Traitor Savant (Second Seal of the Duelists) (17 page)

“Did you hear that?” Bayan
suddenly fell into step with him, wearing a grumpy look.

Kipri only twitched a little at th
e duelist’s stealthy appearance. “Hear what?”

“The headmaster, at supper.”

“I ate early. I had some activities to plan out for my newer students. What did I miss?”

Bayan’s lips formed a silent snarl.
“No one is to go anywhere on campus alone or unsupervised after dark.”

“But, it’s dark
now
.”

“That’s why I’m with you. You’re staff, and you can walk me back to my barracks. Please?”

Kipri sighed, changing direction. “Of course.” Maybe this escort service could work in his favor with Tarin.

“Do you ever get the feeling that someone is just toying with you?”

Kipri glanced down to hide his surprise. Was he trying to tell Kipri something about Tarin’s state of mind? “Sometimes.”

“As if they
either don’t know or don’t care that what you’re after is an impossibility.”

Kipri let out a mirthless laugh. “Some things just seem doomed to fail, no matter how hard we want them
to succeed.”

“And no one else can give you the answer either, because they can’t even understand the question. Ay, Bhattara.”
Bayan lifted his hands and let them fall helplessly to his sides.

“All that passion, and it doesn’t mean a thing.”

“Even Kiwani couldn’t find any books that old—what?”

“What are you talking about?” Kipri asked.

Bayan’s face crinkled in incomprehension. “What are
you
talking about? What passion?”

Kipri sighed.
It seemed Tarin hadn’t told even her closest friends about her involvement with him. “I suppose that answers my question.”

Bayan narrowed his eyes in confusion.
“What question?”

“
Here’re your barracks. Good night, Bayan.” Kipri turned and trudged back across campus, leaving Bayan to stare after him from the porch. All the torment in the world at the hands of angry young eunuch bullies couldn’t hold a candle to the pain he felt in that moment, knowing he was truly in love, and that Tarin wasn’t.

A small distraction awaited on the floor of his front room. He’d been so distracted by his relationship with Tarin that he’d forgotten it was royal mail packet day. Someone had thoughtfully slipped his latest Philo letter under his front door.

Grateful for any news that didn’t involve wrenching his heart open, Kipri scooped up the cream envelope and broke its matching seal, then settled into his padded green and white chair to read it.

Three paragraphs in, Kipri gasped aloud.

I won’t speculate, lad, whether you’re already aware of this tangle and have been protecting her, or whether this somehow slipped your notice, despite its obvious origin at the Academy. There’s no shame in missing a secret, even one this dangerous. The key to good information networking lies in guessing the shape of a thing you cannot see, and such skill is only acquired with years of experience.

Nonetheless, you can see as plainly as I that this particular secret, now loose, will cause significant damage to the emperor. I say “will cause” because its existence has not yet become public knowledge, even here in Akkeraad, City of Rumor. But it will, and soon.

I urge you to warn her. There will be repercussions, especially among the few nobility on campus. And be wary. Something shifts across the empire, like ripples in a pond. I can feel it, but even I cannot yet guess its shape.

“Teach me your magic, if you can.”

Treinfhir looked up at Bayan in surprise. His hands were full of barbecued ribs dripping onto his lunch plate. “Why do you ask me this?”

“My friend says that you attacked one of the students on campus with your magic
, while I was here with you two days ago.”

“I didna
!”

“And I believe you,” Bayan said. “But you need to show me how your anima
magic works so I can prove your innocence. I need to see how your invocations look. Or… whatever you do to make your magic work.”

Treinfhir hesitated. The man was constantly nervous
and not a little paranoid. Would he see that Bayan was endangering himself on Treinfhir’s behalf, that such a venture was risky for them both? Bayan hoped so.

“Can someone who knows elemental magic learn anima magic?” Bayan pressed.

Treinfhir frowned and nodded. “I believe ‘tis so, aye. But if I doona?”

“Then my friend will ev
entually report that you’re up here. That’ll bring all sorts of bad things. Please, I’m not trying to threaten you. I’m trying to help.”

Treinfhir sniffed, then dug a bit of meat out from between his teeth with his tongue. “Aye, all right, I could show you a bit. Wh
at do you want tae know?”

Bayan settled down against the far wall, a mere two strides from where Treinfhir sat. “Is it possible to make a predator attack someone when you can’t see either of them?”

Treinfhir bunched up his thick lower lip in thought. “Aye, ‘tis doable. Lifeseeker can find any beastie you like in the surrounding area. But you canna control a creature from a distance unless you’ve bonded with its kind before, up close. Even then, it can refuse.”

“Refuse? An animal can refuse?” Bayan frowned
. That seemed to go against all the teaching he’d received regarding anima magic.
How would such a refusal even happen? It doesn’t seem possible.

Treinfhir seemed offended. “What do ye take me for, lad, some depraved monster?
Such fiends are put tae death among the Tuathi! What do they teach you in this place?”

