ChaoticArmcandy

  The Arcane Tower brooded over Harmine like a gargoyle over its calcified, encrusted nest. No slender, angur spire of wizardry, this tower. No, it was squat and broad, darkened with age. The topmost levels were built of newer brickwork and ashcrete, it was true, and paned with gss, but the foundation slumped with rounded shoulders, older perhaps than the rest of Harmine, but still sound.

  What y at the roots of the Tower was older still.

  Penelope Caul considered those roots, as she paced around the massive stone pilr that held up the ceiling of her b, deep beneath the ground. Most of the other Arcane boratories were housed up in the Tower proper, alongside the cssrooms and the workspaces of the other Factors, administrators, and professors.

  As Acting Factor of Thanopegic Depth Research, she’d been given a rge office with a grand view, up on one of those higher levels, but she preferred being down here, in this ancient, hollow hive, and its unstirred, entombed air.

  This was what mattered, and down here was where it y.

  The pilr before her was so wide that it took at least a dozen paces to prowl around. Penelope knew this because she’d done it many times. She was something of a prowler by nature.

  She peered closer at the carved stonework, tracing first with her eyes, then with a brush of her gloved thumb the blurred edges of an ancient pattern. Like whorls of tree rings—or ripples in water. A smile crept slowly onto her lips.

  How old was this tangled warren of tunnels and crypts, drowned mazes and sealed-off halls, rotting like buried secrets below the school? She doubted even her uncle Lanius knew, though he’d funded repeated excavations into the limestone beds that Harmine was built on, and into which the roots of the Tower sank.

  Some in Harmine’s administration would call those excavations fruitless, would cim that all her uncle had uncovered were more impenetrable secrets and shrouded mysteries.

  She rolled her eyes. Fools, all of them. Anyone who mattered—meaning anyone with any standing in the Hierophancy’s inner ranks and circles of power—knew what Lanius Caul had come within a hair’s breadth of achieving.

  It was her uncle, and no other, who had designed and commissioned the instruments and equipment in this b. From their own family coffers, he had funded the research, slowly deriving hard data from a mess of ancient clues and hoarded hints, schorly conjectures and calcuted assumptions.

  And he had triumphed, however briefly, though the knowledge of his breakthrough was, at his own insistence, a closely guarded secret.

  Since his limited success, not another soul had come close to matching it, and the boratory had in dormant and nguished in disuse. Thank all the sightless gods of dread that Lanius had insisted on maintaining it, over the protestations of the miserly and shortsighted administration. Penelope sneered as she turned away from the pilr of stone and prowled deeper into the b, coming to a halt before a spherical vat of alchemically hardened gss, inside of which floated a gaseous cloud of dull silver.

  This was the prize that all her uncle’s preparations had been predicated on securing more of, the key ingredient of thanomancy, without which the secret transmigration spells preserved since the time of her ancestors were impossible—the Primary Matter itself, bo karesh in the tongue of Old Gel. Though her uncle had always referred to it, in its subpegic phase, as magnetized tourmaline.

  For many ages, the knowledge of its synthesis had been thought by most in the Hierophancy to be lost. Lanius had been the one to prove the others wrong. It had taken years of work, and an Interdiction of the entire Whistling Sea that had stretched the Imperiati navy to its limit, but her uncle had managed to discover and secure one st cache. But that had quickly run out, and all his efforts to reverse engineer it alchemically and tap an unending supply had been in vain.

  Until a scant few months ago.

  One moonless night, Lanius had swept in from the capital in a great carriage pulled by a dozen pure bck thoroughbreds with the news—a breakthrough of utmost importance was afoot. He’d offered her the factorship then and there, and she’d jumped at the chance to continue his work.

  Penelope allowed a satisfied smile to slip onto her face.

  With no forward progress to speak of in the st ten years, many in the Hierophancy’s inner circles had given up all hope of recovering thanomancy.

  But very soon now, she alone would be the one to restore it to them.

  The hooded and muzzled wraithbait for today’s test thrashed against his restraints again and she shushed him as she rounded the thrice-hardened gss wall of the transmigration chamber, avoiding the chalked lines in the floor where the warders would position themselves

  She couldn’t remember where her research team had gotten this one, just that one of her ckeys had been sufficiently bothered by his existence to have him acquired, and put his name next in line for wraithbait, as her researchers called the subjects they supplied her. Just a somebody that nobody would miss. Just a pawn on a board vaster and older than he could possibly comprehend, but one that she’d been training to become a pyer on for her entire life. One of the few.

  And now, over the heads of her older brothers, it was given to her to become the first real thanomancer in a thousand years—perhaps her uncle Lanius had briefly had the glory, but he had been unable to sustain it, and so had squandered his chance. She would not. She would upstage him, him and all her squabbling, sneering brothers. She would show them all—everyone in her family who had ever discounted her, everyone in her line who had preceded her time upon the glorious center stage of History—that she was no one to be trifled with. None of the Cauls, in all their varied positions of prestige and power inside the institutional apparatus of the Imperiat, would ever overlook her again.

  She would prove her worth to them on their terms, and then they would finally see that she was not only fit to sit at their sides as one of them, but that she—a woman, no less—was the instrument of their destiny, the greatest among them. They would honor her, henceforth, and shower her with gratitude and praise.

  All she had to do to prove that her will to dominate matched that of her ancestors, was leash the invisible gods of dread that ruled the Ninth Abyss.

  Penelope gritted her teeth. Her first field trial had been…well, her uncle would have frowned sternly at her and called it a failure. And yet it had worked—or nearly so, as far as she could tell. She’d racked her brain to try and understand what had gone wrong. The link she’d made to the revenant from the Sixth Abyss had been severed, somehow, before the blood ntern spell had fully consummated.

  She chewed her lip. Had she aimed too high, or not high enough? Would disaster strike her if she tried the same with a more powerful Eater, an actual god of the Endless Abyss? Or had her error actually consisted in leashing too weak of a revenant, one that her prey had somehow been able to defeat? Impossible, surely…

  Her thoughts turned venomous. She could barely believe that her wretched quarry seemed to have escaped unscathed, again. The nuisance of its existence was fast becoming unbearable.

  She balled her fists, pressing her nails deep into the skin of her palms and relishing the sharpness of the sensation. Pathetic rodents they might be, but if she had no hunting trophies to dispy as proof of her success, the Hierophant would not cover her in the glory that was rightfully hers, and some merit-appointed opportunist without a second name would sneak through a requisition order for all her data and steal it from her. Or worse yet, one of her brothers would be sent to run the b, and take over all her work.

  No! she vowed silently. It would not happen. She would not let it happen.

  She whirled as a sharp rap echoed on the door of her b.

  “Prefect Caul?” called an orderly’s voice. Creswell, she thought his name was.

  “What!?” she snarled. “And that’s Factor Caul, to you.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Factor Cordivar is here, and requesting your presence.”

  Penelope blinked, momentarily put off. “Cordivar?”

  What in the Nine Abyssal hells could she want?

  “Yes, ma’am. Shall I escort her in?”

  “What? No, you fool.” Penelope cursed. “Where is she now?”

  “Upstairs in your office, ma’am.”

  “Keep her there! Don’t let her come looking for me. I’m on my way.”

  With her head cocked, she listened to his footfalls hurry away. It was too bad she had been dependent for her ambition on an unsanitary mutt like Cordivar, not even someone with a sorcerer’s blood lineage. Penelope’s lip curled. What could the carrion upstart want, this time?

  ChaoticArmcandy