The Bronze Key (Magisterium #3)(45)

Her eyes were burning with a fanatic light. Call glanced sideways at Aaron; he seemed fascinated.

“Most human beings will never truly see the soul,” she went on. “We work like the blind, in darkness. But you can see. Call and Aaron, face each other.”

Call turned to face Aaron. He realized with some surprise that they were about the same height; he’d always been a bit shorter than his friend. He must have shot up an inch or two.

“Look at the other person,” said Alma. “Concentrate on what makes them them. Imagine you can see through skin and bone, blood and muscle. You’re not looking for their heart — you’re looking for something more than that.” Her voice had a lulling cadence. Call stared at Aaron’s shirtfront. He wondered what he was supposed to be seeing. There was a dark spot on the shirt where Aaron had spilled tea at the Refectory.

He flicked a glance up at Aaron’s eyes and found Aaron looking at him. They both grinned, without being able to help it. Call stared harder. What made Aaron Aaron? That he was friendly; that he always had a smile for everyone; that he was popular; that he made bad jokes; that his hair never stuck up like Call’s? Or was it the darker things he knew about Aaron — the Aaron who flew into rages, who knew how to hotwire a car, who had hated it when he turned out to be the Makar because he didn’t want to die like Verity Torres?

Call felt his vision shift. He was still looking at Aaron, but he was also looking into him. There was a light inside Aaron, a light that was a color Call had never seen before. He couldn’t describe it, the new color. It was shifting and moving, like a glow cast against a wall, the reflected light of a lamp that was being carried.

Call made a noise and jumped back in surprise. The light and color vanished, and he found that he was just looking at Aaron, who was staring back at him with wide green eyes.

“That color,” Aaron said.

“That’s what I saw, too!” Call exclaimed. They grinned at each other recklessly, like two climbers who had just made it to the top of a mountain.

“Very good,” said Alma, sounding pleased. “You two have just seen each other’s souls.”

“This seems awkward,” said Call. “I don’t think we should mention it to anyone.”

Aaron made a face at him.

Call felt giddy. Not only had he mastered the magic on the first attempt, but seeing Aaron’s soul had made his brief suspicions of Aaron seem ridiculous. Aaron was his friend, his best friend, his counterweight. Aaron would never want to hurt him. Aaron needed him, just like he needed Aaron back.

The relief was overwhelming.

“I think that’s enough for today,” Alma said. “You both did very well. Next, I want you to interact with souls. You’re going to learn the soul tap.”

“I am not doing that,” Call said. “I don’t know what it is, but I won’t like it.”

Alma sighed as though she thought that Master Rufus must be pretty long-suffering to put up with Call, which was pretty unfair since, before, she’d said other Masters wished they’d picked him.

“It’s a method of knocking an opponent unconscious without doing them any real harm,” she said. “Are you still against it?”

“How do we know it doesn’t hurt them?” Aaron asked.

“It doesn’t appear to,” Alma replied. “But, as with all soul magic, there hasn’t been enough study for anything to be entirely certain. When Joseph and several others and I began our research, we thought that chaos magic held the potential for doing much good in the world. Because there are so few Makaris born into each generation and because chaos magic has always been considered dangerous, we just don’t know enough about it.”

The greatest Makar of your generation. The words came back to Call, rankling him. He didn’t mind Aaron being better than him, but he didn’t like the idea of someone being better than Aaron.

Alma went on, warming to her subject. “You have to understand how exciting it all was. We were discovering entirely new things. Oh, chaos mages had seen souls before — a few had even learned how to rip souls from bodies. But no one had attempted to touch a soul. No one had tried to put chaos into an animal. No one had tried to switch a soul from one body to another.”

“So did Joseph go crazy or what?” Aaron asked. “I mean, how come he didn’t stop Constantine before he killed his brother? Was he just excited by all the magic?”

Jericho Madden. Call felt his head swim. Although all this was the distant past, it felt closer than ever. Lately, Call felt as though it was about to push him out of his own life, the way Master Joseph had wanted to push his soul out of his body.

Alma’s eyes clouded. “To tell you the truth, I look back on that day and I don’t know what happened. I’ve turned it over and over in my mind, and I can’t help coming to the conclusion that Jericho died because Joseph wanted him to die.”

That got Call’s attention. “What?”

“Constantine was a young man. He had other interests than the study of chaos magic — or rather, he felt as if he had his whole life to study it. And, of course, Rufus was his Master, not Joseph. I think that Joseph wanted Constantine to be committed to the cause.”

Call was horrified. “Master Joseph arranged for Jericho to die so Constantine would be more committed to the idea of using chaos magic to bring back the dead?”