Shoestring Theory

FIFTEEN

Cyril had not expected Tigris’s excursion into the palace to be quite so fruitful, but the day was turning out full of surprises. It was midday when she returned.

“ I’ve found it!”

She burst into the room, an embodiment of pride. He was sitting on a small armchair reading ahead on their little pirate horror romp. Half of the main cast had died by chapter five , and he was unsure the remaining characters could carry the story. Cyril put the book face down on the arm of the chair, so as to mark the page, and stood.

“What have you found?”

“You said there might be a library. I think I’ve found it! It is more of a warehouse , really. Oh, Cyril, you will die once you see it.”

“A warehouse? I’ve seen nowhere in the palace with that kind of infrastructure. The ballroom and the main hall I’ve already visited.”

“That’s the thing! There is a basement!”

Cyril’s eyes widened. He had not seen a single set of stairs leading down in his entire stay in the palace.

“Are you certain?”

“What? Yes, I’m certain! How can one hallucinate a whole basement ? And it is massive, spanning the area of the entire palace.”

“How did you even find it?”

“Well.” She puffed up her chest. “I am very smart, as you know.”

He nodded. “Indeed.”

“So I went into the gardens and mingled with the other familiars a bit. I figured if there’s a library for mages then there’s bound to be mages in there. I watched until one of them – the fidgety little hare I don’t trust.”

“It is just a hare .”

“Hush. It left the garden. And oh, it thinks it’s so sneaky and clever, but I am the best hunter in court, so of course I did not lose its trail.

“I followed it all the way to a set of stairs by the servant’s quarters leading down. I waited until it came back up and then I made my own descent and found your library. It is criminal that Atticus has not shared it with you yet! You would thrive in it.”

“Well?” He felt a bubble of excitement in his chest, the need for a sense of purpose strong in the forefront of his mind. “Let us go!”

“Yes! There was no one in there when I found it. It’s why I came rushing back. Oh, I am so relieved you were in the room.”

“You would have found me.”

“If you were not here, I would be afraid of interrupting a private moment.”

They left at once. Cyril eager to do something in this palace other than read convoluted novels and gorge himself on local delicacies. He hurried to keep up with Tigris’s feline gait. As they were making their way towards the servant’s quarters Cyril nearly tripped over his own feet.

“How did that go, by the way?”

“It–” Colour rose to his cheeks. “I shall tell you later. It will have been useless if the library ends up being a dead end.”

“Oh, so it went well! What did you do? Did you play the ingenue again?”

“ Again ?” he sputtered.

“Yes, you’re right. That is just your personality. But I have been so bored here, Cyril, give me at least some of the juicy details.”

“I said later!” He must be flushed as an overripe tomato. Tigris merely nodded.

“It is good that you are bashful. It means you truly like him.”

Cyril chewed on his lower lip. “Perhaps…”

It was a long trek to the opposite end of the palace’s ground floor where Tigris had seen the hidden staircase, but Cyril was so excited by the prospect he felt as though he had floated there. Ill-advised as it was to simply plunge into the depths of a darkened set of stairs, neither of them cared about danger or discovery when they began to climb.

“It is perfectly reasonable for one to have stumbled upon this place on their own,” said Tigris.

He gave her a nod. “Quite right.”

“If Atticus wanted to keep you away from somewhere, he would have set boundaries.”

“Indeed.”

“Besides, we are merely trying to help.”

“And you did not see anyone else down in the basement?” As they made their way deeper into the hallways, he lowered his voice to a whisper.

“Not since last time I was here. And that was about a quarter hour ago!”

Bolstered by an unusual burst of confidence, Cyril wove himself a ball of magefire in his hand to light their way.

“How did you even see down here, Tig?”

“I’m a cat.”

“Oh, yes. What was it like ? The library, I mean.”

“We–ll, I don’t know the first thing about magic, but I was impressed. It was like Auntie’s study, but bigger! And there were… tools and artefacts as well. And I believe ingredients for… um…”

“Alchemy?”

“That’s the one! I saw an open book on the table. I jumped up there to try and read it, but I think it went over my head. Talked about… medicinal tools and something about being airborne. It honestly gave me gooseflesh, a bit. Felt like something from a lair.”

“The book?”

“Yes, though… truly? All of it. You mages have a flair for the dramatic. The first time I set foot into Auntie’s tower, I thought her an evil sorceress.”

“Do not discard that theory just yet,” Cyril said with a smirk.

Tigris led him down corridor after corridor of the high-ceilinged catacombic underground of Cretea’s palace. There were some lit sconces here and there, but it was otherwise a frightfully dark place, with a draft coursing through it that chilled his exposed skin and made the hairs on his arms and the back of his neck stand on end.

