Chapter 26
~26~
A lise bit back her questions, increasingly alarmed by Cillian’s distraction—and concentrated attention on something beyond her ken. As when he’d been using his wizardry to locate and extract the House Phel archives, his magic had resolved from grayscale into crisp black and white lines. They spiraled out neatly into the archives, seeming as if they formed a text she’d be able to read if only she could focus her eyes correctly.
She hadn’t had occasion to participate so closely while a different kind of wizard worked their magic. Observing Cillian had really brought home how very differently their magical styles operated. As if they used the same voice, but in entirely unrelated languages.
She’d learned enough about his techniques in the last hour, to be keenly aware of how his wizardry combed through the archives, with a distant sense of pages ruffling, as it did now, but with an urgent intensity. Also, she’d never seen Cillian so tense. Really wanting to ask, but knowing better, Alise reviewed the skills Professor Seraphiel had taught her, readying herself to fight. She also summoned her warrior spirits, though she kept them invisible for the moment. Cillian complained that library magic wasn’t useful for battle. Well, hers was and she would protect them both.
Though it would help to know what had so abruptly and profoundly worried Cillian. She breathed a sigh of relief when he focused on her again. Short-lived relief, as it turned out.
“I set off some sort of alarm,” he said in a low, terse voice. “I’m an idiot. I should have realized that—”
“No time for that. Is someone coming? Now? Gordon?” She managed to keep her voice steady saying his name, wrestling the immediate stab of panic. She refused to let that odious slimeball cow her.
“I don’t know.” Cillian sounded steadier. “I can just sense the archive sending out a kind of call. Who knows who’s being signaled?”
“Can you shut down the alarm?”
“Maybe… with time, I could—”
“We can’t count on the luxury of time,” she said, cutting him off with what she recognized as Elal ruthlessness. Papa would be proud. “What if you fold up the Phel stacks again—will that stop the alarm?”
“Possibly.” He sounded dubious. “Even then it might be too late, if they’ve already been alerted.”
“We have to take the chance. Fold up those stacks again.”
“But we need that information!” He glared at her in frustration.
“And we’ll get to it later,” she answered, marveling at her own calm. Nice to know she didn’t turn into a frightened, gibbering mess at every sign of threat. “For now, we need to protect those stacks and that information. Hide it all again—and alter the lock so only you can access it.”
“Good idea.” He heaved a sigh. “I hate to ask, but…”
“My magic is your magic,” she said, squeezing his hand and pouring more into him. “Work fast.”
He did work more rapidly this time, knowing what he was about, seeming more confident, despite the gaffe of not thinking about the archive being tagged with an alarm. Frankly, she should have thought of that, too. They could exchange recriminations later. Cillian’s magic lanced out with black and white precision, clicking efficiently. Somewhere on the periphery of her wizard’s senses, she heard a vast groaning, the sort of sound you’d imagine a roomful of shelves packed with heavy tomes would make if you folded it like origami. She wasn’t sure, however, if she actually heard a physical sound or if it was a synesthetic perception of Cillian’s magic. Tense, she waited for it to cease.
A moment later, he sighed again, this time in relief and nodded an answer to her questioning look. “It’s done and only I have the passkey.”
“Great, let’s move.” She tugged him out of the chair, relieved that he complied this time, grateful to be able to physically release some of the fierce need to flee. Or fight. Fleeing sounded much better. “If someone is coming, I don’t want to be here when they arrive. At least we know those stacks are secured against further tampering. No one’s getting into them without you.”
That was the wrong thing to say. Cillian dug in his heels. A stricken look crossed his face. “Oh no! That was a terrible idea that I coded the spell to only me. What if something happens to me? Those texts will be lost forever. I have to—”
“You have to get a hold of yourself,” she told him crisply, pulling him along. “And we’ll make sure nothing happens to you.”
He nodded miserably, unconvinced, but at least moving. “But what if—”
This time he stopped himself on a gargle of horror. Alise couldn’t blame him, as the shadows between the towering stacks resolved into the slinking forms of hunters.
The creatures had been designed to instill horror, deliberately made into monsters by the houses that combined their magic to create them. Alise had been seen hunters before, though never this close, at the siege of House Phel. In her classes, however, she’d read about the abominations in the wizard-only texts.
A conglomeration of numerous animals, shimmering with various magics, the hunters sported the long jaws of a jackal filled with rows of fangs. They moved with the loping grace of weasels, their paws tipped with hard, curved talons. They also possessed a rudimentary intelligence—some more than others—and were nearly impossible to kill. Chopping them into pieces too small to be a threat worked best, but even then they sometimes reassembled themselves.
