by Derin

“They can get out without you, you know,” my reflection said.

“What?”

“The others. You looked worried. I know you’ve given up on escape, but you don’t need to worry about them. They’ll do just fine without you.”

“I haven’t given up. I’m resting.”

“Uh-huh.”

We sat in silence for a bit. But silence was worse, so eventually I said, “You could help, you know.”

“I did. I moved them on for you. I can’t help you leave because there is no way to leave. We’ve been through that already.”

“Would you tell me if there was, though?” The last spellthing I’d met, in the Initiation, had tried to trap me. But it could be beaten. Could this one?

“Why? So you can slow them down further and perhaps get them killed? You know you don’t have anything to offer them. They both have important skills and talents, but what can you do? Pace steps? They can do that without you, if they thought to bring something to measure with. It’s very lucky, I suppose, that the group member they lost was the expendable one.”

I narrowed my eyes. I couldn’t argue with that; it was true. But I didn’t like the reflection’s tone.

“You’re kind of a dick,” I said lamely.

“And you’re all bluster.” The reflection made a show of indifferently inspecting his fingernails, as best he could in his invisible restraints. “But that’s in our nature, isn’t it? Sound is useless. It’s not a material, it’s just a trick.”

“We don’t have a nature. You’re not my spell.”

“I’m sure you’d know, with your magical expertise. You’ve been working so hard to try to approach ‘average’ in a world you’ll never fit into. How’s that going?”

“You obviously already know. Do you mind? I’m going to keep looking for a way out.”

“Of course you are.”

“I know what you’re doing. You’re trying to confuse me, somehow, or… make me give up.”

“Or I could just be making conversation. Have I lied or misled you about anything I’ve said?”

“That’s not the point!”

The reflection shrugged, and said nothing. I turned back to inspecting the tooth slope. If only I’d brought rope or something… I’d owned rock climbing equipment, once upon a time. What had happened to that?

“Anyway,” I said after a moment of uncomfortable silence, “there’s nothing wrong with being an average student. If your angle of attack is academic insecurity then boy did you pick the wrong target.”

“Hmm. You’ll never be average, though, will you? You could be the most genius potion maker in the world, and you’re still someone who can’t cast a spell.”

“That’s hardly – ”

“And it’s your fault. Alania Miratova is ready to help you unbind yours. You didn’t want to. Everyone else here can do it, and you won’t. Why? Are you that lazy, or just that much of a coward? A mage who can’t cast.”

“The world is full of people who can’t cast spells.”

“And you abandoned them. Because you were never going to be part of their world, either. How long has it been since you’ve written to Melissa, or Chelsea, or your parents?”

“I’ve been busy.”

“How long has it been since they’ve written to you?”

“They’re… probably also busy.”

“I imagine they are. Their lives are probably better, without you weighing them down, being a constant threat to their lives that they had to ignore. I bet your parents are settling wonderfully into their new house, although they didn’t feel the need to write to you about it. They’re who all of this was for, aren’t they? The people back home. You acted like you wanted to be a mage, but that’s clearly not true, or you’d be trying to unbind your spell. You came here because the greatest act of love and charity you could give to the people you truly care about was to remove yourself from their lives.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“And now you’re in a new world you don’t care enough about to learn the basics of, trying desperately to avoid getting involved in anything of consequence because you know you’re not up to any task. The people in Skolala Refujeyo would be better off without you too, except there’s nowhere else for you to go. Except down here. So stop wasting your time with that tooth slope and sit down. This is the best place for you, and you know it.”

I gave the slope another look. I knew my chances of successfully climbing it were remote. Even if I succeeded, what then? I’d be in a collapsing tooth castle. And if I got out of there, I’d be lost in a tunnel network. The others would be fine; they didn’t need me. And I couldn’t get out alone. Would it be any better to die up there, lost and bleeding and wandering about until I collapsed from exhausting and died in some other horrible illusion, than to do so in the relative comfort and peace of this one?

I sat down.

