Chapter 28. The Puzzle

  Gravion-Shleicy was located in the far eastern region of Forland and was a rather small town, quiet and cozy. Quaint two-story houses of yellow brick, red and green tiled roofs, lots of trees. The houses were nestled in greenery, and here and there the leaves had already turned yellow, blazing like bright autumn torches.

  Calypso and I followed Kes, who was leading the way.

  “This way,” he waved toward a house with a bright sign depicting a tooth.

  “A dental supply shop?” Calypso raised his eyebrows in surprise, reading the sign above the entrance.

  “Lamárk, explain to me why the hell you brought us to a shop for dentists?”

  “My girlfriend works here,” Kes replied quietly.

  “As who?” Calypso asked, even more surprised.

  “A salesgirl,” Kes said even more quietly.

  Calypso and I stared at our classmate with identical expressions, putting two and two together.

  “Yeah, she’s not a mage,” Kes said very quietly, sounding somewhat embarrassed.

  “What are you staring at me like that for? Forland isn’t only home to mages, you know that perfectly well! There are entire districts where there’s not a mage in sight! And there’s no taboo on relationships between mages and ordinary people without a magical Spark!”

  “Of course there’s no taboo, you just really surprised me,” Calypso shook his head.

  “Didn’t expect this kind of choice from a stuck-up snob like you. So how does your family feel about this relationship?” Calypso asked doubtfully.

  “Your dad is obsessed with keeping the bloodline pure, as far as I know. And your mom even tried to push a bill to have non-mages expelled from Forland so they wouldn’t ‘get in the way’ of mages. She got shut down fast, of course, but still…”

  “They don’t know,” Kes mumbled.

  “I haven’t told anyone about it yet.”

  “Afraid they’d laugh at you and tear you apart?” I smiled understandingly.

  Kes nodded eagerly.

  “My father would skin me alive if he found out about my relationship with a non-mage… But being with her, well… It feels good. We met at a local fair a few weeks ago. I don’t know how much time we’ll spend together, but… I like her, basically,” Kes was completely embarrassed now.

  “Maybe we’ll break up after a while, but what if something bigger comes of it? So please don’t go blabbing about this at the academy… okay?”

  I shook my head in surprise. So that’s why Lamárk had been so calm lately, suddenly backed off from me and started acting like a normal human being. So that’s what it was…

  “I’m not one for blabbing,” Calypso replied.

  “And Lori hasn’t been known for that either, as you can imagine. So, shall we go in?”

  ***

  Kes’s girlfriend turned out to be Sophie — a freckle-faced redhead who threw herself around his neck the moment she saw him, skipping out from behind the counter.

  The small shop, its shelves overflowing with all kinds of dental instruments, was empty at the moment, and the cheerful Sophie chattered non-stop, rattling on so fast that her babbling quickly gave me a headache.

  She talked about everything at once: the wonderful sunny weather, her evening plans with Kes, her progress learning Elvish, complained about poor sales today, and tried to sell us something in the midst of her endless chatter. In just a couple of minutes, she’d managed to show us various spatulas, pluggers, surgical scissors, and tried to foist them all on Calypso, who politely declined with a frozen smile on his face.

  “Or maybe you need a mouth retractor?” Sophie suddenly offered with gleaming eyes, holding the dental instrument.

  “You know, we have the best mouth retractors in all of Forland!..”

  “You don’t say,” Calypso said, barely keeping a straight face.

  I snorted into my fist, trying not to laugh. Kes shot me a reproachful look, but Sophie didn’t even notice me and just chattered on with even more enthusiasm.

  “Yes! Look here, when applied it provides excellent access. With a flexible contour, see how convenient it is!”

  “Lori, do you need a mouth retractor?” Calypso asked me politely, his eyes dancing with amusement.

  “I think I manage just fine without one,” I answered, barely holding back laughter.

  “That’s what I think too,” Calypso sighed and turned back to the persistent Sophie.

  “Thank you, but we don’t need this extremely useful household item. Do you need one, Lamárk?”

  “Oh, shove it!” Kes snorted.

  “For that you’d need a different kind of shop,” Calypso shook his head with an exaggerated sigh.

  He turned back to Sophie with a charming smile.