A moot point anyway, since neither she nor Cillian wore any weapons to attack with. She’d been prepared for all that evading and eluding should Gordon Hanneil show up, not for fighting hunters hand to hand. Still, the hunters typically went after familiars, not a high-level wizard, student though she might be. She should be able to handle this.
And so, she stepped forward, putting herself between the hunters and Cillian.
“Alise,” he gasped, grabbing her shoulder.
She shrugged him off with a sharp gesture and a glare. “Hide. Run. I’ll handle this.”
“I’m not leaving you!”
She tapped her temple. “You are the sole repository of those records.” She pointed forward, the warrior spirits she’d had on hold becoming visible. “This is my forte. You keep saying so.”
Turning her gaze firmly forward, she nevertheless sensed his hesitation. Then, thankfully, he slipped away. Cillian would know the labyrinth of the archives better than anyone. He would be safe, if only to ensure the preservation of the stacks he’d hidden away. Putting him out of her mind, Alise focused, drawing ruthlessly on her magic—and on a few more spirits she’d kept on hold.
The lead hunter advanced, jaws agape and dripping. Unlike the stories she’d heard of the hunters pursuing her friends, these didn’t comment or give instructions. She counted five of them—and none that she’d seen peeled away after Cillian. Likely they’d been tasked to kill anyone opening those stacks, which meant whoever enchanted them to that purpose had anticipated an archivist. Not an Elal wizard.
One of her warriors leapt, swinging its ethereal sword. As she’d counted on, the hunter in its path ignored the spirit as immaterial, just like the animals that made it up would. The sword condensed just enough upon contact to sever the hunter’s head from the body. The long-muzzled head tumbled to the floor with a satisfying thud, spewing black blood, the jaws snapping futilely from a point too distant to bother her. The temporary surge of triumph at that small success faded immediately as the hunter’s body, of course, kept advancing on her.
Along with the other four intact hunters.
Maybe she’d been overconfident. Too late now. Using her magic to control both warriors, she also summoned a group of fire elementals, mentally apologizing to the archivists and promising that she wouldn’t let the flames spread. Feeling as if she worked multiple puppets with both hands at once, she set the warriors to attacking the advancing hunters. Then she unleashed the fire elementals to burn.
The effect was startling. Along with the smell. The stench of burnt fur and slowly roasting canine flesh billowed out, followed by black oily smoke that stung her eyes. The fire elementals gleefully danced over the still advancing hunters, bright spots of flame in the greasily thickening shadows. Some elementals fell off into the gloom as the warrior spirits cleaved away limbs. It was all eerily silent, the hunters giving no sign or sound of suffering. As the flames penetrated their immortal flesh, however, the sizzle of fat and crackling skin became audible, turning her stomach.
Until an alarm wailed—some embedded enchantment to detect smoke or flame in the archives. Well, shit.
Quickly, Alise summoned water elementals to douse the fire, which resulted in more suffocating smoke, but hopefully preserved the materials in the nearby stacks. Cillian would never forgive her if any harm came to the archives. Recalling what little she knew about fires, she quickly summoned air elementals to disperse the smoke, to prevent that kind of damage, too, which had the side-benefit of giving her a clearer picture of the aftermath. And relieving the burning ache in her lungs she hadn’t paid attention to until that moment.
Twitching, seared, and smoking chunks of hunter laid strewn across the floor, Alise’s warrior spirits continuing on their assigned task of chopping them into even smaller bits. Fire elementals burned sullenly, squabbling with the water elementals. Black blood pooled everywhere. In the distance, shouts indicated the fire alarm had been heard and answered.
“Dark arts,” Cillian breathed, coming up beside her. “What a mess.”
She flicked him a more than irritated glance. “I told you to run and hide.”
“I did the latter,” he answered, unperturbed. “Then I came out when it was safe to do so. And I don’t take orders from you, Lady Elal. Deal with it.”
Oh, he was asking for it, he really was. Alise knotted her hands into fists. “Listen, you—”
“Better summon some earth elementals to devour the evidence,” he interrupted, “unless you want to answer a lot of questions. The less notice the better at this point.”
“Fine. We’ll argue later.”
“I look forward to that,” he murmured, setting a reassuring hand on the small of her back. “But you know I’m the better debater.”
Despite herself, she smiled. She had no idea how he could amuse her like this, especially under such circumstances.
Feeling a bit thin on magic—though Brinda’s infusion had really lasted through a lot—Alise summoned a veritable horde of earth elementals to devour the blood, ash, and remaining twitching chunks of decimated hunter. The last did give her pause. What would those unkillable creatures do inside an elemental? She didn’t know if anyone had tried that approach before. At the Siege of House Phel, Jadren El-Adrel had “healed” the hunters and returned them to their constituent animal parts. Not an option here, not without Jadren’s truly unique brand of wizardry.
