The Once King

by Rachel Aaron

  “Haven’t been here in a while,” I said, self-consciously brushing the grime off my warded poncho as I stepped onto the pristine white cement of IMA’s new visitor pavilion. “I like the new duck pond.”

  “I think it’s supposed to be a reflecting pool,” Sibyl said. “The ducks are just swimming in it.”

  “Then I hope they’re ready to sell their souls to pay tuition,” I joked, looking around at the perfect green lawn and artistically scattered white buildings that made up IMA’s main campus. “You go into debt just for breathing around here.”

  Like everything else that was worth real money, IMA was up on the Skyways. It had a nice location, too, taking up several elevated blocks just half a mile south of the Dragon Consulate where the Peacemaker, the dragon who claimed the DFZ as his territory, kept his lair. I wasn’t sure why the DFZ allowed any dragon, particularly one as famously eccentric as the Peacemaker, to claim her as his land, but there must have been some kind of history there, because she loved him. Her buildings were forever shifting around the multilevel Dragon Consulate to make sure the dragons had a clear flight path coming in.

  And they were always coming in. Thanks to the Peacemaker’s Edict, which declared that no dragon could attack another within the city without facing the Peacemaker’s wrath, the DFZ had turned into a sort of dragon Switzerland. Clans that would kill each other on sight anywhere else in the world routinely met in the DFZ to talk. Not about peace—normal dragons never talked peace—but they talked a lot of business, which was probably why the DFZ gave them so much leeway. No one loved capitalism more than she did, and when you considered how much wealth the average dragon accumulated over their immortal life, courting them was just good sense.

  It was also good for IMA. Being so close to the Dragon Consulate, and the spectacle of the giant dragons that constantly flew through the sky surrounding it, gave the school an edge that other magical arts universities simply could not top. Add in the fact that they’d converted their entire Skyway campus into a lavish park complete with water features, semi-tropical gardens, and buildings that looked like modern art installations, and the whole place just reeked of exclusivity and money.

  Of the three major magical colleges in the DFZ, the Institute for Magical Arts was the most expensive by an order of magnitude. While MIT-Thaumaturgical and the New Wayne College of Magic had to pour their efforts into industrial spellwork research to court corporate funding, IMA dedicated itself to the “art” part of magical arts with graduate programs in expressive casting, illusionary sculpture, magical theatre, and, my specialty, magical art history. It was the best magic-focused liberal arts school in the world, which meant it was trust fund kids all the way down. I’d fit right in when I’d first arrived almost four years ago. Now I felt like a homeless bum who’d wondered onto campus by accident.

  At least I could still look like I knew where I was going. The campus had changed a lot since I’d finished my master’s degree a year and a half ago, but the path to the art history department was still drilled into my memory. Once I figured out how to get out of the fancy new visitor’s area, I walked straight there, ordering my truck to circle the block a few times so I wouldn’t have to pay for parking while I cut across the bright-green grass lawn toward the perfect white cube that was IMA’s historical arts building.

  As a lowly doctoral student, Heidi’s office was in the basement. It was a very nice basement with reactive lighting and fake LED windows displaying real-time footage of famous landscapes, but it was still a bunch of closet-sized offices crammed into an underground hallway. I didn’t remember which one was Heidi’s anymore—it had been more than a year—but I didn’t need to. Her door was still covered in the same history jokes and pictures of her and her golden retriever as I remembered. It opened the moment I knocked, revealing a startlingly tall blond woman with tanned skin, a healthy, athletic glow, and cheekbones that could cut glass.

  “Opal!” Heidi cried, rushing forward to hug me before I could warn her about my wards. “Ugh,” she said a moment later, snatching her arms back. “What are you wearing? It feels like a trash bag.”

  “Anti-dirt wards,” I explained, pointing at my poncho. “And anti a lot of other stuff, which is why it feels so slippery. That and the fact that it is actually made of plastic.”

  Heidi looked horrified. “Why are you wearing that horrible thing?” she asked, stepping back to let me inside. “You’re not still working as a Cleaner, are you?”

