Chapter 81. Like Being in a Nightmare with Nothing Wrong
“Oh, this place ,” I said.
“Not the Cleaning Closet again!” Fek said. “It was really boring.”
The janitor frowned as he put the smallest key into the lock and turned it. “You mean you got stuck here? How? It’s locked.”
“The skeletons were coming out,” Fek said, shrugging. “So we went in. We weren’t even the first ones.”
Hector sighed and put the keyring back into his pocket. “I told them to set proper guards, but do they listen to me? Oh well, at least you know the place already.”
“You said we’re going to be cleaning it?” I asked. “It was pretty clean to begin with?”
“Well, that’s nice. Less for me to do. I’ll handle the scrap and such. The magical stuff is on you.”
Suffocating air rolled out from the corridor. It didn’t smell like anything, but breathing it in made my thoughts feel sluggish and dark, like the air was weighing me down. I wrinkled my nose at it. “It’s even worse than before.”
“Yeah, the skeletons caught some of it before,” Hector said, scratching at his head. “Now that they are gone, the stuff has nowhere to go, so it lingers. They say.”
“Cool,” Fek said. “Where does it come from?”
The janitor shrugged. “Does it really matter where the dirt comes from? Needs to be swept away, anyway. I had some instructions for you, wait a second.” He patted his overalls and pulled out a piece of folded paper from one of their pockets. “They said you’d figure it out.”
I took the paper and squinted to read it in the gloom of the Academy. The thick air rolling out from the door made my toes cold, so I stepped aside from in front of it. “I’m supposed to find the thickest concentrations of Null and Fek will disperse them with mana.”
“That’s all it says?” Fek asked. “The note looks longer.”
“Well, there are some runes you should use for it. Let’s make sure you can draw them before heading in.”
“Lots of text as well,” Hector said, leaning to peer at the paper over my shoulder.
“Well, it’s from Falar, so there are ironic remarks about the importance of keeping places tidy and about how we should distinguish ourselves even in this, so we can become cleaners if we’re not cut out for something more worthwhile.”
“Look, there’s a second page,” Fek said.
I turned it around, checking both sides of both pages. “Just more of the same. Let’s go.”
The corridor was as I remembered it. We stopped in the second room on the left that felt especially dead to me. The air was stale enough that breathing it in felt dangerous. I had to squeeze with my stomach to push it out of my lungs, leaving my windpipe cold and aching. The air didn’t really seem to bother Hector or Fek. “Don’t you two feel that?” I asked.
The janitor shrugged. “I leave the magical stuff for others.”
“It’s pretty dank, yeah!” Fek said. “I sort of want to take a nap and not wake up, if that makes sense?”
“Whatever, let’s try it here,” I said, taking out the paper with the runes.
Fek got them right on the third try. Maybe he had burned his eyebrows off enough times that he started to take drawing runes seriously. They flared bright and settled to glow with a warm yellow light.
Fek looked from me to the janitor like a dog expecting to be petted.
I looked at the janitor.
He looked somewhere toward the ceiling.
“Well, go ahead,” he said after a moment. “You’re the wizard. Do they look right?”
“Right,” I said. “They do. Feels nice.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” the janitor said, tapping his breast pocket. He picked out the crumpled packet of cigarettes, but then put it back. “I wonder if I should start rationing these.”
“Ang will be back in a couple of weeks,” I said. “You got those from him, right?”
He glanced at me, frowning. “Yup. How do you know when he’ll be back?”
I shrugged. “I work for the Bursar.”
“Right. Still weirds me out, if I’m being honest. She’s a tough lady.”
“Um, what should I do with these?” Fek asked, hand holding the runes.
“Keep it going,” I said, shivering. “This place needs to be scrubbed.”
The light flowed out from the runes. It wasn’t light, in the same way how the Null wasn’t dark or cold. The magic vibrated as it passed through me, driving the Null to the corners of the room and smothering it there. The first rune had been called Vivaciousness and the other Vibration. It sounded like they had been invented for Fek.
I walked around the room, smelling at the air. Hector busied himself with the cart, pulling out a bucket filled with water and a mop. Where had the water come from? At least the mop was normal, thick wood worn glossy by being used so much.
“I think you’re done,” I said.
The air was clear, even though motes of dust hovered everywhere, highlighted by the orb of light hovering near the ceiling. The place smelled like it had been forgotten a generation ago, but at least the air wasn’t actively oppressive anymore.
