Traitor Savant (Second Seal of the Duelists) (9 page)

Kiwani’s response was quiet, slow.
“Dunno. Been a little crazy. Praying man wouldn’t shut up. You have any water?”

Eward and Calder pounded
over to the edge of Bayan’s excavated floor and gaped in shock.

Bayan pulled Kiwani to her feet.
“Eward, can you pull some water from this air?”

Ki
wani was unsteady. By the time Bayan helped her back up to the main floor, Calder and Eward had formed a stone cup and squeezed enough moisture out of the air to fill it halfway. Kiwani gulped it down at once.

“We need to get her to
Doc Theo—I mean, the Chantery,” Bayan said.

Kiwani licked her dry lips and swallowed several times in a row, getting every drop of water she could. “What about the praying man?”

“I don’t think—” he began, but Calder interrupted him.

“We all thought we knew what Kah was saying, too, dinna we?”

“Fine. You two take her out of here, and get her back to campus. I’ll look for this praying man.”
Bhattara, how many tortured souls are buried in this ancient labyrinth? Is this the Waarden version of the Endless Shores?
He hoped not. The Waarden hell seemed far worse than the afterlife his own people looked forward to.

Eward and Calder escort
ed Kiwani back in the direction they’d come. Bayan hopped back down into Kiwani’s would-be coffin and squatted down.
She heard a praying man. That means he must be close.

A quick Wind spell revealed currents of air passing through small holes in the walls of the
coffin-sized pit. While it was encouraging that whoever put Kiwani down there hadn’t meant to kill her, Bayan also knew that someone had, in fact, put her down there. Shoving aside his angry questions, he concentrated on listening, and heard faint breathing noises nearby. He had to release his Flame magic so he could use Earth magic to peel away the stone on the side of the pit—
Hexing Earth and Flame at the same time would be really useful right now!
—then he re-lit his surroundings and peered through the hole he’d just made. Another ventilated pit lay encased in stone, and within it huddled a ball of rags.

Bayan’s eyes widened.

Shortly thereafter, he raised Timbool to the surface at the edge of the evergreen garden. He stood up in the middle of his avatar’s back, and the man he’d rescued slumped against him, semi-conscious. A quick glance along the road revealed that Calder had waited behind for him.

His friend jogged over and slid into Timbool's back to support the freed prisoner while Bayan controlled the avatar.
“Well, shock me in the arse; you did find someone else.” The stone dog rose to the surface and trotted up the road at a swift pace. Bayan’s group caught up to Eward and Kiwani before the Hall of Seals, so Bayan stopped and offered them a ride.

The jostling
of the stone avatar soon woke the raggedy man from his daze. Upon realizing that he was outside in the open air, the ex-prisoner cried out in a hoarse voice and scrambled to the bottom of Timbool’s seating pit, covering his head and begging in thickly accented Waarden to be put back.

“Sir, you’re all right
.” Eward tried to comfort the terrified passenger. “You’re safe now. No one will hurt you here.”

“
They bloody will,” Calder said, his voice oddly chill. “That bloody fool’s a Tuathi.”

Bayan felt his eyes widen in shock.
“A Tuathi? Here?”

Calder nodded and gave him
a bitter smile. “We Dunfarroghan don’t trust them half so much as we trust each other.”

Which was to say, they didn’t trust them at all; Bayan knew the Dunfarroghan prided themselves on their ability to
take advantage of anyone, including each other, when it suited their purposes.

“M’
family… ” Speaking seemed to drag the Tuathi man to the brink of exhaustion.

“Are probably calling you seven kinds of fool for getting lost in the heart of the empire,” Calder finished in a callous tone.

“Calder!” Eward scolded. Of the Tuathi, he asked, “Is your family nearby?”

The man shook his head. “Lost, taken
… I have tae stay hidden. They’ll be punished.”

Bayan and
Eward exchanged worried glances. Calder frowned and looked out across the valley. Kiwani stared blankly ahead.

“Let’s get you healed first,” Bayan
said.

