Chapter 25
~25~
B eginning to feel the effects of his upended sleep schedule and knowing he wouldn’t be able to tackle the major magic working he had in mind without a bit of rest, Cillian was able to squeeze in a decent nap before heading to his shift in the archives a few hours early.
If all went as planned, he could execute this refined search before his work day started. It meant missing dinner, but he felt confident Alise would eat in the dining hall and he’d scarfed some leftovers at his place. The sleep had helped and he felt energized with renewed determination.
This was something he could control. The Szarina thing had spiraled out of his grasp with astonishing speed—if he’d ever had any control in that relationship—but this was different, even if it was technically helping Alise. It did not, however, count as white-knighting. Doing this research was part of his job, delineated as urgent by the provost herself and was something he could do well, if only he applied himself. About time he concentrated on that task.
The whole situation with Gordon Hanneil had distracted him, which he ruefully had to concede to himself had been the intention of House Hanneil, to derail this research. Rage still clouded his thoughts now at what they’d done and tried to do Alise, and he needed to set that aside to formulate this magic working clearly. And trust that Provost Uriel would handle the situation.
Cillian waved to the librarian on duty, then proceeded directly to his private nook in the archives. On the way, he mentally reviewed his plan for this entirely new working and his own magic reserves. Ruefully, he acknowledged that he might not have enough power for the magnitude of what he had in mind—and no familiar to supplement his magic. There’s no such a thing as a library emergency , he’d told Alise. It just figured he faced the equivalent of one now.
He deliberated on acquiring sufficient magic. Maybe he could ask Marah or one of the other for-hire familiars employed by the academy for such purposes. But that might tip off anyone spying on him that he was up to something unusual. While he mused over that, Cillian sketched out the basics of his plan. This would be a multi-layered approach. He could employ some of his standard techniques for indexing information and some of his tricks for locating texts related to vague descriptions from patrons, but he needed to supplement that with ways to search for hidden and deliberately obscured information.
There were only so many methods for hiding texts in the archives, which had been explicitly designed to make stored materials findable. Occasionally, however, faculty members asked to make certain valuable and potentially dangerous texts difficult to find except by those approved to handle them. The Archivists Council had compromised with a work-around that allowed carefully selected works to be placed in a space that could be accessed only by those in possession of a password that activated a trigger to reveal those texts. The enchantment had to be of the sort that could be operated by anyone, even mundanes with no magical ability, to preserve the availability of the archives to all Convocation citizens. The documents were also still listed in the commonly used indexes, for the same reason. Functionally, that meant the librarians could find the hidden texts, but most people lacked the appropriate skillset.
The most closely guarded secret regarding the Convocation Archives was that, huge as the physical space was that housed the centuries’ worth of collected texts, the archivists also employed library magic to allow a far greater volume of work to occupy that space than was physically possible. This proprietary magic—provided by House Harahel, of course—operated invisibly to most patrons, even highly gifted wizards. It helped that the ambient magic of the ancient building, saturated with centuries’ of wizardry, created enough background “noise” that even the most sensitive put down the sense of space and time dilation to that, especially in the deepest parts of the archives.
Also, the stacks had been designed to add to the sense of disorientation. It didn’t take much—amplified shadows, a bit of optical illusion built into the construction of the shelves, giving them a looming quality. The archives lacked timepieces that gave cues on the passage of time. To preserve the materials from the ravages of natural light, there were already no windows.
Most people who ventured deep into the archives ascribed the sense of lost time to becoming absorbed in their search, which wasn’t far from the truth.
One reason Cillian had paid close attention to Alise’s explorations of the deep archives—at least in the beginning and that hadn’t been solely a rationalization to excuse his interest in her movements—w as to ensure she emerged safely again without having lost too much time. All of the House Harahel librarians took on that responsibility as part of their sacred duty to house and Convocation. No one wanted some hapless student, or absentminded professor, to become lost in the stacks for an extended period of time.
