The Alchemy of Chaos: A Novel of Maradaine (Maradaine Novels)

by Marshall Ryan Maresca

  Veranix looked back over at Delmin. “I’ll catch up with you.”

  “You’re very smart, Veranix,” she said. She took his arm like he was escorting her to a function. “I think this will work very well for the both of us.”

  Bell was led in the back entrance, through the kitchen and out to Fenmere’s dining room. Fenmere must have been in a good mood, if he was willing to be seen during his breakfast.

  “Bell, how was last’s night’s adventure?” Mister Fenmere was sitting at his long table with Gerrick and Corman, all three having hotcakes and tea.

  “It went, well, exactly as planned.”

  “Excellent.” He gestured for Bell to sit down.

  Bell took his seat, even though he wasn’t as happy with things as Fenmere. “As planned” meant that Hecks and Ferrie were dead, killed by the Thorn. Fenmere had said of them: “The best use they have is bait.” Bell wondered when the same would be said of him.

  One of the servers poured tea for Bell.

  “And the bag?” Fenmere asked.

  “He burned it right off, like you guessed.”

  “That confirms our theory,” Gerrick said. “He’s not interested in supplanting your business.”

  “Honestly, I couldn’t care what he’s interested in. Did one of the Birds find him?”

  “One,” Bell said. “And I have to say, it was quite a fight.”

  Fenmere slowly put down his utensils and wiped his mouth. “Could you explain, perhaps, what you mean by ‘quite a fight’? Was the Thorn impressive? Did the people of Aventil cheer him?”

  Bell tightened his mouth, and decided he needed to choose his words carefully. “You said you wanted a show, and they got one, let me tell you. And, yeah, folks in the street cheered for Thorn. Until that Bird slapped him all around Cantarell Square.”

  Fenmere smiled and picked up his tea. “Please tell me more.”

  Bell went through the whole fight as he saw it, piece by piece, blow by blow. Gerrick and Corman both got quite engaged, except for their tangential discussion about possible magical allies to hire now that the Blue Hand Circle were gone. Fenmere just sat and listened, the slight smile on his face as he drank his tea.

  When Bell finished, Fenmere put down his empty cup. “This is quite a lovely day, wouldn’t you say?” He got up from the table. “I think I’ll take a little ride to the apartments today. Bell, keep me informed.”

  With that, he left the dining room.

  “Well,” Gerrick said. “I suppose that leaves things in our hands for today. We need to inspect that new chemist, for one, make sure his accounts match his—”

  “Hmm,” Corman said, moving his eyes over.

  They both looked at Bell with no small amount of disdain.

  “Don’t you have some rounds you should be doing, Mister Bell?”

  Bell got up from the table, and nodding to them both, went out back through the kitchen, just as he came in.

  Jiarna led Veranix up to the north side of campus, but not quite to the girls’ college. Instead she took him into one of the science buildings. The whole walk over she spent talking, almost incessantly, about her classes, her friends at the girls’ college, and anything other than the implicit threat she’d made. Veranix didn’t listen to what she was saying, but he also had a strong impression that the entire purpose for her chatter was so no one walking past would notice them walking in silence. Given how the cadets were out in force, patrolling the walkways in trios, not appearing out of place was probably a paramount concern. Jiarna had likely noticed just as he had that the cadets were stopping anyone who seemed out of place.

  She confirmed Veranix’s theory by stopping mid-sentence as soon as they were inside.

  “This way,” she said, now all business.

  “What exactly do you want me to do for you?” Veranix said. “I’ve humored you, but I’m not what you think I—”

  “Don’t insult my intelligence,” she snapped. “I honestly don’t care what you do outside of campus, but I need a mage to help me.”

  She opened up a small workroom, with a bench cluttered with devices not unlike the kind Phadre had been working with.

  “All right,” Veranix said cautiously. “But first let’s talk about this proof you have.”

  She held up a bottle of blackened glass. “This is a solution of dalmatium nitrate. Do you know what that is?”

  Veranix knew all too well what dalmatium was—the metal was used in mage shackles and absorbed numina. Being in contact with it made performing magic all but impossible. But the rest of what she said had gone over his head. “Not exactly.”

  She gave him another smug smile. “Don’t worry, no one else knows what it is either. I discovered it reacts to shifts in numina by changing color. Now why do you suppose that’s relevant?”

  “I don’t know,” Veranix said.

  “Of course you don’t.” She held up a device with a lens of some sort attached to the front. “Do you know what this is?”

  “Can we skip to the part where you tell me about the proof?”

  “If I just told you, Veranix, you wouldn’t understand it.”

  Veranix had no idea why Professor Alimen didn’t like this girl. She was apparently the daughter he never had. He sat down on the one clear space in the whole room. “Fine. Illuminate me.”

  “A fascinating choice of words. Illumination is, in fact, key. This is a camera obscura. Inside here I have a plate that has been treated with dalmatium nitrate. The lens has been treated with a different dalmatium salt solution.” With the device pointed at Veranix, she pulled a shutter on the lens. She clicked her tongue a few counts, and closed the shutter. She then pulled out the plate from the back. “And what do we have?”