“Nae, nae. Hide me again, please. I b
eg you. Anywhere, anywhere. Doona let anyone see.”

“But the chanters can help you,” Eward pressed.

The man shook his head, causing tremors to spread through his entire body. “I dinna see his face. The man who had me. He could be anywhere. He has friends, he says to me. Friends who will hurt me children. Please!”

Eward
looked at Bayan. “Where? Our room?”

“I don’t think he’ll
come to campus at all.” Bayan thought desperately, and a wild new possibility came to him. “Maybe one of the cold houses on the outskirts. There are some built distantly on purpose. They have stoves and everything. Listen. Eward, you take Kiwani to the Chantery. Calder, get Tarin to bring some clean clothes for her to wear. I’ll take our new guest up to the cold houses and fetch some food and water, and some medicines if I can think of a way to nab some. I’ll meet you at the headmaster’s office.”

“Headmaster?”

“We have to tell him that someone took Kiwani. He needs to find out what’s going on around here. And with him being both a Master Duelist and the Headmaster of the Academy, don’t you think it should be him that we tell?”

Eward shook his head. “I’m not so sure that’s a good idea. We have no idea who took this man and Kiwani, or why.”

Calder barked a disbelieving laugh. “Are you really saying you think the most powerful duelist in the empire has stooped to kidnapping? Whatever for?”

Bayan looked at Eward. “Calder’s right. He’s the one we need to see. Go. I’ll meet you later.”

Timbool paused, and Calder, Eward, and Kiwani stepped out of the dog and rounded the corner to campus. Bayan ordered Timbool toward the cliff. “Hang on tight,” he told the injured stranger. Timbool clawed his way up the eroded cliff that edged the road. The steep angle pushed Bayan and his passenger back to near-horizontal positions. Though Bayan had tried the maneuver before and was certain he wouldn’t slide out and tumble back down to the road, the old Tuathi’s eyes went wide with terror, and he clung to the edge of the seat shelf with weathered, scraped hands. Bayan tried to assure him that everything would be well, but he wasn’t sure the man understood through his terror.

As the dog-avatar gained the flat ground atop the cliff and lop
ed across the terrain toward the distant cold houses, the stranger relaxed and said, “You must be a strong caster, young one. Your school is lucky tae have such as you.”

“You have no idea.” Bayan
took a moment to study his new companion. It was hard to judge the wiry man’s age beneath the layers of grime on his face, but he seemed about as old as Bayan’s father. The Tuathi’s hair was long and lank, possibly brown with gray mixed in, and his eyes were a pale, striking blue. His mouth seemed capable of generous smiles, though it was rough with dry skin and caked blood. No matter who he was, the man needed some friendly help.

They arrived at the cluster of cold houses—tiny stone structures meant to dampen wild magic while the student inside was rendered harmless to those around him— and Bayan Idled Timbool into lying down, then let him dissipate, leaving the ragged man leaning on Bayan for support. Bayan pushed open the heavy stone door on the most isolated cold house, helped the man sit in the single wooden chair inside, and work
ed on lighting a fire in the small iron stove.

As he worked, he spoke.
“You’ll be safe here. There aren’t more than two or three students in cold houses at a time, and they all use the ones closer to campus. And the cold houses block elemental magic, so no one can cast at you. I’ll be back as soon as I can with something for you to eat.”

Having successfully kindled a small fire,
Bayan rose to go, but the man caught his wrist. “Your name, young one?”

“Bayan. Bayan Lualhati.”

The grizzled man nodded. “A Bantayan, aye. Good people. Good neighbors. I… you may call me… Treinfhir.”

“I’ll
be right back, Treinfhir. My word on it.”

As Bayan hurried back to campus, his mind
finally had time to swirl with a hundred questions. Their answers had to relate to each other somehow, but at the moment, he couldn’t see how Kiwani’s disappearance had anything to do with a ragged outlander, nor why someone would want to hold either of them prisoner within the mountain.

