My Path to Magic (44 page)

By the way, the growing of that plant without a license was punishable by three years in prison.

Mrs. Hemul became very pale.  "Who could have done..."

"I do not know, but I've got one person in mind, who has some explaining to do.  Come on!"

The rapid response team was still responding.  I suspected that the "cleaners" went to Clarence to get his car (the one that Alfred and I had dismantled) and now they were giving him a "concert".  Poor people of Mihandrov!

"But who could..."  Mrs. Hemul was stuck.

The white cannot tolerate stress well, and they take a long time to respond to threats.  They try to understand the reasons, but the dark do not need reasoning; they just get hit in the face and move on.

"There is only one employee at the school who has worked here for over ten years.  I'm not saying he's guilty; I mean he should give us an account of his today's activities."

Some understanding glimmered in the eyes of the headmistress.

Five minutes later we stood before the assistant principal's office.  I knocked, pulled the handle—it was locked.

"Perhaps he is gone," Mrs. Hemul suggested.

I looked through the keyhole—the key was inserted from the inside!  Indeed he left!

"Step aside!" I was not going to ask permission.

My kick broke off the lock along with part of the doorpost (I was not that strong, it was just a good curse), and we entered.  Quite a large room: two tables, bookcases, chairs and a sofa, comfortable and modest, unlike our dean's office or Satal's.  A completely dead Mr. Fox (face up) and Petros (in an unknown condition—face planted) lay on the worn carpet in the center of the room.  I didn't think that my talk with Fox would turn out like that.

"Oh my lord!" Mrs. Hemul rushed to the child first.  "How do you feel, my dear?"

The kid was breathing—that was a good sign.  While she lamented, professionally checking his pulse and pupils, I feverishly looked around the room for the cause of death.  No bloody knife, no empty glasses, no smoking censers could be seen, but there was surely something that killed the big guy and nearly killed the boy!  Some black fragments crunched under my foot—that was my ward-off amulet.  The realization dawned on me like lightning.

"It's magic!  Mr. Fox has a spell on him.  Find out which ritual he had used!"

Mrs. Hemul indignantly shook her head.  "Fox was a white mage!"

"Was" was the appropriate word choice.

"I do not care who he was!  Look for it, or let me do it."

"You are mistaken," she murmured through her tears, but the brooch on her jacket began to glow, "you are deeply mistaken.  You just cannot imagine how wrong your idea of white magic is..."

Sergeant Claymore (no, he didn't break in - it would be unprofessional) cautiously peered through the door.  Ensuring that there was no need to fight anyone right now, he came in, forcing me to make room for him.  He nodded to Fox: "Your work?"

"No, he did it himself.  Have you searched the kitchen?"

He chuckled.  "It's not just a kitchen, it's a necromancer's dream—one could murder a whole army.  We'll have to throw out all the contents and re-floor the room.  As I see, the suspect kicked the bucket?"

"To hell with him!" I did not care that we had spoiled Artrom's crime statistics.

"This face looks familiar," the "cleaner" said thoughtfully, "though not from that angle."

Surely Fox developed his skills somewhere.  I shrugged and attempted to leave the room.

"I'll be waiting for you at the office at nineteen hundred," the sergeant said to my back.

I nodded silently and went off to look for Lyuchik.

The square in front of the main entrance was crowded with frightened white kids.  The teachers tried to calm the pupils, the staff and cooks were whispering—huddling at the fountain—and Gorchik grimly guarded them all.  Lyuchik sat next to him on a bench with a very serious look, and I could see that he was there for a reason.

On seeing me, people became agitated.

"Stay still!" Gorchik barked.

"He says please to stay where you are, for the sake of your safety," my brother perked up.

Ah, he had latched onto the "cleaner" as an interpreter!  Gorchik looked at me with grim doom; I smiled back without any sympathy.

I had some business to Lyuchik.

"Hey, they aren't serving lunch today.  Let's go find something to eat in town?"

"Can we take Petros?"

At that moment, I realized that the kids should not know the details.  "He will be fine; Mrs. Hemul is with him now."

The kids put their necks out to listen to our talk; someone could not resist saying, "What happened?  What's going on?"

