Page 12 of Strange Familiar (Warriors of Magic #2)

~12~

C illian needed a familiar. Possibly several. His eyes gritty, his magic reservoir drained to the dregs, books piled around him, he had to confront the fact that this was not a one-person job.

Rather than growing easier, extracting each book from the sticky web of enchantment embedding them grew more difficult the “deeper” he went. Though he knew it was a fallacy to think of the folded space in terms of physical dimensions like depth, he couldn’t help envisioning the layers of books as being like nuts or raisins studded throughout a giant, insubstantial cinnamon roll he was gradually unwinding. The image amused him as much as the grueling process did not.

As he worked, he’d become more and more convinced that the key texts, the critically important ones with the information that had caused them all to be hidden, lay at the gooey center. There didn’t seem to be a discernible pattern in the books he pulled out like wrenching teeth from the hardened jaw of a fossilized mastodon. They came from different eras regarding different topics by different authors, randomly shuffled together. The only consistent theme was, of course, that they all had to do with Meresin and House Phel in some way. Whoever—the multiple whoevers over the centuries—had stowed in them in the archive had done so by rote, he imagined. Someone had started it all with the key incriminating texts, then others had followed behind, probably obeying instructions by rote, wedging books in with no regard for order.

Although it could be the nature of that folded space that made establishing and maintaining order impossible. Still, whether as a result of his library magic operating subconsciously or flights of fancy taking over, Cillian began to form an idea of how the folded archive had been first created and then added to over the years.

The initial enchantment had clearly required a librarian wizard of immense skill and power, but after that, various minions probably had been assigned the task over decades and centuries. There had been at least a hundred of them, judging by the magical remanence they’d left behind on the books they’d hidden. For a time, Cillian had considered indexing those actors, along with the other data he was collecting, but it seemed like a wild-goose chase. These were not major players, but lackeys lobbing books willy-nilly into the folded space, ensuring that they stuck, but otherwise leaving them to randomly settle.

He couldn’t decide which sort he loathed more: the initial traitor to the sanctity of the Convocation Archives who set up the elaborate spell to hide these books from existence or the shitty flunkies who’d blithely and unquestioningly followed along all those years. It was especially galling to know that so many had been willing to simply comply. It deeply offended him that any librarian wizard would violate the historical record this way; that there had been so many heaped insult upon injury.

The one he most wanted to identify was that long-dead initial culprit, the deeply unethical wizard who’d colluded with the enemies of House Phel centuries ago. They were well past punishment, but Cillian wanted their identity anyway. The world should know what had been done and by whom. And why.

Just as soon as he figured it out.

Which wasn’t going to happen with him sitting there on the salon floor, surrounded by towers of books like a kid building a fort, his eyes so gritty he couldn’t blink without pain and his magic so threadbare he couldn’t even feel the folded space, much less consider extracting one more book. He hadn’t begun the task of comparing the extracted books with their counterparts in the Harahel house archives.

That phase was complicated by the quarantine on the texts from the folded archive. He couldn’t take those books out of the shielded room and he could hardly bring the entire Harahel archive to them. Probably what he needed to do was index everything regarding Meresin or House Phel in the Harahel archives, make a comprehensive list, then compare it to the list he had yet to make of the books piled around him. Eventually.

“ Cillian. ” The sound of his name came as if from a great distance, and with the tenor of having been repeated more loudly. It occurred to him to look up, gaze traveling over the neatly aligned titles of the tomes in the nearest tower. His grandmother stood there, lips quirked in amused irritation, peering at him over that teetering pile. “What in the dark arts do you think you’re doing?” she demanded.

He blinked—ouch—and considered how to answer that. “Working on extracting books from the folded archive. You told me to.”

She snorted inelegantly. “I gave you the assignment, yes. I never said to kill yourself doing it. When did you last eat? You haven’t been to a family meal in over a week.”

No, he hadn’t wanted to take the time, or face the questions, or be made to engage in conversation of any kind. He’d been grabbing snacks from the kitchen or trading on his meager sway as a scion of the house to have plates sent up to his room. Unfortunately, especially in the evenings, those plates of food went cold and congealed when he passed out before remembering to eat.

“You’re too skinny and your magic is whisper-thin,” she observed. “And you look like a demon scraped you off the pavement then put you through a washing wringer.”

“I love you, too, Grandmother,” he replied wryly, realizing as he said it that he did love her. Still. Despite everything. He sighed. “I just want to get to the bottom of this riddle.”

“You never could resist a puzzle,” she noted fondly. “You were just like this as a boy, glued to whatever riddle-game you’d found, refusing to eat or sleep until you solved it—or we forcibly pried you away.” She paused meaningfully. “Do I have to forcibly pry you away?”

“No,” he said, capitulating to the fatigue so intense it nearly hurt. “I’ll go sleep.” It looked to be nighttime anyway, the windows black, not even a reflected glow from the wintry landscape outside.

“And you’ll eat first.”

“Yes, Grandmother.”

“Don’t ‘yes, Grandmother’ me, boyo. I’m wise to your tricks.” But she offered him a hand up, steadying him when he swayed. “You’ll sit at the table and eat while I watch,” she decided.

