Chapter 17 #2
What about moon magic then? It seemed like the most usual manifestation of Gabriel’s moon wizardry was how it solidified in to silver—again, often without his wanting to—but they’d found useful ways to apply the moonsilver. He used moonlight as illumination at times, bending the light and… Hmm.
“I know you didn’t feel anything,” she said, “but what if Gabriel somehow used moon magic to bend the light so we can’t see the seams?”
“Excellent insight,” Jadren replied with such warm approval that she blushed.
His approval shouldn’t matter so much, but…
well, fine. It did. “Let’s see if we can change things so we can at least see the door, then go from there.
” He held out a hand to her and she placed hers in his, appreciating the affection squeeze he gave her before turning his attention to the wall.
“See if you can concentrate on feeding me only moon magic.”
They’d been practicing this kind of technique, at least, neither of them officially educated in wizard–familiar dynamics.
Jadren thought that gave them a creative advantage.
Commonly accepted wisdom was that familiars were entirely passive, requiring a wizard to draw magic from them, but Nic and Gabriel had found that she could deliberately push magic into him, so Selly had been working on doing the same.
She thought about that now, the feel of the moon magic in her, that silver white light, so much softer than the sun, but reflecting the sun’s intensity with a kind of refined purity.
“Good,” Jadren said, his clockwork magic ticking with well-oiled precision down the bond, partly drawing from her, partly receiving what she offered.
It was sensual and sexual, the magic intertwined with her passion and desire for him.
His hand heated in hers, a finger tickling her palm to show her he felt it too.
He couldn’t actually wield the moon magic, but Jadren plucked out a lens of glass from one of his many pockets, using his El-Adrel magic to enchant the artifact, blending the moon magic into the disk.
Jadren held up the lens—and a stream of moonlight played upon the wall.
Selly caught her breath in amazement and Jadren threw her a pleased grin.
Then they both emitted yips of excitement when a round door manifested, silvery white against the whitewash, seamlessly flush with the plaster.
“Like magic,” Jadren crowed. “Is it moonsilver?”
“Not exactly.” Selly, still holding onto him, laid the palm of her free hand on the door. It still felt like the rest of the wall. “It might be just … plastered over?”
“Then there’s some sort of trigger to open it, like with any physical door.”
She looked, the moonlight shimmering over the surface as Jadren changed the angle of the lens to better illuminate the section she studied. “Aha!”
It was a simple bolt, also flush with the surface, this one made of moonsilver. “I think you have to use wizardry,” she said, “but it’s a simple device.”
Jadren shook his head. “I can’t see it. Where your finger is?”
“Yes. A horizontal slide.” She traced the outline. Jadren handed her the lens to focus the light on the right part, then touched the bolt. A small spark of wizardry, a miniature El-Adrel lightning bolt that was the house crest, and the bolt sprang back, the door opening inwards.
“We are the champions,” Jadren declared, giving her a swift kiss. “After you, my lady.”
She stepped inside, still carrying the lens, because they needed the light to illuminate the shadowy stone tunnel.
It was both as she remembered from her childhood and completely different.
It was dry, for starters, with no water dripping from the ceiling as she recalled, though the scars of moss persisted in places, darker stencils against the scrubbed stone.
A raised walkway traveled down the center of the tube, which sloped downward.
“Are we under the lake?” Jadren asked in a hushed tone after securing the door behind them.
She calculated. Shook her head. “Not quite yet, but we will be.”
“It’s kind of creepy,” he noted. “I’m glad we don’t have a subterranean arcanium—though that sounds cool to say. Subterranean arcanium. Subterranean arcanium. We could set it to music.” He began crooning to a popular tune. “Subterraynnneannnn arcaynnniummmm.”
She only half-listened, knowing his chatter was partly to soothe her nerves.
Selly didn’t do well with enclosed spaces.
All that time in her youth when her well-meaning family had tied her up to keep her from wilding off into the marshes for days on end had left her with a dread of being trapped.
This didn’t feel the same, but she appreciated Jadren’s thoughtfulness and concern so much that she didn’t say anything.
They were nearing the end, the silvery light from the lens showing the tunnel pinched closed.
