The Flaw in All Magic (Magebreakers Book 1) Read online

  Greymond was silent for a moment—confirming his sincerity with her divinations again, or perhaps just weighing the decision. But she would tell him. She wouldn’t have asked him here otherwise. He expected it would be a poorly formulated spell for an artifice project or the like, something the University administration needed fixed quickly and quietly. Perhaps something for the airship in drydock at the waterfront—it was meant to launch the day after next, the first ancryst-powered flying machine, and they wouldn’t want word of any problems getting out now.

  But what Greymond said next wasn’t what he expected at all.

  “A student was killed on campus last night, Mister Carver.”

  Chapter Two

  _____

  “WHAT?” TANE SHOOK his head. I can’t have heard that right. “Are you telling me someone was murdered?”

  “I am,” Greymond confirmed.

  “And you sent for me? Why not bring in the bluecaps?”

  “Stooketon Yard is being notified, of course, but the chancellor wants to have this situation well in hand before we bring in the constabulary. The University’s reputation must be considered, after all. To that end, there is a matter I believe you can help with. Let me explain.”

  “Please,” said Tane. A murder, and they need me for some reason. This could be the chance I’ve been waiting for. It felt ghoulish to be excited about it, but helping here could get him a foot in the door with the University administration. They might actually listen to him this time.

  “Shortly after midnight last night, someone accessed the primary artifice workshop. There were guards in the building, but they saw no one in the halls at any point. A… a student”—Greymond’s eyes flicked away from his there, for an instant—“was using the workshop, considerably past the hours she was scheduled to be there. She was involved in the airship project, but those spell diagrams had already been submitted and approved. Still, she may have hoped to fit in some last-minute change before the final inscription of the glyphs this morning. The guards heard her screaming, but by the time they arrived, she was dead. Spellfire burns all across her face and chest.”

  Tane winced. “That’s awful.” Spellfire burned hotter than molten metal. The only thing worse was the fire of a true dragon—at least according to records from before the fall of the Estian Empire, when such creatures still lived.

  “It was… difficult to look at,” Greymond said, and by the look on her face, she was seeing it again now. She didn’t say anything for a moment, and then, “Nothing was stolen from the workshop, so we must assume murder was the intent. The building was quickly closed, and a second student was apprehended, hiding in the graduate workshop down the hall. Our only suspect, but a likely one. He was seen arguing with the victim earlier that day. He claims he was meeting someone in the building, but he won’t provide a name, and my divinations say he is lying.”

  “Sounds like—”

  “If the matter was already solved, Mister Carver, I would not have sent for you. Will you let me finish?”

  Tane almost laughed at that. When has she ever let anyone finish? But he leaned back in his seat and motioned for her to continue.

  “The issue is this: our suspect should not have been able to enter the primary workshop at all, and certainly not without triggering an alarm. The wards and detection spells on that room should only allow University staff, faculty, and students with properly glyphed badges—those involved with the rather privileged spellwork being done within. And the constabulary, of course.” All campus wards had an exemption for the bluecaps, in case of emergency. “As I said, the victim was one of Dean Brassforge’s apprentices, assisting with the airship project. The suspect had no such access, nor did we find a stolen badge anywhere on him. We’ve accounted for all of the badges with access among faculty, students, and guard. None seem to be missing.”

  There it was. The reason she’d asked him here. Wards could be restricted in near limitless ways: by specific name or title or physical feature, by badge or passphrase, by any number of arbitrary criteria or simply by the caster’s whim. But they all shared the same ultimate purpose, which was to keep people out. When they didn’t, it was almost always because of careless magecraft.

  And finding careless magecraft was Tane’s specialty. “You want me to see if I can find a flaw that might have let him in.”