“I had no idea that fell under the aegis of Lady Harahel,” Cillian mused. “Should I add it to my list of techniques to learn? ‘Badger junior wizards into eating and sleeping. Personally observe when necessary.’”

“Very funny,” his grandmother replied, sounding not at all amused now as she steered him out of the salon—barely preventing him from colliding with the door frame as he stumbled—and locking it behind them. “In general, junior wizards are not difficult to pry away from work. Keeping them from indulging in side-projects, pleasure reading, and eating their weight in cinnamon rolls and hot chocolate is the primary challenge.”

“This project is important,” he said fuzzily, knowing that much to be true. Even in his current state, the need to get to the core of the archive, to solve the riddle, burned like an unquenchable flame. “Alise needs these answers.”

His grandmother came to such an abrupt halt, he rocked on his heels and nearly staggered. “I knew it,” she swore, making the words sound like a curse. “You’re doing it for that girl . Even after she abandoned you, just like Szarina. What will it take for you to wake up and realize these wizards are using and discarding you?”

He considered a dozen responses, but his head ached. “I’m too tired for this conversation,” he admitted.

She blew out a harsh breath and recommenced steering him down the hallway. “You’ll eat first.”

The manse, always quiet, had the midnight stillness of everyone else being asleep. “What time is it?”

“Well past time for me to take this situation in hand. I’m shutting down this project, for your own good.”

Oh, he wasn’t so far gone into his own version of folded space as to agree to that. “All right, then I’ll plan to depart in the morning.” In the family dining room, a lone place setting had already been laid out for him, several steaming platters nearby under old-fashioned silver domes to keep them hot. “We should have asked Alise for a couple of fire elementals to warm food,” he noted, just to needle his grandmother. Now that he’d slipped by mentioning her name, he might as well go all in.

“All I need is more Elal spirit spies,” she snapped in a retort. “Besides, your erstwhile wizard girlfriend was in too much of a hurry to leave to give us anything.”

“So you’ve said.” Though he wondered about that story. He knew Alise, better than she knew herself, in some ways, and she was loyal to the bone. She might have other flaws, but she genuinely cared about people. Sometimes despite herself. More than that, she cared about him . Szarina had manipulated his feelings for her, he could see that now. Alise simply didn’t have it in her to do that, not to anyone, but especially not to him.

As he ate, his mind sharpened and cleared. Amazing what a little food would do. His grandmother sat, watching him as promised, sipping her tea.

“I need help,” he told her, making it sound like an admission. “I’ll stay, but I want to finish this project. Also, I need a familiar’s magic, and some clerical assistance wouldn’t go amiss, either.”

She drummed her blunt fingers on the table. “Because of her .”

“Because of me,” he corrected coolly. “You said it yourself: I’ve never been able to let go of a riddle until it’s solved. I found this hidden archive, I extracted it, and I want to follow the mystery it represents until the end.”

“I still don’t want any of my people exposed to this potentially deadly information,” she replied. “This is House Phel’s problem, not ours.”

“Is the integrity of the historical record not our problem?” he countered.

She sat back. “We already had this argument.”

“The clerical help wouldn’t have to know the implications of the work,” he told her, having given this subject extensive thought in his clearer headed moments. “I’ve established an indexing system where I record pertinent information as I extract each book, assigning them a number according to my own system. I could continue to establish that number and record the information that only I can detect and understand. Information like when I extracted it and other factors about the folds of the archive that may prove useful. But if I could then pass off that information for further evaluation, any Harahel wizard could evaluate what’s in our archives and add data using that index number.”

His grandmother continued to watch him thoughtfully. She hadn’t said no yet.

“I don’t think we need to take the step of performing a textual analysis against the Harahel archives,” he continued. “Not yet, anyway. For now I want to know if we have copies of the texts. Maybe later comparing the contents will become important, but my impression so far is that these books weren’t altered—they were eliminated from circulation.”

“To what purpose?” she asked, sounding jaded and weary.

“Why, to disguise the original reason for the conspiracy against House Phel. There has to be some reason why a number of suspect houses colluded to cause the utter collapse of that high house.”

“Have you considered that the house simply fell on its own?” she suggested, not ungently. “It happens. Magic wanes over generations, especially if scions are allowed to breed indiscriminately, without care to ensure their progeny will add to the robustness of the bloodline. There are countless examples of this exact pattern in the Convocation. There’s an entire system built to handle this exact phenomenon. This is why we have second and third tier houses, to provide a deep bench for potential advancement to high house status should one of those fail. Because fail they do.”

“Then why conceal all these books related to Meresin and House Phel?”

She spread her hands in disavowal of any knowledge—or concern. “If they meant to hide a conspiracy, why not eliminate only the pertinent texts? The disappearance of almost all Phel-related texts created suspicion. If your purported conspirators were so clever, so subtle in engineering this conspiracy to destroy a high house that no one noticed enough to write down, and they’re powerful enough to perform such a feat as to hide this archive, then why draw attention by hiding all of the books instead of only the necessary ones?”

