Page 57 of Reluctant Wizard

Naturally, he didn’t have the password. That would be equally hidden away, if not more so. He did, however, have a thorough knowledge of the Harahel methodology for creating the “lock” an enchantment would fit into. He didn’t need the password when he could open the archive from within the indexing that kept it folded and inaccessible.

He hoped.

“Here we go,” he breathed, hoping Alise would understand. He didn’t dare divert his concentration long enough to check with her that she was all right. Getting this finished would do more to spare Alise’s reserves than anything else.

Using one of his proprietary Harahel indexing magics, he sank his concentration into the folded archive. Essentially what made these archives inaccessible to standard searching was a sort of reverse-indexing. Rather than cataloging the contents of a section of the archives, this magic inverted the metadata tags, turning the information inside out and rendering it nonsensical. If he could just find the right thread to pull…

There.

Inside his head—and somewhere in the depths of Convocation Archives—the stacks that had been folded away reentered their shared reality. Quickly, he scanned the contents. So much material on House Phel, going back centuries. Really, it had been a sloppy shortcut to hide so much of it. It would have been wiser, and less obvious, to have hidden only the texts with whatever incriminating information worried them so.

But then, the deception had worked, so who was he to criticize? Also, it could be that all of the documentation threatened the conspirators. The surge of triumph at his success began to disintegrate around the edges as he realized what a monumental task going through all of that material would be, even with focused library magic.

Carefully extracting his wizardry from the sticky folds of the index, he met Alise’s concerned gaze.

“You look unhappy,” she remarked. “It didn’t work?”

“Oh, it worked all right.” He let out a long sigh, abruptly aware of his exhaustion, despite the wine-warm, rose-infused sizzle of Alise’s magic still coursing through him. “That’s the biggest, most complex magic I’ve ever performed.”

“That’s amazing news!” she exclaimed. “Let’s go see.”

He held onto her hand as she tugged at him to rise. “There is a lot,” he cautioned her. “It’s going to take weeks, maybe months to go through it all.”

“Then no time like the present to begin,” she replied, sparkling with excitement. “At last I have something to actually research for this project.”

“True.” Cillian wasn’t sure why he couldn’t seem to share her enthusiasm. Was he simply feeling tired? Something felt off. “Though we can use the House Harahel archives for that, too.”

She pressed her lips together impatiently. “Why bother to journey there when the archives we need are here?”

“Because we need the corroboration between the two sets of archives for quality control,” he answered, battling his own impatience. The feeling of wrongness worked on him, aggravatingly nebulous.

“Well, sure,” she replied, a line forming between her brows, “but I could go through what’s here first, catalogue everything, then we can go to House Harahel to run the comparison.”

“I can catalogue the collection here faster than you can,” he pointed out.

Her chin firmed mulishly. “No doubt, but this is my independent study, as you may recall. Just because you want an excuse to visit family doesn’t mean—”

“That is not why I want to go,” he interrupted, a bit more stung than he should be, given that he had been dreaming way too much about introducing Alise to his family.

“No?” Her black-winged brows climbed. “Then why are you being so cranky all of a sudden? This isn’t like you to—”

“Shh!” He clamped down on her hand, distantly aware of her squeak of pained indignation and that asking her to be quiet inside the silencing shield made no sense. But he needed to concentrate. Something about that stack he’d just unfolded.

Something very, very wrong.

~26~

Alise bit back her questions, increasingly alarmed by Cillian’s distraction—and concentrated attention on something beyond her ken. As when he’d been using his wizardry to locate and extract the House Phel archives, his magic had resolved from grayscale into crisp black and white lines. They spiraled out neatly into the archives, seeming as if they formed a text she’d be able to read if only she could focus her eyes correctly.

She hadn’t had occasion to participate so closely while a different kind of wizard worked their magic. Observing Cillian had really brought home how very differently their magical styles operated. As if they used the same voice, but in entirely unrelated languages.

She’d learned enough about his techniques in the last hour, to be keenly aware of how his wizardry combed through the archives, with a distant sense of pages ruffling, as it did now, but with an urgent intensity. Also, she’d never seen Cillian so tense. Really wanting to ask, but knowing better, Alise reviewed the skills Professor Seraphiel had taught her, readying herself to fight. She also summoned her warrior spirits, though she kept them invisible for the moment. Cillian complained that library magic wasn’t useful for battle. Well, hers was and she would protect them both.

Though it would help to know what had so abruptly and profoundly worried Cillian. She breathed a sigh of relief when he focused on her again. Short-lived relief, as it turned out.

“I set off some sort of alarm,” he said in a low, terse voice. “I’m an idiot. I should have realized that—”

“No time for that. Is someone coming? Now? Gordon?” She managed to keep her voice steady saying his name, wrestling the immediate stab of panic. She refused to let that odious slimeball cow her.

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