The Other Prism (The Broken Prism)

by St. Clair, V.

  It was thoughts like this that kept him occupied for the eleven day journey to Kargath. He had never entered the city from this direction before, and would have been afraid of getting lost if not for the fact that he could see the mayoral compound at all times—it sat on a hill that overlooked the city. As long as he was moving towards it, he knew he would get there eventually.

  The sun had set by the time he made it to the opposite end of town, and Hayden stayed the night in an inn near the gates that led to the compound. He had grossly underestimated how much money he would need for this trip, and spent the last of it that night, wondering how he was going to feed himself for the several-week-long journey back to Mizzenwald. He had been teaching Bonk some basic hunting commands, and hoped that he could talk his dragon into catching some rabbits for them if things became desperate.

  The next morning he dressed carefully, covering his Focus-correctors with a red long-sleeved shirt despite the heat, and smoothing his hair around the edges of his circlet so it didn’t stick up. He tilted the eyepiece out of the way so that it sat on top of his head, pointing skyward.

  He approached the compound and asked a bored guardsman for directions on where to go to submit a request to the High Mayor. The man gave him a skeptical look, as though no one Hayden’s age could possibly have business with the mayor, but pointed towards the main building and said, “First floor, take a right and go to the second-to-last door on the right.”

  Chanting the directions inside his head so that he would remember them, Hayden made the trek up the steep hill that led to the capitol, his leather boots covered in dust from the dry dirt roadway that bisected the grassy knoll. His calves began to burn from the sharp upward angle by the time he made it to the top and the ground leveled out, and he stopped to catch his breath and rest his legs before proceeding through the large double-doors that were currently propped open.

  He turned right and continued down the utilitarian stone hallway. He thought he knew where he was going—to the office of the Small Council, if memory served him correctly. He wasn’t entirely sure it was a good thing that he’d spent enough time in this building to remember its layout.

  Sure enough, when he turned in at the second-to-last door on the right, he found himself in a neatly-proportioned waiting area for the Small Council. A dozen foldout chairs lined the wall for visitors, all of which were currently occupied, and the remainder of the petitioners were standing or sitting in whatever free space they could find. A potted palm tree stood in each of the four corners, including the one behind the mahogany desk where a clerk was signing people in and shuffling through paperwork.

  Hayden got into line behind four other people and waited his turn, mentally cursing himself for not realizing that this place would probably be packed full of people with requests for the Small Council. He should have camped out outside the gates last night to get a good place in line; at this rate he’d be here until dark and would have to return tomorrow anyway.

  There was nothing to do for it but wait. When it was his turn to speak to the clerk, she addressed him without even looking up from the sign-in sheet in her hand.

  “What is the nature of your business today?”

  Hayden frowned and said, “I want permission to visit my father’s estate.”

  The woman looked up at him and raised an eyebrow at the circlet resting around his head.

  “Is his estate being held by the city?”

  “Yes. I was told I needed permission to visit there,” Hayden explained, wondering why he didn’t ask Master Asher for more details about the process of petitioning the Small Council, who spoke with the High Mayor’s voice in most minor matters.

  “Is your father’s estate being held in ransom against unpaid taxes, legal claims against the land or its tenants that are pending judgment, or because of an issue with death benefits and claims of succession?”

  Hayden understood about six words of that, and swallowed hard, trying not to sound like an idiot when he said, “Um, he died, and the Council of Mages took control of his house.”

  The woman raised an eyebrow at him but made a note in her log, glancing up at him again as she said, “Name?”

  Feeling dumber by the minute, Hayden asked, “My name, or my father’s name?”

  The woman almost rolled her eyes in annoyance when she said, “Both.”

  “I’m Hayden, and my father was Aleric Frost.”

