Chương 35: 35 loop 1, part 15

I was in two places at once, and then my perspective came loose from my body. It happened slowly, almost reluctantly. It was as if some part of me had grabbed the rest by the eyes and yanked until they came loose. There was no pain, only a slack little release, like a knot working apart but inside my skull. Then, I was floating a few feet above myself, looking down at the body I had apparently been borrowing for eighteen years. From up here, I could see the top of my own head.

The part in my hair, the forward hunch I'd never known I had, my weight settled on one leg. I'd carried that body my whole life and never once looked at it. My body stood in the middle of the Keeper's study, with its wand raised and my eyes gone dark. Staring at nothing. And breathing regularly. An odd thought struck me as I took in everything. I had never once seen the back of my own head. Until now, the back of my head had been someone else's problem.

There it was, though, real and unfortunate, the hair making decisions that had never once been cleared with me. Below me, my body ignored every one of these discoveries. It stood with the wand raised and the eyes gone dark, breathing slow and even, as if none of this concerned it. That was what unsettled me. If the body could keep itself running without me, I wanted to know what else it had only been pretending to need me for. My uncle lay a few feet away on the floor where I'd dropped him, his chest rising slowly.

The golem stood at the center of the room with its chest cavity open. Its ridiculous gold boots somehow gleaming now, despite the thick layer of dust that had been on them before I left the room. The Keeper still drifted in a slow circle around it, her pages parting, closing. She had already started work on the golem. I let myself drift upward, and my vision flooded the space. Everything arrived at once.

The study, the golem workshop, the crystal chamber, the kitchens, the armory, the back corridors, the iron ladder and the drop past it. I wasn't remembering them and I wasn't guessing. I simply knew where each one sat in relation to the others, the whole place laid out in my skull like a map I had never asked for. Oh, I could even see the grand staircase. I saw so much, it felt like it should have burned my eyes from visual overload. But the magic must have protected them. I pushed myself higher.

The study fell away, and then the restricted levels, and the Archives. And I found myself on the first floor, staring at the iron door while Grimm teleported around, replacing books. And then I broke through the top of the school, and MIRKS opened underneath me. All at once. It was as if my eyes had become magnifying lenses, but instead of zooming in on one thing, I had zoomed in on everything. The Green stretched out below, threaded with running paths, benches, old oaks.

The moving dots of people crossing around, playing Magiball. Or just relaxing. The Spire glowed its usual blue, and the dining hall steamed fresh from a well-cooked lunch. The astronomy tower, the colonnades, the herb garden. Even the Crucible all fit within my vision. It was like [Ambient Eye] had taken everything [Wideview] could do and ballooned it out to swallow the entire campus. But as much as the spell was exceeding my exxpectations, I found it's fatal flaw. I couldn't hear a damn thing.

The problem with seeing everything is that everything is interesting. I knew in some distant part of my mind that I'd come up here for a reason. That I had cast this spell for a reason. But it was like I had lost all ability to focus my thoughts, because the school just kept being there, and I could see all of it. A kitchen worker dropped a crate, and oranges spilled out. Two first-years near the herb garden were having an argument so intense that magic started flying.

Someone was napping on my bench, which I respected, but it still felt like something was being stolen from me. I could even make out Malus playing a game of Magiball with his friends. [Wideview] had only ever let me avoid turning my head. This spell let me avoid being anywhere at all. It was, on reflection, the single greatest spell ever cast. I mean, who wouldn't want to see everything? And then I noticed a shadow creeping up on my vision. It wasn't much, but it covered the edges of my view.

I caught the spell's timer and realized what had happened. A full minute had passed, and I had spent the opening of it admiring a man's nap. I mean, could you blame me? There was only one boy I needed to track down, and the sun had already crossed mid-sky. Without a second thought, I drove my vision toward the Crucible. When I arrived, I caught the end of Finn's match. The first time around, Finn had won this one by being Finn.

He'd shielded, took damage, healed himself, and repeated, until the other student ran dry on mana. After winning, he'd stand there looking modest. Practically endured the other man into losing. That was his style. And he made it look easy. Stolen novel; please report. He was still doing most of that with the match. But there was something off about the way he moved—about the way his opponent moved. His opponent was pressing him hard, fire-edged force spells hammering his shields.

Finn was rebuilding them, healing his burns. But his attention kept shifting away from the other fighter. Every few seconds, his head would turn toward the stands, toward the section where I would have been sitting. It almost seemed like he was whispering the words, " Where are you, Laz?" under his breath. I knew he probably hadn't said it. I couldn't hear a thing up here.

