Hollow Core

by Gage Lee

  Tycho stepped past me and snapped his fingers. The veil of jinsei around me vanished.

  “Come along, Mr. Warin,” he commanded. “It’s time for you to see your new quarters.”

  Walking through the School alongside Tycho was a completely different experience than my normal travel through the building’s changing passages. The instant we left the judgment chamber, we entered a short corridor of moldering stone with heavy barred doors at either end. The narrow hall, barely twenty feet long and less than half that wide, looked hundreds of years older than the rest of the building. There were no windows, and no signs of other students or faculty. A thick layer of dust covered the tiled floor, and dense tangles of cobwebs shrouded the corners near the ceiling.

  “Welcome,” Tyco declared as we approached the nearest door, which he opened with a wave of his hand, “to the stacks.”

  A gust of ancient air swept through the open doorway, carrying with it the scent of decaying paper, rotting glue, and moth-eaten spines. It reminded me of an old used bookstore my mother had once taken me to, back when laborers were still allowed to read books. The scent was both familiar and depressing, a hint of a life I’d lost and of knowledge wasting away in the darkness.

  Tycho clapped his hands and a ball of glowing jinsei appeared above us. He directed it forward, and the ball lit our path as we entered the ancient vault. The silver light cast deep shadows behind towering stacks of books of all shapes and sizes. It splattered across the painted dome of the ceiling far overhead, and the sudden light startled layers of insects that scrambled into the dark at its touch.

  “What is this place?” I asked. Tycho seemed in a reasonable mood, so I wasn’t worried that asking a question would immediately endanger my life.

  “A dump,” Tycho said with a laugh. “This is where the School disposes of things that are too valuable to burn, but not valuable enough to display. It is also where you will be spending the next six months of your life.”

  My heart sank at the idea. My cell of a room in the dormitory tower had been cramped, drafty, and uncomfortable. But it was so much better than this place that I couldn’t believe I’d ever had a bad thought about it.

  “Is there a bed?” I asked.

  “There is now.” Tycho waved his hand and the stacks of books slid apart to reveal a patch of open floor. A faint sizzling sound rasped around us, and a cot appeared out of thin air and plopped down on the empty space between the books. “You’ll need to infuse it with jinsei every few days, or it will fade away. I’m not sure when I’ll return, so you’d best care for it if you don’t want to sleep on the floor. Or a pile of books.”

  “I see,” I said. “And what am I supposed to do here?”

  “You’ll continue your studies,” he said. “Hahen will be your tutor. He seems to have taken a liking to you while you were in the laboratory, though I must admonish him for not catching you in the act of stealing from me.”

  Tycho’s eyes burned against my core as he studied my reaction.

  “I purified so much jinsei,” I explained. “I didn’t think anyone would notice if I took a little for myself.”

  “A little?” He laughed. “You took a fortune from me. Fortunately, most of it was recovered before you could guzzle it down, but still. What were you thinking? I could have had you executed for what you did. That’s what Grayson hoped would happen, you know.”

  I hadn’t known that, but I’m not sure it would’ve changed what I’d done if I had. I didn’t steal the jinsei because I wanted it. It wasn’t a fancy new pair of tennis shoes or a new cell phone. I’d needed the sacred energy to survive.

  “I never had a plan, really,” I admitted. “I needed the jinsei, so I took it.”

  “I hope it was worth it,” Tycho said. “When Hahen arrives, he’ll explain the rest of your duties. For the next six months, this is your home. You will stay here in the day, and you will travel to the alchemical laboratory in the evening to continue your work there at night. When you’re through, you will return to the stacks to sleep. This will be the sum of your existence until the end of this year.”

  “I understand, honored elder,” I said.

  “I hope that you do, Mr. Warin.” Tycho stroked his chin for a moment. “I’ve said before that I have a use for you. Don’t misunderstand me, though. You are not irreplaceable. If you steal from me again, or step out of line in any way, I will deal with you more harshly than even Grayson would find reasonable.”