  It was almost satisfying to see the ink pen drop from her hand and roll onto the floor, leaving a trail of black ink in its wake. The clerk’s eyes widened as she took in Hayden’s appearance once more, and then she bent down to retrieve her pen and said, “Very well, if you’ll just take a seat…”

  She looked like she was afraid he’d refuse to wait and attack her instead, and Hayden’s momentary pleasure in catching her off guard quickly evaporated.

  “Alright.” He turned away from her desk and went to find a comfortable stretch of floor to sit on.

  A few people cast him sideways glances when they saw the circlet on his head and Bonk on his shoulder, but thankfully Hayden’s familiar was being extremely well-behaved, so his neighbors gradually relaxed. It took about thirty minutes for the door behind the clerk’s desk to open, and a man and woman walked out of it together. Hayden was just trying to do the mental math on how long he would be here, assuming that each person took thirty minutes of the Small Council’s time, when he heard his name.

  “Hayden Frost.”

  The effect his name had on the room was chilling. An unnatural silence fell all around him, and every eye in the room focused on him as he got to his feet and tried to look unaffected.

  “I didn’t think it was my turn yet,” Hayden said calmly, uncomfortably aware of the people who were tensing their muscles as though prepared to fight him, while others were reaching slowly into their pockets—probably for a knife. Bonk was scarily still on his shoulder.

  “The High Mayor will see you in his office,” the clerk explained. “If you would please, follow me.”

  She stood up and motioned for him to join her through the door the couple just exited. Hayden was eager to escape the room full of hostile locals before they could attack him, but his heart was racing at the knowledge that he was being sent to the High Mayor himself. For all the time that Hayden had spent in the capitol before now, he had never actually crossed paths with the mayor, whether by coincidence or design it was hard to tell.

  They walked through a chamber with a high-vaulted ceiling, entirely empty except for the long table through the center of the space, angled so that it looked like half a hexagon. There were six people currently sitting at this table, wearing blue-and-white suits, and they all stared at Hayden as he was led past them and into a door at the back of the chamber.

  The room they walked into was nearly as large, but without the vaulted ceiling. The High Mayor’s desk looked exactly like the one the Small Council used, except it was angled inwards instead of outwards so that the High Mayor could use all three sides. Half a dozen filing cabinets lined one wall, and there were several neat stacks of paper along one side of the desk, labeled ‘Incoming’. A smaller stack was a foot away, under a heading labeled ‘Outgoing.’ Most of the space in the office was unused, which Hayden considered a waste. He was led past a comfortable-looking down-stuffed couch and directed into a stiff wooden chair in front of the mayor’s desk.

  The man himself was sitting on the other side, studying Hayden without any identifiable expression on his face. He was probably in his fifties, with salt-and-pepper hair and creases in his face around his eyes and mouth. He was wearing a navy blue suit that probably cost more than Hayden’s childhood home, and either he was still very physically fit, or else his tailor was excellent at making it look that way.

  He stared at Hayden with dark brown eyes and said, “Thank you, Cecily, you may leave us.”

  The clerk left them alone and shut the door behind her. Hayden couldn’t help but feel like he had just been ento
mbed, and was mentally kicking himself for coming here and inviting trouble upon himself.

  “So, you’re the Frost boy.”

  “And you’re the High Mayor,” Hayden answered automatically, determined not to show fear. He was tired of letting people bully him around just because of who his father was.

  “You must be fond of my compound, since you keep returning here.” He ignored Hayden’s sarcasm entirely, still watching him with that intense gaze.

  “Not by choice, until now,” he admitted. “How come I’ve never seen you before, in all the weeks I’ve spent here?” He wasn’t sure why he felt compelled to ask that question.

  “Because I didn’t want to see you,” the man answered simply, tenting his hands beneath his chin and staring at Hayden from across the desk.

  “Why not?” Hayden swallowed painfully. “Because of who my father is?”

  “Yes,” the High Mayor answered neutrally. “If you are like him, then I am compelled to eliminate you, and if you are not, then I don’t have any business with you and therefore no need to know you.”