  She handed the plate to Veranix. There was an image on it: shining and sparkling, dots of bright white, but the shape they formed was unmistakable. It was his own face.

  “That . . . how?”

  “It would only work on mages, and the clarity of the image is mostly due to your proximity. Which is why I was so amazed at the plates I recorded from the south lawn last night, when I was trying to take images of the moons.”

  She picked up another plate off the table, and again the image was painfully clear. Veranix standing, with the cloak around his shoulders and the rope around his arm. Him, as the Thorn, clear as anything.

  “I have more of these.”

  “That doesn’t matter,” Veranix said. “Mostly because no one will really understand what these plates mean. Certainly the captain of the cadets won’t make any sense of it.”

  “Maybe Professor Alimen will.”

  “That doesn’t matter,” he repeated. “Fine, you figured me out. Do you really want to make an enemy of me?”

  She raised an eyebrow and chuckled. “Very scary, Veranix. And, no, I don’t. We’re going to be friends. You’re going to help me.”

  If nothing else, he had to admire her confidence.

  “Fine. But I want you to know it isn’t the blackmail that’s making me do it.” He held up the plate. “It’s because this is blasted impressive. This alone should get you your Letters of Mastery.”

  “You would think so, wouldn’t you? But that doesn’t seem to be the case. The science professors don’t understand what I’m doing, and the magic professors don’t care.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t claim to understand it, frankly. So you’ve created a way to capture an image of numina around a mage.”

  “No. Well, yes, but that’s inconsequential.”

  “I think it’s—”

  “You’re easily impressed,” she said. “However, the important aspect of this work is the numinatic lens. I need to be able to demonstrate the way numina moves, but I don’t have a better way to measure it.”

  “Measure it?” Veranix’s thoughts immediately went to Phadre
’s devices.

  “My point is this: the world of science is all about observation, measurement, and evidence. However, it is my contention that we cannot make consistent observations, and all else that follows, without taking the effects of magic or other mystical phenomena—Physical Focus, Psionics, so-called ‘miracles’—”

  “Psionics?” Veranix asked. “You’re talking mind-reading and such? That isn’t real.”

  “You know this for a fact?”

  “I know carnival tricks to make you think I know what number you’re thinking.”

  “There are quite a few sources confirming it is a real thing, known privately within Intelligence and selected parts of academia. Professor Jilton—you’ve distracted me from my point.”

  “Which is what?”

  “That scientific observations aren’t useful unless we can take mystical phenomena into account. Be it through deliberate act, such as someone like you doing things to alter the natural order of reality—”

  Veranix wasn’t sure if that was an insult or not.

  “—or the result of ambient numina or unobserved phenomena. And that is my main point. Take the Winged Convergence last month.”

  This kept coming up. “What about it?”

  “What about it, besides the fact that it should be impossible?”

  “It should?” That sounded like something Delmin or Eittle would have brought up at some point.

  “Of course it should, but no one listens to me!” She grabbed another device off the shelf above the workbench. This was a brass globe with two smaller brass balls attached on thin sticks. She moved the balls in orbit around the globe, putting one inner one in the back and the outer one to the side. She pointed to the inner one. “Namali is full, here.”

  “That’s the blood moon?” Veranix asked.

  She looked at him as if his words caused her physical pain. “Yes, that’s what some call it. It’s full here, with Canus—the sun—coming straight at it from this side. Do I need a lamp to demonstrate this?”

  “No.” Veranix was getting more than a little annoyed with her attitude.

  “Fine. So at midnight, Maradaine is here”—she pointed on the globe—“directly underneath, and you do know that the world is a sphere and the moons go around the world and the world around the sun?”

  “I have managed to get slightly educated the past three years here.”

  “Believe me, Veranix, around here it never hurts to clarify all the facts. But that’s good. So with Namali here, we then need Onali over here, in waning crescent.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because that’s where it needs to be to be in waning crescent. Do you want me to go over all the astronomy?”

  “No, this is enough,” Veranix said.

  “Good. So, let me ask you. If you’re standing here, looking up at the moons, how can you possibly see Onali behind Namali, when it’s all the way over here?”

  The whole business with where moons were and waning crescents didn’t make one bit of sense to Veranix, but the archer in him could see a shot that wasn’t lined up. “It doesn’t work.”

  “Exactly!”

  “But it happened,” Veranix said. “We saw it.”

  “Exactly.” She said it like she had just won the argument.

  “So it’s not impossible.”

  “No, that’s . . . that’s not the point.” Again, her face made it look like he was hurting her. “If something that should be impossible happens, what does that mean?”

  Veranix thought through all the points she’d been making. “Magic was involved?”

  “And Almers House makes a point,” she said. “Though clearly not through direct intent, but through unobserved phenomena. My numinic images on that night were unusable, however.”

  “Because the convergence made numina act wild.”

  “So I heard. But that meant I had nothing to show Madam Henly, and she dismissed all my theories out of hand, in absolute foolishness.”

