Chapter 10
~10~
A lise practically fled to her first class of the day, slamming through the doors with an urgent sense of reprieve that was especially ironic given that the class was her least favorite one of all: Alchemical Mathematics. Ugh.
She also quickly realized her error in judgment in fleeing the dining hall so abruptly, besides the spectacle she’d made of herself, acting like a crazy person upset by a wizard no one else could see, and leaving her breakfast uneaten. She’d left the dining hall far too early and arrived in her classroom well ahead of anyone else. She was alone.
She spun around to correct the situation and wait in the relative safety of the corridor. But she was trapped.
Gordon Hanneil slithered into the classroom with a stark smile and shut the door behind him, putting his back against it and making it clear Alise would have to go through him to escape. Soon, however, other students and the professor would arrive, she reminded herself, rather desperately. He couldn’t trap her in there forever. And surely he couldn’t make good on his threats, with witnesses imminent.
But Cillian had looked right at Gordon and hadn’t seen him. What could Gordon force her to do while others looked on, smiling blandly and chatting, noticing nothing?
“I didn’t break your rules,” she blurted at Gordon, feeling like a small, panicked bird cornered by a cat.
“You certainly shouldn’t be able to,” he said agreeably, but with iron beneath. “Not after our previous conversation. I’m wondering what failed to stick to your addled brain.” A lance of psychic magic stabbed at Alise’s mind, painfully slicing her thoughts into helpless disarray and piercing her will.
And yet… She wasn’t taken as unawares as the day before. Now that she’d experienced this sort of psychic attack once, she could better observe the parameters of what he could and could not do. One very important discovery: he’d thought the compulsion he’d implanted in her would prevent her from more than it had. That was promising. After all, she might not want to own her Elal origins, but they were known as one of the most powerful families of wizards in the Convocation for a reason.
House Elal had been one of the leaders in the war that defeated House Hanneil and imposed the sanctions on them. She might be a baby wizard, but she was from a tough and ancient bloodline. In that self-knowledge, she found that not all of her mind and will lay vulnerable to the unscrupulous man. Part of the psychic manipulation, it seemed, was making her believe that he controlled her.
“I… I haven’t worked on the project at all ,” she stammered, trying to sound pleading, giving herself time to think. And for people to arrive. She couldn’t see the El-Adrel clock on the wall from where she stood, but surely it couldn’t be that long until first bell.
“Ah, but you were discussing the project with that Harahel archivist, your independent study lead. He certainly seemed to believe you were continuing the work.”
“I have to tell him something ,” she whined. “The provost herself assigned the study. If I fail, I won’t graduate.”
“That’s your problem. Tell me what he discussed with you.”
So, Gordon didn’t know everything. Alise shoved the intense relief at that realization down deep, far below the surface thoughts, so the proctor wouldn’t read it in her. A non-wizardly trick she’d known how to do for years.
That was a perhaps unintended consequence of Convocation Academy’s pervasive use of Hanneil wizards as proctors to monitor student behavior. Even as young uncats, the students learned to mentally duck the proctors and find ways to conduct illicit activities under their noses without detection. One didn’t need brilliant psychic defenses to pull it off, just a level of mental agility and strong motivation.
Getting away with shit in school had incentivized many a clever student to find ways to fool the proctors. Alise recalled those early lessons now, something she’d been too rattled to do on her first encounter with Gordon. She didn’t need major psychic shields or battle magic, just a bit of student cleverness. To amplify the feeling of whiny, put-upon student, she said, “I don’t even know what that boring librarian was maundering on about. Blah blah blah with cross-referencing I don’t know what.”
The Hanneil wizard narrowed his snake-black eyes, his magic rudely probing her mind. She wanted to vomit from the violation, but she held her pose of pitiful vulnerability, pretending to be unaware of his invasion.
“I’ve heard that you and that low-level wizard-archivist have a special relationship,” he crooned, curling his voice lasciviously around the words. “Is he your boyfriend, Alise? You can confide in me.”
“No,” she breathed. “He’s old and boring. A low-level wizard with no future except the same as what he’s got right now.”
Gordon didn’t move, but his magic wrapped around her with slimy familiarity. “That’s not what I heard.”
“From where?” she scoffed. “My so-called friends in the student population? They’ll say anything to make me look bad, to kick the underdog while she’s down. I’m sure the provost would be thrilled to hear some rumor that I’m diddling a faculty member instead of doing my best to graduate. That kind of thing might get me finally expelled.”
Gordon tsked at her. “Silly little Elal. You forget who you’re dealing with. I can read minds and that Harahel boy is head over heels in love with you. Even if you don’t return the feelings,” he added with less certainty, his magic picking away at the layers of thought her stunned surprise had liberated from hiding.