  “Precisely,” said Greymond. “Either he found a way to exploit our wards, or someone else with access sneaked by the guards. We need to know which, at the very least. The wards have been recalibrated to allow only constables, high-level faculty, and University Guard for the time being. With the airship so close to completion… Lady Abena has invested a great deal into the project, and we cannot afford a lapse in security only days before the launch ceremony. Chancellor Nieris is eager to resolve the matter before then. He has charged me with overseeing the investigation.”

  Hoping she can divine an answer before they have bluecaps crawling over the campus, no doubt. Tane understood the stakes now. It was common knowledge that the Protector of the Realm had put much of her political capital into the airship project. She’d given a number of speeches in the Senate of Houses to that effect, touting the age of peace and prosperity that would result from improved trade and travel between the Audland Protectorate and the nations of continental Calene—relations that had been strained since the Mage War had dissolved the Estian Empire into squabbling factions centuries ago. And the University couldn’t afford to displease the Lady Protector if they wanted to maintain their operating budget.

  If Tane proved himself useful here, it could change everything. It might get me out of double-checking the glyphs on fenced artifacts just to pay rent, at least.

  But there was something else. Greymond wasn’t using names, and the way she’d avoided his eyes for a moment there… “Wait,” he said. “This woman, the victim—if she was on the airship project, or any project in that room, for that matter, she must be a graduate student.” Which meant she might have been a classmate of his. And one name came to mind above all others, one woman who would easily have qualified for such a prestigious apprenticeship. Not her. Please. “Do I… did I know her?”

  Greymond sighed, and Tane’s heart fell into his feet. “I should have known it wouldn’t take you long. I’m afraid so.”

  No. He clutched the arms of his chair, and waited.

  “I’m sorry, Tane. It was Allaea Hesliar.”

  A wave of relief swept over him, and he felt awful for it. Allaea had been a friend, once—an elven woman with a sharp tongue and a passion for ancryst machines. She deserved better. But it’s not Indree.

  And then the full weight of it hit him. Memories of long nights spent studying, the three of them trading notes and ideas and stupid inside jokes. Allaea had been kind, and clever, and never shy about letting him know he was being an ass—and now she was dead. Burned alive in the worst way imaginable. He hadn’t seen her for two years, but it hurt, even so. Spellfire, Indree must be devastated. He’d only known Allaea through her, and those two had been inseparable friends long before he’d met them. He swallowed against the lump rising in his throat. “Does Ree know?”

  “I can’t say. Miss Lovial took her considerable talents elsewhere after graduation. But if this is too difficult for you…”

  “No. I want to help.” He didn’t imagine Allaea had thought very highly of him after the way he’d left the University—or the way he’d left things with Indree—but he owed her this much.

  “I hoped you would.” Greymond shuffled through the papers on her desk and slid several towards him. “These are the diagrams for the wards on the workshop, and the detection spells. I… when I learned who she was, I thought of you, and that dissertation of yours. You always were the best at finding the cracks in whatever spell I put in front of you.”

  Tane flipped the spell diagrams around to face him and looked them over. Glyphs detailing the exact nature of the spell, directions for placement. A few things stood ou
t to him as worth checking into, but they might have been incidental. There were always flaws and oversights. Casting a spell meant making a request of the Astra, the plane of magical energy that stood behind the physical world. And that energy always did exactly what it was told, for better or worse. A misused word or careless sentence structure could have disastrous effect. It was very much like all the old stories of magical wish-granting spirits—if there was the slightest way for the spirit to misinterpret the wish, it always did.

  That was the essence of the dissertation he’d been expelled for: how dangerous spells could be when cast carelessly, especially when so many in the Protectorate relied on artifacts and machines created by mages. How even the non-magically gifted should be allowed to enroll at the University to learn how the magic they relied upon worked, how to check it for errors. How it was ludicrous to expect reliability from a spell that had only ever been proofed by the caster. And the centerpiece of the essay had been the fact that Tane had spent near four years as a student of magic at the University without any magic of his own, outsmarting every detection spell and excelling above the true mages in most of his classes.

