NOVEL NEXT Chapter XV (15)- Seeking Answers
CHAPTER XV (15)- Seeking Answers
By morning, his sketches were starting to look quite a bit better. Kizu felt significantly more confident about the divination spell’s progress before he fell asleep. As per usual, he slept through the hours of early morning. A missed breakfast resulted in another hungry dash to his first class of the day. Thankfully, it was dark enough in the astronomy tower that nobody noticed his tardiness as he slipped in. He managed to take his seat next to Harvey without interrupting the lecture.
Professor Grove continued speaking. Her bobbing blue light in the near pitch-black room reminded him of how she had looked the previous night. His thoughts once again turned to hypothesizing about the box's contents. And who would bury a box of enchanted items in a flowerbed like that? Would the hider of the items come back for them? And what were the footsteps that seemed to chase him to the spot?
And he couldn’t find any answers. For the thousandth time he cursed the fact that his divination class was scheduled for the second semester. The most useful class in the academy, and it was three months out of reach.
In Music F the professor supplied a piano for him in the back of the class. He set Kizu up with scales to practice and then left him to address the violinists who had begun fencing with their bows. Kizu tediously went through the scales a few dozens of times before stopping.
Nobody in the class seemed extremely committed to any particular pattern of noise. They all just created a cacophony of random sound. It reminded Kizu a bit of all the noise in the basin at night. Except, it sounded far more intrusive.
When they were all dismissed, the other percussionists dragged him along with them to the bustling lunchroom. Tara complained about how her parents were already trying to get her to plan her life outside of the academy. The others nodded along empathetically as they ate.
“What do you plan to do next year, Yon?” Tara asked the quiet boy.
He shrugged. “Get a job probably. I really wanted to join the archeology digs in the south, but my history score isn’t up to the standard required.”
“Damn, those digs sound exhilarating,” Gregor said. “Last week they uncovered a dungeon with statues made of solid gold with thumb sized diamonds for eyes! A toe of one of those things would get you set for life!”
“And two weeks before that,” Tara interjected. “Twenty-three people were petrified in that exact same dungeon. Four others were partially petrified and still have to lug around stone limbs. Those guys last week are lucky that the statue wasn’t cursed.”
“Risks equivalent to the reward.”
“This is your last year?” Kizu asked Yon.
“Yeah.” the older boy sounded a bit glum.
“Are you worried about your music placement?”
“Hardly,” Gregor answered for him. “Music is our dump class.”
“Dump class?”
“Not including combat, there are twelve classes at the academy,” Tara explained. “You only need to get in the top three hundred students in nine of the twelve classes to graduate from the academy. Three of them you can get dead last in, doesn’t matter.”
“Do you get expelled if you’re unsuccessful?”
Gregor snorted. “Hardly. You just don’t graduate.”
“What sort of thing could get you expelled then?”
“Who knows? Probably something really destructive? Nobody’s been expelled in like a decade.”
Kizu watched Yon as Gregor explained. Nothing. Yon appeared completely disinterested in the subject. If the older boy knew anything about a mysterious expulsion a few years back, he didn’t show anything.
Grabbing a honey pastry, Kizu stood up and dismissed himself. He munched on it as he wandered the halls towards the Elemental F courtyard. Ione was already there, hands laced behind her head, sleeping in the sun beside the little creek. Other than her though, the courtyard was still empty. He followed her example and found himself a nice patch of sun.
After the rest of the class slowly accumulated in the courtyard, the turkey professor waddled up to them. He barked a few orders and sent them back into their positions from the previous day. He seemed significantly more on edge though. He didn’t even spare Ione a glance.
Kizu was proud of his result when he managed to make the water steam on touch, but Professor Oasaji appeared unimpressed. He simply instructed him to work on freezing it now.
Trying to freeze the water felt like starting back on the first steps of making it steam. He found himself forcing himself to double back and undo all the things he previously focused on pushing forward. By the end of class though, he managed to get a bit of frost built up from the droplets on his hands. A start at least. As he left, he turned the frost to steam, warming up his fingers.
Again, after class he returned to the nook he’d found previously to work on studying. Just as the previous day, other students continuously poked their heads in, looking for a quiet place. He ignored them, focusing on practicing the divination patterns. Whenever he needed a change in pace, he worked on antimagic shields. He practiced condensing and stretching them out. He also tested how far he could send the shield before it winked out. Only about two meters. And it felt significantly weak after getting one meter away.
After a brief break for dinner, he brought some fruit to his room and picked up Mort. The owl monkey perched on Kizu’s shoulder as he exited the dormitory. They narrowly managed to avoid detection by a group of loud third years by the fireplace. Kizu let out a sigh of relief once they exited the painting into the academy’s hallways.
This time when he returned to his nook, he found it occupied. His cheeks burned as he hurried away from the two students. He needed to find a new spot. One that was less sought out. Wandering around in the academy halls, he eventually found himself at a familiar spiral staircase. After giving it a bit of thought, he realized the steps led down to the caverns where blood samples were disposed of. That gave him an idea. He descended the spiral stairs, but at the very bottom, he turned back around. Sure enough, behind the stairs, there was the little nook where he had changed clothes before. The lighting was obscured by the steps and very dim, but his bond with Mort meant he didn’t need much light to get by. In fact, the darkness made it even more appealing because that meant fewer people would want to go there.
He sat down on the dusty stone floor and opened up his book. After a dozen more sketches, he decided to attempt the divination. The book said locating someone worked better if you had an object of the person. Hair also could work well. The absolute best option would be to use the actual blood. But Kizu had none of that from his sister. He didn’t even have a memento. But, if he performed the rite correctly, he should still be able to get at least an impression of where she was.
