Red Queen

by Jolie Jaquinta

  Chapter 8

  Academy of Magic

  A soft chime sounded as Jack arrived in the high tower via the household teleport system. He paused briefly to recover from the vertigo and assess his surroundings. The wide, circular room had many windows. Those on the sunward side were shaded, but still let in a filtered breeze. Those on the other side let in indirect light and a high view of the ironwood forest surrounding the fortress the tower stood in.

  The room itself had a wide variety of tables and equipment in it. All were neatly arranged, with easels and wax tablets charting work in progress. Tables lay along one side full of glowing crystals and contraptions. The further down the more sparse or shrouded they became. All the way at the end were empty tables awaiting their own projects. Magelight sent up firefly embers from several places, and burning fumes rose from others. All whisked up into air vortices which channeled it from the room to outside the windows.

  In the midst of it all a young woman sat on a high stool. She wore a clean white work robe over a closely tailored dress of deep blue. Slowly she dropped small, steaming white rocks from a crucible into a retort with tongs held in hands so pale they had no color to them at all. Glowing symbols above the retort slowly changed color as the pebbles raised the temperature and she watched intently with red eyes, as devoid of pigment as her skin.

  “Hello Lilly”, said Jack quietly after walking, noiselessly over to her side.

  “Hello Jack”, she said, continuing to watch the reaction with that focused intensity. Her movements and features were very precise, like porcelain animated with clockwork. Her expression did not change. “Do you need my immediate assistance?” She dropped another rock in.

  “I have something important, but not urgent”, he replied. She nodded and continued her work. He examined the diagrams on the easel briefly before moving to another table. He examined it intently, his fingers stroking his beard as he was lost in thought. This table contained a large map etched into the bulk of its surface. Glowing embers and spider web traceries covered parts of it. The pulsed slightly, but were otherwise unmoving.

  After several minutes Lilly appeared at his side. “What is it?” she asked.

  “Have you been sleeping?”

  She paused for a moment in thought. “I have made sure to get at least two hours of condensed sleep a night, as per your suggestion”, she said. “Is this the important matter?”

  He shook his head. “It's just... I bring you important things all the time. I don't want you to neglect yourself or feel pressured to do so because of... affairs of state.”

  “We are at war”, she said simply. “There are few who are as schooled in the New Magic as I am. There are things only I can do. Therefore I must find time to do them.”

  He nodded again. Simple and logical. It brooked no argument. “Yes. But as this war drags on into years, we must think about how we marshal our personal reserves strategically, not just tactically.”

  She thought for a moment. “I understand the logic of what you are saying. Do you have a specific suggestion?”

  He thought for a moment. “You could take some time off. Sleep certainly. Get out. Do something.”

  “What would I do?”

  Jack paused again. “Jesca used to take you and Bianca out. Riding, to a Mummery, or that sort of thing.”

  Lilly thought back on this. “Jesca is Queen now. She has not had much time. She was always the one with the ideas.” After another pause. “What do you do with your time off?”

  Jack looked slightly awkward. “It's hard for me to rest while that sword is on the loose.” He was, perhaps, the worst person to make suggestions for how to use idle time.

  “Your mind is not designed for that”, said Lilly. “Since the primary alteration of the sword was to dislocate your Will to its specific end, you will continue to experience monomania for some time. Shall I take a reading?”

  “Yes”, said Jack. “Please.”

  She opened a drawer at the end of the bench and took out some headgear. She pressed her thumb to another compartment, and Jack pressed his next to hers. A number of crystals rose on a plinth. She picked a dark one, placed it in the apparatus that Jack had attached to his head and moved her hands over the surface in small traceries as she murmured under her breath. After a short time of intense focus, the crystal glowed like the others. She removed it, placed it in the next slot in the plinth, and worked some additional magic over it. Glowing symbols appeared over it and moved gradually between forms.

  “Your Will continues to deviate from its dislocated position. So it is still free, although not showing the same range as a normal one.” She pointed at certain indicators. “The reattachment of your Soul to your Will continues to be strong. Your Animus, as always, is fine.” He nodded, removing the headgear. He knew the basic theory of the New Magic, but little of the practice. The Soul was the essence of his being, but needed the Will to guide his Animus to actually do things. When the Mackheath sword had taken him over, many years ago, it had severed his Soul from his Will, and then bent his Will to its own designs. Once it got what it wanted, it had abandoned him, a limp, unresponsive body, with no way for his Soul to direct his Animus. That would have been it, but for the New Magic, which was able to repair the connections. What it could not repair was the damage to his Will. With no original pattern to base things on, it remained, largely, in the shape it had been bent to. While the sword was in control, it relayed selective memories to him in order to do the tasks it needed him to do. Since it controlled his Will, the fact these were disconnected recollections from different lives was never questioned. Now, the discontinuities were obvious. But it was all he had.

  Jack handed her another opalescent gem from inside of his collar. She examined it briefly and handed it back. “Your monitor shows no sudden alterations of Will back to the canonical Mackheath pattern. No blackouts I presume?” He shook his head. “Then I do not think there have been any attempts to control you.”

  “Good.” He slipped the opal back into his collar. He pointed to the black bag he had placed at the end of the table. “He pulled a job in Gartica. We got the gourd.”

  Lilly rubbed her hands and a soft glow covered them. She opened the bag and pulled out a simple drinking bowl shaped from a gourd. She placed it over the table and it held there, hovering. With another look of concentration she pulled a complicated silver tracery from it and centered it on the table. She pulled another one up from a stone set into the table and compared the two.

  Jack watched intently as she identified and marked common strands, removed clear outliers, and blurred deviations. After an initial pass she burned the result into another stone. “The Mackheath Will is definitely involved”, she pronounced. “But, once again, it is working indirectly. The pattern is nowhere as clear as in your Will.” With a gesture a large subsection of the diagram pulled from Jack glowed yellow and blurred slightly into a shape from the reference gem. “I do not think this subject's will has been magically altered. It was probably just socially engineered.”

  “You don't think it's mastered any of the New Magic then to produce a temporary full alteration?” asked Jack.

  She shook her head. “Any strong manifestation of the canonical pattern would be immediately spotted.” She indicated the web traceries. “So even if it's absorbed the Biblica Hexapla it stole, it could not use it in this way undetected.”

  “Unless it has mastered them to the degree that it can thwart our detectors”, said Jack.

  She nodded. “That is a possibility. If it could focus it's monomania on that, much like I have.”

  “I don't think it could exceed your skill”, said Jack.

  She shrugged. “Its monomania is magically induced. Its boundaries are unknown. Mine is just a factor of my upbringing.” She dismissed the new tracery of Jack and stowed the plinth of stones. “I will refine the pattern here and adjust our detectors. Clearly they missed this. We can increase the fidelity of what they are looking for to ma
tch this without, hopefully, generating many false positives.”

  “Thank you, Lilly”, said Jack.

  “What priority should I assign to this?”

  “Well, the job is over. He usually doesn't do more than one every few weeks. So we probably have at least that long. Maybe a few months again.”

  She nodded. “I will fit it in.”

  He turned to go, and then stopped. “If you take some time off, let me know.” There was an awkward pause. “Maybe I'll take some time too.” She nodded, and the household transporter whisked him away with another chime.