The Scion of Abacus, Part 1 Read online

  “Are you lying to me now?”

  “Perhaps. But I can see you are beginning to understand something. You are beginning to understand doubt. And once you understand doubt, you will understand your strength, Toven. The rest of the world, the Eikos, the Synths, the Hymanni even, all of them live their lives in nice, comfortable patterns. The only doubts they have are minor. They do not doubt the grander things, and that is as it should be. But there are some who know the world for what it is, and for us, doubt gnaws at our souls every moment of every day. There is no peace to be had from it. But there is strength to be taken from the doubt. The moment you know that trust is just another lie is the moment you recognize the greatest source of strength in the world.”

  “And what is that?” I asked.

  “That is something you will have to discover for yourself. You cannot be told what it is, or the lesson will not be learned, for how can you trust the word of another if all there is to be found is doubt?”

  I nodded as though I understood, though in reality I had no idea what she was talking about. I began to fear I’d been recruited by a mad woman who was playing some grand jest at my expense. As soon as I thought that, I recalled what she’d just said about doubt, and I suddenly had no idea what to think.

  My head began to throb. Deryn Lhopri reached out and plucked the book from the table as I hung my head in my hands. “That is enough for today, I think.” She set the book on the shelf again. “We can continue this study next week. I suspect that, after what we’ve just discussed, you would miss half of what I say because you cannot decide whether I’m speaking the truth or lying. Go, and try not to let the doubt consume you.”

  As I left her office, I realized that her parting words had set me another test. They were not merely the friendly words of a teacher who’d given me something to think about. They were a challenge. If I returned next Fifth Day with my head still consumed by doubt, I would have failed. I realized then that what she’d been talking about, at least in part, was the need of a student to be master of his own mind. Whether or not what she’d said was truth or lie, I could not allow the possibility of either to so expend me as to make me nonfunctional. Doubt was everywhere and in everything, but I had to conquer it.

  And in my young mind, naïve as I was in those days, I thought the lesson was that the only person I could really trust was myself, and that gave me some amount of peace for a time. But only for a time.

  * * *

  That evening, after my discussion with Deryn Lhopri and after I had looked at the book she’d set before me, I could not help but return to the journal I’d found in the mage’s tower. I chose to return to it alone, not wanting to stir up new feelings of anger and betrayal—and whatever else it was she’d felt—in Hero.

  During supper, Hero and I had talked about my first meeting with Deryn Lhopri, and Hero agreed with my assessment that the woman was mad—though, true to my new teacher’s words, Hero was rather skeptical of everything I told her. I think she knew that I was going to be looking at the mage’s book again, for she did not bother to ask what I had planned for the rest of the evening. She was very good like that, Hero, always knowing when I needed to be alone or when I had something to do that was best done without her presence.

  So after supper, I walked back to my room, knowing that I would be left alone by all the world. The summer evening would lure my roommates outdoors just as it had done on the previous three nights. I saw no one as I walked the hallway from the mess to the boys’ dormitory, for which I was thankful. The last thing I wanted was to be distracted from my purpose. I had a feeling—had had the feeling all day ever since I’d opened the near-identical volume in Deryn Lhopri’s office—that tonight I would finally find something new in the book I’d discovered in the mage’s tower. I believed that the ancient codex would begin to yield up its secrets at last.

  And I was not to be disappointed.

  The dormitory was abandoned, as expected, and after performing a check to ensure nobody was lurking in some hidden corner, I retrieved the book from beneath my mattress and sat down in a far corner with my back to the door. In the previous days, I’d been given a private room in the dormitory, the privilege of being Hymanni I was told.

  I was nervous again. The past two nights had simply been a matter of opening the mage’s book, confirming there was nothing new to be read, and then rereading what I’d already discovered. But on that night, knowing in the deepest recesses of my heart that I would find something new, I hesitated. What if, my mind said, conjuring up a thousand fresh doubts, what if I see nothing but the words I’d read in the book on Deryn Lhopri’s shelf? What if all I find herein is only confirmation of everything I’d been taught?

  You must not mistake these thoughts for a sense of rebellion or any sense of mine that things were not right in the world. No, I believed in the Dominion, in the Hymage, and in Feril Animis’ mantra that “there is no God but Aaria.” What I was afraid of was disappointment. I did not want Abacus’ journal—or confession, as he called it—to alter the way I saw the world, and yet I also did not want to be lied to. Although I did not give it much thought at the time, the problem was that Deryn Lhopri’s talk about doubt had in fact taken over my mind. She had implied—and I’d been too naïve to pick up on it—that I could not even trust the Hymage, that I could not trust the version of history he had sanctioned for us to learn in the University. Had I thought of this, I might have been more eager to open the book, but then the doubt had already eaten away enough that I did not know whether I could trust even the long-dead Abacus.

  Had not the mages, after all, been tyrants in their own right, rulers over Aaria even as the Synths and Hymanni do so now? That, at least, was what I had been taught, and like many lessons that are ingrained on our memories through repetition, it was not an easy thing to admit my view of the world might be wrong.