  The revelation had not been well received. Not even by the professor he’d most hoped would support him.

  That still rankled, more than a bit. “If I was the best, why—”

  “You think I should have stood up for you with the chancellor? After what you did?” Greymond narrowed her eyes, and a suggestion of anger heated her careful, professional tone. “Never mind how much you humiliated the University, did you ever think for a moment how humiliating it was for me? The Dean of Divination fooled for four years by her favorite student? If you’d just come to me with the truth at any point, I might have…” She stopped herself, took a long breath. “It doesn’t matter now. We aren’t going to do this. Just look at the spells.”

  She’s right. Don’t ruin this chance. “It’s going to take longer than a few minutes to study these,” said Tane. “I’ll have to bring them back to my office.” By which he meant the narrow brick-front single room he rented in Porthaven by the docks.

  “Not the originals. I will have copies sent to your address.”

  “Fine. 17 Tilford Street, in Porthaven. I’ll also need—”

  “No. Under no circumstances may you enter the workshop. We can’t have anyone interfering with evidence before the constabulary investigates, and your involvement is not something I want widely known. The spells were cast from those diagrams, and I promise you they match perfectly. That should be enough.”

  Disappointing, but Tane had expected that. “Fine. Then I need to know a few things. You’ve checked the glyphs for wear?” Magic always needed specific instruction. Without a mage’s active concentration, long term spells used engraved glyphs of the lingua magica to direct their energy.

  “Of course. They were redrawn last month, and have been double and triple checked against the diagrams. A perfect match, as I said.”

  “No sign of Astral tampering?” Tracing a spell’s Astral link and deconstructing it was extremely difficult for even the most skilled diviners, and it took a great deal of time and effort, but it was possible.

  “None. It would have set off a number of detections.”

  “Were the gems replaced recently?” All spells needed a source of Astral energy. Absent a mage, most used gems or crystals charged in advance, linked to the spell glyphs with magically conductive copper. That was the other, slower way to beat a ward—simply waiting for the power to fail.

  “A week ago, and plenty of energy left in them. We hardly need you to point out the obvious, Mister Carver.”

  “And your divinations? Did you find anything I should know?”

  “Very little, sadly. I was able to witness Miss Hesliar’s final moments through the Astra, but they didn’t offer a great deal of guidance.”

  “Show me.”

  Greymond frowned. “Are you sure? It isn’t a pleasant memory, and I know you were close.”

  He wasn’t sure at all, but if there was any chance that he might see something she hadn’t… “Do it.”

  Greymond’s eyes focused somewhere behind his head, and pressure built in his ears for a moment before the sending came to him, halfway between a memory and a waking dream.

  For some reason he’d expected to see Allaea, but instead he was looking through her eyes, at an aisle of shelves stacked with artifice tools and materials. The workshop. She was moving quickly, running from something. He could hear her breath, heavy and frightened. There were footsteps behind her, and a male voice, chanting in the lingua magica. She stumbled, put out a hand, knocked several bits of metal from a shelf. Until then there had been a part of Tane that didn’t believe it, but he knew her by that hand—long, delicate elven fingers callused and scarred from tinkering with ancryst machines. She looked over her shoulder, caught a brief, blurred glimpse of a dark figure rounding the corner, wearing a masked cowl like an executioner’s hood. The figure reached out toward her.

  Allaea screamed as her vision dissolved into silver flame.

  Tane’s ears popped as the sending faded. He took a shaky breath, and tried to focus on the facts instead of the pain in that scream. “Not… not much there, with the mask.” That was unfortunate but not uncommon—when a diviner could call up the last memories of the dead, smart murderers covered their faces.

  “As I said.”