It reminded Cyril of the dungeons in the lower ground of his own home, a place for cool stone, shadow and castigation that Cyril did not particularly like treading. He was, perhaps, being a bit harsh. An entire underground structure could hardly be made of wood and plush carpeting.

Finally, they stopped in front of an intricate iron door, finely decorated with sigils and runes. A curious piece of architecture. Cyril held the mageflame out in front of him to make out the runes and they were simple warding spells, easy for any mage worth their salt to disable. He was surprised Tigris got past, but he supposed she was a familiar now, immune to triggering traps set for mere mortals.

After plucking the wards undone, he pushed through the door. Tigris slotted her boneless body through the first breach available to walk ahead of him.

She was not exaggerating. It was breathtaking.

The library had been shrouded in darkness, and a single spark of flame would not be sufficient for how cavernous it was. Cyril went around looking for unlit candelabra and sconces and, one by one, conjured flames to bathe the room in light. It was palatial, the size of a grand ballroom, and its walls were crammed to bursting with books and studies and notes and texts.

A smattering of simple, practical wooden tables were scattered across the room. Some contained devices of alchemical import, others held open books and writing instruments: a quill and inks of different colours, from midnight black to apple red and a nub of a pencil that had seen many days of work plotting. Others, still, housed open star charts, maps, an astrolabe and compass.

Barrels and crates were filled with yet more treasures of the magical variety. Gemstones and herbs, ingredients used for spells, rolled up maps of every territory in the known world, vials of potion, some empty and others sizzling with promise.

He felt he could spend hours here. It irked him that he needed to sneak down like a common criminal.

“Are you enjoying your tour?”

Cyril was rudely snapped out of his reverie, and he looked to Tigris, who had scaled one of the rolling ladders attached to the shelves and was scanning through the books.

“If you’re free, I’d love it if you could help me figure out how these are organised.”

Cyril huffed and begrudgingly stalked towards her.

“You knew I’d get distracted! How could I not? Look at this place!”

“Yes, Cy, I’ve seen it. I’ll admit, candlelight brings it to life, but doesn’t it give you the chills? Just a bit?”

“It gives me the thrills !”

She made a face like she’d sucked on a lemon rind. “Augh. Horrific. I hate that you’ve said that.”

Cyril chuckled and climbed up onto the ladder to help her out. She was right, of course. Tigris was usually right. But her bad feelings were surely because of the nasty draft that permeated the entire basement level. A literal chill that still had him goose fleshed.

From the vantage point atop the steps, looking down at the expanse of the library, there was something he couldn’t quite pinpoint that gave it an eerie quality. He couldn’t explain why, but he had an incredibly strong gut feeling that this place ought to be teeming with cobwebs, despite it being clearly frequently used and thus regularly cleaned. It just felt like somewhere household spiders would take hold.

But he was being mean. His own quarters looked like a war zone, he could hardly judge another man’s place of study.

He turned, finally, to the books, reading out the titles. A few were in foreign languages he didn’t speak (though he was sure Tigris, who had been schooled in every language under the sun since birth, could translate for him easily), but the gist of this particular shelf was clear.

“These are all on illusionism,” he said.

“Well, I got that ,” she huffed. “I can read. It’s just I don’t know where curse breaking falls in your pantheon of schools of magic.”

“It depends on the curse. The closest I can think of that the rings would be, perhaps… some form of prolonged enchantment. But it does not affect our minds. They are enchanted items , which is a subset all in itself.”

“You’ve no idea where to start looking,” she surmised.

“I have some idea.”

He hopped down from the ladder and started making turns about the room, slowly, looking over each shelf to see if anything drew him in. It felt like a very erratic way of searching. They might need hours to scour the entire library and he did not know how much time he had.

“I am going to look for books on curses,” Tigris announced.

He nodded. “Very well. I will… I will look .”

Cyril spun his way around the myriad shelves, dizzying himself in the process. He could not figure out how they were arranged. Even the Academy , rife with unruly adolescents who couldn’t put a thing back into its rightful place if they were paid to do so, had a better sorting system than this.

He thought about coming clean to Atticus. Asking for his help. But the thought of revealing, at once, that he was a fifty-year-old man and also already married discouraged him instantly.

Finally, he decided to just peruse the tables. The books and charts were wide open there, he could sample a piece of what the king’s mages were working on and perhaps he would get lucky in the process. He was also just curious.

He walked to them slowly, one by one. The first table he looked at held a map of the two territories: Farsala and Cretea. Next to it, there was a quill still in its inkwell, as though the map were going to be scribbled upon soon.

The second table he found held a complex series of beakers and distilling contraptions. There was a large, upside-down glass vial filling with a gas emanating from a potion underneath it. Cyril was no expert alchemist, but he could probably figure out what was going on with a bit more context. For now, it seemed an interesting experiment.