Bayan
pressed his lips together in frustration. “Not much, apparently.”

“Ach, for
the love of breath. Here, ‘tis like this now: you canna go aboot, dragging animals into your service. The hand of evil, that is. You must respect the animal’s wishes. If it doesna feel threatened—as
you
should before you ask its help—it willna agree to help, and should be left tae its life. Anima magic is natural defense, noothin more. A man among his fellow beasts, fighting back with coordination of effort and concentration of weaponry.”

“Weaponry?” Bayan briefly envisioned marmots with daggers, birds with garrotes, bears with swords.

“Aye, lad. Claws, fangs, spines, poison, venom, anesthetics. Weaponry.”

Bayan’s vision morphed to a mangled monstrosity bearing all of the weapons Treinfhir had just mentioned. The look on his face must have spoken volumes, for Treinfhir threw up his sauce-coated hands in despair.

“Love of breath, lad. You’ve got tae get over your terror of whatever rumors this campus has jammed into your ears. Else you too will be condemning me, right along with your friend.”

Chastened, Bayan met
Treinfhir’s eyes. “I’m sorry. You’re right. Will you teach me from the beginning?”

Treinfhir smiled. “Aye. I’d not mind dying whilst doin
g a bit o’ good in the world, yet.” He offered Bayan his plate, which still held a few uneaten ribs. “If you’re staying, you should eat.”

Bayan
grinned; the sentiment was very Balanganese. Surely Calder was wrong about this man.

“Now, let us begin at the beginning. And that beginning is a
n understanding of what life is. Let me instruct you in the beauty of Lifeseeker.”

~~~

Bayan returned to Treinfhir’s cold house every day for an hour of anima training at lunch time, since he could not visit after dark anymore, thanks to the new headmaster’s unnecessarily strict rules. The hex’s Savantism training had been on hold for too long already, but Bayan hadn’t come up with a safe way to train. He’d told his hexmates to share any good ideas they came up with, but Calder didn’t seem to want to discuss it, or anything else. His anger with Bayan was apparent, despite the fact that Bayan was doing exactly as he had demanded.

Bayan
hadn’t yet learned any anima spells that might be used to control a bear from afar—any gestures at all, in fact—so he couldn’t prove Calder wrong about Treinfhir being Cormaac’s attacker. A small part of Bayan wondered if Treinfhir wasn’t delaying teaching him the actual motions because they would prove his guilt. The headmaster continued to insist that the attack had been perpetrated by a wild beast, or maybe a pack of them. Calder called that a necessary lie, saying the master knew something else was going on, but he couldn’t announce it yet,as if he had an inside view of the master’s mind. And maybe he did. Even more than hating Calder’s chosen blindness, Bayan hated his own jealousy.

Bayan brought two plates heaping with food to the cold house, tromping through a light fall of snow that had appeared overnight. Between bites, Treinfhir expounded on the theories that drove anima magic. Every day, B
ayan learned that something he believed to be true was in fact completely wrong. But Treinfhir’s latest revelation didn’t just affect Bayan’s perception of anima magic. It made him question his entire training.

“What do you mean I can do elemental magic in the cold house? Its entire purpose is to prevent wild magic from getting out o
f the duelists’ control. I know. I’ve been put in one for that.”

Treinfhir gave him a patient look. “You’re not listening, lad. Unfocused magic is different t
han focused magic. If I tried tae do focused anima in here, it would fail. This cold house restricts both our magics.”

At least the outlander had finally admitted the cold house restricted anima magic. That answered one of Bayan’s myriad questions.
“Why one sort of magic and not another?”

“I canna say. My people doona have that wisdom.”

“But what makes the magic focused or unfocused?”

Treinfhir paused as if considering his next words. “
Long ago, our clans first clashed with the Waarden, in a long, drawn-out war. Imperials call it the First Tuathi War. We call it the War of Secrets. During that war, the imperials learned something special about our magics. They used it against us and turned our conquest of the middle lands to dust. We were routed, and we never learned why. Whatever the imperials learned, all those centuries ago, that is what I call focused magic. It made them stronger than we were, stronger even than our own elementalists.”

“You had elemental magic?”

“Long ago. Times have changed. We remember how it hurt us, and we only study anima.”

Bayan mulled that over, then returned to an earlier topic. “Do you know how I can unfocus my magic? How I can do elemental magic here in the cold house?”

“Nae, as I said, I doona know what the imperials did tae change their magic so long ago. I canna tell you how tae undo it. I can only tell you that focusing the magic restricts it as it strengthens it. Unfocusing, well, that lets it exist everywhere. In a cold house on the campus of the Duelist Academy, and in the heart of the empire itself, the Kheerzaal.”

An odd sense of relief came over Bayan. Finally
, he had an explanation for the impossible magic he’d witnessed at the emperor’s palace. Treinfhir had used unfocused magic. On the other side of that ducat, however, lay the darker thought that unfocused magic was all the Tuathi used anymore. Should the clans decide to invade the empire again in the future, their magic would work perfectly well, anywhere and everywhere.

Bayan soon departed for his next class, but his head throbb
ed with questions as he descended the trail down to campus. And the question lurking in the dark behind all of the others was the one that concerned him the most: if the defeated Tuathi enemy knew that elemental magic had secrets, why didn’t his instructors?

Or do they?