  But I could not hold off forever. As the book sat on the floor, it seemed to call out to me and bid me peel back the leather cover once more. There was an undeniable tug on my will, much like there had been from the mage’s tower itself on the day when I’d found the volume.

  I opened the book slowly, almost fearfully, and ran my eyes down the first page. Everything was exactly as I’d last seen it save for one line: the bottom of the page was blank, missing those all-too-familiar words You are not yet ready.

  So stunned was I that I did not think to turn the page for a whole minute. I simply sat there staring at the empty space, formerly occupied by that single line, and waited—waited perhaps for the line to suddenly appear as expected. Or for something else.

  If you’ve ever had the shock of finding something familiar and expected to be suddenly gone, you’ll understand the unsettled feeling that came over me just then.

  But at length I knew I must press on, and so I reached out to turn the first page. My hands were shaking like an old man’s, and I nearly tore the fragile velum, so jerky were my motions in turning it over. I was quite beyond being surprised at that moment, and when I saw that the next two pages were filled with text in the same script and handwriting as the first page, I did not even blink. I fell into reading instantly, all my fears and worries forgotten in a heartbeat. Here was what I had hoped to discover, and the longing in my heart and the secret hold this book had on my soul drew me in as cheese draws a mouse to the trap.

  I scanned the new text, noting the rambling tone of the Confessions, a feature I would become intimately familiar with over the next several years. I got to the end of the third page and turned over the leaf to find yet more writing continuing about two-thirds of the way down the following page.

  Ending, once again, with the phrase You are not yet ready.

  I remember staring at that line in shock and disappointment. We humans can be rather odd creatures at times. For days, I had longed to glimpse even a single sentence more of the book than I’d seen on that first evening, and now that I had two-and-a-half new pages of text to mine through, I was dis
satisfied that there was not more than that.

  I shall not endeavor to write out all that I read therein, even though the book sits open before me as I write these confessions of my own. For one, much of what Abacus wrote would be unintelligible to you. I know this because I spoke oft of what I found therein with Hero, and though she was the most intelligent person I knew, she could make very little sense of it. It is a book, you see, not written to the average man or woman, but to a very specific person.

  It was written specifically to me.

  Over a thousand years ago, the last mage Abacus sat down to write a book, and he wrote it to me.

  I realize now that I am being a terrible narrator of these events, and that you had hoped to read something more specific of what I found in the mage’s confession. I shall not disappoint, and I shall quote extensively from the text where I think it will enhance my own narrative, but as this is my story and not the mage’s, I think you will forgive me if I keep those excerpts to a minimum.

  I reread the new words three times before I was distracted, and I’ll come to that in a moment, but my memory serves to tell me that although all the information gleaned therein was new and fresh to my mind—and much of it contrary to what I’d been taught in the University—only one paragraph truly stood out. I think this is because the paragraph struck the most doubt in my mind regarding the Dominion’s stance on religion. It was a fairly innocuous passage by comparison with much in the book, but I think that when you read what I’ve copied out below, you’ll understand why the passage unnerved me so.

  The mages are an ancient order, stretching back to time immemorial. There was a time when every human being had some sort of magical ability, and perhaps such a day will be again. But the question that has long occupied the minds of the great mage scholars has always been, “Where did this ability come from?” It’s rather simple really, and once we figured it out, we thought ourselves quite foolish for not having seen it earlier. I say “we,” but you must not mistake that to mean I was one of the discoverers of this truth. I am not so old as that. No, I mean we, the mages in general, and it is a truth universal that has been handed down for centuries. Where does this ability come from? Quite simply, it comes from God.

  Abacus later goes on to make a rather stirring and intellectual case for the existence of God—not merely for some anthropomorphic being such as the Eikos of my day have worshipped and been led to worship by the Synths and Hymanni, but of a true and proper omnipotent Being who is at once the source of everything and apart from everything. The whole theory is based on the magical ether, that fifth element we in the University were supposed to be learning to control. Ether is, as I’ve said previously, also known as spirit. God being the source of everything is necessarily connected to all things, though he remains apart. In human terms, the mage is apart from the rock he attempts to manipulate by tying his ether to it, but in the moment his ether is connected to the rock, he is in a sense a part of it and it a part of him, and yet he is still distinct. Similarly, God created the world through his own infinite ether, and he still governs all things because he has never withdrawn his ether from the world.

  You will understand why this passage unsettled me. We had been taught that the mages were as atheistic as the Synths are now, that the belief in God is a childish nonsense worthy only of the Eikos. God, as the Eikos believe in him, is indeed a fairytale. But the God I read of in Abacus’ confessions is a God who is a necessary component of existence, not only of life but of all the universe.

  But I get ahead of myself, for in that room of mine on that evening and with that book cracked open to that passage for the first time, I knew only that I was disturbed. I did not understand why. It was, of course, the doubt that Deryn Lhopri had instilled in me earlier that day. I could not trust anyone, and yet the deepest recesses of my heart wanted to trust the words of Abacus. I know of no way to describe the yearning I had to believe the mage, but I found that faith did not come so easily as I desired. I simply could not abandon everything I’d been taught in the last five years.