“I have a theory about that,” he answered with excitement, having wondered that too. “From what I’ve excavated so far, I think that was the original plan, with only those most dangerous texts hidden away. But, over the ensuing centuries, books were added more haphazardly, with less finesse. Because of lack of skill, I extracted those texts first. I suspect less proficient flunkies were assigned to maintain the hidden archive, to monitor it to ensure it remained hidden, and to add any new texts that came to their attention. These people didn’t know the full story, however, so they couldn’t discern the dangerous from the innocuous, so they just threw anything Phel or Meresin-related into the fold as extra insurance.”

She considered that and Cillian took pleasure that she had no immediate counter-argument. “Why not simply destroy the books?” she asked softly. “That would be most efficient. And thorough.”

He knew the answer to this one. “Because librarians did it, Grandmother.” Before she could interrupt, indignation bright in her expression, he continued. “You know this. We discussed it before, that only a Harahel-trained librarian wizard could have pulled this off. And, no matter how corrupt or compromised—and I do think that’s a possibility—that wizard was, I think they could no more bear to destroy a book than you or I could.”

She let out a sigh, looking weary. “Then why did this ancestor of ours comply at all? That’s the part that bothers me. What did they know about House Phel that concerned them so much that they’d go to this extreme? For you and I both know that removing these books from Convocation Archives is a short ethical step from destroying them full stop.”

“I have two theories.” Cillian had considered whether to share these thoughts, but she was the head of his house, after all. And despite his differences with her high-handed ways—a definition that could be applied to the heads of all houses, let alone high houses, and Lady Harahel was probably among the least autocratic of them all—he did owe first loyalty to the house of his birth. She needed to know if he’d brought danger to their doorstep.

“I still don’t know why the conspirators went to so much effort to bring down House Phel.” He regarded her steadily, though she hadn’t tried to interrupt. “I don’t believe for a moment it was part of a natural progression. If the Phel family magic had declined, why did it appear again in such strength in Gabriel Phel and in his sister, Seliah? I checked and I’ve seen no other instances of spontaneous reoccurrence of a family’s exact magical potentials suddenly bursting forth like that. It’s as if the magic in the family had been suppressed and escaped those constraints.”

“If these purported conspirators of yours are still active, as you seem to be indicating, why would they allow the suppression of magic to fail?” she asked cannily.

“I have a theory about that, too.” He finished shoveling the last of the food on his plate into his mouth and signaled no when she moved to offer more. His stomach strained with fullness, reminding him that he really had failed to eat as he should. No more of that. He needed to be strong for what was to come. For Alise. “But let me stick to this wizard who made the folded archive. Either they believed in the conspirators’ cause—which I am certain will be revealed when I find the root texts in the archive, the one or ones that began it all—or they were psychically manipulated.”

His mind-reading grandmother’s face tightened. “You think House Hanneil is involved.”

“I know House Hanneil is involved,” he corrected, “because they sent an agent to stop Alise’s research into the missing archives. He very nearly succeeded, too.”

“House Uriel could perform the same level of manipulation you suggest,” she pointed out.

“Yes, but they’re too principled. And ,” he added when she looked dubious, “Provost Uriel has been helping us. She neutralized the Hanneil agent. She assigned me to assist Alise. I believe House Uriel is invested in uncovering this conspiracy.”

“A lot of suppositions,” Lady Harahel noted thoughtfully. But she’d also stopped arguing.

“True, but I’m working on verifying what I can. I need to get to that root book or books and you’re right, Grandmother, my magic is too low. I need help. A familiar or two. Someone I can trust.”

She gave him an impatient look. “You know full well House Harahel doesn’t employ or house familiars. They’re of no use to us here. Never mind one or two you can trust; I don’t have anyone of sufficient strength to assist you. Any familiar potent enough to be useful gets sent off to the other houses.”

Like a commodity to be traded. Cillian didn’t voice the thought, however. That was a core tenet of the Convocation and not something he could change by arguing with his grandmother, especially when he needed her to agree to this request. “I have an idea.”

She narrowed her usually warm wizard-black eyes. “I’m not going to like this, am I?”

“Probably not,” he admitted. “But I think it’s a sound one. At House Phel there are two unbonded familiars, Han and Iliana. Both are exceptionally powerful and owe fervent loyalty to Lord and Lady Phel. They would assist me and be discreet.”

“I know about those two.” Lady Harahel pointed an accusing finger at him. “You think I’m an ignorant bookworm living in the backwoods, but I know those two escaped agreed-upon contracts with House Sammael to become bonded familiars. And Alise Elal is the one who helped them.”

“All true,” he replied evenly. “Which is why those two would sacrifice anything to repay the asylum House Phel gave them and what Alise did to set them free.”

“Need I mention that our relations with Sammael are already sour due to your shenanigans with Szarina?”

“All the more reason to ignore their wishes,” Cillian pointed out. “In addition, Han is particularly skilled with weapons, both wielding them and teaching others to use them in pitched fighting.”

Lady Harahel raised her brows. “Do I want to know why you think weapons skills are something I should care about?” She swept a hand at the quiet manse around them. “Do you expect our books to suddenly attack?”

“No,” he answered, though his amusement drowned in the seriousness of his gut-deep fears. “I expect that House Hanneil will.”