“Good,” the reflection said. “Now we can – ”

And then it exploded.

The mirror shattered, showering me with glass. I lowered the hand I’d hastily raised to shield my eyes to see… Kylie, standing where the mirror had been, holding a large rock.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“Um,” I said.

“Come on. Max thinks we have a route to the centre, and I need to get into a current strong enough to stop channelling soon.”

I got to my feet, picked up my pack, and followed her down the passage that had, apparently, been behind the mirror. Why hadn’t I thought to break the mirror? Idiot!

I glanced between Max and Kylie as we continued down the tunnel. “You, um. I thought you guys had moved on?”

“How gullible do you think we are?” Max asked. “Did you really think you’d be able to lead us away like that? That we wouldn’t come back for you? You’ve lost the right to lecture me on coming down here alone after pulling a stunt like that.”

“Those two things are not on the same scale of dangerous!”

“They certainly – ”

“Can you two argue about this later?” Kylie asked. “Your dick measuring contest is really distracting, and I’m trying to channel magic here.”

“I’m just saying,” Max mumbled under his breath, but he did not continue saying whatever it was that he was apparently just saying.

We quickly found a place where Kylie could stop channelling, but rather than continue to berate me, Max elected to use our resting time to flip though his projected maps. “I think,” he said, “that we should be extremely close to the centre.”

“Are you ready to tell us what we’re going to find?” I asked. “Aside from an exit, anyway. I think I’ve had enough surprises for today.”

“We’ll need to continue a bit further for an exit. But in the heart of the labyrinth I expect to find… well.”

“If you say a minotaur,” Kylie said, “we are no longer friends.”

“Ha! No. Information.”

“Information.”

“The… details of the… contract.”

“What contract?” I asked.

“You know. The contract. What we agree to by entering the Initiation. I want to know exactly what that is.”

“You didn’t have to come down here for that,” I said. “They literally gave us paper to sign. The contract is on the intranet. You can look it up.”

“Not… not that contract.”

“Then I am well and truly confused.”

“Me, too,” Kylie piped up.

Max looked uncomfortable. “So you know how spells can behave… oddly,” he said. “They can act in, in ways that reflect the world as their creators saw it, rather than as we see it. Like change spells; you’ll remember that last semester, the Fiore made a huge deal over how an understanding of chemistry greatly enhances the use of a material change spell, but neglected to talk about how before the discovery of the atom – ”

“You’re getting off topic.”

“Right. Yes. Sorry. Well. Take… take truth spells, for example. They vary greatly in compelling what someone believes to be true, or compelling one to speak with words they believe to be true but allowing one to mislead and deceive, or allowing one to speak only what is actually true regardless of belief, which is far less useful for research and discovery than you’d think because the spells have wildly different ideas of what ‘true’ means. Or, or my spell. It acts on whether people believe they owe a debt, or harbour guilt. But similar debt balancing contract spells act not on perception, but under specific systems of law.”

“Okay,” I said, “and this is relevant how?”

“Well. The traditional method of training a mage is, I’m sure you remember, quite different to the Refujeyo method.”

“Apprenticeship, yes. We’re aware.”

“So, when the Pit and Skolala Refujeyo first started, the… perception of how to train mages, the assumptions and norms and soforth, were different than they are now. The contracts we signed, well, if we’d been in this school fifty or a hundred years ago, those contracts would have been different. They would have had different clauses.”

“But they didn’t. They were modern contracts, and you can look them up on the intranet.”

Max combed his fingers through his hair uncomfortably. “Not all contracts are written on paper. The Pit we entered, the runes we’ve been tracing as we move through the school ever since, or even before the Initiation… these things are as old as the school.”

“You’re saying that by going through the Initiation, or maybe by entering the school at all, we signed some secret contract they didn’t tell us about that we weren’t signing?” I asked. “That’s not how contracts work!”

“No, but it can be how metaphysical ones work. If the things we agreed to were openly known and assumed and part of the magical foundation when it was constructed, us not being aware might weaken the effect, but… Kayden, look at the raw power of this place. They can build something strong here. I believe that they have.”