Cillian had been mulling the seemingly vanished materials regarding House Phel, along with House Hanneil’s urgent need to stop Alise’s search, for quite some time. Only one answer made sense: someone had to have found a way to use the archives’ unique characteristics to hide materials from even him and the other, far more experienced archivists. Did that mean another Harahel wizard had done so? His sinking stomach indicated there could be no other explanation, which was also why he’d dragged his feet for so long on pursuing this particular avenue until he’d exhausted every other possibility. Some things you just didn’t want to know.
Also, penetrating this deception required a level of psychic sleuthing that went beyond his normal skills. “But not my abilities,” he muttered to himself, though the lack of magic amplification made the challenge even more daunting. “I can do this.”
“Can do what?” Alise asked. She gave him an impish smile at having startled him. “You must have been lost in thought. That’s the first time I’ve been able to sneak up on you, and I wasn’t even using a cloaking spirit.”
“Shouldn’t you be at dinner?” he asked, unbending from his scribbled diagram and stretching. He had been concentrating a while.
She raised a brow. “It’s long past. Now I know you’re preoccupied if you forgot about spying on me to make sure I was adequately fed and—before you ask—yes, I ate in the dining hall, even though the snacks you gave me could feed a small family for a week.”
“What time is it?”
“About half an hour before your shift starts. I figured I’d find you here. How did it go with Provost Uriel?”
“Well. She’s handling it. You’ve had no further incidents?”
“None.” Alise shook her head, blue-black feathers of hair shimmering around her face. “What are you pumping yourself up to do?”
He debated with himself for only a moment. “Some of this is proprietary Harahel information, so I’m walking a line here in what I can and can’t tell you. I have an idea for how and where I might look for those missing records.”
“That’s brilliant.” She smiled broadly, eyes shining in a way that made him feel like a true hero of the old tales.
“I’ve never done anything like it before. It’s kind of… next level.”
“Next level librarian wizardry. I love it. If anyone can do it, you can.”
Her sincere faith in him was staggering. “The problem is, I may not have enough magic. I was trying to think of a familiar, or a few, I could borrow magic from without raising suspicion. Would your friend, Brinda Chur, help me, do you think?”
Alise instantly chilled, in expression and in magic, the scent of roses going frosty. “She is no friend of mine, nor of yours. Now’s not the time. I’ll tell you the story later, but fair warning.”
“Too bad.” He wanted to ask more, but Alise was right that this wasn’t the time.
“However,” she added more brightly, “I just filled up on magic from Brinda, fortunately before our distressing conversation that I’ll tell you all about later, so I can give you plenty.”
He stared at her a moment, feeling as if he’d missed a step. “But you’re a wizard.”
“I’m aware of that,” she replied in that grave manner she used when she was amused by him.
“I need a familiar,” he clarified, frowning when she laughed.
“Wizards can give each other magic,” she told him. “There’s nothing stopping us. They do it at House Phel more and more. It’s just not typically ‘done’ in the Convocation because wizards are competitive and jealous of their power, and thus not interested in helping other wizards. They’re also eager to exploit familiars who really have little to no ability to object.”
She was right, he realized, rather astonished that this hadn’t occurred to him. “But you need your magic,” he protested, though he was happy to see she had indeed filled up, glowing with transmuted fire and sunlight.
“This is important,” she reminded him. “Very high on our list of priorities. Besides, during our, ah, intimacy, our magic already blended some. This should feel quite natural.”
He loved that she blushed, her astonishing eyes skittering briefly away. “Our intimacy ?” he echoed, teasing her.
“You know what I mean, Cillian Harahel,” she replied sternly, then bent to kiss him, all too briefly, before proffering her hand. “I’ll maintain skin contact, so take as much as you need as you work. Let’s get this done.”
