Dark apprentice, p.24
Dark Apprentice, page 24
He ate breakfast in the kitchen, at the table, with proper plates and cutlery, like a civilized fucking human being. That too, was a thing he’d decided upon returning. The affliction might be sucking away his time, but he’d be damned if he would let it reduce him to the creature he’d seen in the mirror in London. Unlike Medea, he had manners.
Medea sat at the counter when he entered the lab, sipping tea and reading a book. If she’d discovered the book he’d planted in her to-read section, she’d yet to mention it, though if she had, it explained why she’d taken to leaving books for him in overly conspicuous places. They were always on healing or botany. He’d ignored the passive-aggressive move.
Medea cleared her throat. “Good morning, Nikolai.”
He froze. Not only had she greeted him, she’d used his name. Victory! He forced himself to continue to the cabinets as if nothing were amiss. When he placed his ingredients on the table, he kept his face carefully neutral. Gloating now would spook her into foregoing the habit.
“Good morning, Medea.” He allowed himself a polite smile.
She looked down at her tea and took a deep breath. Oh god, she was winding up for something. He placed the cauldron in the sink and began to fill it, hoping the water would drown out the impending lecture.
“I thought about what you said, and you’re right.”
He turned the water to a slow trickle.
“I have been lax. I used to learn names. They were quite important, actually. At one time, it was traditional for mages to discard their given names in favor of something that suited them better.” She gave him a sidelong glance. “As you may have already guessed, Medea is not my given name.”
“I thought maybe you were the Magi from Greek legend.”
Medea laughed. “I’m not that old. I was familiar with her story, and it spoke to me. Never had I seen a woman represented with so much . . . agency. She was feminine, and yet her actions were so far from what was expected of women that she was villainized. When it came time to take a name, I knew exactly which to choose.”
She grew pensive. “Over time, names became less important to me. It’s not pleasant to lose people you care about, generation after generation. Easier not to get attached. Let them blend together. And then once my apprentices kept trying to kill me . . .” She shook her head. “There was little point in learning their names. Sometimes I forget that each person sees their life as important, even if it’s brief compared to my own. If I have offended you, I am sorry.”
A greeting, his name, and an apology? He was on a roll. But her lamentations didn’t make sense. Why not make her loved ones immortal? He opened his mouth to ask, but she stood brusquely, all business again.
“Today you will be learning something new. When you are done with your morning tasks, come see me outside.” With that, she left.
Too abrupt, even for her. Normally, she hung around the lab and they both went outside together. Had he stumbled onto a sensitive topic? At some point she had cared about people—mildly surprising, but then most people cared about others, or at least those closest to them. It hurt her enough that she’d seen the wisdom in setting aside that nonsense. Still, that she had the capacity to care made her vulnerable. It was something he could use.
Of course it was also possible she’d left to avoid discussing immortality. Maybe her method was something that couldn’t be shared, like an artifact. If so, all the more reason to kill her and steal it. The sooner he mastered telepathy, the sooner he could get into her head and find out.
Unfortunately, the ground floor of her library, that which was accessible to him, had been less than helpful. It was painfully clear most of the authors weren’t natural telepaths and had a shaky understanding of the magic. Journal entries described the lengthy processes these Magi had required to master a fraction of what he could do as a boy.
The only Useful things he found were exercises for repelling attacks. The most promising suggested visualizing a physical barrier and attempting to hold the image in your mind throughout the day. With practice, it would become subconscious, creating an ever-present magical obstacle, the properties of which depended on what you’d imagined.
He had thought carefully about what kind of barrier would be most effective. A brick wall would provide strong protection, but a swirling mist could confound and trap your attacker. A curtain of water was best for alerts; when disturbed, you’d feel the ripples. He finally settled on imagining a solid sheet of ice—as with the wall, it required force to break through, but even the slightest crack should alert him to an attack.
Incredible that Medea allowed him to learn that much. She’d stormed off so fast the day he accused her of telepathy that she probably forgot to remove any Useful books. For someone of her intellect, she seemed remarkably scatter-brained. Then again, if she was like him, as he suspected she was, then the disorganization was all an act.
In any case, her promise to teach him the specialty had gone unfulfilled. He’d have to press her for lessons, test her abilities, and find a way to access the books he needed on his own.
He dumped the half-filled cauldron and put it back. No sense doing the boiling exercise if Medea wasn’t there to see. He quickly made his potion allotment and exited the hovel.
Medea perched atop the largest rock in the gravel pit across from the garden with her eyes closed. The wind tugged playfully at her hair and dress, momentarily revealing a braided leather anklet contrasting sharply with her pale skin. There was voyeuristic pleasure in catching sight of something normally hidden. Her red dress, though delightfully form-fitting, left little flesh exposed. Was this how it had been in ages past, when women covered themselves so completely that an ankle was considered risqué?
The wavy lines raked into the gravel showed no evidence of tracks. Nikolai paused at the border and cleared his throat. “Can I step on it?”
