Scholar's Plot
I must have gone mad. Or been corrupted, horribly corrupted, all my values — not to mention simple common sense — driven right out of my head. Which was probably why I’d gone mad.
I was doing a good deed.
It was still fairly early in the evening when I rode Tipple into Slowbend. The sun was low enough to reflect in the diamond panes of the west-facing windows, casting fragments of sunlight over the cobbles and sometimes, curse it, into my eyes.
I’d spent most of the several months after I’d left Michael in Tallowsport trying to find a scam that tempted me … and failing. Curse him.
From sheer habit — never attract attention by studying a crib you plan to crack — I glanced casually at the tall gray towers of the university. They were the only tall buildings in town and dominated the view, just as coats in the university colors, black with red shoulder patches, dominated the garb of the crowd as I drew nearer to the campus.
I found a street going west, rode till I reached the river docks that formed the edge of the small city, and selected an inn there. It took a few minutes to find one that had stabling for my horse, since most of the people who visited that part of town had come down on the riverboats from Crown City. And after I found one, the stable boy made the usual joke about, “Where was rest of the show?”
I’d like to think it was Tipple’s spotted hide — remarkable enough to make her owner memorable — that had kept me from finding a juicy target, settling in, and figuring out a way to siphon off a bit of that juice. I could have ditched Tipple in some nearby town and gone back for her after the scam, or even sold her outright. She was far too distinctive a mount for a con man to own.
But she’d always been my horse, as Chanticleer had always been Michael’s.
I warned the stable boy about how she’d earned her name, and left him snickering. But he’d also promised to keep her away from any place liquor was stored or served, and he was old enough to be reliable.
It was easy to book a room, since the house was less than half full. We were four months from Appleon, which was when most university admissions took place. I’d lived in several university towns in my childhood, and I knew their rhythms.
When I came down the taproom was full, and if
the locals ate here that promised well for the ham, cooked greens, and onion tart I ordered. I managed to fall into conversation with a couple of people as I ate and bought ale for several more, hitting my own mug sparingly. Some of their gossip was about the campus, but it usually concerned their own doings instead of the project I’d come to … research, shall we say.
I ended up talking to the tapster, which is probably where I should have started. He was plump, too young for his hair to be that thin, and his apron wasn’t too
badly stained. He didn’t look particularly sharp, but when I came up to the bar his eyes narrowed shrewdly.
“Thinking of enrolling, sir? You’re a bit older than most. Not that Pendarian don’t take older students, ’deed they do.”
I gave up on pretending not to be interested in the university.
“Not me, my friend. I mean, do I look like a scholar?”
“Actually, you do,” he said. “Or maybe a clerk.”
“Well, I’m not.” I smothered my annoyance. Looking like a clerk instead of a criminal was something I used to appreciate. Only lately had it begun to annoy me. “But I’ve got a young brother who is a scholar, and since I was up this way my father asked me to check out Pendarian.”
“Best university in the Realm, if you ask me,” the tapster said. “The third that High Liege Pendarian founded, which means he had time to get it right.”
I refrained from pointing out that since he’d probably only seen this university his opinion wasn’t well-
informed. And also that by that logic, all the universities that had been founded since Pendarian’s day should be
better
than it was.
“It’s not the scholarship I’m concerned about,” I said, preparing to slander my nonexistent brother. “It’s more what kind of rein they keep on their students. Not that Rob’s a bad kid, but he’s got too much brain for his own good, if you ask me…”
It was a useful gambit, as it turned out. I learned that although older students could take rooms in town if they chose, for the first two years they had to live on campus, under supervision. The campus was surrounded by a high wall and they had a gatekeeper, a “very reliable man.”
I invented an interest in studying the nature of magic for my mythical brother, and got an earful about the “important project, funded by the crown itself,” which was going on right now, as well as a number of other projects. Doing research all the time they were, at Pendarian.
A perfectly natural question about the dangers of messing with magic netted the information that the project was housed in an old tower, separate from the dorms and classrooms, and with tight security. No danger of some student getting involved with magica at all. And indeed, they weren’t really dealing with magic, only with Gifts, so all the students were perfectly safe, as they always were, at Pendarian.
To change the subject I asked, but hadn’t there been some scandal lately…?
It was a safe bet, for I’ve never heard of a university — or any institution with more than six people in it — that didn’t have some sort of scandal going on.
Sure enough, his eyes fell. I bought another ale, and sipped on it as he assured me that scholars plagiarizing their theses were very rare at Pendarian, and that the man in question had only been a junior professor, and he’d been fired the moment he was found out.
If that was the worst scandal the place had, then it must be almost as clean as the tapster claimed. But most of my mind was considering the “tight security” around the project, and I almost missed it when he said there was a big lecture going on tonight.
Skinday is the day most guild workers have off, and universities don’t hold regular classes then, either. This makes it the most common night to put on big lectures that the whole university is supposed to attend. I asked if a lot of people from the town went to those lectures, and learned that quite a few did. And if half the students lived off campus, there would be a lot of people moving past the gatekeeper all at the same time; and very shortly after that, the grounds would be almost deserted as everyone swarmed into the lecture hall.
I asked about getting a pass at this late date, and learned that since the lecture would start in just over an hour it probably wouldn’t be possible.