  “Madam Henly, right. She’s the main magic instructor for the girls’ college? I heard she was injured when a prank was launched at Faishin Hall?” Veranix’s suspicion that Jiarna might be behind the attacks was higher than ever, given what she was accomplishing in her work. She was clearly brilliant; brilliant enough to pull it off.

  “Was she?” Jiarna asked coldly. “I wouldn’t know or care.”

  That didn’t put him any more at ease.

  “Look,” he said cautiously. “What you’ve done here is . . . intriguing. But I don’t know if I’m the man to help you.”

  “You have to.”

  “I don’t think I know how. I’m not very good at this sort of thing. Maybe Delmin or Pha—”

  “They wouldn’t help me. You wouldn’t if I didn’t threaten you.” For a moment, her voice quavered. There was a hint in one of her dark eyes like a tear was about to form, but then nothing.

  “I’ll . . . do what I can, all right? But right now I will barely have time to have some breakfast and then get to my Magic Theory exam, which I am woefully unready for.”

  “Fine.” Her voice now sounded almost defeated. “I will hold you to that.”

  Someone was pounding on the flop door. Every one of Colin’s crew were in, including the new birds, so he had no idea who it would be. It certainly wasn’t a boss. If they were calling, the pound would have been accompanied with someone shouting that Colin better answer. There would have been authority to it. Same thing if it had been the Constabulary.

  Whoever was on the door, it was somebody young and far too excitable for their own good. Pounding like a blasted dog who smelled a piece of meat on the other side.

  “Blazes is it?” Colin snapped.

  “Cainey!”

  “Who the blazes is Cainey?”

  “He was one of ours,” Theanne said. Tooser was at the table with her, showing her how to swap dice in a dice game when no one was looking. For a big guy, Tooser had fast hands, faster than anyone expected.

  “Good to open?” Colin asked. Theanne just shrugged.

  “Cainey’s fine,” Deena called from the back room.

  Colin unlatched the door and let Cainey in. Another young one, same as Jutie and Theanne, with dirty hair and dirty coat. “Did you hear?” he practically screamed as he came in.

  Colin shut the door behind the kid. “Hear what?”

  “Last night, it was huge! I mean you should have seen it!”

  “Seen what, kid?”

  “Out there, in Cantarell! First the Thorn came, like, pounding down on the Red Rabbits, right at the Trusted Friend. And there were a bunch of goons, well-dressed nats, who must have come from by the river or something . . .”

  “Or just Dentonhill?” Colin asked. Sounded like Veranix had good hunting, and got a fair amount of attention for it.

  “Maybe, maybe. These nats came to the Friend, and Rabbits had come out, and then the Thorn swoops in, and he’s all bam—down! Bam—down! The Rabbits are all standing around, like, what just happened?”

  “I told you!” Jutie called from the back room. He came out, a huge grin on his face. “I knew he’d show those Rabbits whatfor. I would have liked to have seen that!”

  “That wasn’t all. Just as he has them, there’s this bird, see?”

  “Really?” Deena leaned in the doorframe from the back room, skeptical eyebrow raised at Cainey. “This ain’t one of your stories, Cainey?”

  “Not just, Deens, not just at all! This was real, I saw it, other Princes saw it, Orphans and Rabbits saw it.”

  “Back up,” Colin said. “There was a bird? What was that about?”

  “Crazy! She’s decked out in blue leather, showing more skin than must be legal, and she’s throwing blades and spinning blades around her body. And the Thorn, he shoots at her, but she’s so good, he
r blades just knock the arrows away. So the Thorn is jumping around, and she’s spinning blades, he can’t hit her. He drops his bow, tries to tie her up with his rope, see?”

  “So that took her down, right?” Colin asked. He tried very hard to keep his voice level. But there was nothing to worry about. That rope of Vee’s was some special magic. He brought that out, any blade-spinning bird would be as good as done.

  “No! He wraps it around her, and she’s all, ‘nope,’ and slashes at the rope, and he screams like she cut his own hand! Crazy!”

  “Quite.” Colin didn’t like the sound of all this.

  “So how’d he beat her?” Jutie asked.

  “He didn’t!”

  “Liar!” Jutie shouted. “Don’t tell me some bird—sorry, girls—but don’t tell me some bird with hoops beat the Thorn!”

  “I’m telling you. He pulls out his staff, and he’s all—” Cainey mimed staff fighting, looking more than a little ridiculous. “And this bird—she called herself ‘Bluejay,’ can you imagine? She’s just hammering on him. Wham! Wham! So he runs off, and she chases away!”

  “No!” Jutie shouted.

  “Calm down, Jutes,” Colin said. This wasn’t good. If this girl was that good, and called herself Bluejay, then . . . but that was just a rumor. Deadly Birds weren’t a real thing, right? “He got away?”

  “Far as I saw. Then the Rabbits are all yelling—Thorn did something to stick them all to the ground—and the Orphans and us run into the square, grabbing his arrows and her blades and someone got his bow . . .”

  “Someone got his bow?” Colin asked. Blazes, that bow . . . that was Uncle Cal’s bow. “Was it a Prince?”

  “Why does it matter?” Deena asked.