  Tycho left before I could respond, and the stone door slammed behind him. The ball of jinsei that hovered above my head flickered, then guttered, and I had to quickly forge a bond with a rat to funnel jinsei into the light before it went out altogether. I couldn’t imagine being trapped down here in the dark for any length of time. Getting lost in this maze of books would be maddening. I’d probably stumble around and knock a tower of books onto my head.

  With nothing else to do, I looked through the books closest to me. Their pages were old and brittle, but as long as I handled them with care and didn’t bend their spines, the books didn’t crack or fall apart. Most of what I found were ancient jinsei manuals, books on the theory of sacred energy and its many uses. It was, unfortunately, very basic material, more theoretical than practical. I’d learned more than what lay between the covers of the first ten books I looked at on my first night in the laboratory.

  But the stacks were vast. There had to be something here I could use. I just had to keep looking.

  “There you are,” Hahen called from the far side of the room. I had no idea how he’d gotten over there without my seeing him enter the room, but there he was. “You’ve dragged me very far from my home, Mr. Warin. I am most disappointed.”

  “My most sincere apologies, honored spirit,” I called. “It was not my intention to cause you distress.”

  “I suppose it wasn’t.” The rat spirit’s form flickered, vanished, then reappeared on top of a stack of books much closer to me. “Ugh. I hate this place. So much knowledge, squandered by sloth and neglect.”

  “It is unfortunate,” I said. “But the books I’ve seen here don’t seem to be of much use to anyone.”

  The spirit reappeared at my left elbow. I jumped back in surprise and nearly toppled a stack of books onto my jinsei-fashioned bed.

  “I doubt that’s true.” The rat spirit peered at the spine of a book in the middle of a stack. “You only need to search for the right book. What is that saying? Even the heaviest weight can be lifted with the right lever.”

  “How would I even know where to look in this mess?” I flung my arms wide to encompass the disaster around us. “This place has no order to it at all.”

  “It’s a good thing you’re here then,” Hahen said. “Your punishment is to organize the stacks so they will be useful again.”

  A lump of despair caught in my throat at the thought of the monumental task ahead of me. It didn’t seem possible that anyone, even an army of dedicated librarians, would be able to put this place back in order.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “There must be thousands of books here.”

  “Tens of thousands,” Hahen corrected. “Many tens of thousands.”

  “That isn’t possible. No person can organize that many books. Not in six months. Not in six years,” I protested. “I’m doomed.”

  “Very possibly.” Hahen patted me on the knee, tilted his head toward the nearest stack of books, and then continued. “Might as well get started.”

  The Technique

  THE STACK HELD TONS of books, many, many tons, but thinking about the sheer number of them wouldn’t solve my problem. I needed to take it in bite-size chunks, one step at a time. I started with the stack Hahen had indicated and examined the books in the silver light of the jinsei sphere that still floated above our heads.

  There were more than a hundred books in the tower, but they seemed to fall into a few broad categories. There were tomes on jinsei theory, alchemy, Empyreal medicine, art, natural science,
history, and even a few basic martial arts manuals. I’d hoped I’d be able to identify the different subjects by the colors of their bindings, or maybe by the titles or publishers stamped into their spines, but I had no such luck with that tactic. The books were of all shapes, sizes, and hues, and the publishers seemed to cross subjects without hesitation.

  “You still haven’t moved any books,” Hahen commented. “At this rate, you will never finish.”

  “That’s helpful,” I grumbled. “I don’t suppose you have any actual advice?”

  “You aren’t very good at taking my advice.” Hahen settled himself on my cot. “That’s how we ended up in this mess.”

  He had me there.

  If there weren’t any physical differences I could use to categorize the books by subject, there might be another way to identify them without having to examine each one. Inanimate objects had auras just like people, though they tended to be simpler and more descriptive than the jumble of chaotic aspects that flittered through the auras of humans. I took a deep breath, crossed my fingers, and focused my spirit sight on a book at the top of the stack.