She scrambled to squelch them again, throwing her very real shock and confusion to obscure what he could read in her. Cillian… in love with her? No, it wasn’t possible.
In fact, it was so impossible that Alise realized Gordon had said it only to manipulate her. Effective approach. But still, she didn’t want the Hanneil wizard’s attention on Cillian, who couldn’t defend himself, magically or politically.
“You didn’t know,” Gordon murmured, a pleased smile crawling across his loathsome face. “But what is this I sense? You’re protective of him.”
Dark arts take her. She needed to fix this fast. So, she curled a lip and shrugged. “You think he’s lusting after me, a student? Maybe he’s more of a social climber than I gave him credit for.”
“Everyone is a social climber, baby Elal. Some just hide it better than others.”
She’d argue, but in Convocation society, status and power were everything, so Gordon had a point. Except that she knew Cillian and he only cared about books and baking. Maybe those game figures he collected. But all as harmless as it got. He deserved to enjoy that kind of life, far away from the kind of power-struggles she’d been born into and likely would never escape, not even in far Wartson.
“You will stay away from the librarian,” Gordon informed her, apparently coming to a decision. “The next time I detect any communication between you, I will take action.”
“I can’t refuse to communicate with my independent study advisor,” she contested hotly.
“Figure it out,” he shot back. “You’re so clever.”
“Cutting off contact would look suspicious. It would attract more attention, and you don’t want that, do you?”
“I can handle that part,” he sneered, waving off her argument. “Don’t forget who I am.”
“Even against Provost Uriel?” she persisted. “That seems like an extreme move, risking House Uriel becoming aware of House Hanneil interference.”
That, at least, gave him pause, and Alise allowed herself to enjoy the brief flush of triumph. A minor victory, but every tiny triumph chipped away at his control over her.
“Don’t let it come to that,” he advised, adding a bit of psychic pressure. “Speak to the Harahel boy if you must, but only to put him off. I’ll be watching your every thought and if I detect the least hint of rebellion…” He grinned, gaze lingering on her bosom, which was so slight and so concealed under her baggy shirt that she knew he couldn’t possibly see anything. Still, the hint served to turn her stomach. “Well, I will make you regret any disobedience.”
“House Phel won’t take an attack against me lightly,” she warned him. “Even House Elal will take it amiss if you harm me.”
“Oh, I’m not going to harm you ,” he returned. “Though my promise to make you eagerly squirm in my bed stands. Who knows? You might find you enjoy it after I release the compulsion that made you crawl to me in the first place.”
She regarded him impassively, refusing to give him the pleasure of revealing her profound revulsion. The Hanneil wizard—the stereotypical version of the worst of that house—clearly got off on frightening her and on his own prurient fantasies of rape, mental, emotional, and physical. Someone rapped sharply on the door, shouting a question. Finally.
Gordon’s smile went thin. “No, baby wizard. If you can’t follow instructions, the person who will be hurt is the librarian.”
Cillian settled at his favorite study desk, the one in the quiet corner near the windows, surrounded on the other two sides by shelves of obscure treatises on early Convocation experiments on soil amendments. The very stale information possessed the infinitely magical quality of repelling all comers. Nobody ever visited those materials. In fact, of all the shelves in the vast archives, this corner of obsolete academia was the least visited. Cillian had determined that quite some time ago and quietly moved a battered desk and comfy chair into it. With the addition of an old lamp with an aging fire elemental that produced light so grudging no one would miss it, Cillian had the perfect refuge, the polar opposite of his station at the reference desk where anyone could interrupt him and regularly did.
With a sigh—not exactly happy, as the circumstances were far from pleasant—he arranged the piles of bound records. The situation was beyond terrible, but he couldn’t help that he did love a bit of a research project. This one might end quickly, with the standard information easily located and presented as expected, but…
As he’d suspected, however, neither Convocation Academy graduation records nor the citizenship rolls turned up a wizard Gordon Hanneil. Almost certainly that was the name he’d given when he was hired as an academy proctor, but with a little psychic push on the correct low-level, data-entry personnel, a false name could be applied to his hiring dossier. The underlying records would be more difficult to falsify and could lead to trouble if a person needed to prove their citizenship. Why take that risk when a new name for a new job was much easier?
No, Gordon Hanneil existed, Cillian was certain of that—and was equally certain that wasn’t his name. Sent by Hanneil, almost certainly, but not Gordon and maybe not entitled to use the house name as his own. Cillian would find him.