For all I knew, he was muttering spellwork, or strategy, or some very reasonable complaint about a best friend who'd vanished for most of the day without explanation. But I knew Finn. Worrying was just what he did, all the time, without being asked. He did it without much concern for how exhausting the rest of us found it—me most of all. He'd have noticed I was gone. He'd have panicked when I never came back to the dorm, or the stands, or anywhere a decent friend would have been.

Finn stood at the center of the platform with his shoulders down and his hair stuck to his forehead, one hand pressed to his side where the healing light had already faded. He looked up at the stands. He'd lost because I wasn't there. That was probably too dramatic. Finn was a grown mage. He could lose a match without my help, and it was a little arrogant of me to assume otherwise. But he kept searching the stands for me; I pulled my focus off him before the guilt could make me useless. I was on a mission.

I had to find out where Kalin was, and if he was going to still summon Eirkedross. I swept the stands, aisles, practice pens, the corridors in and out of the arena. But I couldn't find Kalin. So I had to go looking for the Prime Minister. The guests who had been there Tuesday were gone. The stands looked like any normal day. Full of students and some faculty who used their free period on entertainment. But no minister. His entourage wasn't there. That should have made me feel better, and some part of it did.

There was no Prime Minister in the crowd, and no one named Creed had risen to turn Kalin into a spectacle in front of the school. The straight line I'd been dreading, the one running from this afternoon to a shadow dragon over the sun, didn't seem to exist anymore. So I couldn't explain why the Crucible still felt wrong. But then I saw him: someone who hadn't been there the first time. Minister Theodore Vex was down on the ground level by one of the staff corridors, talking with Deputy Headmaster Bain.

Whatever the two of them were doing, nobody was being arrested. Nobody was being called out. My impulsive decision to intervene this morning had paid off. Minister Creed wasn't going to arrest my uncle—or Kalin. The center of the arena had finally been repaired from Finn's last match. Staff had reset the platform, and the next name went up on the slate. Kalin Tuffet. I froze in the air. That was wrong. The first time through, Kalin had been dragged into this tournament.

It had taken a whole ridiculous chain of events to cause it. He had been in the tournament because of Bain's insistence on punishment. But because I'd put Davos on his face before he could throw a single punch, no punishments had occurred. Davos wasn't on the board, and neither was I. Which left exactly one explanation for Kalin's name on the slate. He had signed himself up for the matches. What was his angle? That made no sense to me.

I was scared for a second that he was still going to summon the dragon when he walked onto the stage. But his other hand was empty. The Lich's Orb wasn't in it. That should have settled it. Without the orb, Eirkedross stayed sealed and the dragon never tore itself loose. Finn wasn't going to end up empty-eyed on the white marble. Corwen wasn't going to fall out of the sky. No healer was going to stand over either of them and say "twelve hours" in the flat voice they kept for the cases they couldn't promise.

It made a clean line of reasoning, something a tired person could grab with both hands and pretend was a rope. He held out his catalyst, and as the judge dropped her hand, dark circles bled out from under his catalyst across the white marble. His opponent, Holt, led with force. Kalin dodged out of the way and let his shadows do the work, and a wolf-shaped darkness peeled off the floor and slid sideways. His opponent wasted three spells, hitting it where it used to be.

I was a little amazed at how swiftly everything had changed. My actions at breakfast yesterday had changed the tournament order, to say the least. And then my spell ran out. The world collapsed inward. The Crucible went first, then the Green, then the Archives, the restricted sections. And now I was crammed back behind my own face, permitted to see exactly as far as the ends of the room. I lurched and caught myself on the edge of the desk before I vomited to the side.

I fought an overwhelming sense of vertigo as I struggled to maintain my balance. I smiled. I had done it. I had prevented the dragon attack. Because Davos hadn't thrown a punch, his grandfather hadn't come to save him. And because his grandfather hadn't come to save him, he wasn't called out in front of the entire school, causing him to crack. I still felt bad that Finn had lost because I wasn't there, but. But. No one was going to die. I let out a loud, boisterous laugh.

I was interrupted from my thoughts by a strange sound.

"What did you see?" It was the Keeper's voice, but wrong at the edges, lower and rougher than I was used to. I turned. The book was gone from the air. The golem stood where it had once been. It's chest cavity closed now. Its head tilted a fraction, a motion too precise for a person and too alive for a statue. The voice was coming out of its mouth. Her spells had worked. Of course they had. I left someone alone with a body for one minute and she'd used it responsibly.

I'd have taken a nap first, just to establish who was in charge of the limbs.

"What did you see?" she asked again.

"My worries about the dragon were overblown," I said.

"Everything's going to be fine."