  I shrugged and took a seat on the minimalist metal stool in front of her neatly organized desk. “It’s not so bad.”

  “Really?” she asked, shutting the door behind me. “Because you look terrible.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Thanks.”

  “I’m serious,” Heidi snapped, walking back to her desk. “You’re thin, and I don’t mean that as a compliment.”

  “It’s been a rough few months,” I admitted, reaching into my bag. “But I’m working on turning it around. That’s why I’m here, actually. I need a favor. I found these on a job, and—”

  “Stop,” Heidi said angrily. “Just stop right there. What do you think you’re doing?”

  I blinked at her. “Asking for help?”

  “Help?” she said, her perfect face growing furious. “Opal, you vanished! You got your degree, and then you disappeared!”

  “I didn’t disappear,” I said defensively. “I was still here in the DFZ. I just needed a change of—”

  “You moved out of our apartment in the middle of the night!” she yelled at me. “The only reason I knew you were working as a Cleaner is because your mother called to see if I could talk you out of it. Which I couldn’t because you never answered any of my messages!”

  I winced. Maybe coming back here hadn’t been such a good idea after all. “I’m sorry, I just—”

  “Sorry?” Heidi yelled, slamming her hands on her desk. “It’s a little late for sorry!”

  The raw anger in her voice was a shock. I’d known Heidi for years, but I’d never seen her get this emotional. To be honest, I hadn’t realized she’d cared so much, which made me feel like a jerk. In my defense, I’d had a lot going on at the time, but that didn’t take the sting out of seeing her stare at me like I’d stabbed her in the back.

  “Why, Opal?” she said, her voice cracking. “I was your roommate. I thought I was your friend. Why did you leave without saying goodbye?”

  “I wasn’t doing it to be mean,” I said, pulling off my goggles so that I could look at her properly. “And you are my friend, I just…I needed a clean break, that’s all.”

  “A clean break from what?” Heidi demanded. “Were you in trouble?”

  I’d actually done it to get myself out of trouble, but I couldn’t tell Heidi that. I’d lied to her enough back when we’d been roommates, which was one of the main reasons I’d left. I was tired of lying all the time. Tired of doing the dance that was necessary to keep everyone else safe. Tired of being me.

  A pretty gem of little value.

  “I had to go,” I said, hardening my voice. “I can’t tell you more than that, but trust me when I say that it was for the best. I wouldn’t have bothered you now, but I really need to know what this spellwork—”

  “Please, bother me!” Heidi begged, reaching out to grab my dirty hands. “What part of ‘I am your friend’ do you not understand? If you’re in trouble, let me help. I’m still living in our old apartment. You can move back in anytime you want. Or don’t, I don’t care, just please let me help you! I can’t stand to see you like this. You look homeless and you smell like death.”

  “Told you,” Sibyl whispered in my earpiece.

  I muted her with a flick of my finger and focused on Heidi. “Thank you for the offer. It means a lot to me, it really does, but I can’t.”

  Heidi’s brown eyes narrowed. “It’s your dad, isn’t it?”

  I stopped cold. “No,” I said after way too long.

  “You’re not nearly as good a liar
as you think you are,” she said, crossing her arms. “Look, I know you and your dad don’t get along. Given the way you used to yell into your phone, I’m pretty sure the whole building knew. But if he’s the reason you ran away, I swear I won’t tell him you’re back. Just come home. Whatever you’re running from, we’ll work it out together. I can even give you a job. There’s an opening right now in my department. I can get you set up today if you want. For the love of God, Opal, you have a graduate degree from the best magical arts institute in the world! You don’t have to dig through other people’s trash to make a living!”

  I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t tempted. After my last five months, moving back into Heidi’s sun-drenched apartment on the Skyways sounded like paradise. But if she knew about my dad, then she was already in too deep. I’d left precisely so he couldn’t use people like her against me. If I took her offer now, I’d be playing right into his hands.

  “I can’t.”

  “Opal!”

