing looked like it would do. The footsteps were louder now, closer. One of the crumbled lower floors had something like an intact wardrobe in it, but going down the stairs now only meant getting caught sooner. Hanging from the window was an option, if she thought she had the strength in her fingers to do so for more than a minute, which she didn’t. Even if she managed to hide herself, she had left too many fresh traces in the room for them to not notice she was immediately about.
She imagined being bound in lead manacles and chains. She imagined being dragged up the center path of her school, countless people lined on either side, jeering at her. Rotten vegetables and eggs flying at her, hitting her head. The stench. The green yolk of an egg gone bad flowing down the side of her face. Duff was in the crowds, her boyfriend Felix, the prodigy Magnus, Kaya who had taught her what few spells she knew. And Eldred.
Maybe dying would be better, to say goodbye to the Academy, to the Office of Truth, to this Powered parasite in her mind. Never to see Cain or Lucretia again. Arienne looked out the window and down. Jumping from here would mean instant death. The skeleton in the underground staircase at the school—the hapless student killed by Eldred. Whom no one had found, whose eye sockets were now home to mice…
Arienne imagined this student, whom she had never met, being fooled by Eldred into going down the spiral staircase. A boy, ordinary height, slightly heavy, wearing spectacles with buffalo-horn rims and the school robes. He comes all the way to the door of the Power generator chamber, where no one has ventured for many years, before getting scared and turning away. And almost at the top of the staircase, merely a few steps from the door that would lead outside, he sees something so horrifying that he screams. He falls backward, down, down, this can’t be happening writ on his face, frantically reaching for handrails that are not there…
Arienne turned to the stairs. She imagined it happening, firmly engraving the details in her mind, just as she had when she created her inner room. She thought of it again and again. The boy she had never seen fell to his death, over and over.
The man from the inn had finally reached the top of the stairs. The bow he’d been carrying on his back was now in his hands, the arrow already on the string. A smile on his face, like a hunter who had just spotted a deer in the woods.
The boy in her mind vanished, replaced by the man with the bow. The killing incantation Eldred had taught her at Lucretia’s house came to her lips.
The man looked as if he’d seen a ghost. He started walking backward, then stumbled and fell backward toward his doom, the same expression as the boy in her imaginings on his face.
“Nerius!” screamed the woman.
Arienne turned to the woman, whose face was filled with rage as she ran up the stairs with her axe raised. The falling man in her imaginings turned into the woman before her.
Arienne recited the incantation.