“You can’t levitate?”
“Levitate, yes. Fly, no.”
“They’re not much different, but that’s a lesson for another day.”
If he had a coin for every time she said that.
An invisible force wrapped his body, and Nikolai rose into the air. He savored the idea that she touched him, even if she wasn’t touching him. He floated across the gap, landing gently on the rock across from her.
“Sit,” she said. “You will need to concentrate for this. The exercise I’m going to show you needs to be completed daily. Save it for the afternoons, when your other lessons are finished, provided you are not . . . indisposed.”
“What is this place?”
“It is called a karesansui, or dry landscape. I came across them in my travels to Japan. They are used for meditation. Before I created this garden, I did most of my focus exercises on the beach. It is not impossible there, but the wind and fine sand add a challenge. Gravel is not as apt to blow away.”
A single grey stone rose into the air between them. “The task is deceptively simple,” she said. “Raise a bit of gravel into the air and hold it thus with your mind.”
Nikolai began to levitate a stone and she halted him.
“No. Not like that. Telekinesis only. No spells that will allow it to remain airborne without thought. You must consciously hold it there until the task becomes unconscious.”
He tried again, miming with his hand and focusing on the gravel to keep it airborne.
“Good. Now raise another, but do not lose your grip on the first.”
Easier said than done. Every time his mind grasped the second piece of gravel and brought it up, the first dropped to the ground. Again and again he tried. Sometimes the stone made it halfway before falling. At one point he tried to bring two up together. Medea corrected him and said it must be one at a time. Fucking impossible. What was the point of this Useless exercise?
After what felt like an hour he finally succeeded. Sweat beaded his brow and his face screwed up in concentration as he hovered two stones side by side. They wobbled precariously.
“Good,” said Medea. “Try to relax. Hold them steady. When you feel comfortable, pick up a third.”
There was no way to respond without losing focus. It took all he had just to keep the two stones aloft. He reached for a third, then sagged forward in defeat as the other two fell. What was the point of all this?
“What’s the goal here? How many do I have to hold?”
“The goal is to build your focus. There is no set number that you need to reach. The object should always be to add yet another stone. That is how you measure your success—one more stone.” He glanced down at the gravel pit. So many stones. He looked at Medea.
“How many could Thomas do?”
“At the rank of master, I believe he could hold around thirty.”
So he’d have to get at least thirty-one. Forty would be even better. “How many can you do?”
“I do not think it wise that I tell you. It will only make you think of how much further you have to go.”
As if he wasn’t doing that already.
“Please,” he pleaded, “let me see what a grand master is capable of.”
Thinly veiled as the ploy was, it seemed to work, for Medea sighed and raised the gravel, one by one, stone by stone. They assembled into neat lines overhead.
“This is harder than it should be,” she said. “You’re sitting where many of my stones need to go.”
“I can move.”
“No, I can make do.”
Stones continued to rise, an impossible number, yet still they came, marching on like soldiers. They radiated out in a three-dimensional pattern.
“What are you making?”
Medea did not respond. Her brow knit as she focused on the stones above. It was staggering. On and on they came, until the ground below was half-empty. At last the stones slowed, and no new stones rose. She held the pattern for a time, then gasped and allowed the gravel to fall. The surface of the pit smoothed out. A rake rose from nearby and traced wavy lines in the substrate.
“That was incredible.” And daunting. Thomas, her best student, hadn’t even come close. He could pass Thomas if he worked hard enough, but this? It didn’t seem possible.
Which meant it likely wasn’t. There had to be some trick to it, a trick she failed to share. That or she cheated and used levitation to hold them without breaking her concentration. The display was designed to be impressive.
Medea shrugged. “It took a long time to get to this point. As you progress, you will be tempted to create a shelf of sorts in the air to keep your pieces suspended. Do not. Use yourself as an anchor. Your body naturally senses where it is in space and attempts to orient the world around it based on itself. Use that sense. Pick a spot in relation to your body, and always begin at that spot.”
A single stone rose and hovered in front of her face, an inch off center from her nose. “Build out from there. In time, laying the first stone will be as easy as touching your nose with your eyes closed.” A second stone joined the first, this one an inch off center on the opposite side.
“I have found that patterns help. If you frame your stones the same way each time, eventually it becomes automatic. Less concentration is required—like hanging a coat you have hung a dozen times before. When you get to that point, you can trust your mind to hold them in place and focus on adding new stones. I recommend keeping a bit of sand in your room for practice. Gravel is nice, but sand may be easier for you to hold.”
“Thank you, I will.”
She straightened her back. “There is another matter we need to discuss.”
Ugh, what now? “Yes?”
“Have you been boiling water every day?”
As far as she knew, he was. He was careful to do it whenever she was in the lab, but if she was out, or if the malaise kept him bedridden until she had moved on to other things in the afternoon, then no, he hadn’t bothered. He hardly saw the point in continuing an exercise designed purely for purification purposes.
Without a trace of guilt or remorse, he answered, “Of course.”