I cleared my throat diplomatically.  "I cannot violate the confidentiality of the investigation.  You'd better direct your questions to Sergeant Claymore; he is the boss.  I am sure he wouldn't mind holding a press conference."  I knew that one mention of the press conference would stall his brains.  "I can only say that the danger is over, but the school is poised for change."

"We've been experiencing an entire year of 'changes', " one of the teachers muttered.

"You are mistaken;
nothing
has changed since the commission's work.  But there will be changes now, and I'm sure, for the better."

That was it.  If they had any brains, they would understand the hint, and if not, it would be better for them to keep the state of blissful ignorance.

Lyuchik didn't go with me; he decided to stay with the white to support them morally.  I made sure the "cleaners" understood the simple idea that Lyuchik was my brother and then portrayed myself as a battle-worn warrior and went off.  I could no longer look at the white and the "cleaners" together!  I came back to the garage and worked on the famous Mihandrov car until evening.  I enjoyed the work as a cat delights in valerian, and I was late for a meeting with Claymore by half an hour.

By the time I arrived, the atmosphere at NZAMIPS had reached a fever pitch.  Lieutenant Clarence was nowhere to be seen: he had either fled or gone to work with the townsfolk.  It was twilight already: they could kill me and secretly throw in the lake.

"So, the press conference, you said?" the sergeant roared in place of a greeting.

It was my turn to stand awkwardly and look askance—I wasn't going to fight with him over nothing!

"I did not want to bypass the senior officer."

He pondered it and decided to forgive me.  "Judging by the imprint of the aura, that corpse was Fox's work," the sergeant magnanimously told me.  "Why we don't record imprints of the white magicians, too?!"

He was very cheerful; hence, they found a reason to flee from here.

"It's unfair," I agreed.

"Let's drink to this!"

Bottles of fresh beer and a bag of lovingly-packed snacks appeared from under the table, and my account of events gradually melded into the booze on the occasion of the successful completion of the case.  It was the first time I shared a table with a company of combat mages, and their nasty reputation was not confirmed.  Normal men, not any worse than Quarters!  We knocked back, sang a few songs from the army's repertoire; Rispin told a few fresh anecdotes, Gorchik started to squint with both eyes, the beer was over, and we parted peacefully.  They went to their hotel, and I - to Mrs. Parker's mansion.  The naive sergeant could afford to sleep tight, but I had to get up at dawn tomorrow: a brain-twisting intrigue, spun by me with an eye on the coordinator, entered its final stage.

* * *

An encoded telegram bearing the name of Satal came at the last moment; the senior coordinator intended to leave Redstone for the capital and was nervous and swore all morning.  Sparing the nerves of his subordinates, Captain Baer personally delivered the telegram to the boss—a half-sheet of text; obviously, the sender didn't try to save money on the letters.  As soon as the coordinator read it through, his face brightened, and lips twisted in an arrogant smirk.

"That's another story!  A priest that was making human sacrifices got caught and decimated in Mihandrov.  The central database identified him as Sigismund Salaris, an artisan; he was wanted for fifteen years."

The captain gasped: "The same Salaris?  Nintark's confessor?"

"Yeah," Satal good-naturedly allowed his subordinate to read the telegram.  "By the way, your Larkes swore that he saw him dead."

"Why is he
mine
?" Locomotive was offended.

"He ruled here all this time, the talentless parasite let business slide!" the dark mage became a bit gloomy.  "They will say that it's Axel who caught the artisan."

"Not a big deal," Locomotive comforted his boss, "you have caught two artisans."

"True, but no one believes that they were the artisans," Satal objected reasonably.  "However, I am sure that the center of their interest is not Polisant.  The death of the living legend of the cult will make them more active," the senior coordinator rubbed his palms in anticipation, "now they'll come to us in flocks!"

Locomotive pictured artisans thronging to Redstone and shivered.  God save us, no!

Chapter 35

The rambling holidays were finally over; my ill-fated trip had come to an end.  I could stay for a couple more days (nobody would kill me for that), but then I would have to attend the funeral of Mr. Fox.  That was Mrs. Hemul's idea—the deceased assistant principal should not remain in the memory of the children as an evil person.