  Its aura was faint, but distinct. Knowledge aspects orbited sparks of beauty aspect. I took the book off the pile and read the title on its cover: A Selection of Empyreal Art.

  Okay, knowledge plus beauty made sense for a book about art.

  I found a clear spot on the floor and deposited the book on it.

  The longer I focused my spirit sight on the stack, the clearer the books became. They all held knowledge aspects, but it was the other aspects that defined them. Change aspects told me the book contained information about alchemy. Life aspects marked treatises on jinsei medicine. The force aspect belonged to science tomes, violence to martial arts manuals, and decay to history books. That knowledge allowed me to glance at the stack and tell what kind of books it held, and from there it was an easy enough task to separate the volumes into new stacks by subject.

  “Clever,” Hahen said. “I was wondering when you’d figure that out.”

  “You knew about the auras?” I clenched my jaw in frustration. “You could have just told me.”

  “But then you wouldn’t have learned anything.” Hahen eased off my cot and wound through the stacks of books that surrounded me. “I was confident it wouldn’t take you long to figure out such a basic technique, and look, I was right.”

  “In the future, honored spirit, I would appreciate your guidance so I don’t waste time on this enormous task.” It was difficult to force myself to be polite, but I pushed through my frustration and bowed to the diminutive creature. “The sooner I complete this, the happier we both will be.”

  “We shall see,” Hahen said. “But my advice won’t be as helpful to you as more hands would be. Or more eyes.”

  I paused with an alchemy textbook in my left hand and considered the rat spirit. His gaze was bland and unblinking, but I knew he’d given me a hint. There was no way for me to get more hands down here. I didn’t even know where here was. But more eyes?

  That I could do.

  There were more rats in the stacks than I would’ve imagined possible. They’d created nests in piles of ancient books, burrowed into the walls, and settled into the narrow spaces above the domed ceiling. There was a virtual army of the creatures all around me, just waiting for me to mobilize them.

  “All right, little guys,” I whispered. “It’s time to get to work.”

  The first step was establishing bonds to as many of the rats as I could manage. Until the night before, I’d been limited to only ten rats. I’d pushed that to fifteen during my fight with Hagar, which meant I could push it even further.

  Somehow.

  Soon I’d latched on to fifteen of the little creatures. That was useful, and I stole some of their jinsei to start healing the wounds that left me sore and slow, but I would need far more little friends to finish this task.

  The threads of sacred energy that bound me to the rats were as thick as kite strings. Upon closer examination, I saw that each of the bonds was actually several smaller streams of jinsei woven together. Each of the braided stands had its own purpose.

  The center of the bond carried the sacred energy between my core and each of the rats’. It was the thickest and most durable of the strands, but I wasn’t sure I’d need it for what I had in mind.

  The next strand wound around the bond’s central line in a clockwise direction, and it carried sensory information from the rats to me. I definitely needed that one.

  The final strand twisted counterclockwise around the center, and it carried mental impulses. That thread gave me control over the rat army. I also needed that one, at least for now.

  “Don’t think too hard, you’ll hurt yourself,” Hahen chided me. “And those books aren’t moving themselves.”

  Ignoring my mentor was difficult, but I gave it my best effort. If I could figure this out and get it to work the way I wanted, I’d be able to identify huge numbers of books at once. Then it would be time to try out my next big idea.

  Concentrating on the bond to the nearest rat, I plucked at the central strand with my thoughts. It sizzled and popped under my concentration, and wisps of jinsei evaporated from its surface. I bore down on it, and it grew translucent, then faded away entirely.

  I could no longer draw jinsei from that rat, but that was all fine. The rest of the bond was still intact. I felt the rat’s primitive thoughts and sensed the world around its twitching whiskers. I repeated the process on five more rats, until I was confident the bonds wouldn’t unravel any further. The five simpler connections required very little jinsei from my circular breathing technique.