Charmed, grateful, so dazzlingly in love with her, he changed their hand clasp so their fingers interlaced, and bent his attention to his diagram. Alise angled her head to look at what he’d drawn, but didn’t comment. He doubted his arcane scribbles—an abstract representation of how the hidden stacks felt to his wizard senses—would make any sense to her. And she was conscientious about his house proprietary information, granting him both the courtesy of not inquiring and the quiet he needed to concentrate.
He began with basic librarian wizardry, performing a search that he’d executed so many times now that it had become practically rote, seeking references to House Phel. He’d long-since modified his indexing with the techniques he used to search for items that patrons described vaguely or, on more than one occasion, flat out incorrectly. Another Harahel invention taught in-house, this fancy bit of magic operated almost with its own kind of intelligence, seeking what might be close to the search term, but not precisely it. Cillian had no idea how it actually worked, but it yielded amazing results, able to collect information not consciously remembered.
During his brief visit to House Phel, Cillian had chatted briefly with Gabriel about the restoration of the manse and how the process had taken on a life of its own, drawing on some sort of ancestral Phel memory of how the house had been before it sank into the swamps. Cillian had been fascinated, thinking of the search spell and suspecting a similar magic operated there, with it drawing on information from elsewhere.
Tempted to try his standard search one more time, just because he still couldn’t believe every previous attempt had turned up exactly nothing—which had never happened to him before and still annoyed him no end—he resisted, figuring it would be a waste of magic to confirm what he already knew. Instead, with the special search mentally prepared, he left it poised while he took on the next, very experimental step. Meticulously sliding his wizardry into the folded parts of the stacks, he identified the hidden, coded ones. It took a while, as there were a number of them that had been created over time, for different groups and different purposes. He’d searched them all before, more than once, so he again resisted looking just 0one more time.
Instead, once he’d catalogued them all, he lined them up in a mental queue, drawing on some of Alise’s magic to bolster his. It reminded him a bit of how she’d described mentally holding a multitude of incorporeal entities. The folded spaces didn’t like to be identified and tended to slide away given the least bit of inattention. The magic from Alise, as heady as potent red wine, improved his concentration immensely.
It felt very different, drawing from a wizard rather than a familiar, though it did help that their sexual intimacy had allowed for some interweaving of their magical natures already, as Alise had so astutely discerned. Still, the flow from her had a more… deliberate feel than it would from a familiar. Rather than feeling as if he drank from a passive container, Alise’s magic pushed into him and he had to be careful not to metaphorically choke on it. If they ever planned to do this again—and why would they? Library emergencies came along once in a lifetime—they’d have to practice.
Making sure he maintained a pin of concentration on the correct number of verified hidden archives, Cillian launched an entirely new search for something that should exist but didn’t to all normal appearances. This was the tricky bit as it was very difficult to look for a null value. If his theory proved correct that this was how the Hanneil conspirators had hidden the House Phel archives, they would have disguised the fold carefully—and very likely with the specific intention of foiling Harahel indexing techniques. Otherwise, the senior archivists responsible for the regular cataloguing and maintenance of the collection would have noticed a discrepancy long before this.
That search took more time, and even more magic, rendering him excessively grateful for Alise’s offer and her steadfast flow of magic. Now that he’d become more used to it, he found he liked the way she injected magic into him as he needed. She seemed to intuitively know when he required a boost, somehow tracking the waxing and waning of his wizardry. Possibly she could sense his efforts, the feeling of her in the back of his mind a strong and reassuring presence. Without her, he would have flagged long since. Limitations, perhaps, the conspirators had counted on.
As it was, he very nearly missed it. In fact, he did miss it, mentally passing over the blip disguised as an irregularity in the ambient magic.
He only caught the scent of it in hindsight, realizing that the slight bump faintly radiated an odor that reminded him of House Hanneil. Their magic didn’t truly smell rank, but he disliked them enough that he perceived their brand of psychic magic that way. In passing, he wondered if Lord Elal would smell sweet like his daughters’ magic or unpleasant, given how much Cillian loathed the man. Nander Elal, the youngest of the bunch, didn’t ever frequent the archives, so Cillian didn’t have that basis for comparison.
