The Patient Mage (21)
They waited in silence for the Spirit Awakeners of Lion Pavilion. At last they came in, Alex at their head.
He was swaggering along in that shoulder-rolling strut of his when he caught sight of the high mages gathered there, and surprise hunched his shoulders.
Catherine saw something else. Her eyes fell on Mark's — the pupils gouged out, nothing left but black holes — and she screamed.
"Quiet."
At that single word from Randal, Catherine stacked both hands over her mouth.
David put on the warmest voice he could manage.
"Come here. Stand."
As they approached, David, Peter, and Carl each took one of them and grilled them hard on where they had been, and what they had been doing, between midnight and two. Chris kept his ears wide open and listened, praying with everything in him that there would be no alibi.
An idle voice cut in from the side.
"We could just extract their memories."
Harvey sounded genuinely regretful.
What the hell is wrong with that bastard?
Chris cursed him inwardly, and then he understood. If you wanted to practice fire, you hurled a ball of flame into empty air. If you wanted to work water, you went down to a stream, or filled a tub and practiced there. The rest was no different. Earth, wood, and metal lay scattered everywhere you looked, and the wind blew every day. If you wanted to practice magic, you practiced.
Harvey's magic was not like that. When he had drawn the scene out of Mark's eyeball, the pupil had burned. That art mutilated a corpse by necessity, and no bereaved family was going to hand a body over so Harvey could train. Memory extraction was worse still. What madman would offer himself up as a practice dummy and risk being reduced to an imbecile?
So Harvey's magic was bound to go unpracticed. To train, he had to buy corpses or slaves, and that cost a fortune. A chance to practice for nothing was precious to him, and it delighted him.
Chris cursed Harvey all over again and felt a stab of self-disgust. Since coming to the tower, his stock of curses had grown considerably — and not once had he spat a single one of them out. Every curse stayed inside.
Mages...
He wanted so badly to be a mage. Badly enough that he wanted to curse a lunatic like Harvey to his face and feel the relief of it, and Randal too, and William...
How clean that would leave him inside.
It was terribly sad, because it was a dream that could never come true.
The alibi check came to an end. Catherine and Frank had alibis; they had been eating with their peers at the time. Only Alex had none.
Chris exulted.
Yes.
He bore no grudge against the peers who had succeeded in sensing mana. Spirit Awakeners were at least treated as people by the tower, and the mages had only dragged them in so they couldn't do something as vicious as rip out memories.
Alex excepted. Chris loathed him. If Alex was put through misery, he would clap his hands and cheer.
The best possible result.
That Alex alone had no alibi came to him as pure joy.
David gave the order.
"You, over there. You two, that way."
Alex went to stand beside Tony, his face swollen and sullen with resentment. Tony dodged him and stuck close to Smith.
When they had first moved into Lion Pavilion, the nobles had banded together, sneering at the slaves and dressing them down. Eleven months on, Tony would rather stand with Smith than with Alex.
Harvey rubbed his palms together.
"So the culprit is one of those four. How do you mean to tell them apart?"
William said, "Who knows."
"I'm telling you, extract their memories. That's the best way."
"Best for you, maybe."
If his own disciple Peter had learned a magic like that, William would gladly have offered the lot of them up as fodder for practice. But Harvey was the disciple of Sheikh, a man William ordinarily detested, and worse, Harvey's habits took after his master's, so that the mere sight of him set William's teeth on edge. He had no wish to do anything that would please Harvey.
David spoke up.
"What about reading the memories out of the dagger?"
Randal said, "We would have to ask a mage above our own rank. I rather doubt those personages would bestir themselves to investigate the killer of an apprentice."
Harvey said, "Those people would snort even if a Thought Formulation mage like the rest of us dropped dead. Busy as they are, they're the sort who'd thrash us for bothering them with a trifle."
He went on, still rubbing his hands.
"Someone has to die at Seed Cultivation or higher before they'll so much as lift a finger."
Chris turned it over.
So after Spirit Awakening comes Thought Formulation, and after Thought Formulation, Seed Cultivation.
There might be another stage between Thought Formulation and Seed Cultivation. But judging by the nuance of what had been said, that seemed unlikely.
David stepped forward.
"I'll contact them."
Randal warned him at once.
"You could be disciplined for it."
David clenched his teeth.
"I'll accept that."
The grim set of his face made it plain that even getting in touch carried a risk.
How foul-tempered do you have to be before people are afraid just to contact you?
Every mage Chris had met was filth as a human being.
Does learning magic rot a person like that, or were they rotten to begin with? If it's the first, will I rot too once I learn magic?
Even if his character changed, Chris wanted to be a mage.
David formed a transmission bird and sent it winging off, then drew a long breath to steady himself.
Alex said, "I have been truly wronged."
Tony asked, "Wronged how?"
Tony had asked, but Alex addressed the mages.
"I am not someone who belongs with these insects. I am a mage, the same as all of you."
Harvey snorted.