  “Now put that thing back and calmly tell us about the anti-magical zone in the forest. You know, about what exactly you know, how you found out about it, where it’s located, how to find it.”

  Sophie obediently nodded, set the mouth retractor back on the shelf, and began speaking in a suddenly changed tone, explaining how things stood.

  I immediately understood that Calypso had given the girl a mental suggestion, but our classmate didn’t catch on right away.

  “Did you just enchant her?” Kes was taken aback.

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  “Yep. Saved us time, otherwise she’d have spent another half day telling us about retractors for various places.”

  “Have you no shame?!”

  “Sorry, Lamárk, but listening to your girlfriend sober is only possible out of deep love, which I don’t feel for her,” Calypso smiled venomously.

  Kes kept grumbling, but Calypso ignored him and just did what he needed to do, extracting the necessary information from Sophie.

  Once he’d learned everything he needed, Calypso implanted the thought in the girl’s mind that she hadn’t seen us or Kes just now, and she returned behind the counter, going through the motions. Her gaze was temporarily unfocused, and she seemed not to see us for the moment: Calypso must have suggested that behavior to her.

  We hurried to leave the dental shop, Kes shot Sophie one last guilty look as we left.

  “She’s fine, I didn’t hurt her,” Calypso smirked.

  “I just carefully wiped her memory of our brief meeting. There’s not even a trace of my mental interference left in her consciousness. I did that just in case, for her own safety.”

  “You can do that already?” Kes asked in surprise.

  “I can do a lot of things. Mental magic is kind of my thing.”

  “And it seems to have gotten sharper after that dark magic release ritual of yours, right?” I asked, thoughtfully scanning Calypso’s aura and noting its unusual density.

  “By the way, I didn’t notice your mental influence on Sophie at all from the outside. It’s become… more subtle somehow. Before, at least you had those golden spirals in your eyes, but now they weren’t there. And your aura used to pulse slightly in a certain rhythm during mental influence, but now it didn’t even ripple once.”

  “Possibly,” Calypso nodded.

  “Honestly, I simply haven’t had time yet to study all aspects of my magical changes. My magical Spark only just finished stabilizing today after the ritual. Anyway, we don’t have time to chat now. Let’s hurry. I don’t like what I saw in Sophie’s memories.”

  Since Calypso had extracted all the necessary information from Sophie’s memory, we quickly teleported to the edge of the forest on the eastern outskirts of Gravion-Shleicy. The houses in this part of town were of a distinctly rural type, and there were no residential plots right by the forest. Just trees everywhere, birds singing, not a soul around. The middle of nowhere.

  “Sophie often comes here in the mornings with her grandmother to gather mushrooms and herbs,” Calypso said quietly as the three of us stepped into the forest.

  “That’s actually how they stumbled upon the strange zone. Sophie herself actually has a magical Spark, by the way, but it’s so weak she can’t cast any spells. Magic just didn’t take root in her. That happens when magical bloodlines get too diluted. Her parents, both very weak mages, frankly realized this when she was still a child and decided to voluntarily leave the mage community. So their grown daughter wouldn’t have problems later, so she’d grow up among ‘her own kind’, so to speak. And her parents weren’t exactly brilliant anyway, so not much changed for them after giving up magic they found happiness in other things. Working as dentists now…”

  “Anyway, quite a family. And her grandmother was once a decent mage, but judging by what I saw in Sophie’s memory, her grandmother’s magical Spark is slowly fading. Has been fading for years. That happens as a result of various injuries and an initially weak magical Spark… If she kept casting spells, she wouldn’t have lasted long. But her grandmother chose to give up magic entirely in exchange for living longer. Even put on special anti-magical bracelets to make sure she wouldn’t accidentally cast something. It was actually those distinctive bracelets I saw in Sophie’s memories that helped me piece together the puzzle.”

  “Brr,” Kes shuddered.

  “I’d prefer death to that kind of half-life.”

  “So would I,” Calypso agreed with a smirk.

  I smiled silently to myself. Not long ago, I’d dreamed of somehow giving up my magic just to never feel that pain again, but still live. So I more than understood that kind of choice. Different values… You don’t understand until you’re in that situation yourself.

