Page 24 of Strange Familiar

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.

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