01 - The Price of Talent (36 page)

              My practices with Claudius were going well too. He had moved on from the basics, which he thought I had mastered, to accuracy and distance training. Also, he was lengthening the time I spent using my powers to increase my mental endurance. I could hit a target with fire or lightning from just about any distance, I was a little less accurate with ice though. So much depended on making an icicle that was evenly weighted and aerodynamic so as not to pull to one side or another. I was also getting a little better at being able to tell what kind of magic he was creating by judging how he tapped his magic powers. Still, as in all things that involved mental magic, I was not advancing as fast as I wanted.

              On the day of the festival, the whole castle was atwitter. Not only was there going to be a festival in town that evening which off duty guards and priests were going to attend, there was going to be a feast and a party in the dining hall of the castle for those of us left behind who did not have other duties. Alfieri called practice short with the initiate inquisitors when more than one student hurt themselves, likely because they were thinking more about the celebration than their sparring practice. Regardless, this gave me plenty of time to use the practice field for my own workout, and I got in a good practice. Later, in my room, I even managed to levitate myself a little higher and longer than last time without being quite so exhausted when I was done. A quick bath and change afterwards and I was ready to have a quality meal at the dining hall.

              When I got there, it was about half full of people with more trickling in as I ate. I chose a table towards the back away from everyone else. Not only because I was still shunned by most of the initiates and priests, but because I was planning on ducking out early and getting in a good nap before Meredith dropped by. After all, I had no idea how long it would take for us to get the information Meredith wanted, but I knew I would have my usual duties and activities the next day, and I did not want to be yawning through them. Meredith, on the other hand, had the next morning off because she was working till midnight at the hospital. A reward for being willing to work the night of the festival.

              Still, despite eating alone during a feast, I enjoyed myself. The food was good and plentiful. I had more than my fair share of it, given I had spent all afternoon practicing with my sword and powers. Afterwards, I ducked out, with no one paying me much heed. After all, they weren’t interested in socializing with me anyway. By the time I was in my room in the dorm wing, I could hear the hubbub coming from the main hall of the castle. I’m not sure when I fell asleep, but it did not take long despite all the noise.

              When I woke up to a knock at my door, it was quite thoroughly dark. There was still a ton of noise coming from the castle, and from further off in the town. As I was blinking sleep from my eyes, Meredith opened the door and snuck in carrying a candle.

“Huh, glad to see you hard at work, as usual,” she said, eying me as I sat up on my bed. “And here I was coming to apologize for being an hour late. But finding you asleep after I worked such a hard day in the hospital makes me less inclined to apologize.”

“Sorry, Meredith,” I said. “But I figured I would be more of a help on a decent amount of sleep than if I was up all night partying at the dining hall or fretting about the task ahead.”

“Regardless, at least you had the decency to sleep in your robes,” she said. “At least this way it doesn’t require much effort to get you ready to go.”

              So, with that, I got up, got on my sandals, and prepared myself for a trip to the library. Meredith seemed quite impatient, likely she was worried that our late start would limit the time we could spend searching the library basement and sub-basements. Fortunately, it did not take me all that much time to get ready.

              Once ready, we headed out of my room. The noises from the parties were still going strong, if muffled by the fact that we were not near a window. As we walked down the hallway, it became clear that some of the festival attendees had made their way to private rooms.

“See, this is exactly why people tend to hide out in the library or stables when they want to be alone,” she whispered. “No privacy…”

              We both had a quiet giggle at the various amorous noises coming from people’s rooms. Still, with the occupants of the dorm otherwise engaged, we were able to slip out unnoticed. Once outside, things were a little quieter. Instead of traveling through the castle wing to the main castle, we had decided to go outside and traverse the gardens between the dorm wing and the library wing. We wanted to be observed by as few people as possible, and hopefully those people would be too drunk and preoccupied to remember.

              It was a relatively bright night thanks to the nearly full moon. The weather was cool and clear that late fall evening. The last of the fall vegetables and herbs were still in their beds in the garden; apparently the initiates responsible for harvesting were a little behind on their duties. The farmer in me was a little annoyed by that lack of attention. However, the rows of corn stalks were especially useful in traversing the distance between the dorms and the library unnoticed.

              Once at the library, Meredith and I walked up to the front door and slipped in. Sure enough, there was a young woman sitting at a desk. The desk itself occupied the open area near the doors with a good view of the large hallway that ran down the length of the library. I presumed, rightly, that this was Meredith’s friend.

“Don’t mind us, Judith,” said Meredith, who immediately adopted a sheepish grin on her face. “We’re just, uh, looking for some privacy.”

              With that Judith looked up, saw Meredith and me, and giggled. She had been reading a book by candle light. What the book was about I couldn’t tell, as the light from the candle reflected off the book’s pages in such a way that it made it hard to read from my angle. When Meredith introduced us Judith looked up and gave me an appraising eye, a dismissive shrug and then turned back to Meredith. She seemed to be of average build and had brown hair. Her pointedly appraising look was punctuated by the light reflecting off her bright green eyes, which were really her only remarkable feature.

