Chapter 17

“It’s better than sleeping on the floor,” Aden said aloud as he stretched after his nap. “Probably still has the smell of ancient butts ground into the fabric and I think the seam left a crease indented on my face.”

He walked out into the main room and made his way to the tray of sugar buns with warming expectation. “Hmm,” he said as he counted how many buns his friend had liberated on the way out the door. “When did you become so greedy?” he asked, happy that no one was around to answer.

Licking the last of the sticky sweet goo from his lips, Aden surveyed his domain from front to back and from the ceiling to the floor. Nothing he saw gave a clue to the combination he was seeking. Plain stone, plain sheets of metal that must have cost a small kingdom and wood beams without any carvings was all he saw. Even the banners only had pictures on them. The building had felt empty before but with new eyes, it felt both empty and desiccated, like dried buried bones of a forgotten corpse.

“I may be a bit biased,” Aden admitted. “This place reminds me too much of me.” With a grunt, he strode across the practice floor to the headmaster’s office. He examined the entirety of the study from the bottom of desk drawers to the stones in the fireplace for the next hours. Aden felt foolish laying on his back and pushing himself into the foot well of the desk, hoping for a paper taped to the bottom. He finished his search, having located several coins and three buttons, without any clue leading towards an answer. The safe failed to offer any help.

He knew it was late in the day when he left the faculty facilities intent on trooping down the stairs from the second floor. Each room search deepened his sense of futility. Professors had their secrets and students as well, but faded pictures of long-passed naked women (and a couple of men) were not helpful. The change in standards of beauty was momentarily interesting but the quest was pressing.

As he marched down the hallway and turned the corner, Aden passed the double doors of the dining hall and stopped. He had already checked the bathrooms and showers; how much more absurd would it be to examine the kitchen? The room was dark until Aden located the unusual light source running as two lines across the length of the ceiling.

The room conveyed dignity and purpose. The tables were old but solid, their tops stained and scarred from year upon year of spills and scrapes. The back bar against the wall still held ceramic jars, a short keg and mugs, both long ones for cool drinks and short ones for hot beverages. The jar at one end was labeled “Sal” and the jar at the other end by the mugs was labeled “Sukari,” a term that Aden did not know. He lifted the lid and took a sniff. He dipped his finger into the crystals and brought to his tongue. “Sugar,” he said.

The kitchen itself was functional and utilitarian. The only unusual piece was a box and conduit that ran from the wall to the ovens and stovetops. All these cooking apparatuses apparently ran on phyzeec that must have run through the pipes at an alarming rate, considering the girth of the pipes, as if such a thing was possible. The kitchen was another example of the brute use of phyzeec as force instead of efficiency and finesse.

The cupboards were bare. The larder was stripped of everything but the hooks for hanging carcasses. In the pantry, Aden was not surprised at the empty shelves, but the cleared circular spaces where barrels must have been, did take him aback. Why take the barrels too, which were awkward to lift and heavy?

Aden walked a full circuit around the kitchen and mess again, intuition teasing him that he was missing important clues about the last days of the academy. They took the food and they shut off the power. They took the barrels but left the necessary salt and precious sugar. There had to be a reasoning behind these choices, but the puzzles were still beyond his grasp. The logic eluded him even though he felt that a solution was possible. He chided himself that “Gut feelings often led to indigestion.”

With a huff of frustration, Aden banged his fists the double doors and barged out into the hallway. Downstairs he pinched one of the last sweet rolls and bit into it, tearing at it fiercely with his teeth. He barely tasted it as he chewed and swallowed. He bit into again with a growl. Without chewing, he stared at the remnants in his hand as a sense of failure crawled up his spine.

He collapsed in the chair and finished swallowing. When the pastry was gone, Aden licked his palm and his fingers, hoping for one last taste of sweet. Wiping his hand on his trousers, he took stock of what he had learned thus far.

Hours more passed before Aden was shaken from reverie by a banging at the door. He wondered if it could be the hangman at first. He was amused that his only second conjecture was beggars seeking miracles had learned a wizard was in town. In his experience, the love-potion crowd was hard to reject with their faces showing their shattered dreams. The cure-my-malady people just broke the heart with their severed or rotting limbs, bloated bodies and disfiguring ailments. The looks of desperation tore at the conscience even though there was not one thing he could do for them. Somehow, words of consolation transformed into insults and condescending judgments when he spoke. When people did not get what they wanted, they sometimes turned their disappointment into anger, directing it at the practitioner, as if he were to blame for their troubles. People sucked.

Nonetheless, Aden opened the door.

A woman stared back at him as he focused on the scar that ran down the side of her face from her eyebrow to her jaw, just in front of her ear. The scar was a straight line of a blade slice but the puffy bumps on either side told a story of infection that followed.

“Ezza sent me,” she said. “He said you can’t feed yourself and don’t know how to keep track of the time for dinner in any case.”

Aden shifted his eyes back to the rest of her face. He swallowed the obnoxious retort lolling on his tongue and shrugged his shoulders instead. “I do lose all sense of time when I have a project. Who are you?”

“Willa,” she said. “You are paying me to make you meals. Ezza said so. You’re late too. The sun is going down and the light is fading.”

“The whole day is gone?” Aden said, stepping out onto the stone step to view the sky. “I have nothing to show for it. Nothing.”