Chapter 58 – Tests

There were arcane devices and spell engines all around the Divine Monument. Some were clearly for taking mana flow measurements, and others measuring various types of energy. Still others, Mirian had no idea. They had glass bulbs with strange colored fluids, twisted brass pipes snaking all over, and metallic protrusions. The glyph sequences were unfamiliar, and the devices looked hideously complex.

High Wizard Ferrandus directed Mirian to a simple chair that had been set up next to another of the devices. This one had intimidating looking silver spikes, linked by rubber tubes that led to several glass vials full of an angry looking crimson liquid.

“What… does it do?” Mirian asked warily.

“We feed mana into the Monument, then look for reactions or resonance from your aura,” Professor Torres said. “You’ll feel strange. Shouldn’t hurt.”

There were more tests after that. At one point they used a drop of her blood in another machine. She kept feeling the prickling feeling of magic running over her aura. As the wizards turned on spell engines, glyphs on the Divine Monument would light up, then fade. She watched as they cast divination spells she’d never seen before. Mirian didn’t know what any of it meant.

As the tests progressed, Ferrandus was getting increasingly agitated. The wizards with him shared glancing with each other, perhaps anticipating what these results would mean for them later.

On the fifth device they used, Mirian began to wonder if her soul was being affected. It was difficult to focus in on it, since it felt like her aura was being scraped at, but it seemed the devices only interacted with her aura. She searched for that strange hole in her soul. It was still there, unmoving. If the Divine Monument was interacting with her, it was in some way that neither she nor the Academy’s best arcanists could detect.

As they wrapped up the last test, Ferrandus was grinding his teeth. He approached Jei and began talking to her in angry whispers, though not so quietly that Mirian couldn’t hear him. “Worthless, Song. We have introduced this liability—for nothing!”

Jei kept her composure. “We haven’t tried everything. Besides, secrecy does not matter anymore. Our enemies know, and therefore we should be more generous with our allies. Selkus Viridian—”

“—is not as smart as he thinks he is,” snapped Ferrandus. “And also a liability. Do you know what our potential donors were concerned about, last banquet? The Palamas were worried about him, specifically. The Bardas and Allards discussed ‘trends of worrisome research in radical ecology.’ We probably missed out on a pile of doubloons because Luspire doesn’t want to—hells, why am I bothering to rehash this? No, this isn’t a problem of needing more minds. We tried growing plants next to the Monument. Selkus would simply say we didn’t try growing enough! The brightest minds in the Academy are already here. It is not a problem to be solved by quantity. Get her out of here. I need time to think.”

Ferrandus took a position over on the other side of the room. Torres and the other arcanists stayed behind to work with the devices, though what they were doing was still beyond Mirian. Jei gestured for her to follow, and they left. She was apparently used to being dressed down by Ferrandus.

“You can see why I left my homeland,” Jei said as they walked. “After seeing it, I have spent a long time contemplating the nature of reality.”

“Yeah,” said Mirian, because she couldn’t think of anything else to say. In another life, she would have been perfectly content dedicating herself to studying it. As it was, she doubted she had anything to contribute. Still, it was good to know what it was the Akanans were after. Now she just needed to figure out what they thought it did.

As they made their way up the spiral stair, she said, “Have they figured out how to open the stone doors? There’s a faster way down if they can.”

“No,” Jei said. “Ferrandus called it a distraction. Here,” she said, handing Mirian a scroll. “The mathematical formulas you need to break the spy’s cipher. Memorize them.”

Mirian took it and placed it in her bag as they continued back up. For a while, they walked in silence. Then Mirian said, “What’s the other way in? The one through the Griffin Hall passage?”

If Jei was surprised Mirian knew about that, she hid it well. “I will show you.”

They started up the ramps, while Mirian debated whether or not to tell Jei the other revelation she’d had. As they reached the storage room, she blurted out, “I’ve seen a place that looks the same as the Divine Monument. I dreamed it.”

“Interesting,” Jei said.

Mirian told her about it: about the shifting rooms that seemed to phase in and out of existence as she walked, about the strange materials it was made of—and of course, of the colossal thing on the throne, gaping wounds all over its body. “I still don’t know what it means,” she added. “It felt… real. Even when I woke.”

“It sounds like the descriptions the archivists found of the Mausoleum of Ominian.”

A shiver ran down Mirian’s spine. “But that was destroyed. I mean, that was part of that whole thing with the end of the Persamian Triarchy. There was that crazy priest who thought they needed to sacrifice a bunch of people, and then—look, I didn’t pay great attention in history class so I don’t remember the details, but even I remember that temple was destroyed. Along with most of the city, right? It’s one of the best documented divine interventions. My priest back home talked about it too.”

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