I said I’d try and departed … not in search of a pass, but of something more easily come by.
In a university town, garb in university colors makes up most of the work in any laundry, and their drying yards have no security at all. It took me longer to locate a laundry than it did to climb the fence into the yard. Half the garments there seemed to be black coats with red shoulders, and there were even a few long cloaks with two red stripes flowing from neck to the hem. The cloaks’ concealing hoods were tempting, but this early summer night was too warm. I took the time to pick a coat in my size — medium, to go with my medium brown hair and medium looks, all quite useful to a con man.
It was still a bit damp, but you can’t have everything.
If I had time after I finished my errand, I might even return the… Curse it! That thought would never have crossed my mind before I’d met Michael.
By the time I emerged from the alley behind the laundry, I was near enough to the university and the hour was late enough that a number of people were flowing toward the gates. I fell into step with them. At almost twenty-one I was much of an age with the older students, though listening to them chatter about exams, and the size of the tavern maid’s bosom at the Wicked Grape, I felt a thousand years older.
I didn’t look forward to seeing the jeweler again. We’d first met him in Atherton Roseman’s attic, where he’d helped his master keep us prisoner by creating magica collars, one of which I still sometimes felt around my neck in nightmares. His eerie madness was less disturbing to me than it had been to Michael — probably because Michael was afraid of going mad, too, though I thought if he were going to he’d have shown some sign of it before now. Instead, Michael had driven
me
mad.
When the Liege Guard had hauled the jeweler off, cringing at the bright sunlight, terrified, weeping for the loss of his pet rats, it had been perfectly natural to assure him he’d be all right. Anyone would have.
But only someone who’d been corrupted by Michael’s lunacy for almost four years would have found themselves being haunted by that promise.
It wasn’t all the time. I’d see a fine stone flash as a lady climbed into a carriage, and remember, not the collars that had bound Michael and me to do Tony Rose’s bidding, but my promise to the jeweler who’d made them. I’d be reminded by a mouse in a trap, or a groom stitching a bit of leather … and after a few months, I’d started dreaming about the cursed fellow. Not every night, but often enough, and when I woke up, a voice in my head would whisper, “You promised he’d be all right. You don’t know if ’tis so or not.”
The worst thing about it was that my overactive conscience spoke with Michael’s accent.
The real problem, I’d decided over the long weeks of wandering, was that I hadn’t had much practice at setting my own direction in life. After I left my family, at my new and respectable brother-in-law’s insistence, I’d soon been picked up by Jack — and since I was only his apprentice con man, he’d chosen our course. When Jack dumped me, I stayed on that course from sheer inertia till I met Michael … and immediately let
him
set my course.
This made it all the more ironic, and maybe fitting, that the quarrel that finally drove Michael and me apart was about my refusal to see Jack hang. I didn’t think I was as spineless as my past suggested, but it was time for me to leave Michael and I was usually glad I had.
I was done with being a squire.
But I must admit, I wondered from time to time how he was doing. And it seemed to me that if I checked
on the jeweler, and made sure he was well cared for, that curst annoying voice would stop whispering in my ear. Then I could finally move on, setting my own course…
It’s hard to set a course, when you have no destination in mind.
The Liege’s guardsmen had told me where they were taking the jeweler, and that was as good a destination as any. Of course, if the poor madman wasn’t being treated decently there was nothing I could do about it, but I refused to borrow the future’s troubles. Getting in to see him would be trouble enough, if security on the project was as tight as the tapster had claimed.
He was right about the campus — the stone wall around it had to be twenty feet high, and the fancy wrought iron gates had no gap beneath them. There was a keeper at the gatehouse, too, and for all I knew he might be a reliable man. But now, all he did was nod and smile as a hoard of scholars and townsfolk poured past him.
I attached myself to the back of a group of students about my age, and since the best way to make it look like you’re listening is to listen, I learned that Professor Darple had lost ten silver roundels on “that worthless nag” he favored, and was bound to be in a rotten mood when he graded their essays. But Connell was worse than Darple, because he was never in a good mood.
I passed through the gates and into the campus without a hitch.
I considered shedding my damp coat then, but it was probably the least conspicuous garment I could wear here. In the gathering darkness those red shoulders would be less visible, even though the magica phosphor moss lamps that lined the lanes had begun to brighten. If they had those lamps all over the campus, Pendarian wasn’t short of cash.
I followed the crowd down a wide avenue between two tall buildings, four and five stories tall and larger than most palaces. The avenue ended in an open square of neatly mowed grass, with yet more huge stone buildings around it, and still more beyond — a big campus, which I should have expected but somehow hadn’t.
The lecture hall on the opposite side of the square was only two stories tall, but it made up for it by being almost as large as the open space I was crossing. At the top of the low steps, in front of open doors through which light streamed out and people streamed in, half a dozen students were checking lecture passes — though I noticed they didn’t take them.
One of them was a girl, and the fact that they had female scholars here gave me a plausible excuse for wandering the campus in disguise. It would help if I knew one of the girls’ names, but if worse came to worst, I could always claim I’d seen her in the street and fallen madly in love without knowing her name. It was silly, but I’ve sold stupider tales in my day.