“I’ll mop the place,” the janitor said. “That took a while, so maybe you can go ahead and I’ll catch up? There’s a door further in. It’s locked and warded, so don’t go past that.”
“If it’s locked and warded, how and why would we even…” I said, but stopped mid-sentence. “I guess it’s a fair warning. Come on, Fek.”
The air started to grow cold and stale two steps outside of the room. “We’re not going to go far in this soup,” I muttered. The Null made my brain feel raw, like skin worn thin for being scrubbed too hard. Staying near Hector’s cart had made it tolerable. Whatever protected it from the winds, seemed to keep away the Null as well. “Can you do the runes while we walk?”
“Nah, that’s hard,” Fek said. “I mean, it’s not supposed to be, but stuff tears easily when I do it.”
“You should…” I said.
“Huh?”
“Nothing,” I said. The way he gushed mana, it might make sense. A properly drawn rune felt like it wanted to stay together, but Fek pushing mana into one would probably twist it this way and that, rupture it. “I don’t know. I just got a feeling about the magic stuff, but what do I know? I’ve been here for two months.”
“You do get a lot of stuff, though?” Fek said. “Reanimating a skeleton by yourself is supposed to be hard. I still have no idea how to channel the purple stuff.”
“Null,” I said absently. “It’s not purple either.”
“Huh?”
“Nothing,” I said. “I keep saying that, don’t I? This place makes it hard to think.”
“Maybe you can do the runes while we walk? Would that work?” Fek asked.
I scratched at my head. Maybe I could. I fished out the note from my pocket and squinted at it. Falar had drawn small arrows and written instructions around the rune, suggesting which finger to use and in which order to draw the shapes. Meticulous, but what had I expected? Fek had obviously ignored the instructions, but still managed to get the shape together. When I did it, the drawing took much longer.
The runes flickered to life. I moved my hand around and the runes followed, sticking to my fingers bleeding mana into the glowing shape. The light was dim and steady, but it made it easier to breathe. “Nice,” I said.
“Huh, I could have stayed at the dorm and slept,” Fek said. “You could have done this by yourself!”
When he had drawn the runes, the light had filled the whole room and made my chest swell. The dim light of my runes felt like it would go out at any moment, smothered by the darkness roiling around us. “Let’s go,” I said.
We reached the room with the angry, broken skeleton. Nothing had changed. Some bits of bone still lingered on the floor, but if they radiated anything malevolent anymore, it was washed out by the still air weighing down on me.
“My turn?” Fek asked.
“Yeah,” I said, wiping off a bead of sweat before it rolled into my eye. I let the runes wink out and the moment I did, the gloom closed in on me. I had been left here to suffocate, Falar had finally found a way to get rid of me without having to bother himself about it, Minnelil would be glad, not having me hanging around her anymore. Even the old crone with the sharp teeth could breathe a sigh of relief when the school could say the—
Fek lit up the room. I shivered as the vibrations passed through me, the warm light that wasn’t light flowing out from his hands. Actually, things might be pretty ok.
He had both hands pushed into the runes that pulsed rhythmically, like a heartbeat. “Look, maybe it goes faster if I used both hands? I can do more this way?”
I trembled, face squirming. “Great. Nice. Good thinking, Fek.”
“Oh, no, wait, the other rune—“
The vibration turned into a trill, making my ears pop. I slapped his hands away from the rune and the magic sizzled on my skin. I yanked my hand away and grimaced at my fingers, already swollen and red.
“Whoops,” Fek said. “Maybe I’ll just do it like last time after all?”
“Please,” I said.
“You could feel it too?” I asked after a while. I sat with my back to the wall, watching as Fek scoured the place with magic. My fingers tingled and my nails felt too small for my fingers, but the feeling was receding. I would kick his ass if my fingers stayed looking like sausages. “When the Null was thick?”
“Yeah, didn’t like that,” he said. “Do… do things feel like that to you always?”
I blinked, moving my gaze from my hand to Fek. He kept his eyes on the runes. The light didn’t cast proper shadows, so his face looked flat. Weird. “It’s worse here.”
“Oof,” he said. “Sorry.”
“Thanks,” I said.
I watched him burn more of the Null away. The pressure passed through me as it flew away from him. I shivered at its touch. “It messes things up. Like being in a nightmare even when everything is normal and nothing is wrong.”
“I get it,” he said.
“You do?”
“Yup.”