"Anyway, he was their teacher; they learned a lot from him.  You cannot say to a child, 'Remember this and do not remember that.'  The children must realize the ambiguity of his personality themselves, separate in their minds the right and the wrong.  I know you see this as over-complacency, but his death closes all accounts, and we need forgiveness for ourselves in order to live on."

Well, maybe for the white it is so, but I could not picture myself grieving about artisans—even after a liter of beer.

And yet, Mrs. Hemul wanted to know the results of the investigation, because the achievement of clarity is a fundamental feature of the white; they physically cannot disregard or forget something important.  The wise directrix chose the easiest way to reach her goal; she invited all interested parties to dinner at that same pub, at her own expense.  Claymore's eagles came in full strength.  I did not want to go, honestly; I was too proud for that.  But I was asked by Clarence to be there.  Max came with me: I had already introduced it to the "cleaners", and an extra set of teeth during the meeting would be helpful.

The sergeant expounded readily and in detail the results of the investigation, half of which was done by someone else.  The main achievement of the "cleaner" was identification of Fox—the nice nelly—which provided an objective basis for my fanatical ravings about the artisans (I was very grateful to him for that).  "By joining the artisans' cult, he took the alias Sigismund Salaris, under which he became famous, in some way.  He was the mastermind behind the branch of the cult that decided to openly challenge the authorities and establish a community in Nintark.  Of course, later he was considered dead and was searched for without passion, but all the time he was hiding here."

Mrs. Hemul took the news of the artisans with amazing composure, having practiced for years approaching horrific news with a stone face.  I wondered what she was before she came to Mihandrov.

"I confess I always perceived the artisans as mentally ill, but now I see that my ideas were too primitive.  Fox talked sensibly and consistently, but he was able to do absolutely unthinkable things at the same time.  And most importantly: why?  For what purpose?"

" 'Why' is clear," I could not refrain, "he wanted to protect bigger things by sacrificing the smaller ones, so to speak."

"To protect them from whom?"

I had my thoughts on this topic, though to voice them in their entirety meant to reveal my sources.  Did I need it?  In abbreviated form, my speculation looked like this:  "Do you know that Petros' father - Fox's relative - was killed during an armed bank robbery?"

Clarence slightly frowned.

"Yeah, yeah, that same robbery!  Three months before the birth of his first and last child, among other things.  The first victim had gone missing a few days after the incident.  You can rummage through the archives—a lot of strange things happened at that time.  I do not know what Fox was trying to fight off with that shield, but he obviously liked the effect and, grieving and weeping, began to let his pupils die under the knife.  Of course, he selected those whose death would affect as few people as possible.  Orphans, in short."

The sergeant nodded: "A typical artisan's logic."

"But the children!  Why did he try to poison them?"

"That is clear, too.  What the otherworldly phenomenon was Fox knew well, I suppose, from his experience in Nintark.  He lost control of the situation: his followers were killing themselves, but the shield did not hold for long, human sacrifices were required more and more frequently, but the school's leadership had changed, control had tightened.  The white tolerate stress poorly!  Eventually I showed up and started spoiling his flock, planting a bit of common sense into the children, and I helped Petros in a way he could not.  Where you saw hope, he saw only depravity and degradation.  Mourning and weeping again, he decided to save everyone from a collision with the real world—to put them to sleep like terminally ill pets, purely out of compassion."

"All of them come to this, sooner or later," Claymore growled.  "This is the only logical conclusion of their philosophy."

"You'd better cheer up," I suggested, "that everything ended so well."

"Well?" the directrix did not understand.

"Uh-huh.  The children are alive, and Fox's suffering has ended.  Just think what would have happened if he had been jailed!"

"Execution by burning has not been abolished yet," Gorchik commented to the point.

"A scandal will start again," Mrs. Hemul sighed.

"It's in your favor!  The situation is critical: if NZAMIPS does not send a regular team to Mihandrov, all of Fox's fears will be realized.  In addition, we must knock some sense into the heads of the townsfolk.  You need help of empaths and additional funding, but under the current circumstances you will get these either after a massacre or in the wake of a public scandal.  In your shoes, I would cooperate with the town authorities and pursue a preemptive tactic.  The best treatment is prevention!"