“Do what you like, just don’t make a mess…” she said with a giggle, apparently finding the implication of “making a mess” amusing. “You’re not the only people here looking to get away, but I think you’ll find that the back stacks are still unoccupied.”

“Thanks Judith, I owe you one,” said Meredith, again affecting a sheepish smile.

              Not wanting to appear out of the ordinary, I adopted what I hoped was an embarrassed smile and Meredith and I disappeared into the back of the Library. Fortunately, as we headed back to the end that abutted the main castle, the muffled noises of other library occupants disappeared. By the time we made our way back to the wall where one of the doors to the basement lay, it was quiet.

              Of course, upon arriving there, and checking the handle, the door was still locked. So, I started to draw in a little power to force the door when Meredith intervened.

“Not that way!” She said in a rather stern whisper. “Do you want everyone to hear, or sense, what you’re doing? Let me take care of this…”

              And with that she kneeled down in front of the door and produced a small bag from which she pulled out a number of lock picking tools. Within a minute or two of her getting to work on it, the lock turned and the door opened.

“Do I dare ask where you learned how to do that?” I asked her.

“I’m a woman of many talents,” she whispered back. “Not the least of which was getting up to mischief in my spare time when I was younger. It was part of the reason my father got me involved in the Forsburg hospital, to keep my idle hands from getting into trouble.”

“Well, you certainly are full of surprises…” I whispered back with a smile. “Still, you probably did make less noise than I would have forcing the door with magic.”

              Once open, we slipped past the door, and closed it behind us as quietly as we could. Then Meredith relocked the door behind us. She then took a couple of candles out of her pockets and lit them with a tiny amount of power.

“I barely felt you use any power to do that, Meredith,” I said, a little impressed with her skill.

“I may not be able to summon as much raw power as you, but what I can do is manage a little subtlety,” she said. “When you practice in the training yard with Claudius or by yourself I would be surprised if there was a talented person in the whole of the holy empire who couldn’t feel it!”

“Uh… So you’re saying I lack subtlety?” I asked.

“Subtlety is… not one of your talents, no.” She said with a smile.

              Once our candles were lit, I got a better view of where we were. We were on the top landing of a stair case that went down to another landing, reversed, and ended at another door. Once at the bottom of the stairs, we found that this second door was not locked. Meredith seemed almost disappointed she didn’t get to show off her talent for picking locks again. Still, we slipped through as quietly as possible and shut the door behind us. Inside this first basement, it looked much like the library above. Except here the books on the shelves looked much older, and many had a good amount of dust on them.

“This doesn’t look like a records room…” I said.

“No, I believe these are all the banned and confiscated books that tell apocryphal stories and histories,” said Meredith.

“One of my friends, Ross, said that the library here contained unaltered histories. Because he was caught reading them, he ended up having to flee the church,” I said.

“I don’t doubt it,” said Meredith. “Still, I’m surprised by the scale of it all. Until I came to Caer Sud, I hadn’t ever seen enough books in one place to fill a room. When I saw the library upstairs, I thought it must contain all the knowledge in the world. I would not have imagined then that it was only part of the knowledge that the church has collected. Knowing these are down here, it’s awful tempting to sneak down here to see what they say…”

“When Ross first told me about it, I was a little surprised,” I admitted. “He said something like controlling what people know helps control what people do. But I didn’t quite follow what he was saying.”

“Regardless, we can’t linger here,” she said. “We have a job to do and a limited time to do it in.”

              I almost regretted that we were leaving. Standing there surrounded by shelf after shelf of forbidden knowledge made me see why this seduced Ross. Curiosity really was dangerous.

              At the end of the hallway, between the shelves, we came upon another door. This one was locked. For whatever reason, this lock took more effort for Meredith to pick. Fortunately, there was no one here to notice what we were doing. Once she did get the door unlocked, and we slipped through, we found ourselves on yet another landing and staircase heading down. Again, at the bottom, the door was unlocked.

              Once through the door, there was another hallway. This hallway though was made with walls and doors instead of stacks and shelves of books. On each door there was a label. The first we got to was labeled as storerooms. We opened the unlocked door and looked around. Inside was a desk with parchment against the wall, and then a series of shelves containing documents and ledgers. A quick perusal showed that they all had to do with how well provisioned the castle was, crop yields from the gardens, tithes from the surrounding villages and the like. Since this was not our goal, we tried to leave things as undisturbed as we could, and left.

              As we walked further down the main hallway of the second basement we noticed that there were a total of four doors, two on each side. The first, as I just mentioned, was labelled as a storeroom, the next was labelled “Coin” and was full of account ledgers, bank notes and the like. The third door was labelled “Personnel” which we thought was promising. Unfortunately, it was just full of ledgers detailing the lives of the various teachers and grounds staff going back many years. The files all had impressive levels of detail and indicated that the church was paying close attention to its employees, but it did not contain a file on Meredith or her Father. Fortunately, the fourth and final door on this level was labelled “Students”, which got Meredith quite excited.

“I think this has to be it!” she said.