  “What about this suspect the guards found, then? He’d know better than anyone how he beat the wards. If he did. You say your spell caught him in a lie, but that could mean a lot of things. You know as well as anyone that truth-spells aren’t perfect. They can be misled.” Tane himself was living proof of that. All a truth-spell did was reach through the Astra to read a subject’s mental and emotional state, both of which could be controlled. Or the opposite—agitation could make true statements look false to a spell. “If he’d really planned to kill someone, I’d expect him to have invented a better story.”

  “A fair point,” said Greymond. “But added to the rest of it, the lie certainly doesn’t speak to his innocence.”

  “Who is he? Anyone I know?”

  “The same year as you, but beyond that, I’m not sure. Kivit Thrung.”

  “I’ve met him.” A goblin student, concentrating in artifice like Allaea. He’d always been over-competitive in class. Goblins weren’t exactly highly respected as mages—he’d always had to prove he deserved to be there. Tane knew how that felt. “Things can change in two years, but… he always seemed too nervous to hurt anyone. Could—”

  “Yes, I thought you might want to talk to him.” Greymond answered the unasked question with a nod. “That I can arrange. He is just across the hall—I was questioning him before you arrived. As I said, my divinations caught him in a lie, but he refuses to explain further. Given your history, you might get something out of him that I couldn’t.”

  “As a fellow liar, you mean?” Tane said, quirking an eyebrow.

  “Essentially, yes. You mimicked divination in my class for years—in the absence of magic, I must assume you did so by reading behavior. That may prove useful. Come.” Greymond stood, and led him out of the office.

  Across the hall and a short distance down, the two guards Tane had passed on the way were still standing at attention. Greymond approached them.

  “Let us in,” she said, and the half-orc woman pushed open the door, held it, and followed them in. Her partner remained outside to watch the hall.

  Inside, a scrawny goblin man with grey-green skin sat hunched over the table, the tip of his long nose pressed flat against the wood. A pair of round spectacles sat low on his face, threatening to fall off at any moment. He didn’t look up. “I already told you I didn’t do it!” he said in a high, nasally voice.

  Tane glanced at Dean Greymond, who gave him a slight shake of her head—she was still detecting a lie. They sat down across from Thrung while the half-orc guard took her place in front of the door.

  “Ask w
hat you will,” Greymond said.

  Thrung finally raised his head then, and saw Tane. He pushed up his spectacles, and small black eyes narrowed beneath the lenses. Thick goblin eyebrows knit together to form a single line of bushy black hair. “Carver?” He looked to Greymond. “What is he doing here?”

  “Helping,” Tane said quickly. “Can I ask you a few things?”

  Greymond, for once, didn’t interrupt—she just sat silently, watching Thrung sweat. Apparently she was willing to let Tane take the lead on this.

  Thrung’s eyes moved wildly from side to side. “I already told them, I was just meeting someone. I swear!”

  It was impossibly obvious that he was lying, divination or no. The real question was what about. By necessity, Tane had learned how to read people fairly well, and this didn’t strike him as the manner of someone who had just burned a rival alive. “Calm down, Kivit. I want to help, if you’ll let me.”

  Hope brightened Thrung’s face immediately. Predictable—a drowning man would cling to whatever happened to float by. “You understand what it’s like, don’t you, Carver? To have everyone distrust you? They just think I did it because I’m a goblin.”

  “And, to be fair, because you were the only one in the building, and you were seen arguing with Allaea earlier.” Hope was important, but he couldn’t let Thrung forget the stakes, either.

  “I didn’t kill her!”

  Tane held up a hand. “Of course you didn’t.” He really did want to believe that, but if it was a lie, he meant to find out. For Allaea’s sake. “But it would help to know what you were arguing about.”

  “She took my spot on the airship project! My diagrams for the heating glyphs in the envelope were far more elegant, and we both knew it. But a goblin was never going to be picked over an elf. I just wanted her to admit it, that’s all. I promise I didn’t want her dead.”

  Tane could see why Greymond thought Thrung had done it. He wasn’t exactly helping himself. “And you were meeting someone in the artifice workshops that night? Who?”