Irina Syromyatnikova - My Path to Magic

“Uncle, don’t you feel that something is wrong here?”

“The supernatural,” he nodded with the look of a connoisseur. “It looms so close to the borders of reality that it presses on our nerves. Actually, our whole venture is starting to smell.”

“Well, they ought to have known where they were going to.”

“Are you sure?” Uncle chuckled. “The situation can change very quickly. They expected to be met. Have you noticed? Who was supposed to meet us, and where is he now?”

I shuddered involuntarily. So far, I hadn’t met anything deadly dangerous that could take away a man’s life. The only guests from the other world in our valley were ignes fatui —flashes of light that wandered in fog—quite a harmless phenomenon, as long as you didn’t touch them.

Somebody knocked on the door politely.

“Come in,” Uncle offered.

The white mage from the generator room timidly peeked through the door and said: “Mrs. Clements has asked for everyone to gather downstairs.”

“We are coming!” I tried to remember where I put my shoes.

“What’s the urgency, I wonder?” Uncle grunted and pulled out of his bag a pair of felt slippers. Alas, I lacked the foresight to bring the same.

“Maybe she wants to bid us farewell?” I giggled hysterically.

Perhaps, the prison’s administration used to live in this building at one time: rooms were spacious, narrow hallways with multiple doors were absent, and a spacious hall was right behind the front door. There, among a heap of unsorted equipment, Mrs. Clements decided to gather us. In the absence of chairs, we had to sit on the luggage. The atmosphere at the meeting was quite peculiar: there appeared to be no immediate danger, but something strange was certainly going on. The problem, in my opinion, was that the capital residents thought that otherworldly threats were severely exaggerated (you can afford an attitude of that sort only if you live on top of salt marshes—the supernatural doesn’t like salt). Nobody seemed to realize that there was nothing alive, not even rats, on the King’s Island. Intuition stubbornly kept telling me that Krauhard wouldn’t forgive such an attitude.

Two students conversed in hushed tones, the white from before (I remembered his name now—Alex) looked depressed. Uncle was the only one who showed up at the meeting in slippers. Mr. Smith looked like he just crawled out of some hole and smelled musty and dank. Only Mrs. Clements was cheerful and unfazed. I thought the audience was in for a lecture on the rules of safe conduct, but instead she delivered a speech about the necessity of hard work: “The expedition has to work on a tight schedule; attaining our goals will require a thoughtful and responsible approach to the job from everyone. Simple execution of assigned tasks will not be enough. Upon successful completion of the project there may be bonuses.”

“What are we looking for?” I could not resist asking.

She glanced at me in irritation: “If you permit me, Mr. Tangor, I will get to it in a minute.”

The students readily giggled. I shrugged; two years in Redstone had taught me to ignore simple jabs.

“This island safeguards the sanctity of the mysteries of the most ancient civilization in the world,” Mrs. Clements informed us loftily and launched into a lengthy description of someone’s work, citing authors and the results of their excavations. Students were hastily scribing it down.

My attention to the lecture quickly wavered. History was never in the sphere of my interests; I failed to see the point in gathering thousands of useless things. The idea that from these fragments one could draw pictures of the lives of past generations seemed funny to me (will you agree? If not, try to assemble even an ordinary alarm clock from scattered debris), and the aesthetic value of shards and fragments was even more arguable. Archeology, in my eyes, was a costly foolishness based on insatiable human curiosity.

“…and to assess the level of the technomagic development of that era,” Mrs. Clements finished her next premise.

That brought me out of my stupor: “Alchemy?”

Mrs. Clements gave me a scornful look.

“Tech-no-ma-gic,” she repeated almost syllable by syllable, “differs from alchemy in its ability to manipulate very delicate structures of matter, and it allows the execution of these fine operations thousands and hundreds of thousands of times, without any deviation from the original.”

I pulled from the pile of things a box of fuses that survived contact with Alex.

“Like this?” I asked. Let the one who thought that it deviated from the original cast a stone at me.

She scrunched her face: “No! On a much more subtle level, commensurable with the effect of magic!”

“The lost alchemical techniques,” Uncle Gordon concluded competently.

I shrugged and decided not to push the argument; there are people who have an irrational aversion to alchemy. Usually, they belong to the whites, but you can also meet them among ordinary people. And their ostentatious dislike for the “artificial” nonetheless sits perfectly well with love for products of white magic, like all those trans-horses, trans-rabbits, and trans-cows. Mrs. Clements belonged exactly to that category. My Redstone experience suggested that an altercation with such personalities was pointless and unproductive.

After a lengthy lecture about the grandeur and uniqueness of the technomagic, we finally learned what we were here to look for: the audience was shown drawings, diagrams, and reconstructions of ancient objects. They looked like small, angular beetles with varying numbers of legs and no distinction between their front and rear ends. The latter fact amused me a lot, but I managed to keep myself from laughing until we were back in our room.

“Don’t cackle,” Uncle remarked, watching my convulsions. “If they find at least a dozen of these, it will more than compensate for the cost of the expedition. These things used to be called ‘sand gnats’, and their artificial origin was discovered not too long ago. Ever since then, they have been in sharp demand by everybody: the military, academia, private developers. No one knows what they are, but they are wanted by all. I heard that one of their intact nests was sold for one and a half million crowns.”

“One and a half million…” my mirth left me in a flash.

“Don’t even think about it!” Uncle warned me. “Why do you think this island hasn’t been ransacked yet, despite all the bans? Remember the castle. Inside it is dark all around; there has been no light for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Understand my point?”

I caught his meaning, and it made me sick. I recalled a theory to that effect: the longer an otherworldly phenomenon existed, the stronger and more evolved and unpredictable it became. It explained why there was such a strong magic ambiance here! For thousands of years even a primitive ignis fatuus could turn into a fiery phantom, not to mention the more complex entities. What a fabulous island this was…

“We are waist deep in…” I began.

“Ah, you got it at last!” Uncle rejoiced. “Don’t fear! Just mind your surroundings; there is little hope for help from our companions. Those two blockheads are just mirror images of the king’s godfather, and the woman is probably the same.”

In Krauhard’s mythology, the “godfathers of the King” were the doomed ones, people carrying the mark of impending death. In this case, the nickname was a good match, too good, even. Unthinkable! Why did NZAMIPS let us come here, a pack of civilians accompanied by only one official dark magician? From childhood I had been taught that, when confronted with otherworldly forces, your main weapon is stealth, but a big expedition invading the island could only remain unnoticed through pure chance. I came to the conclusion that somebody was set to kill us.