Finally, table three stopped him dead in his tracks. There were more areas to peruse in the library, many more, but looking down at this one parched his throat and rendered him immobile. Open upon it was, likely, the book on alchemy Tigris had mentioned. She could not understand it, but it was a book about magic and Cyril read books about magic as a job .

Once, when he was but a small, waifish eight-year-old, a distracted servant in the palace, while attending to their cleaning duties – chiefly polishing the floor – had, in their rapt distraction, quite literally pulled a rug from underneath where he was standing. He did not weigh very much, so he was instantly sent flying in a graceless arc that finished with his face making direct impact on the floor. He broke his nose and Heléne had to reset it with magic through his shaking, overwhelmed tears.

He was experiencing this exact sensation again, down to the broken bone in his nose, but now it was all playing out in the theatre of the mind, where he was actor and spectator, chained to his seat. It was so visceral he could smell the tang of blood filling up his respiratory tracts and leaking into his throat.

“Ti–g,” he called for her in a small, shrill voice.

To her credit, she was at his side immediately, ears perked on the highest of alerts.

“What? What’s happened?”

Cyril took a deep breath and cleared the memory of the headache and the stench of drying blood from his mind. He pointed down at the book.

“I am going to explain to you what’s in this, and what I think it implies,” he said very slowly, chewing his words. “And you, in your infinite enthusiasm, are going to offer up an alternative, less incriminating explanation.”

Tigris said nothing, but she nodded. He looked down at the pages he’d been staring at and flipping through for what seemed like hours now.

“So,” he began. “This is, indeed, a book on alchemy. But it also draws quite a bit from medicinal magic and surgery. It speaks of poisons and their antidotes and, this particular page, has a full description of one of the rarer breeds of poisons an alchemist can make. It is undetectable within a person’s pattern because it is indistinguishable from a… wasting disease.” He paused to swallow convulsively.

“ However , this brew can be spotted under autopsy. By examining the victim’s blood system, the lining of their stomach, an experienced surgeon can pinpoint the cause of death, hidden though it was, as not being borne of natural disease.

“That is where this book .” Cyril pointed at a smaller tome which had been closed, but he had leafed through ravenously, to the right of the alchemy book. It had the tell-tale stains of ink in its margins that indicated it was filled with notes. “Comes in.

“This is another alchemical piece, much more specific than this comprehensive list of potions. It is a guide on how to sublimate potions so they are… airborne. Ingested via inhalation. It makes them less potent: for example, the wasting disease would take hold in a few weeks, not days, but it would make it essentially indistinguishable from a real illness. The perfect concoction.

“…What do you make of this, Tigris?”

Tigris looked at him in silent contemplation for a long, excruciating while, and then she let out a small breath, like a disappointed tutor.

“Sounds like a couple of bumbling oafs failed to solve my murder.”

“Gods fucking damn it, Tig.”

She hopped up onto the table and looked at the books laid out, as though she could confirm it for herself.

“I knew it! I did not like the man the moment I laid eyes on him.”

“Wh– you did not know !” he scoffed.

“I knew I did not trust him as far as I could throw him. My intuition is never wrong.”

“You– you tried to set me up with him!”

“We have to go back now, do we not?” she said, ostensibly ignoring him.

“Back… to Farsala?”

“Yes! I do not want you around a killer!”

“To be fair, he has not done anything yet.”

“Oh? You think this is his first crime? The man with the dark evil lair?”

“It could be… it could be one of his mages has gone rogue.” Tigris gave him a look like he was insane. He felt insane for even entertaining the idea. It was ludicrous. He just hated to have been so wrong .

“Still… your brother still wants my head on a platter.”

“We go to Auntie! Sneak into the tower, she will hide us. Gods, Cyril, you are so bad at thinking on your feet.”

“I do feel I need to sit down…” he said faintly.

“I know where Atticus keeps his horses. We will escape immediately; he will not know we are gone till we’re far beyond his borders.”

“You think we can make it?”

“Of course! This palace is mostly empty, I’ll bet we won’t run into a single servant on our way to the stables.”

Cyril nodded, feeling suddenly emboldened. “Then I shall… I shall put these back to how they were.”

He started fussing around with the books, hands shaking in equal parts fear and adrenaline at the discovery.

Tigris, seeming to have remembered something important, cast him a rueful look.

“I’m sorry, Cyril.”

He barely glanced at her, but raised a brow. “Sorry? Whatever for?”

“He… you really liked him, didn’t you? I am not relishing this revelation. Well, I am a bit, but not because your relationship has been ruined!”

“There was no relationship. I… was taken by him, but that was the extent of it.”

“Truly?”

“Yes, I am serious. I don’t think I was ever in love with Atticus.”

He did not hear the solid clicking of boots at the doorway until it was far too late. The voice that followed, measured and soothing as ever, though, he heard icy clear.

“Oh, Cyril. That really hurts my feelings.”