A force like a slap rang across his face.
“Do not lie to me.”
He held his cheek and stared at her accusingly. “I’m not lyi—”
Pain tore through his back. He gasped and clutched at it in agony, the intensity such that he almost vomited. Just as suddenly, it was gone. He shot her a murderous look.
“That was your kidneys,” she said, voice hard. “Next time it will be your scrotum. I told you I would know if you hadn’t been doing it. Your mana reserves are far below what they should be by now.”
“Fine! No, I don’t do it every day. I don’t see the point.”
“Whether or not you see the point is irrelevant. You are my apprentice, and you will obey me when it comes to your training, or else you will forfeit your position here. Do I make myself clear?”
“Yes.”
“Give me your oath that you will perform your duties.”
“I swear I will boil water and perform any other Useless exercises you assign me, but only if you fulfill your end of the bargain.”
That got her attention. “What do you mean?”
“Telepathy. You’ve yet to teach me anything.”
“You have the library—”
“And you’ve blocked off the books that would be of any use. The lower level is worthless to someone like me and you know it.”
Her face flushed. “When you master the basics—”
“If you mean never, just say never.”
“After you master the basics, I will teach you whatever you want.”
“Even immortality?”
“No. That is the one subject I do not explicitly teach. Given the stakes of such a thing, it is imperative that a person figure it out for themselves.”
“So your vow means nothing.”
“I vowed to answer your questions. I never said you would like my answers.”
“You haven’t answered me at all!” He slid from the rock and paced, heedless of the destruction he wrought to her careful patterns in the substrate. Fuck her kare-whatever-the-fuck garden.
Medea watched him impassively. “Then I will explain further. Death fuels life. You saw that yesterday. It is the same for humanity. For a society to grow and change, each generation must die, and their values with them. New generations are only able to shape their future because those who would have previously opposed them no longer exist. That is how cultures change over time.”
“What does culture have to do with anything?”
“It is unethical for an immortal to interfere with the affairs of mortals. It forces the Present to live in the Past. I know my values differ from many societies today. Even in my own time, I was a bit of an outlier. Would it be fair of me to impose my own standards of morality upon others?”
He wheeled on her. “But you do. You kill people—”
She waved a hand dismissively. “A few individuals make no difference in the grand scheme of things. I do not seek to influence the world at large, and I will not grant immortality to any who might abuse it. If someone reaches that height on their own, so be it, but I will not place them there.”
A waste of talent. That’s what she was. So this was why she’d sequestered herself away on a deserted island. This was why, despite all her power, she wasn’t ruling the world. Ridiculous! What was the point of having power if you didn’t wield it? What higher calling was there, if not to shape the world as you saw fit?
“Is that why you didn’t involve yourself in the last war? Because if you had, it probably would have lasted five seconds.”
“Do you have any idea how many wars I’ve seen? They say nothing is certain but death and taxes. I say with certainty that there is always a war going on somewhere. I do not involve myself. It’s unethical for me to take sides.”
What the hell was wrong with her? How could she sit by and do nothing? It was disgusting. No—worse than that—it was a dereliction of duty. Like all the damned countries that sat on their hands while the Nazis marched across Europe. Countries that remained “neutral.” Neutrality was for the spineless. It accomplished nothing, and by the time some nations chose to get involved, millions had already died.
He was only eight when the Germans arrived on their doorstep, yet he’d used his fledgling magic to save himself and the only person who mattered to him. If he’d had Medea’s power, he could have broken through enemy lines, raised an undead army, and slaughtered all who threatened him.
Medea had been here the whole time, reading her books while the world tore itself apart.
“I can see I’ve upset you—”
He laughed bitterly.
Medea floated from the rock to the low wall bordering the garden. “Your mind is in no state for learning. Take the rest of the day off.”
He watched her reenter the hovel, then hopped the low wall and stormed off toward the sea.
Why did she have to be so stubborn? Couldn’t she see that her abilities could be put to much better use? What did it matter if she toppled Mundane governments? It was like she said—they were constantly killing each other anyway. Their own paltry attempt at unifying the world was laughable. They needed a firm hand.
With the right spells, government might even become unnecessary. Magic could be used to keep people in line. Why had no one ever tried it? Probably because Magi were too few, and the scope of their power limited. Medea was living proof that more was possible. If he could acquire her level of skill, if he could convince others to join him, he might be able to change the course of history for the better.
Nikolai arrived at the cliffs and made his way down to the cave. He couldn’t find the entrance, and for a second he thought he’d gone the wrong way. He backed up to the water and faced the sheer cliff, orienting himself by the sloped path to his left. There was no mistaking it—solid rock blocked the cave entrance.
He cast Magic Sight, hoping the blockage was merely an illusion. It wasn’t. The rock had no magical properties. As ever, something magical pulsed inside the cave. He might be able to blast it open, but the damage would be obvious. Better to come back another time when he was prepared. Nikolai climbed the path to the top of the cliffs and paused to admire the view.
