Page 56 of Reluctant Wizard

“About half an hour before your shift starts. I figured I’d find you here. How did it go with Provost Uriel?”

“Well. She’s handling it. You’ve had no further incidents?”

“None.” Alise shook her head, blue-black feathers of hair shimmering around her face. “What are you pumping yourself up to do?”

He debated with himself for only a moment. “Some of this is proprietary Harahel information, so I’m walking a line here in what I can and can’t tell you. I have an idea for how and where I might look for those missing records.”

“That’s brilliant.” She smiled broadly, eyes shining in a way that made him feel like a true hero of the old tales.

“I’ve never done anything like it before. It’s kind of… next level.”

“Next level librarian wizardry. I love it. If anyone can do it, you can.”

Her sincere faith in him was staggering. “The problem is, I may not have enough magic. I was trying to think of a familiar, or a few, I could borrow magic from without raising suspicion. Would your friend, Brinda Chur, help me, do you think?”

Alise instantly chilled, in expression and in magic, the scent of roses going frosty. “She is no friend of mine, nor of yours. Now’s not the time. I’ll tell you the story later, but fair warning.”

“Too bad.” He wanted to ask more, but Alise was right that this wasn’t the time.

“However,” she added more brightly, “I just filled up on magic from Brinda, fortunately before our distressing conversation that I’ll tell you all about later, so I can give you plenty.”

He stared at her a moment, feeling as if he’d missed a step. “But you’re a wizard.”

“I’m aware of that,” she replied in that grave manner she used when she was amused by him.

“I need a familiar,” he clarified, frowning when she laughed.

“Wizards can give each other magic,” she told him. “There’s nothing stopping us. They do it at House Phel more and more. It’s just not typically ‘done’ in the Convocation because wizards are competitive and jealous of their power, and thus not interested in helping other wizards. They’re also eager to exploit familiars who really have little to no ability to object.”

She was right, he realized, rather astonished that this hadn’t occurred to him. “But you need your magic,” he protested, though he was happy to see she had indeed filled up, glowing with transmuted fire and sunlight.

“This is important,” she reminded him. “Very high on our list of priorities. Besides, during our, ah, intimacy, our magic already blended some. This should feel quite natural.”

He loved that she blushed, her astonishing eyes skittering briefly away. “Our intimacy?” he echoed, teasing her.

“You know what I mean, Cillian Harahel,” she replied sternly, then bent to kiss him, all too briefly, before proffering her hand. “I’ll maintain skin contact, so take as much as you need as you work. Let’s get this done.”

Charmed, grateful, so dazzlingly in love with her, he changed their hand clasp so their fingers interlaced, and bent his attention to his diagram. Alise angled her head to look at what he’d drawn, but didn’t comment. He doubted his arcane scribbles—an abstract representation of how the hidden stacks felt to his wizard senses—would make any sense to her. And she was conscientious about his house proprietary information, granting him both the courtesy of not inquiring and the quiet he needed to concentrate.

He began with basic librarian wizardry, performing a search that he’d executed so many times now that it had become practically rote, seeking references to House Phel. He’d long-since modified his indexing with the techniques he used to search for items that patrons described vaguely or, on more than one occasion, flat out incorrectly. Another Harahel invention taught in-house, this fancy bit of magic operated almost with its own kind of intelligence, seeking what might be close to the search term, but not precisely it. Cillian had no idea how it actually worked, but it yielded amazing results, able to collect information not consciously remembered.

During his brief visit to House Phel, Cillian had chatted briefly with Gabriel about the restoration of the manse and how the process had taken on a life of its own, drawing on some sort of ancestral Phel memory of how the house had been before it sank into the swamps. Cillian had been fascinated, thinking of the search spell and suspecting a similar magic operated there, with it drawing on information from elsewhere.

Tempted to try his standard search one more time, just because he still couldn’t believe every previous attempt had turned up exactly nothing—which had never happened to him before and still annoyed him no end—he resisted, figuring it would be a waste of magic to confirm what he already knew. Instead, with the special search mentally prepared, he left it poised while he took on the next, very experimental step. Meticulously sliding his wizardry into the folded parts of the stacks, he identified the hidden, coded ones. It took a while, as there were a number of them that had been created over time, for different groups and different purposes. He’d searched them all before, more than once, so he again resisted looking just 0one more time.

Instead, once he’d catalogued them all, he lined them up in a mental queue, drawing on some of Alise’s magic to bolster his. It reminded him a bit of how she’d described mentally holding a multitude of incorporeal entities. The folded spaces didn’t like to be identified and tended to slide away given the least bit of inattention. The magic from Alise, as heady as potent red wine, improved his concentration immensely.

It felt very different, drawing from a wizard rather than a familiar, though it did help that their sexual intimacy had allowed for some interweaving of their magical natures already, as Alise had so astutely discerned. Still, the flow from her had a more… deliberate feel than it would from a familiar. Rather than feeling as if he drank from a passive container, Alise’s magic pushed into him and he had to be careful not to metaphorically choke on it. If they ever planned to do this again—and why would they? Library emergencies came along once in a lifetime—they’d have to practice.

Making sure he maintained a pin of concentration on the correct number of verified hidden archives, Cillian launched an entirely new search for something that should exist but didn’t to all normal appearances. This was the tricky bit as it was very difficult to look for a null value. If his theory proved correct that this was how the Hanneil conspirators had hidden the House Phel archives, they would have disguised the fold carefully—and very likely with the specific intention of foiling Harahel indexing techniques. Otherwise, the senior archivists responsible for the regular cataloguing and maintenance of the collection would have noticed a discrepancy long before this.

That search took more time, and even more magic, rendering him excessively grateful for Alise’s offer and her steadfast flow of magic. Now that he’d become more used to it, he found he liked the way she injected magic into him as he needed. She seemed to intuitively know when he required a boost, somehow tracking the waxing and waning of his wizardry. Possibly she could sense his efforts, the feeling of her in the back of his mind a strong and reassuring presence. Without her, he would have flagged long since. Limitations, perhaps, the conspirators had counted on.

As it was, he very nearly missed it. In fact, he did miss it, mentally passing over the blip disguised as an irregularity in the ambient magic.

He only caught the scent of it in hindsight, realizing that the slight bump faintly radiated an odor that reminded him of House Hanneil. Their magic didn’t truly smell rank, but he disliked them enough that he perceived their brand of psychic magic that way. In passing, he wondered if Lord Elal would smell sweet like his daughters’ magic or unpleasant, given how much Cillian loathed the man. Nander Elal, the youngest of the bunch, didn’t ever frequent the archives, so Cillian didn’t have that basis for comparison.

These idle musings rolled through the back of his mind, ungoverned, as he wrestled the multiple tasks of having his multilayered, experimental search poised at the ready while he kept a mental eye on that infinitesimal inconsistency in the ambient magic, and as he extended an indexing probe to unlock what he hoped was a hidden archive. The more he was able to hold it still for examination—though it felt as slippery as separating an egg yolk from the white without breaking either—the greater his certainty. It felt like the same construction as the other hidden archives, which unfortunately meant Harahel magic, but he’d think about that later.

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