Very like House El-Adrel did with the hallways she didn’t want anyone to traverse.
“Looks like a dead end,” she observed doubtfully. Had she led them wrong after all?
“There must be a way to open it,” Jadren replied with easy confidence.
“I don’t know. Seems like it could just be what it looks like: a dead end.”
“Why would anyone build a tunnel that goes nowhere?” he asked reasonably.
“And why would the notoriously practical and efficient Lady Veronica Phel go to the trouble and expense of maintaining a useless old tunnel? This place has been obviously fixed up, cleaned, and kept dry. It’s just another hidden door.
Besides, you had the intuition that all of this was here and you were right. ”
“I was guessing.”
“Intuition,” he corrected, taking the lens from her and examining the join of the stones.
“That’s a wizard thing.”
“How do you know?” he argued absently, playing the light over the closed end. No silvery door appeared. “If Anciela’s data proves correct, which I suspect it will, your brain and magic are the same as any wizard’s with one small block. If Gabriel can access ancestral Phel knowledge, so can you.”
She didn’t know about that. She didn’t feel all that intuitive.
“No luck on the light,” Jadren informed her, unnecessarily. “What should we do, intuitive one?”
“You’re not funny.”
“I’m being perfectly serious.”
And he was, she could see. “Well, I think we need to apply moon and water magic together. If you’re right and this is the entrance to the arcanium, we’ll need both.”
“Good thinking.” Jadren looked around. “We should have brought some water.”
“There’s some right on the other side of these stones,” she suggested helpfully. “A whole lakeful.”
He grimaced.
“Don’t remind me. I can practically feel the weight of the lake overhead.”
“How about your water flask?” She grinned at his stunned expression, feeling very clever indeed.
“You’re a genius, Seliah mine.” Jadren dug out the moonsilver water flask from one of his pockets.
He’d helped Gabriel redesign the flasks for production by House Phel and kept this one as a nostalgic prototype, but also because having a flask that was always full of cool, clean water came in handy.
The flasks weren’t all made of moonsilver—that was a fancy version Nic had insisted upon for the cachet for the nobility and those who fancied themselves noble.
Her marketing savvy had proved true and the silver flasks were bestsellers.
Jadren and Selly had gotten so used to having this one that they’d taken its magic for granted, but it was a stellar combination of moon and water magic.
Jadren held Selly’s hand and asked her for a blend of the magics this time, and splashed the stone wall with water from the flask.
The stones glowed and changed texture, swirling like a whirlpool as the cracks between the stones bent and spiraled.
A grinding sound echoed through the tunnel and then the wall vanished, opening up into the most extraordinary room Selly had ever seen. An underwater dome.
Gleaming tiles formed the floor, spinning in a dizzying pattern of silver and myriad shades of blues and greens, evoking the swirl of moonlight on water.
Stone walls inlaid with silver runes framed sheets of thick glass, the water beyond them deep blue, growing lighter nearer the surface with the sun now at midday.
An enormous round lens of glass—or crystal, given its luminosity—sat in the center of the ceiling, focusing sunlight on a circle formed by the tiles, an echo of the window above.
At night, it and the glass panels curving from it to the floor, would glow with moonlight.
Various cabinets lined the walls between the windows.
Strange tools—mostly moonsilver by the look of them—hung in orderly rows.
Selly had no idea what they might be used for, but Jadren surveyed them with interest, looking as if he itched to test a few.
Her attention, however, was riveted to the piece of furniture occupying the tiled circle under the moon window.
It was a bed made entirely of moonsilver, radiating moon magic and made up with pillows and various coverlets.
And silver chains at the four bedposts. Too late, she clapped a hand over her eyes.
“Can’t unsee it,” Jadren taunted.
“Why is there a bed in here, with chains?” she got out, firmly turning her back on the sight.
She would unsee it. She’d prove Jadren wrong there.
He was methodically searching the cabinets, scrutinizing the rows of tools and especially documents and diagrams stored in shallow drawers.
She should probably be helping, not… speculating. Curse it.
“Oh, I think you know,” Jadren said in a teasing singsong. “Does it give you ideas? Maybe some fun with sex magic?”