Still, Cillian was right that the last complication they needed at this point was to attract even more attention—especially not knowing exactly who their enemies might be. It was bad enough that they’d inadvertently alerted whoever had hidden the Phel archives to their tampering; they didn’t need their blissfully ignorant colleagues developing suspicions, too. She encouraged the earth elementals to devour every trace, allowing the fire and water elementals to return to their own realms, and sent her personal cadre of spirits back into stasis.
The earth elementals snuffled over the floor, seeking any last traces of organic snacks. Footsteps approached, the glow of lanterns growing brighter in the dimly lit stacks.
“We should go,” Cillian said with increased urgency. “That has to be good enough.”
Using the enchantment she’d learned that very day from Professor Cixin, she put the earth elementals into an incorporeal space and sealed it. The elementals should be content enough there for a while, as they were thoroughly sated. If all went well, maybe they’d have completely digested the hunters’ immortal flesh when she checked back.
Cillian was already pulling her along as she worked mentally, deftly weaving them back through the more obscure stacks, away from the commotion. Unfortunately that meant they were also moving away from the one exit from the archives.
Finished with her magical tasks, Alise dug in her heels. “We need to get out of here,” she protested. “We’re trapped in this place.”
“I know that,” he snapped with frustration. But he stopped, pulling her into an alcove, and drawing her into his arms. “Let’s take a breath.”
She did, leaning against him as they embraced. It felt good, right, and safe, no matter what happened outside their shadowy circle. “They’re going to know it was us,” she said after a beat, pulling back to look at him. “No one else could have done this, so we’re not hiding so much as evading. And eluding,” she added, thinking of Professor Seraphiel.
“Suggestions for doing so are welcome,” he replied grimly. “There are good reasons for the archives to have a single exit, but that’s working against us at the moment.”
“I can cloak us.”
“Do you have enough magic?”
Did she? She’d used a lot, but she’d been replete at the start. “I do. Plenty to get us out of here.”
“All right.” But he looked glum. “What worries me next is how we’ll get back to those Phel texts though.”
“We can think about that later.”
“Can we though? What if this is our last opportunity to get at them? There’s no guarantee we’ll be able to get in here again. You should go and I can stay.”
Alise tried to contain her exasperation. “You’re just going to hide in the archives for days or weeks?”
“Whatever it takes,” he answered with that stubbornly noble tilt to his chin. “I know these stacks like the back of my hand. I can hide from anyone.”
“Even from more hunters?”
“Maybe there won’t be any more.”
That was hoping for a lot. “What will you do for food and water?”
He hesitated. “I can get by for a few days.”
Cillian was being totally unreasonable, but she’d also learned to recognize when he’d entrenched on a course of action. “All right,” she agreed, deliberately slumping her shoulders. “I’m sure I’ll be fine without you. Gordon Hanneil won’t dare come after me openly.”
That worked, the agony of indecision contorted Cillian’s face as he grimaced. “Dark arts,” he cursed. “No, you’re right. Your safety comes first. We’ll just have to leave the archives and hope we can come back. Besides, I don’t know how we can examine the contents without setting off the alarm again.”
“We need to find a way to put the equivalent of a silencing spell around them,” she mused, resuming their winding trek through the shadowy archives toward the exit. Cillian didn’t correct her trajectory, so it must be more or less the right direction. “Still, any time we return to the archives, we’d run the risk of being trapped. I wish we could somehow take the documents with us.”
Cillian snorted at that. “That won’t happen. There’s an enchantment that prohibits removal of archived materials. Every student should know that.”
She did, of course, know that. It was the topic of much griping among the student populace that only certain texts could be borrowed and taken out of the archives. For anything truly useful, they had to sit there and work on site. It could be super inconvenient. The wizard-students in particular were forever concocting work-arounds to try to sneak texts out of the archives, but even the smallest of books secreted in a pocket set off the enchantment…
An inspiration struck.
“Wait, I have an idea. Tell me—before you unlocked the Phel stacks, they didn’t take up any physical space, right?”
“Well, it’s an interesting conundrum. The concept of physical space is debatable,” he began.
“Cillian,” she said, stopping him firmly. “You can explain the conundrum to me later. Yes or no?”
His usually gentle black gaze glittered mutinously. “It’s not a simple yes or no answer.”
“Dark arts preserve me. Are they portable enough for you to simply bring the folded-up stacks with us to House Harahel for a side-by-side comparison there?”