  The best way to tell a lie is to deliver it as undeniable fact. That seems obvious, but if you watch a man lie who knows he is lying, you will always spot some telltale sign of the truth. The most dangerous liar, though, is the liar who actually believes what he is saying, for then not only are the tells missing from his face and body language, but the passion with which he speaks lends a weight to his words that the knowing liar cannot generate for himself.

  I was in the rather perplexing position of having to decide between two worldviews, each of which was being related with all the passion of a man telling the truth, yet one had to be a lie. They were so diametrically opposed that they could not co-exist and be true.

  Like the obedient student I was, I chose rather to believe a thousand years of scholarship in the University than the obvious ravings of a mage dead those thousand years.

  * * *

  After I had read and reread the new pages some half-a-dozen times, I suddenly felt the uneasiness of being watched. I did not immediately turn about to look for the source of the feeling but rather slowly and deliberately shut the book before me and pretended to everything being normal. The last thing I wanted to do was to scare the spy away.

  I had shut the book and was in the process of standing up when a body hurtled into me, throwing me against the wall. My head cracked against the cold, hard stone, and my vision shifted out of focus.

  As I shook my head to clear it, I saw a large student in a white cassock leaning down to retrieve my book from where I had dropped it. I did not recognize the young man, and as he looked considerably larger than myself, I took him to be at least two years my senior. Quite what he was doing in the dormitory of his juniors was beyond me just then, but I looked on with horror as he flipped open the mage’s journal and began thumbing through its pages.

  Only after the look of consternation sprang to his face did I recall that Hero had been unable to see anything on the first page, and it was logical to assume that the same would hold true for anybody else. The young man’s face began to twist towards a kind of angered disappointment, the type that usually makes a person lash out in frustration. My head was still spinning, but as our eyes locked together, I knew I was in very big trouble.

  He held the book out to me, open about half way through, to pages that were blank even to me. “I heard about you,” he said with a peculiar mixture of curiosity and scorn in his voice. “They say you failed the trials and yet still got made Hymanni.” He sneered, at which point my dazed mind recalled that his white cassock, like mine, indicated his status as one of the elite.

  “I can see now that you are mad. Here I thought, seeing you hunched in your corner reading, that you were cheating, that you’d cheated your way to sit among your betters. But now I see that you’re nothing but a mad bastard!”

  As he said it, he took hold of a handful of pages in the mage’s book and ripped them maliciously from the binding.

  I screamed.

  It was not the scream of denial that breaks from the lips of those who see something precious broken before them. It was not the scream of challenge that issues when you mean to fight. No, it was not even the animal, primal scream of a man in a rage, which admittedly I was.

  It was a scream that was seldom heard before and would never be heard again, or at least not for a long, long time.

  It was the scream of a dormant ether awakening.

  I don’t know what happened, and even now, years on from that moment, I don’t understand it fully. My memory is a blur, but I do recall that I did not move a single inch from the spot where I stood after picking myself up.

  But the elder student moved. He lay on the floor halfway across the room, writhing in agony and clutching at his throat. As I stared at him, not understanding what had just transpired, I realized that I held the mage’s book in my right hand and the torn pages in my left.

  I blinked and finally tore my gaze from the young man
where he lay to look at the mage’s book. I flipped open the journal to the place where the torn pages belonged, placing the leaves in tenderly, as though handling a wounded animal. I sucked in a hard breath as the pages seemed to melt back into place, re-fusing themselves to the jagged, torn edges that were bound within the book. It all served to confirm, once again, the magical nature of the mage’s codex.

  Only gradually did my attention return to the situation at hand. As soon as my eyes had left him, my assailant had ceased his thrashing and lay panting hard. When I looked again to meet his eyes, my movements were slow and lethargic, trapped in the aura of the magic book.

  The young man must have seen what happened, for our eyes were locked only a second before he scrambled hastily to his feet and bolted from my room.

  -VI-

  I spent the following few days awaiting punishment for my actions. It was strictly prohibited for students my age to engage their ether in any way whatsoever outside of the oversight of a professor. My assailant was also under a ban restricting his use of ether, such that he might have been on the receiving end of some rather nasty stripes himself if I had chosen to report him. But the University does not expel students, and there is a very good reason for this: The Dominion has never wanted any Synth to exist outside of its direct control, and the University was the most convenient place for ideological brainwashing to ensure all Synths remained in their places—even as they put the Eikos in theirs.

  But it appeared after a few days that there would be no reprisals, and I assumed this was because the older student who’d come looking for trouble was too embarrassed by what had happened to tell anyone. Perhaps he was sensible and knew he’d find himself in as much trouble as I should he speak out. I do not know; I know only that I was not punished, and for that I was more than a little relieved.

  I was unaware of my growing reputation among the students and the faculty at the University in those days, so it is even possible that he did tell someone and I simply went unpunished. Whatever the case may have been, the fact that I had imbibed no hyma in days—not since we’d been tested—should have meant I was not able to do anything to the bully at any rate, for it was only through the juice that Synths gained access to their ether.