  “Anyway, the point is that Sophie’s grandmother, being magical by nature, after all, sensed something wrong in one part of the forest a few days ago while picking cranberries. She suspected there might be dark creatures nearby, but the artifacts that warn of dark creatures were silent. Sophie’s grandmother always keeps one of those artifacts in her pocket, just in case. Useless trinket, honestly, because in a real attack the artifact would only warn you a couple seconds beforehand, and a non-mage wouldn’t be able to defend themselves. But that’s beside the point what matters is that the artifact should shriek loudly. Here it was silent and looked completely dead.”

  “Sophie’s grandmother thought it was broken, went home, grabbed a new artifact, returned to the cranberry clearing, but the artifact went dead again in the exact same spot. And also the automatic berry-picking gadget that ran on magic stopped working. Sophie’s grandmother is a rather curious woman who loves experiments, so she dragged several more magic-powered gadgets from home to that clearing. But they all broke the moment she brought them into that weird spot in the forest.”

  “Why didn’t anyone call the Inquisition to investigate?” I frowned.

  “There wasn’t even a rumor about it in town.”

  “The locals decided some ‘evil spirits’ had settled there and just started going to other parts of the forest for mushrooms,” Calypso sighed.

  “And then the anti-magical zone disappeared on its own, and people just stopped paying attention. If Sophie hadn’t happened to mention it to Kes while they were discussing Forland news, who knows when we would have found out. This observation zone isn’t a priority.”

  “If I had my way, I’d station one Inquisitor and one Fortemin in every corner of the world and the Universe to monitor everything in time, even some forest in the middle of nowhere,” I grumbled.

  “If only there were enough of us for that.”

  Calypso smirked in agreement and added:

  “Also… It looks like someone was diverting everyone’s attention here. That’s why they didn’t run to the Inquisitors.”

  “You think someone cast distraction charms on the locals?” Kes frowned.

  Calypso shrugged vaguely.

  “Possibly.”

  “I also sensed through Sophie echoes of that energy I recently felt in you when you had your episode,” Calypso added via mental message so only I could hear. “Not a direct influence on consciousness, but more like something passing by. That happens when a person enters a zone that has powerful mental charms laid on it.”

  My breathing quickened with worry, and I turned to Calypso. Judging by his expression, he didn’t think it necessary to discuss my episode in front of Lamárk, probably not wanting to share the details with others.

  “Effu?” I whispered with just my lips.

  Calypso barely shook his head.

  “No… something else.”

  It was immediately clear that we’d entered a zone where an anti-magical atmosphere had recently prevailed — the general magical vibrations were already very familiar to me.

  “The feeling is exactly like the previous pentagrams,” I said quietly.

  Calypso nodded grimly and picked up his pace.

  We found the victim right in the middle of a small forest clearing. Not buried in the ground, not covered by anything, just hidden by shadow murk. When Calypso lifted it, Kes actually jumped back in surprise and stared at the mutilated victim with disgust.

  The same pentagram, the same ritual nodes, the same nasty energy. And the same strange zigzag rune carved with a ritual dagger on the victim’s forehead.

  “And this thing has been here for several days already?” I asked in horror, grasping the scale of the problem.

  “The fourth pentagram has already been opened,” Calypso muttered, crouching beside the victim and moving his hand over her, reading all the magical fluctuations.

  “We were expecting it to open today, but it was opened days ago…”

  “How is it that none of our people noticed it opening?” I asked anxiously.

  “Clean work,” Calypso murmured, moving his hand further along the ground and reading the energy information.

  “This person who opened the fourth pentagram… They’re clever and stayed one step ahead of us: after opening the pentagram in this remote wilderness, where we have no special observers, where we weren’t expecting pentagrams to open in such an odd location, they waited for the right energy surge and then closed the pentagram themselves. Diverted the locals’ attention. That way, information about what happened simply never reached us. If not for Sophie’s chattiness and her knowing Kes, it still wouldn’t have.”

  “So it’s a necromancer, since they closed the pentagram themselves?” I said grimly.

  “A powerful one?”

  “Or they weren’t alone and used some necromancer’s services,” Calypso murmured.

  “I can’t say more yet, but this is some seriously nasty stuff… But that’s not what matters right now. What’s today’s date?”

  After I answered, Calypso let out a string of curses.