  Perfect.

  I sent a trickle of the jinsei I’d freed from my cycled breathing toward a sixteenth rat. The sacred energy wanted to sink into the rat’s core, but that was too deep for what I had in mind. Instead, I forced a lighter, surface connection between the rat and me. The trickle of power split itself into two streams and reached out for the rat.

  The twin strands of jinsei encircled the rat’s head, and the creature shivered and tried to back away. Before it could escape, the connection snapped into place with an audible crack. With a sigh of relief, I soothed its frayed nerves until it was calm and docile once again.

  That was when my head split open.

  A sound like a screaming freight train burst through my thoughts and shattered the boundaries of my mind. A more powerful, deeper understanding of the Pauper’s Dagger opened to me.

  I’d just discovered the next step on my path. It was called the Army of Unseen Eyes, and it was exactly what I needed. I could have done without the headache that accompanied the new knowledge, but I’d learn to live with it.

  “I warned you that if you thought too hard you might hurt yourself,” Hahen said with a cluck of his tongue. “Was it worth it?”

  I picked myself up from where I’d fallen on the floor and put my new technique to use. The connections to the rats I’d gathered unraveled and then stretched out to encompass the stacks. I gained ten eyes, then twenty, a hundred. My senses expanded until I could see every corner of the stacks, and a wondrous picture began to emerge.

  “It was definitely worth it,” I said.

  “We shall see,” Hahen said cautiously. “As you progress along the path it becomes narrower, more precarious. A few more steps, and you may find it impossible to turn back.”

  Hahen’s warning seemed a little over-the-top to me, especially when I had so much work to do. I had no idea what he was trying to tell me, and I honestly didn’t really care. This new technique allowed me to quickly and accurately identify an enormous number of books. It gave me a wider view of the world than I’d ever imagined possible, and I didn’t see how that could be a bad thing.

  Unfortunately, identifying all those books didn’t get me much closer to finishing the task of organizing them. While it made it very easy for me to know where I could find all the history books, that was a far cry from pulling those books o
ut of the stack and relocating them to their proper section.

  I spent days wrestling with that problem and wasted countless hours moving books by hand. It was tedious, exhausting work, and it made both my mind and body ache by the end of the day. Of course, the fact that I was exhausted didn’t deter Hahen from dragging me off to the alchemical laboratory every night for hours of jinsei purification. It also didn’t stop him from drilling me relentlessly on different aspects of jinsei theory, forcing me to undergo rigorous breath cycling, and making twice daily attempts to strengthen my core beyond its current capacity that were as futile as they were painful.

  “I might as well try to train a rock,” Hahen said. “Your core refuses to advance beyond the foundational level. You still can’t hold more than a tiny thimbleful of jinsei inside you, and that only for a few moments.”

  “I’m sorry, honored spirit,” I said as I lifted my thousandth book for the day. “It has always been this way. I do not know why.”

  “It is a shame,” Hahen continued. “You pick up so many things easily. I don’t understand why your core won’t progress. It is a puzzle, and one we should be able to unravel.”

  “I hope so,” I said, honestly. Healing my core was one of the main reasons I’d wanted to come to the School. I hadn’t expected that it would be as baffling to the professors and everyone else as it was to me.

  “Can you summon serpents?” Hahen asked. “Perhaps if you could show them to me, I would be able to help you.”

  “Let me see here,” I said. I shifted my technique from Army of Unseen Eyes to Borrowed Core and forged new connections to fifteen nearby rodents. It only took me a few seconds to cycle enough jinsei through them to fill my aura with their beast aspects. After that, I just had to shift my breath cycling technique to transform those aspects into the serpents of light.

  Well, in my case, serpents of shadow.

  The beast aspects didn’t glow like other serpents I’d seen, but floated around me like living shadows. They circled my arms, and the sharp pricks of hundreds of tiny clawed feet raised goosebumps on the skin of my arms.