These idle musings rolled through the back of his mind, ungoverned, as he wrestled the multiple tasks of having his multilayered, experimental search poised at the ready while he kept a mental eye on that infinitesimal inconsistency in the ambient magic, and as he extended an indexing probe to unlock what he hoped was a hidden archive. The more he was able to hold it still for examination—though it felt as slippery as separating an egg yolk from the white without breaking either—the greater his certainty. It felt like the same construction as the other hidden archives, which unfortunately meant Harahel magic, but he’d think about that later.
Naturally, he didn’t have the password. That would be equally hidden away, if not more so. He did, however, have a thorough knowledge of the Harahel methodology for creating the “lock” an enchantment would fit into. He didn’t need the password when he could open the archive from within the indexing that kept it folded and inaccessible.
He hoped.
“Here we go,” he breathed, hoping Alise would understand. He didn’t dare divert his concentration long enough to check with her that she was all right. Getting this finished would do more to spare Alise’s reserves than anything else.
Using one of his proprietary Harahel indexing magics, he sank his concentration into the folded archive. Essentially what made these archives inaccessible to standard searching was a sort of reverse-indexing. Rather than cataloging the contents of a section of the archives, this magic inverted the metadata tags, turning the information inside out and rendering it nonsensical. If he could just find the right thread to pull…
There.
Inside his head—and somewhere in the depths of Convocation Archives—the stacks that had been folded away reentered their shared reality. Quickly, he scanned the contents. So much material on House Phel, going back centuries. Really, it had been a sloppy shortcut to hide so much of it. It would have been wiser, and less obvious, to have hidden only the texts with whatever incriminating information worried them so.
But then, the deception had worked, so who was he to criticize? Also, it could be that all of the documentation threatened the conspirators. The surge of triumph at his success began to disintegrate around the edges as he realized what a monumental task going through all of that material would be, even with focused library magic.
Carefully extracting his wizardry from the sticky folds of the index, he met Alise’s concerned gaze.
“You look unhappy,” she remarked. “It didn’t work?”
“Oh, it worked all right.” He let out a long sigh, abruptly aware of his exhaustion, despite the wine-warm, rose-infused sizzle of Alise’s magic still coursing through him. “That’s the biggest, most complex magic I’ve ever performed.”
“That’s amazing news!” she exclaimed. “Let’s go see.”
He held onto her hand as she tugged at him to rise. “There is a lot ,” he cautioned her. “It’s going to take weeks, maybe months to go through it all.”
“Then no time like the present to begin,” she replied, sparkling with excitement. “At last I have something to actually research for this project.”
“True.” Cillian wasn’t sure why he couldn’t seem to share her enthusiasm. Was he simply feeling tired? Something felt off. “Though we can use the House Harahel archives for that, too.”
She pressed her lips together impatiently. “Why bother to journey there when the archives we need are here?”
“Because we need the corroboration between the two sets of archives for quality control,” he answered, battling his own impatience. The feeling of wrongness worked on him, aggravatingly nebulous.
“Well, sure,” she replied, a line forming between her brows, “but I could go through what’s here first, catalogue everything, then we can go to House Harahel to run the comparison.”
“I can catalogue the collection here faster than you can,” he pointed out.
Her chin firmed mulishly. “No doubt, but this is my independent study, as you may recall. Just because you want an excuse to visit family doesn’t mean—”
“That is not why I want to go,” he interrupted, a bit more stung than he should be, given that he had been dreaming way too much about introducing Alise to his family.
“No?” Her black-winged brows climbed. “Then why are you being so cranky all of a sudden? This isn’t like you to—”
“Shh!” He clamped down on her hand, distantly aware of her squeak of pained indignation and that asking her to be quiet inside the silencing shield made no sense. But he needed to concentrate. Something about that stack he’d just unfolded.
Something very, very wrong.