  “No,” I said, clenching my hands into fists. “I’m sorry about the way I left. I didn’t mean to make you worry. I just had a lot of stuff I had to deal with on my own, and this was the only way I could do it.”

  “By becoming a Cleaner?” she cried. “How does that help anything?”

  It had helped a lot, actually. Unlike respectable art historians, no one cared what Cleaners did. They came and went as they pleased, and they made their own money. Much better money than an entry-level job at IMA paid, current bad luck notwithstanding. It wasn’t neat or respectable, but I needed money more than I needed my pride right now. And anyway, I liked Cleaning. It was surprisingly fun digging through people’s lives, and sometimes I found great stuff. Heidi wouldn’t understand that, though. From the look on her face, she clearly thought I was little better than a rag picker, and the fact that I looked the part certainly wasn’t helping matters.

  “I appreciate the job offer. Really, I do, but I’m not coming back.” I held up my dirty poncho. “It’s not pretty, but this is my life now, and I’m happy with that. Honest.”

  Heidi did not look convinced, but at least she didn’t keep arguing. “So does that mean you’ll answer when I message you now?”

  “Sure,” I lied. There was no way I could stay in contact with her. Not until my debt was paid and I was in the clear. But for all her talk about me being a bad liar, she must have bought it, because for the first time since I’d come in, Heidi smiled at me.

  “How are you so stubborn?” she muttered, sinking into her office chair.

  “Talent,” I said, smiling back. “So can you help me or not?”

  She sighed. “What do you need?”

  I pulled out the folded notes I’d found in the warded box under the mage’s bed. “Can you look at these and tell me what they are? The forms look alchemical to me, but deciphering ancient spellwork is your area of expertise, not mine.”

  “You always were more of a brute-force-o-mancer,” Heidi agreed, wrinkling her nose as she plucked the papers from my hand. “Do I want to know why these smell like dead animal?”

  I shook my head, and she sighed, thumbing through the sheets as if she was grading papers. “They’re plans for a ritual,” she said after a few minutes.

  I nodded excitedly. “A ritual for what?”

  “Something big,” she said, sounding interested now despite herself. “The main structure involves multiple overlapping circles, which is an influence of modern Thaumaturgy, but the core spellwork is absolutely alchemical. Primarily the Islamic forms, but there’s lots of stuff stolen from the Ancient Greeks as well.” She glanced at me. “Where did you find these again?”

  “In an amateur historian’s apartment,” I said, tactfully leaving out the bit where said amateur historian had been lying dead right next to them. “I’m trying to determine if they’re valuable.”

  “They’re certainly unique,” Heidi said, laying the pages out on her desk in a grid so she could see all of them at once. “Historically, alchemy was all about transformation—turning one thing into another. Usually lead into gold, but there’s no mention of gold here.”

  That was disappointing. Gold always sold. “So what was he trying to do?”

  “I’m not sure,” Heidi said, squinting at the papers. “It looks as though he’s using the transformational nature of alchemy as a tool to make something, but I can’t see…Ah ha!” She stabbed her finger down on a particularly doodle-covered page. “Here it is. I had to find the central variable. This is a ritual to make a cockatrice egg.”

  “You can make those?” I asked. Cockatrices were one of the many mythical animals that had reappeared when the magic came back. I didn’t know much about them, but it seemed to me that cockatrice eggs would come from other cockatrices, not from alchemy.

  “Cockatrice eggs were a vital ingredient in many Indo-European alchemy transformations,” Heidi explained. “You see them mentioned all the time in historical texts, but due to their organic nature, very few are still in existence. Other than the ones laid by actual cockatrices, of course. But it takes an egg laid by a rooster and incubated by a toad to make a cockatrice naturally, which obviously doesn’t happen very often, so most ancient alchemists just made their own. Unfortunately, the process for creating them was either so secret or so obvious, no one wrote it down. At least, we’ve never found a recipe.”

  My heart began to beat faster. “Does that mean these notes are valuable?”