Taking out a piece of chalk he had filched from the enchanting lecture hall, he drew on the stone. It was a larger size than when he’d previously sketched practice drawings, and so the proportions were skewed a fair bit by the time he finished. Still, the bones of it were there. He set a hand on the edge of the pattern and channeled into it like the crone had taught him.
He waited.
He could feel his energy draining out of him so he knew it must be working at least to some degree. Just when he was about to give up, a tug pulled him slightly downward to the left.
“Did you feel that?” he asked Mort. “She’s out there. My sister is alive!”
Jubilantly he and Mort grinned at one another.
“Now we just need to get our hands on something of hers. That should help us get a better impression of where she’s at.” He paused for a second. “You ready to check out the villa?”
Mort hummed.
“Okay, let’s go give Finn a surprise visit.”
He didn’t bother wiping up the chalk from the stone. If the dust was any indication, nobody else had come behind the stairs in decades. Maybe even since their construction. It was his spot now.
They encountered their first obstacle at the academy’s gates. They were locked tight. He saw a James standing watch over it. Professor Grove had told him the previous night that students weren’t supposed to be out late, so he decided against just approaching the James and asking to leave. Better to ask forgiveness in this situation. Or, better yet, avoid detection and questions altogether.
Scaling the wall proved more difficult than he expected. Unlike a tree or a natural rock wall, it lacked hand and footholds. In fact, as he first started to climb, he soon began to slip back down the wall, as if it was coated in fish oil. His only bit of validation was the fact that Mort couldn’t seem to scale it any more efficiently than him. The monkey looked exceptionally irritated as he continued to throw himself at the wall in attempts to scramble up, only to slide right back to the dirt.
He paced along the wall’s perimeter, looking for something he might be able to prop up against it like a ladder. The best he found was a rain barrel. He pushed it up against the wall, but even climbing up on top of it, he was still several meters short of the top.
“I could throw you,” Kizu suggested to Mort. “Then you could tie a rope above for me to climb up.”
Mort did not look amused. Instead, Mort used Kizu’s head as a springboard to leap onto the wall, only to slip right back down once again. Not that it would have mattered if he’d gotten up, Kizu didn’t have rope anyway.
Standing on the barrel and staring up at the wall, Kizu started to believe that maybe he’d just have to go down to the villa in the morning. He supposed it wasn't really urgent. But, on a whim, he decided to go through his shoulder pack first, hoping to find something there that might help him.
In it, he found the small clay cup he had been using for elemental practice the previous day. He turned it over in his hands, an idea sprouting.
Kizu hopped off the barrel and pried it open. Sure enough, rainwater. He scooped it into the cup, then pressed the cup against the wall. He channeled into it, attempting to change the temperature. There were a lot of inconvenient factors that made it extremely unlikely to work. First, he had never actually been more successful than a few icy flakes when in class earlier. Second, he couldn’t physically touch the water while he pressed the cup against the wall. And third, he’d need to work fast enough that the hand holds stayed in place.
But still, he tried. He focused entirely on it. And when he removed it from the wall, the water splashed down to the dirt. At the very least though, Kizu did notice a spec of frost caked on the edge of the wall. A start.
Mort purred with amusement.
“I’d like to see you do better,” Kizu said to the monkey.
He tried again. Not with any more strategy, but with more fervor. He felt his bond with Mort tighten. The awareness between the two of them heightened and his vision even doubled for a moment. Kizu blinked rapidly, clearing his sight. The owl monkey smiled up at him. Then he crawled across Kizu’s arm and pressed his tiny hand against the cup as well.
When Kizu tried to remove the cup this time, it remained in place. He put a foot to the wall and yanked on the cup. When it slid off, a small block of ice remained stuck to the wall.
“What did you do?” Kizu asked his familiar quizzically.
Mort just cocked his head and hummed.
Not wanting to waste more time, Kizu and Mort got to work on the next cup of water. Soon, they had an icy ladder of handholds all the way up the stone wall. Once on top, he swung his legs to the other side and hopped down, breaking his fall with a roll.
After that, they encountered no further obstacles as they went into the town. It was eerily quiet in comparison to the ruckus and bustle of the previous weekend. Cemeteries had more life in them. But Kizu didn’t mind. It just made his stroll more peaceful. The moonlight let him see perfectly.
He reflected that, as a child, Anna had never let him out at nighttime before. The town seemed different basked in starlight. Even as he approached his family’s villa, it felt wrong. Like a twisted deja vu.
First, he tried opening the front door. Locked of course. He looked over the building, mapping it out mentally. If he remembered correctly, his parents’ bedroom should be on the left side of the building. He and Anna used to sleep in the next room over. But often Anna would slip away at night and sleep in the loft above the living room.
Mort lept into action. He scrambled up the tree beside the house and slipped into a little ventilation hole on the roof. A moment later, the door clicked open and Kizu stepped inside.
As his foot touched the floor, a BOOM of noise followed simultaneously with a jolt of blue lightning that blasted him backwards, sending him sprawling in the street. Black spots obscured his vision, and a sharp ringing overwhelmed his hearing. His brain felt like it danced in his skull.
It all happened so quickly that Kizu struggled to process everything as he lay on the cobblestone. His consciousness kept fading in and out, blurring time for him.
He was dimly aware of lights turning on in buildings throughout the street. He tried to sit up but collapsed again. People crowded around him. He tried to wave them away, but his arms felt like jelly.
Something metallic cinched itself against his wrist. Then the other side too. Try as he might to get his bearings, his vision faded. Kizu blacked out.