“Are you going to train some convincers? Recruit people for a Stop Doing That Squad?”
“But what do wedowith a very bad guy—that is the problem.”
Right. A fight to the death was a terrible idea. And a holding cell wouldn’t hold a magic user for long, even one less talented than Kincaid. “Any luck?”
“No. Not yet. I am no good at inventing spells and Bernie is not either, so it will be up to—”
He stopped as if he understood her desire to press Hartgrave from her head. But not saying the name made it echo even more.
Well. Pigheadedness helped get her into this mess, and it could get her out. She would just think of something else, and she wouldkeepthinking of something else until it worked.
The containment problem wasn’t ideal, involving Hartgrave as it did, but it was close at hand, so she started there. Magic that didn’t dissipate with time or quickly fail under attack—that was what the situation called for. Developing such a thing would have to be enormously difficult. It would take an entirely new sort of magic.
Or ... old.
“The room in the Inferno,” she said, something stirring in her stomach that wasn’t anger or misery. “What about that? Could it be duplicated?”
Willi shrugged. “We have never managed it. We did try for quite a while after ... after I moved to here.”
After his wife was killed. After the Organization murdered who knew how many autodidacts. The damage Kincaid did, not only to lives but also to magical knowledge ...
But something must have happened before him. Otherwise, he would have been up against a thriving community of magic-users who couldn’t so easily be picked off. Maybe the witch hunts really did get witches? Maybe there were talented spellcasters in the nineteenth century, when the Inferno was built, but not (for some reason) in the twentieth and twenty-first?
She pursed her lips. She wanted to know, the men needed to learn how the Inferno spells had been cast and she might get answers to both by going after the same target.
“Willi,” she said, getting up unsteadily, careful of her foot in its protective boot. “Would you take me to Ashburn?”
He jumped to his feet to give her a hand, a priceless expression on his face. “What? Why?”
“To find out who designed the humanities building.”
He argued and wheedled and insisted she needed rest, but in the end, he gave in. He of all people knew the value of distraction.
. . . ..
Ashburn College, barely useful for historical research, proved an excellent source of information about Ashburn College. Within half an hour, she had the blueprints for the humanities building in hand.
They showed no room branching off from the main expanse of basement, but she had hardly thought they would. She found the detail she wanted in the lower right-hand corner, above the 1890 date:C.W. Olsson, architect.
A thrill went down her spine before she could remind herself that architect and wizard didn’t have to be one and the same. A large academic building took scores of people to construct—it could have been any of them. Or none of them, if the room was added after the fact.
Never mind how it was done; just finding outwhowould be a long shot. Barring a miracle or fantastical coincidence, the inevitable end to this project was disappointment. If she intended to start living life as a cold-eyed realist, she ought to give up on the idea now.
She frowned at the blueprints.
Then she struggled to her feet, cane in hand, to start poking into the architect’s history.
Caspar Warwick Olsson—no wonder the man used his initials—proved a historian’s dream. He’d kept absurdly meticulous notes. The ones written during the period he worked on the humanities building, acquired by Ashburn after his death, filled three large diaries. With tiny handwriting.
She couldn’t take the diaries home, and she tired after a few hours away from the comforts of the farm, soit took her several weeks to get through the first two volumes.
By then, she had an intimate understanding of Olsson’s dietary habits thanks to his entries detailing every meal he ate and the effect on his digestion. She’d expanded her repertoire of insults because he liked to gripe, particularly about the campus administrator overseeing the construction, a man named Vintner. And she’d discovered the reason for the Inferno’s corridor-only design: The eccentric college founder whose money bankrolled the building had the idea of a catacombs—though no one wanted to be entombed there when push came to shove, not even its creator.
Of magic, there was no hint.
Emily kept reading anyway, partly because she was curious how many new insults Olsson would dream up for the poor Vintner, but mostly because it felt good to be doing something. To be researching.
Deep into Olsson’s third journal, she hit what had to be the five hundredth reference to Vintner, who’d “requested yet another meeting in the hope (no doubt) of topping his prior best for unreasonable demands.” (Olsson speculated on what it could be this time: “Higher ceilings? Thinner walls? Limestone rather than quartzite? Construction begins in a month, the damnable fool.”)