Kylie shook her head. “You said that they didn’t mind control us into staying or anything,” she said. “You said that was our free choice. Were you lying?”

“No. No; nothing coerced you to undergo the Initiation. In fact, your consent there is important. The less any of us are aware of, the less we choose this, the less influence it has. It’s a very weak effect; even knowing about it, I think, might let someone resist, if they can catch themselves being influenced. It’s certainly not strong enough to make anyone walk into the Initiation.”

“But judging by the way you phrased that, it’s making us do something?” I asked.

Max hesitated. “‘Making us’ is a little strong. The effect is pretty weak, so far as I can tell, just… subtle enough to be a problem. It’s only a little thing; it’s hardly – ”

“Max. What is it making us do.”

“You’re going to freak out if I tell you.”

“Well, good thing we’re way down here where we can safely freak out without attracting attention, then, isn’t it?”

“I’m about ready to freak out now,” Kylie remarked. “I’d like to at least freak out with more precision.”

“It’s… well. Do you remember when neither of you knew if Cheryl knew that spells and curses were the same thing, and you didn’t tell her?”

“Well, of course not,” I said. “It’s not something that you can just blurt out.”

“Isn’t it? It seemed extremely important to you when you first found out. And, on that note, a little strange that I, someone who loves spell theory, hadn’t brought it up with you before.”

“Yeah, well, you said it wasn’t really something people talked about.”

“It isn’t, but it’s odd that nothing peripheral ever came up, don’t you think?”

“Well, that’s not very – ”

“What about your friends and family? Among the commonfolk, who fear curses but respect mages? Surely you told them the good news when you found out.”

“It was a bit confusing to just sort of… bring up?” I said. “And not really relevant to anything. My spell was still dangerous. I was still on trial for assault.”

“You honestly think it wouldn’t have made any difference? For them to know?”

“I suppose it would have. I just never got around to mentioning it.”

“Me neither,” Kylie said quietly.

“Wait,” I said. “Wait a second. Are you saying there’s some kind of influence here that stops us from talking about curses? Because that’s just not possible. We talk about curses all the time.”

“I think,” Max said, “that there is a mild effect discouraging people from explaining that curses are spells, to people who do not already know this. A sort of… information containment. How did you two find out, specifically?”

“I put it together from reading about spell categories in a textbook,” Kylie said.

“And then Kylie told me,” I said, “which means she could – ”

“No. I didn’t tell you. It didn’t occur to me to tell you.”

“I’m pretty sure you did? We were in our room and – ”

“And I showed you the textbook. You inferred it from that. Neither of us mentioned it until we both definitely knew.”

We stared at each other in silence, until Max said gently, “None of your teachers told you directly, did they? Alania waited for you to approach her; why didn’t she approach you?”

“But showing Kayden the textbook worked,” Kylie said, “and Alania set that homework. So it’s not like anyone was actually forced to keep a secret.”

“Well, no. As I said, the effect is mild and subtle. It won’t stop it from eventually getting out to other mages, from whom it’s not a secret, but you’re hardly going to decide against informing your parents and then decide to leave them a bunch of oblique clues instead. I assume it’s to stop some mage from causing problems by explaining all of this to the commonfolk press, although I admit I’m not sure why Refujeyo is apparently so invested on keeping the connection secret.”

“I assumed they just didn’t want the people who occasionally graphically eviscerate others with magic to be labelled ‘mages’,” I shrugged.

“Also,” Kylie said, “the whole spell gathering motivation with the scholarship might have something to do with it. Less people asking questions, right?”

“So that’s what all of this is about?” I asked. “You came down here to confirm whether the school is making us keep mage secrets?”

“No. No; I don’t think that secret particularly matters. I’m pretty sure that knowing about that influence would let us resist it if we wanted, anyway; it’s no longer relevant to us. What I want to know is, if this place can influence us in such a way, what else is it making us do?”