H
e was certain of one thing, though, and it made the pit of his stomach twist: whoever had kidnapped Kiwani had to be an Elemental Duelist. And that meant that Treinfhir’s fears were perfectly warranted: someone on campus was, in fact, out to get him.

Bayan was now all that stood between the frightened outlander and his unknown attacker.

~~~

Calder had managed to get Kiwani out of the Chantery in a clean change of
Tarin’s clothes without Diantha or the other chanters getting suspicious. Now he, Tarin, and Eward escorted her across campus to Master witten Oost’s office, but something about Kiwani still didn’t seem right. Her scrapes and bruises had been healed, but she stared blankly and was slow to answer questions.

“Probably just leftover trauma,” Tarin murmured. “Diantha said mental damage can’t be healed.”

“Mental damage makes you into a potioneer, too.” Calder’s whisper was terser than he intended. “The Master’ll get it sorted.”

The early autumn sunset curled across the western sky as the quartet
ascended the steps to the Hall of Seals and gained entry to Master witten Oost’s finely appointed Headmaster’s Office.

The Master waved them deeper into the room from behind his large, Shawnash-style desk. His welcoming smile slipped at the sight of Kiwani
. “My dear girl. What has happened to you? Such terrible things I sense… ”

Calder let out a breath he hadn’t known he’d been holding. Eward and Bayan had been right; Master witten Oost was the person they needed to see. As Eward explained as much as they knew about Kiwani’s kidnapping and imprisonment, Calder kept an eye on Kiwani herself. She wandered over to a set of cherry-colored knick-knack shelves, apparently uninterested in her own story.

Eward mentioned Kiwani’s lingering vagueness to Master witten Oost, who said, “I have an herbal tea that may assist her recovery. I find its effects to be very settling. One moment, and I’ll fetch her a cup.”

After
the master rose and slipped his bulk through a pair of brocaded burgundy curtains, Calder stepped closer to Eward and Tarin. “That magic tea had better work. There’s no way she can do magic in her condition. We canna lose another hexmate.”

Tarin nodded, shooting a troubled look in Kiwani’s direction
. She gasped as Kiwani, clumsy in her vagueness, knocked a bowl full of walnuts onto the floor. Calder stopped one with his shoe, but as Tarin and Eward stooped to pick up the rest, the nuts leaped into the air on tiny vortices of air, flying back into their bowl. Master witten Oost stood between the brocaded curtains with a cup of tea in one hand.

“No harm done
.” The master offered the cup to Kiwani. “Drink this, child. It will help you feel at ease, more like yourself.”

As Kiwani obediently sipped at the hot liquid, Calder reached down and picked up the last walnut. Its shell was large and glossy, and the heavy weight of the nutmeat inside was noticeable. Master witten Oost certainly managed to get the best of everything he wanted, and why shouldn’t he? Calder plopped the nut back into the bowl with its brothers.

“Be sure to take her straight to bed,” the master instructed Tarin. “She’ll need a full night’s sleep for the tea have its full effect. It’s not magic,” he said with a glance at Calder, “so it needs all the help you can give it.”

Tarin nodded.
“Yes, Master.”

“And all of you, don’t trouble yourselves over this admittedly disturbing matter. I shall seek the truth with all my power, and those who are responsible shall be brought to justice, if it is at all possible to do so. The empire cannot afford to lose young, promising duelists.
With that in mind, until I can determine the motivation behind this attack and can resolve the issue, may I suggest that no one lets Kiwani travel the campus alone.”

Calder thanked the master and helped Kiwani back out into the c
hill night. Eward and Tarin followed. Just then, Bayan puffed up to them.

“All taken care of,” Calder told him.

Bayan nodded. “Good. And this is for you, Kiwani.” He held out her pearl turtle ring.

She reached for it with wonder in her voice.
“My ring? Where did you get it?”

“Kah had it. Without him, we would never have found you.”

Kiwani slipped the ring onto her pinky finger and admired its nacre surface in the twilight. “Sints bless that bird.”