  Hayden thought that was a strange and chilling way to look at things, and almost wished he hadn’t asked.

  “I didn’t come here to start trouble, I just want to—”

  He almost fell out of his chair in shock when the chairman of the Council of Mages appeared in the middle of the room between one blink and the next, wearing his golden robes with the black shirt and pants beneath them that meant he was on official business.

  “Calahan, you’re late,” the High Mayor greeted him tonelessly.

  “My apologies. I was engaging a chimaera when I received your summons, and had to dispose of it before coming here.”

  Hayden couldn’t help but admire the matter-of-factness in Calahan’s tone at the fact that he was battling a chimaera, as though he did that sort of thing every day. Maybe he did.

  “Where are your spoils from it?” Hayden blurted out, immediately feeling like an idiot for asking about spoils at a time like this.

  Calahan raised an eyebrow in amusement and said, “I’m the chairman of the Council of Mages; I don’t really need to collect spoils to demonstrate my worth anymore.” He gave Hayden a wry smile. “Besides, it would require a mausoleum to contain them all even if I did.”

  Calahan addressed the High Mayor now. “May I ask why Hayden Frost is sitting in your office at present? Has he committed an infraction of the common law?”

  Hayden could hear the faint note of superiority in his tone as he said ‘common law’, as though it were beneath him. Since Calahan was kind of like the High Mayor of magical law, he supposed there might be some rivalry between the two over who was more important, even though they had to work together.

  “Not that I am aware of,” the mayor replied evenly, clearly not intimidated by his counterpart. “I have been led to understand that he is petitioning us to see his father’s estate.”

  Calahan looked at Hayden like he was a sea slug and said, “Why would you want to do that?”

  Treading carefully, Hayden explained, “As far as I know, I’m the only Frost left in the world. I never knew anything about my family at all, except for my mother, and now she’s dead. I just wanted to see the place where the Frosts used to live, because I’m curious about it.”

  Calahan relaxed marginally but continued watching Hayden.

  “I’m afraid that’s not such a good idea…”

  Before he could tell Hayden exactly why he wasn’t going to let him see his father’s house, there was a sharp knock on the door, and then it opened without waiting for a response. If Hayden had thought this day couldn’t get any more bizarre, he now stood corrected.

  It was Master Asher on the other side of the door.

  The Prism Master stepped into the room as though he’d been invited, waving an airy hand over his shoulder and saying, “No need to fuss, gentlemen, I can find my way,” as he shut the door behind him.

  “Masters? What in the name of the arcane are you doing here?” Calahan greeted him in surprise, jaw clenching inside his mouth as though the sight of the Prism Master was distasteful.

  Of everyone in the room, Asher certainly looked the most casual. He was wearing a worn t-shirt and loose-fitting trousers with a hole in one knee. If not for the strange circlet around his head (it was holding four prisms instead of one), he could be confused for a down-on-his-luck drifter.

  “Hayden, hello, fancy meeting you here.” He beamed at him. “Cal, long time no see—”

  “Not long enough for my liking,” muttered the chairman.

  “—and Brandon, hello,” the Master continued as though there had been no interruption. “Has anyone ever told you you’ve got an excellent tailor?” He admired the suit.

  “If you refer to me so informally again, I’ll find something to have you arrested for,” the High Mayor said darkly.

  “Of course, where are my manners?” Asher didn’t look daunted in the least. “Your Eminence, Most High of Mayors, it is an honor and a pleasure to be in your exalted company—”

  “That will do, Masters. Now stop being obnoxious, if you can manage it.”

  The Prism Master smiled cheerfully and fell silent, though Calahan opened his mouth and said, “What are you doing here?”

  “I heard that my young protégé was in town, requesting a tour of his late father’s mansion, and that you refused him access to a place he is perfectly entitled to visit.”

  The two older men couldn’t have looked more surprised if Asher had announced he was actually a woman. It was the first real expression that Hayden had seen on the High Mayor’s face since meeting the man.