"A Spirit Awakener is not a mage."
"Haven't we set foot on the same path?"
"No. A Spirit Awakener can give up on magic and become a knight instead."
At that new scrap of information, Chris's eyes lit.
So if you sense mana, you can become a knight?
At the Spirit Awakening stage, it seemed, the road forked — mage, or knight.
Alex's eyes went hazy, as if he were dreaming.
"I am going to soar high into the sky."
"A bit early for talk like that, isn't it? The lofty ones up above don't even count a Thought Formulation stage like mine as a mage. Earn the right to stand beside me first, and then you can say things like that."
Peter looked at Alex and rebuked him.
"Once you've reached Spirit Awakening, you ought to be thinking about studying hard. Why did you torment the residents of Lion Pavilion? That's why you're being treated like this, and why the rest of us have been saddled with the nuisance."
From those words Chris knew his own guess had been right. If Alex had not been folded into the group of suspects, the mages would have thrown Tony, Smith, and Faye straight down the road of memory extraction.
Harvey snapped his fingers.
"That's exactly what I'm saying. Pathetic. Why'd you do it? Wanted a cheap little taste of victory, bullying the losers?"
Alex denied it at once.
"I did not."
Chris couldn't hold his tongue.
"Alex is no good at his studies, is he?"
He looked at Catherine and Frank.
"Right?"
Catherine gave no answer. She only hemmed and hawed.
"Judging by that reaction, he really can't."
Harvey asked, "And what's that supposed to mean?"
"He did sense mana, but everything after that is no easy thing. Among his peers he's probably the worst student of the lot. As the first to sense mana he must have been called a genius, and then his standing slipped and the ones who came later overtook him. The glory was great, so the frustration was just as great. When his peers laugh at him, he comes down to Lion Pavilion to take it out on someone. He works the stress off by tormenting Prince Mark."
Harvey was entertained. He looked at Catherine.
"Is that so?"
She couldn't answer him. The answer came from Frank.
"Dead last."
Chris looked at Frank.
So you hate Alex too.
In the early days of Lion Pavilion, Alex hadn't tormented only the slaves. He had scorned the commoners and bullied them as well.
Chris muttered it loudly.
"Acted so damn high and mighty, and he was dead last! The old saying had it right — an empty cart rattles the loudest."
The eyes the mages turned on Alex were no longer kind. In that instant Chris jolted. Oh no. If their opinion of Alex was driven into the dirt, they would treat him no differently from Tony. The moment the expectation vanished — that he would someday become a mage and stand beside them — there would be nothing to regret in extracting his memories. The whole reason Chris had gone to such pains to make Alex a suspect would disappear.
That can't happen.
Seeing his mistake, he scrambled to salvage it.
"Sir Alex, don't be discouraged. There's a saying — great talent ripens late. A great vessel is long in the making, and becoming a great mage takes time. The trial of coming in last will only temper you. It will send you higher."
Alex, blind to what Chris intended, flew into a rage.
"You dare mock me."
"I'm not mocking you. I mean it."
"Shut up!"
"Sir Alex..."
"What's an insect doing sticking his nose in?"
Alice stopped him.
"Enough. This isn't a place for you to step into."
Chris took the advice and closed his mouth. Alice whispered.
"Great talent ripens late — where did you hear that?"
"The prince used to mutter it sometimes."
"How?"
"I am a late bloomer. A late bloomer..."
Alice's throat tightened.
"So that's how it was. He was hurting badly enough to say something like that."
Harvey wore a greasy, sly smile.
"Listening to him talk, that Alex has no future at all. He's never going to amount to anything, so let's extract his memories. No great loss if he turns into an imbecile, is there?"
"You can't!"
Alex cried out.
Then a bird no bigger than a sparrow flew into the reception room. Strangely, the sparrow glared, as if it were reprimanding every person there.
The three high mages kept their mouths clamped shut like clams. The looks they sent David said only one thing: you did this, so you deal with it.
David stepped out in front of the bird and opened his mouth.
"Mark is a son the king cherishes."
Chris nodded.
So Mark was loved.
He hadn't been thrown away to the tower for being surplus. Somehow that fact was welcome, and it pleased him.
Chris looked at the sparrow with new eyes. He had thought a transmission bird was more formidable the larger it was, but the sparrow suggested that wasn't necessarily so. Other mages' transmission birds carried intent in a single direction — if there was more to say, you had to form another and send it — but this one could hold a conversation.
"The king has not been sparing in his support of our tower."
"Support has increased by ten percent since the late king's reign."
"We judged that we ought at least to show the sincerity of identifying the culprit."
"If you would read the memories from the dagger that killed Mark..."
The sparrow cut him off in a fury.
The sparrow turned its head toward Randal.
Randal broke into a sweat.
"I apologize. Even so, we narrowed the suspects to four."
"Three apprentices, and one Spirit Awakener."
"Yes."
The sparrow sighed.
"How?"
David said, "Pardon?"
The sparrow slowly faded.