~~~

Dusk crept earlier and earlier as autumn strengthened its grip on the empire.
Bayan finished another talk with the second wave of newniks, then let Kipri escort him back to his barracks through a crisp night packed with crackling leaves and frosted grass.

“Bayan, something’s coming,” Kipri said. “You need to tell Kiwani before someone else does.” At Bayan’s sharp look of inquiry, the eunuch sigh
ed heavily and continued. “Her blood secret is out. The emperor knows. Worse, his enemies know.”

Shocked to his core, Bayan could only gape.
Who told? Who would
dare
?

Kipri spoke in a quieter tone as a pair of
chattering bakers passed. “The emperor has been forced to punish her parents for their deception, but he’s managed to protect them somewhat. The public story will be that they’re somewhere in Aklaa, working on cultural issues. A slower pace, health reasons, you get the idea. The emperor will let them retire to their Wisnuk Bay estate in a year or two, and they and their story will hopefully fade from people’s minds. But in the meantime, it’s going to be ugly. The nobles who oppose the emperor already know the true story. Sints know who told them. All the emperor’s current civic and political efforts are in danger of stalling out. Including his newnik waves here on campus.”

“Is… is there anything Philo can do?” Bayan stuttered.

“He’s working on it. He says the empire’s rippling with something big. If Kiwani’s secret is part of it, he’ll tell me.”

Rippling. Like the watery empire map at the Telling. Ay, Bhattara! That’s just a coincidence, right? Tellings aren’t real!
He tried to recall Seer Maas’s ramblings.
Something about danger to the empire, chaos and loss. That could mean anything—

Without warning, the bright oval of
a singer’s portal opened in midair in front of him.

Kipri jumped and yelped in surprise, but Bayan quickly hushed him
. Tala sat on her bed, atop a bright quilt, on the other side of the portal.

“Ay, Bhattara,” Tala lamented. “I’d hoped you would be indoors at this hour.”

Pleased to see Doc Theo’s young friend again despite the whirling in his mind, Bayan replied, “Give me a little while to get to the barracks. It’s a little cold out here for conversation.”

The young singer nodded and grasped the two crystals rest
ing precariously on her bed’s footboard. The portal winked out.

“What in sints was that?” Kipri asked, eyes wide.

Bayan hesitated. “Just a friend from the Temple of Ten Thousand Harmonies. She’s a singer. She’s keeping an eye on Doc Theo for me.”

Kipri merely nodded
, as if Bayan the hero were entitled to all kinds of fascinating magical friends. Bayan thanked him for his timely warning regarding Kiwani’s secret, then bade him good night and thumped up the steps to the second floor of the barracks. The ruckus of nearly two score teenaged boys laughing, arguing, and banging around echoed from the common room.

He didn’t want to have Calder and Eward for distractions
when he spoke with Tala, though—worrying about Kiwani was bad enough—so he headed up to the Hexmagic floor and found an empty room. He performed a small Flamecast to light the room, then sat on a dusty blanket on the edge of one of the beds.

Tala’s portal
soon returned. Her expression looked worried, and she wasted no time in getting to the point. “Can I ask you about Doc Theo?”

“Anything you like
.”

“I wondered if you could tell me
how he was acting before he left your campus. I mean right before he left. I don’t want to trouble him by asking, but… he’s doing strange things… ”

Bayan’s stomach flipped. He’d hoped that
Doc Theo had improved completely at the Temple. He’d been imagining him lounging around, telling his favorite stories to all the students there the way he had done at the Academy. “It wasn’t pretty, Tala. He was completely confused. Angry, too. Ranting things that didn’t make any sense.” Bayan paused, bracing himself for bad news. “Is it bad again?”

“No,
nothing like that.” She sounded relieved. She took a moment to sing a note into each of her balanced crystals, then continued. “He’s just acting suspicious. He lurks around corners. He won’t talk about certain things in public. I think, looking back, that he’s always been that way; he’s always taken me for long walks into the mountains or the valley to tutor me. We never stay on campus.”

“Do the
teachers there treat him well?”

“Some treat him well enough, but
… well, he’s a chanter. All the chanters are toenail mud around here.” She paused, and Bayan smiled at the familiar Balang phrase. “Others, though, they look at him as if he personally wrung their puppy’s neck. They seem to be the ones he’s lurking around, though, so they could just be annoyed at him for that.”