  “Wha—how could you know that he was here?” Calahan blurted out in indignation.

  Master Asher just smiled benignly.

  “Never mind that,” the mayor interrupted. “How could you know that we denied his request? I have systems in place that should render it impossible for magical eavesdropping to work in my office.”

  Asher raised an eyebrow in amusement.

  “I didn’t overhear anything; I just assumed you would refuse him.” He shrugged. “Clearly I wasn’t wrong.”

  The High Mayor exhaled in relief, but Calahan looked more annoyed than ever.

  “Surely even you can see why it is impossible for the boy to go there,” he spoke about Hayden as though he wasn’t even in the room, which was fine with him right now.

  Asher looked surprised. “Why? Has the mansion burned down?”

  “Of course not, but you know I can’t allow the son of the Dark Prism to access his father’s caches of magical weaponry.”

  Asher raised an eyebrow. “Can’t, or won’t?” He didn’t wait for a response. “And I refuse to believe that the Council of Mages left any weaponry—magical or otherwise—lying around the place, after you’ve spent the last three years going over it with a fine-toothed comb.”

  “The Dark Prism was brilliant. Evil, but brilliant all the same. If you don’t imagine that he has hiding places and booby traps all over the estate…we’ve had to examine every inch of the place to be sure there aren’t more hidden caches to discover.”

  “I can imagine.” Master Asher nodded in sympathy. “And when’s the last time you actually found anything?”

  “Six months ago,” Calahan admitted warily. “There was a stone column that concealed a book on corrupted inverse-alignments. Took seven of us to figure out what spells we needed to access it.”

  “Well there you have it,” Asher waved a dismissive hand. “I don’t think Hayden wants permission to look for his father’s old research notes, and you’ve just said yourself that you’ve found everything in plain—and not-so-plain—sight. Surely it can’t hurt to let him walk around the main floor space. I could chaperone if you’d like.”

  “Over my lifeless, rotting corpse,” the High Mayor interjected, pressing his hands against the desk in front of him. “You are the last person I would trust in that house, as you well know.”

>   Offended on his mentor’s behalf, Hayden spoke up at last. “Master Asher isn’t evil just because he was friends with my father when they were teenagers.” He set his jaw firmly, trying to remain calm. “They stopped being friends when my father started screwing around with broken prisms, and he almost got killed fighting against him in the end, so stop acting like he’s the bad guy.”

  The others looked universally stunned that he opened his mouth, even Master Asher. Calahan recovered first.

  “And why did Asher live, when so many others died? The Dark Prism spared him, which begs the question of whether their entire fight was staged for our benefit, to make sure that Aleric had a mole inside the magical community even if things went south for him.”

  Asher rolled his eyes. “We’ve been over this numerous times. I seem to even remember being acquitted of wrong-doing during my trial. I have no idea why Aleric spared me, as I was unconscious and suffering the effects of light-sickness at the time.”

  “There is still the question of the Black Prism,” the High Mayor said quietly, and the others fell silent.

  “I don’t know where it is. I’ve never known where it is,” Asher broke the silence first. “If it didn’t turn to dust in the explosion that took out Hayden’s home, then he hid it somewhere fantastic, because I know you’ve been searching for it for years.”

  Hayden’s stomach rolled over as he realized what they were discussing. His father’s famous Black Prism, which was never consumed no matter what he cast through it, the thing that had destroyed so many lives…

  “It’s still missing?” He frowned.

  “Yes, it is,” Calahan answered him. “No one has seen it since they’ve seen your father.”

  Asher changed the subject abruptly.

  “Hayden is the sole surviving Frost, which makes him the legal heir of the estate. At some point in time you must turn it over to him to occupy or sell at his discretion. You can’t legally bar him from going there now unless you can prove it is dangerous, and as long as you don’t have him rooting around wall panels for illicit magical items, I don’t see why it should be. If you don’t like me as an escort, then send one of your lackeys.”