  “Not to my department,” Heidi said. “I’m a magical historian, and while this little project is interesting, it’s not historical. It also doesn’t look very practical. I don’t know how much a cockatrice egg costs these days, but this spell requires over two hundred thousand dollars in reagents, some of which are extremely morally questionable.” She shrugged. “I’m sorry, Opal. It’s an interesting piece of spellwork, but it’s not valuable. It’s not old enough or groundbreaking enough to be academically relevant, and I can’t believe anyone would go through the trouble of gathering this many reagents just to make a cockatrice egg.”

  My soaring hopes fell with every word she spoke, but I wasn’t ready to give up yet. “But do you think it would work?” I pressed. “If all the reagents were present and the spell was cast as written, do you think it would actually make an egg?”

  Heidi shrugged. “Probably? I mean, I don’t see any reason it wouldn’t work, but you can never tell with a spell until you actually cast it. Just speaking for myself, though, if I had those reagents sitting around, I’d sell them. Or turn them in to the proper authorities. Or even keep them for my own experiments. I certainly wouldn’t waste them on this. Even if you love cockatrices, this spell is simply too expensive to be practical.”

  I heaved a long sigh. “Well, I guess that’s that,” I said, standing up. “Thanks for looking at least.”

  “Any time,” Heidi said, scraping the notes back into a neat stack and handing them to me. “But do think about my offer. I’m sure Cleaning isn’t actually as dangerous as the TV shows make it look, but you graduated with honors from IMA. You’re better than this. Your skills are being wasted on this garbage. You are being wasted, and I hate seeing that.” She gave me a plaintive look. “Can I have your new number at least? Just in case I find a job that can tempt you away from Cleaning?”

  I really didn’t want to. What was the point of sucking up the pain of cutting everyone out of your life if you were just going to let them back in? But I couldn’t take the way Heidi was staring at me, especially not after she’d helped me when I’d done nothing to deserve it. I could always change my number again later, so I wrote it down for her, lying through my teeth when she made me swear to answer her calls.

  By the time I finally left her office, I felt utterly defeated. Not only were the notes I’d pinned my hopes on apparently worthless, I’d been thoroughly reminded of my status as the world’s worst friend. Definitely not my best day, and for all her claims of being a socially sensitive AI, Sibyl wasn’t helping.

&nb
sp; “I told you this was a waste of time,” she said as we climbed the stark white modern stairs back to the ground floor. “You should toss those stupid notes in the trash before they cost us any more.”

  “Not yet,” I said stubbornly. “Some of those reagent receipts were dated less than a week before he went delinquent on his rent.” I put up my hand to shield my eyes as we emerged from the basement into the late-afternoon sunlight. “That means he had to have bought them right before he died. You don’t pay that much for a spell without trying it. I bet he’d either just cast it or was about to when he died. Either way, somewhere in this city, there’s an unclaimed magical circle with a cockatrice egg or two hundred thousand in reagents inside it, and we’re the only ones who know. That’s worth keeping a line on, don’t you think?”

  “No I do not,” Sibyl snapped. “I think you’re letting your optimism run away with you again. Even if you’re right, and there is a pot of gold at the end of this wild goose chase, the DFZ is a hundred and ninety-four square miles that move around. The chance of you finding one mage’s circle in all of that is practically zero, and we don’t have the resources to waste trying. Need I remind you that if you don’t have ten thousand dollars by midnight on Friday, you’re going to be screwed? You bought me to give you good advice, so listen for once: forget this and let’s get back to the Cleaner office. If we hustle, we can still make it in time for the evening auction. There’s always more stuff up for sale at night. We’ll get a good unit, clean it fast, and turn a nice profit in time to go back tomorrow and do it all again. That’s how we’re going to make enough money to get through this. Not chasing wild cockatrices.”

  She was right, of course. Sibyl was always right, which was why I’d downloaded her. But as sensible as her advice was, throwing away the notes felt too much like tossing a lotto ticket before the numbers were announced. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it, so I tucked them back into my bag instead, ordering my AI to recall our truck before she could pull up a picture of eyes to roll at me.