He began by going through the House Hanneil roster, which Cillian fully expected would yield nothing. The pages were arranged chronologically in reverse order, with the youngest members listed first in the binder, each given their own page as the Convocation proctors confirmed possession of magical talent. Usually in-house proctors made the first assessments of children under the aegis of the house, if the house in question could afford to keep a specially trained Hanneil wizard with an oracle head to make the determination. Naturally, House Hanneil had no such issues, able to assess all children born to their denizens frequently and in-depth.
Thus, the House Hanneil pages for each individual showed a relentless amount of testing, usually starting at birth. However, the Convocation relied upon their own rounds of examinations to make the official determinations, which generally started when the child was around five years old. Though magically gifted children were admitted to Convocation Academy around the ages of eight or nine, depending on their MP scores and relative maturity, they didn’t manifest as either a wizard or familiar until well after adolescence, when the brain finished its final maturation. In some rare cases—Han came to mind—late bloomers didn’t manifest until their early to mid twenties.
Thus, every individual’s page held rows of testing dates and the results as spoken by the oracle head, including an identification number indicating which oracle head had delivered that particular verdict. The oracle heads were never wrong, but a great deal of Convocation law and practice depended upon that fact, so identifying details were meticulously documented. The official Convocation testing entries stood out in bold lettering at intervals—when the child in question had been officially registered as magically gifted, along with their MP scores at the time of testing; their scores at the time of admission to Convocation Academy, and at regular intervals following that.
The newest entries, of course, belonged to infants, and Cillian paged through those rapidly, Hanneil children seeming to grow before his eyes as their charts lengthened into multiple pages, their portraits gazing up from the archival-quality House Salis paper, the kids seeming to age as he flipped through, faces losing the softness of childhood, sharpening with understanding and, in many cases, cynicism. Eventually the array of eye colors lessened, the variety of greens, blues, hazels, grays, and browns giving over to a predominance of wizard-black. Oh, the familiars retained their native eye color, but they faded into the background compared to that intensely magical black of their wizard fellows.
He supposed that could be a reflection of his own ingrained Convocation-instilled biases. Only wizards mattered in the world of Convocation Society, with familiars retaining more of their humanity, perhaps, along with their natural eye color, but falling into their support roles to the only people with actual power: wizards.
Cillian snorted softly to himself at his own thoughts, mentally amending the observation to specify “high-level wizards.” As a librarian without spectacular skills of any kind, he lacked power worth mentioning. But then, at least weak wizards and familiars made it to citizen status. None of the house binders included the countless mundanes who inhabited Convocation lands, living their lives unrecorded and largely unnoticed, except that their labors produced coin that filled the coffers of the Convocation houses in return for the goods that improved their otherwise magicless existence.
Dark arts, he was in a morose mood. Though, with all that had happened since he and Alise had returned to Convocation Academy, who could blame him? Certainly he couldn’t be suffering heartbreak over losing someone he’d never had to begin with.
In truth, though he hastened this research with his native wizardry, paging through, reading, and sorting the information faster than anyone without his abilities could, a great deal of what he brought to the task involved simple intelligence. The same ability to parse and interpret data that any mundane could bring to bear. Though he could have used magic to index the House Hanneil binder—and then cross-referenced with House Hanneil hires, as Wizard Gordon wasn’t necessarily born to that house and could have been hired on at any point—Cillian wanted to add that extra layer of quality control by examining the information physically also.
Another stack on his desk comprised the Convocation Academy graduates for each year for the last century. This Gordon Hanneil had to be in there somewhere. Cillian would probably start two decades previous and work backwards and forwards, alternating a year before and a year after, to find the wizard. Whatever name he’d used then, he’d show up in some fashion.
Cillian didn’t exactly know how he’d recognize the wizard. Even if he had seen the man’s face, Gordon might not look the same now as in the records. If he had the wizard’s MP scorecard, Cillian could use his archivist magic to index for that and cut this whole search short. Every wizard’s and familiar’s MP scores were as unique as their fingerprints. Yes, the scores fluctuated until manifestation, but once an oracle head was able to give the final determination of wizard or familiar, those MP scores remained fixed for the remainder of their lives. The only variable after that point was how the person in question used their magic. The MP scores tested potential only. Execution was something entirely else.
But, whoever he was, this wizard possessed Hanneil magic sufficient to be hired as an academy proctor. Cillian began assembling a mental list, using his magic to remember the profiles perfectly and bookmark their locations, of possible candidates. He would find this person and then he would discover why the wizard was tormenting Alise.
What Cillian would do at that point, he wasn’t certain. But he had to do something . Alise needed his help, which mattered more than anything to him. Also, though, if House Hanneil was working to interfere with Alise’s investigation into the missing House Phel archives, then someone had to ferret out their plans.
And who better to compile that data than a librarian?