Page 20 of Reluctant Wizard

“Even against Provost Uriel?” she persisted. “That seems like an extreme move, risking House Uriel becoming aware of House Hanneil interference.”

That, at least, gave him pause, and Alise allowed herself to enjoy the brief flush of triumph. A minor victory, but every tiny triumph chipped away at his control over her.

“Don’t let it come to that,” he advised, adding a bit of psychic pressure. “Speak to the Harahel boy if you must, but only to put him off. I’ll be watching your every thought and if I detect the least hint of rebellion…” He grinned, gaze lingering on her bosom, which was so slight and so concealed under her baggy shirt that she knew he couldn’t possibly see anything. Still, the hint served to turn her stomach. “Well, I will make you regret any disobedience.”

“House Phel won’t take an attack against me lightly,” she warned him. “Even House Elal will take it amiss if you harm me.”

“Oh, I’m not going to harm you,” he returned. “Though my promise to make you eagerly squirm in my bed stands. Who knows? You might find you enjoy it after I release the compulsion that made you crawl to me in the first place.”

She regarded him impassively, refusing to give him the pleasure of revealing her profound revulsion. The Hanneil wizard—the stereotypical version of the worst of that house—clearly got off on frightening her and on his own prurient fantasies of rape, mental, emotional, and physical. Someone rapped sharply on the door, shouting a question. Finally.

Gordon’s smile went thin. “No, baby wizard. If you can’t follow instructions, the person who will be hurt is the librarian.”

Cillian settled at his favorite study desk, the one in the quiet corner near the windows, surrounded on the other two sides by shelves of obscure treatises on early Convocation experiments on soil amendments. The very stale information possessed the infinitely magical quality of repelling all comers. Nobody ever visited those materials. In fact, of all the shelves in the vast archives, this corner of obsolete academia was the least visited. Cillian had determined that quite some time ago and quietly moved a battered desk and comfy chair into it. With the addition of an old lamp with an aging fire elemental that produced light so grudging no one would miss it, Cillian had the perfect refuge, the polar opposite of his station at the reference desk where anyone could interrupt him and regularly did.

With a sigh—not exactly happy, as the circumstances were far from pleasant—he arranged the piles of bound records. The situation was beyond terrible, but he couldn’t help that he did love a bit of a research project. This one might end quickly, with the standard information easily located and presented as expected, but…

As he’d suspected, however, neither Convocation Academy graduation records nor the citizenship rolls turned up a wizard Gordon Hanneil. Almost certainly that was the name he’d given when he was hired as an academy proctor, but with a little psychic push on the correct low-level, data-entry personnel, a false name could be applied to his hiring dossier. The underlying records would be more difficult to falsify and could lead to trouble if a person needed to prove their citizenship. Why take that risk when a new name for a new job was much easier?

No, Gordon Hanneil existed, Cillian was certain of that—and was equally certain that wasn’t his name. Sent by Hanneil, almost certainly, but not Gordon and maybe not entitled to use the house name as his own. Cillian would find him.

He began by going through the House Hanneil roster, which Cillian fully expected would yield nothing. The pages were arranged chronologically in reverse order, with the youngest members listed first in the binder, each given their own page as the Convocation proctors confirmed possession of magical talent. Usually in-house proctors made the first assessments of children under the aegis of the house, if the house in question could afford to keep a specially trained Hanneil wizard with an oracle head to make the determination. Naturally, House Hanneil had no such issues, able to assess all children born to their denizens frequently and in-depth.

Thus, the House Hanneil pages for each individual showed a relentless amount of testing, usually starting at birth. However, the Convocation relied upon their own rounds of examinations to make the official determinations, which generally started when the child was around five years old. Though magically gifted children were admitted to Convocation Academy around the ages of eight or nine, depending on their MP scores and relative maturity, they didn’t manifest as either a wizard or familiar until well after adolescence, when the brain finished its final maturation. In some rare cases—Han came to mind—late bloomers didn’t manifest until their early to mid twenties.

Thus, every individual’s page held rows of testing dates and the results as spoken by the oracle head, including an identification number indicating which oracle head had delivered that particular verdict. The oracle heads were never wrong, but a great deal of Convocation law and practice depended upon that fact, so identifying details were meticulously documented. The official Convocation testing entries stood out in bold lettering at intervals—when the child in question had been officially registered as magically gifted, along with their MP scores at the time of testing; their scores at the time of admission to Convocation Academy, and at regular intervals following that.

