The Golden Tower (Magisterium #5)(10)
Jasper nodded, looking shocked. He’d spent his Iron Year trying to get into Master Rufus’s apprentice group. Master Rufus was the most famous of the mage teachers and had an eye for picking apprentices who would go on to do important things — for good or for ill. He’d taught Constantine Madden, but he’d also taught prominent members of the Assembly and mages at the Collegium. Now, Jasper was finally getting his chance. Call wondered if it was still something he wanted.
“Okay,” Jasper said slowly, as though he was still trying to process what was happening. Gwenda towed him away to pack. Celia went over to Master Milagros, probably to complain. Call decided he better go back to the room and make sure Havoc was on his best behavior for the move.
Tamara fell into step with him. “So,” she said, “what do you think of Warren’s warning?” With everything going on then, it was the last thing that Call expected her to say, but Tamara was a person who seldom let herself be distracted from what was important.
“Could Automotones have really escaped the void?” Call asked, although he didn’t really expect an answer.
No, said Aaron. Not possible.
“I don’t know,” Tamara said. “But we could go to the library tonight to research. Maybe there was another elemental like Automotones.”
“Like his cousin?” Call asked. “And you think that maybe Warren’s friends mistook them because Automotones is the famous one?”
Tamara gave him an annoyed look. “Sure,” she said. “Automotones is in all the elemental celebrity magazines.”
Aaron chortled. That was pretty good.
Oh, shut up, Call thought, homing in on something he realized had almost passed him by. “We’re going to the library tonight?” Is this like a date? A study date?
Tamara nodded. “I think we better check this out, just to be sure. Warren’s annoying, but he’s been right before.” She put her hand to her chin. “We’re going to need help, going through all those books. Jasper might do it. He’s our new roommate now, after all.”
So, not a date, then, Call realized. Aaron sang “I’ve Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts” in his head all the way through the corridors of the cave, just to cheer him up.
THE MOVE DIDN’T take too long, Gwenda did like dogs, and to both Tamara and Call’s surprise, Jasper and Gwenda agreed to accompany them to the library that night before they went to meet with Master Rufus. Gwenda seemed curious, and Jasper — well, Call wasn’t sure why Jasper did anything. Jasper watched Celia stride off to the Gallery with half the other Gold Year students with a forlorn look on his face, then squared his shoulders and followed Call and Tamara to the library.
The library was one of Call’s favorite places in the Magisterium, not because he was particularly bookish but because he’d spent a lot of good times there with Tamara and Aaron. Now he, Tamara, Gwenda, and Jasper trooped in under the inscription that read KNOWLEDGE IS FREE AND SUBJECT TO NO RULE, and sat down at one of the long wooden tables in the center of the room.
“Okay,” Tamara said, taking charge. “Here’s what we’re looking for. Stuff about Automotones — are there other elementals like him? And chaos — has anything ever come back from chaos? Do we know anything about the chaos realm?”
“Don’t you?” Gwenda said, eyeing Call. “I mean, you’re the chaos mage.”
He shook his head. “No. No idea. I can send things through to chaos, but I don’t have any idea what’s on the other side.”
They all split up and took different sections of the library; Call ended up in the chaos magic section, where there were a lot of books he guiltily realized he should probably have read already — books on the history of chaos mages, the meaning of counterweights, and the discovery of chaos magic. He was reaching for a book called Soul and Void: Preliminary Theory when Aaron spoke.
I need a body, he said. I can’t stay in your head forever.
Call slumped against the bookshelves. He’d known this was coming, and it would be a relief to be alone in his own head, but it still felt a little rejecting. Plus, he had no idea how to accomplish it. “It’s not that easy to just get a body,” he murmured.
Maybe someone dead?
“We can’t use a corpse — that’s what happened to you last time. You got weird in there because the brain had been dead. And that was pushing your soul back into you. Imagine how it would be with some random other dead body.” He paused. “And not a baby. That’s what happened with me. You’d lose all your memories. You’d be a different person. A really little, helpless person.”
I don’t want to be a baby. Aaron sounded appalled. And I definitely don’t want to push out the soul of a baby.
“We could go to the hospital,” Call said, realizing how morbid the whole conversation was. “Find someone who’s about to die?”
Wouldn’t I just jump into their body and then die?
“We could fix them with magic?” Call suggested, though he knew this was unrealistic. Neither of them knew that much about healing magic.
Then we should probably patch them up and let them live, Aaron said with the annoying nobility that told Call that this Aaron was okay. He was alive now and not a scary undead monster and there was a big part of Call that wanted to quit while they were ahead, even if it meant Aaron lived in his skull forever.