“No,” she answered emphatically. “I am decidedly not picturing Nic and Gabriel in here drumming up sex magic in that…” She couldn’t bring herself to say it.
“Sounds to me like you have a pretty vivid image in your mind,” Jadren commented so blandly that in itself that became as suggestive as an eyebrow-waggle.
She glared at him, which he didn’t notice because he was busy being useful.
Determined to put the silver bed and sex magic out of her mind, and to be useful herself, she applied herself to searching through the cabinets on the opposite side of the dome from Jadren.
“This feels so invasive,” she muttered as she did.
“Yeah,” Jadren agreed. “I get why Alise and Cillian didn’t want to be the ones. At least you’re family, so there’s a level of being in the inner circle. Still, it’s generous of Nic and Gabriel to give us permission.”
“The cause is important to them.”
“True.”
So they really needed to make this effort count. “I don’t know what I’m looking for,” she complained. “Is it going to be a book titled Key to Anciela Phel’s Encrypted Data?”
Jadren snorted.
“I’m serious,” she said after a moment, straightening from bending over a drawer with all blank sheets of very nice Calliope stationery. “We’re looking for something that we don’t know what it is in a place we’re only guessing has it. How does this make sense?”
“We’re unraveling a two-hundred year old mystery,” Jadren answered equably.
“I don’t think any of this makes sense. As for what it looks like, I know you’re being sarcastic—clearly you’ve been around me too much, poor thing—but no, it won’t be titled because there will have been the same need for secrecy.
And before you make any more of those frustrated growling noises at me, cute as they are, it will look like probably something as equally innocuous as those journals about ballgowns or boring pamphlets on fruit wasp larvae.
But it will have those elements in juxtaposition with something else, like one side it says one thing and on the reverse it says another.
But one is actually a translation of the other. ”
“Or an inventory of dressmaking supplies with numbers attached?” Selly asked.
“I suppose. I wouldn’t confine yourself to… Why—did you find it?”
“I might have,” she breathed, holding the little book apparently made of moonsilver that had been shoved to the back of a drawer.
It was as lovely as a piece of jewelry, with tiny hinges and even various precious jewels decorating the slim spine.
There were several of the chapbooks in there and she handed another to Jadren.
“Pretty,” he commented. “And made to last. This one is all about fruit.”
“Jadren.” Selly closed her book, heart fluttering with excitement. “I think we found them.”
He grinned, then gave her a hard, enthusiastic kiss. “We sure did. Will we get a medal for it, do you think?”
“You’ll have to savor the internal validation, I’m afraid.
” She studied one of the little books. “I still don’t get it, though.
These are as obscure as the other documents.
” Cillian had let them look at those, theorizing it might help them recognize the key.
“I think we have to get these to Convocation Academy safely and see what Cillian can do.”
He sobered. “It would be nice to have back-up copies.”
“How would we do that though?” She wiggled the silver book so it caught the light, gems flashing. “Even House Xerograf only copies paper.”
“Anciela, you cagey witch,” Jadren muttered in frustration. “Why make it so difficult?”
“She made them to last.”
“True treasures, hidden away. At least Cillian was able to copy the other information. It feels safer to bring that here, keep these hidden in the arcanium.”
She shook her head. “We don’t have time for that. We should leave right away. Hopefully we can get these safely to Convocation Center before anyone figures out we found them.”
“I suppose you’re right,” he conceded glumly. “And here I was hoping to have a nice meal, maybe a real bath, and a good night’s sleep.”
A bolt of panic struck her. “Dark arts. Dinner with my parents.”
“We’ll have to send our regrets.”
“No,” she decided. “I want to ask my mother about her pregnancies and if she ever met Nic and Alise’s maman. We’ll just have to make it quick.”
He presented her with a bag he’d extracted from a pocket of his leathers. “Good thing I thought to bring this for our heist.”
Feeling a bit as if she sullied precious objects with bad handling, she set the little books in the bottom, watching Jadren seal the bag. “If you have another, I can put it over my mother’s head when she starts with the baby talk.”
He chuckled. “Courage, fair one.”