The newest entries, of course, belonged to infants, and Cillian paged through those rapidly, Hanneil children seeming to grow before his eyes as their charts lengthened into multiple pages, their portraits gazing up from the archival-quality House Salis paper, the kids seeming to age as he flipped through, faces losing the softness of childhood, sharpening with understanding and, in many cases, cynicism. Eventually the array of eye colors lessened, the variety of greens, blues, hazels, grays, and browns giving over to a predominance of wizard-black. Oh, the familiars retained their native eye color, but they faded into the background compared to that intensely magical black of their wizard fellows.

He supposed that could be a reflection of his own ingrained Convocation-instilled biases. Only wizards mattered in the world of Convocation Society, with familiars retaining more of their humanity, perhaps, along with their natural eye color, but falling into their support roles to the only people with actual power: wizards.

Cillian snorted softly to himself at his own thoughts, mentally amending the observation to specify “high-level wizards.” As a librarian without spectacular skills of any kind, he lacked power worth mentioning. But then, at least weak wizards and familiars made it to citizen status. None of the house binders included the countless mundanes who inhabited Convocation lands, living their lives unrecorded and largely unnoticed, except that their labors produced coin that filled the coffers of the Convocation houses in return for the goods that improved their otherwise magicless existence.

Dark arts, he was in a morose mood. Though, with all that had happened since he and Alise had returned to Convocation Academy, who could blame him? Certainly he couldn’t be suffering heartbreak over losing someone he’d never had to begin with.

In truth, though he hastened this research with his native wizardry, paging through, reading, and sorting the information faster than anyone without his abilities could, a great deal of what he brought to the task involved simple intelligence. The same ability to parse and interpret data that any mundane could bring to bear. Though he could have used magic to index the House Hanneil binder—and then cross-referenced with House Hanneil hires, as Wizard Gordon wasn’t necessarily born to that house and could have been hired on at any point—Cillian wanted to add that extra layer of quality control by examining the information physically also.

Another stack on his desk comprised the Convocation Academy graduates for each year for the last century. This Gordon Hanneil had to be in there somewhere. Cillian would probably start two decades previous and work backwards and forwards, alternating a year before and a year after, to find the wizard. Whatever name he’d used then, he’d show up in some fashion.

Cillian didn’t exactly know how he’d recognize the wizard. Even if he had seen the man’s face, Gordon might not look the same now as in the records. If he had the wizard’s MP scorecard, Cillian could use his archivist magic to index for that and cut this whole search short. Every wizard’s and familiar’s MP scores were as unique as their fingerprints. Yes, the scores fluctuated until manifestation, but once an oracle head was able to give the final determination of wizard or familiar, those MP scores remained fixed for the remainder of their lives. The only variable after that point was how the person in question used their magic. The MP scores tested potential only. Execution was something entirely else.

But, whoever he was, this wizard possessed Hanneil magic sufficient to be hired as an academy proctor. Cillian began assembling a mental list, using his magic to remember the profiles perfectly and bookmark their locations, of possible candidates. He would find this person and then he would discover why the wizard was tormenting Alise.

What Cillian would do at that point, he wasn’t certain. But he had to do something. Alise needed his help, which mattered more than anything to him. Also, though, if House Hanneil was working to interfere with Alise’s investigation into the missing House Phel archives, then someone had to ferret out their plans.

And who better to compile that data than a librarian?

~11~

Alise made it through her classes somehow, the bottle of restless spirits bumping against her thigh, draining her magic like a slow leak as they continued to fight her hold on them. The day passed in a blur of fatigue, worry, and occasional frissons of panic. Fortunately, the crushing pressure of catching up with her already freakishly difficult courseload provided sufficient distraction every time her thoughts began to spiral into a loop of wondering how to solve any of her current problems, including how she could speak to Cillian without jeopardizing him.

He was so obdurate, so determined to solve the riddle she’d presented him with, even nobly inspired by some ideal of saving House Phel, that nothing she could think of seemed likely to dissuade him. Certainly she’d failed to put him off with cutting and cruel behavior. That had rolled right off him and he’d been as kind and solicitous toward her as ever. The man was a study in forging his own, quiet path, implacably strolling along to the strains of a distant music only he could hear. She doubted anything she could say or do would change his mind, now that he’d made it up, even if she could bring herself to be sufficiently unkind.

And she just didn’t have it in her. Apparently she wasn’t Elal enough for that.

Letting out a soundless bark of laughter at the profound irony of that, Alise trudged back through the main halls, hoping for an hour in the quiet privacy of her room to sit and think before the dinner bells rang. She couldn’t skip dinner. Even she could recognize that missing so many meals—there had been no time for lunch—was taking a toll on her. “You should have taken the kolaches,” she muttered to herself.

“Wizard Alise?” A dark-skinned girl Alise vaguely recognized hopped off the deep windowsill where she’d been sitting and waved awkwardly. “Brinda Chur,” she added, her brown eyes full of earnest appeal as she chewed her bottom lip.

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