The Rithmatist (37 page)

“Did Exton come to your aid immediately?” Harding asked. “Last night?”

“No,” Joel said, remembering his fall and Exton screaming. “He was just scared, and he did help eventually. Inspector, I
know
Exton. He wouldn’t do something like this.”

“The minds of killers are strange things, Joel,” Harding said. “Often, people are shocked or surprised that people they know could turn out to be such monsters. This is confidential information, but we found items belonging to the three missing students in Exton’s desk.”

“You
did
?” Joel asked.

“Yes,” Harding said. “And pages and
pages
of ranting anger about Rithmatists in his room. Hatred, talk of … well, unpleasant things. I’ve seen it before in the obsessed. It’s always the ones you don’t expect. Fitch tipped me off about the clerk a few days back; something reminded him that Exton had once attended Armedius.”

“The census records,” Joel said. “I was there when Fitch remembered.”

“Ah yes,” Harding said. “Well, I now wish I’d been more quick to listen to the professor! I began investigating Exton quietly, but I didn’t move quickly enough. I only put the pieces together when you were attacked last night.”

“Because of the wiggly lines?” Joel asked.

“No, actually,” Harding said. “Because of what happened yesterday afternoon in the office. You were there, talking to Fitch, and he praised how much of a help you’d been to the process of finding the Scribbler. Well, when I heard you’d been attacked, my mind started working. Who would have a motive to kill
you
? Only someone who knew how valuable you were to Fitch’s work.

“Exton overhead that, son. He must have been afraid that you’d connect him to the new Rithmatic line. He probably saw the line when your father was working on it—your father approached the principal for funding to help him discover how the line worked. It wasn’t until some of my men searched his quarters and his desk that we found the truly disturbing evidence, though.”

Joel shook his head. Exton. Could it actually have been him? The realization that it could have been someone so close, someone he knew and understood, was almost as troubling as the attack.

Things belonging to the three students, in his desk,
Joel thought, cold. “The objects … maybe he had them for … I don’t know, reasons relating to the case? Had he gathered them from the students’ dorms to send to the families?”

“York says he ordered nothing of the sort,” Harding said. “No questions remain except for the locations of the children. I won’t lie to you, lad. I think they’re probably dead, buried somewhere. We’ll have to interrogate Exton to find the answers.

“This is disgraceful business, all of it. I feel terrible that it happened on my watch. I don’t know what the ramifications will be, either. The son of a knight-senator dead, a man Principal York hired responsible…”

Joel nodded numbly. He didn’t buy it, not completely. Something was off. But he needed time to think about it.

“Exton,” he said. “When will he be tried?”

“Cases like these take months,” Harding said. “It won’t be for a while, but we’ll need you as a witness.”

“You’re going to keep the campus on lockdown?”

Harding nodded. “For at least another week, with a careful eye on all of the Rithmatist students. Like I said. An arrest is no reason to get sloppy.”

Then I have time,
Joel thought.
Exton won’t be tried for a while, and the campus is still safe. If it ever was.

That seemed enough for now. Joel was exhausted, worn thin, and he still had his inception to deal with. He would do that, then maybe have time to think, figure out what was wrong with all of this.

“I have a request of you,” Joel said. “My friend, Melody. I want her to attend my inception. Will you let her out of the lockdown for today?”

“Is she that redheaded troublemaker?” Harding asked.

Joel nodded, grimacing slightly.

“Well, for you, all right,” Harding said. He spoke to a couple of officers, who rushed off to fetch her.

Joel waited, feeling terrible for Exton sitting in jail.
Potentially becoming a Rithmatist is important,
Joel thought.
I have to go through with this. If I’m one of them, my words will hold more weight.

The officers eventually returned with Melody, her red hair starkly visible in the distance. When she got close, she ran toward him.

Joel nodded to Harding and walked over to meet her.

“You,”
she said, pointing, “are in serious trouble.”

“What?” Joel asked.

“You went on an adventure, you nearly got killed, you fought chalklings, and you
didn’t invite me
!”

He rolled his eyes.

“Honestly,” she said. “That was terribly thoughtless of you. What good is having friends if they don’t put you in mortal peril every once in a while?”

“You might even call it tragic,” Joel said, smiling wanly and joining his mother and Professor Fitch.

“Nah,” Melody said. “I’m thinking I need a new word.
Tragic
just doesn’t have the effect it once did. What do you think of
appalling
?”

“Might work,” Joel said. “Shall we go, then?”

The others nodded, and they again began walking toward the campus gates, accompanied by several of Harding’s guards.

“I guess I’m happy you’re all right,” Melody said. “News of what happened is all over the Rithmatic dorm. Most of the others are red in the face, thinking that the puzzle was solved and they were saved by a
non
-Rithmatist. Of course, half of the red-facedness is probably because none of us can leave yet.”

“Yeah,” Joel said. “Harding’s a careful guy. I think he knows what he’s doing.”

“You believe him, then?” Melody said. “About Exton, I mean.”

Things belonging to each of the students,
Joel thought.
And pages of rants about wanting revenge against them.…

They walked the same path Joel had run the night before, terrified in the dark, approaching the police officers. “I don’t know,” he said.

*   *   *

Joel remembered much of what Father Stewart said from the last time he’d gone through an inception ceremony. He’d been less nervous that time. Perhaps he’d been too young to realize what he was getting himself into.

Joel’s knees ached as he knelt in a white robe before Father Stewart, who sprinkled him with water and anointed him with oil. They had to go through the whole ceremony again if Joel wanted to enter the chamber of inception.

Why did everything have to happen at once? He was still fatigued from lack of sleep, and he couldn’t stop thinking about Exton. The man had seemed truly frightened. But he would have been, if his own chalklings had come back to attack him.

Joel felt like he had been swept up in something so much larger than he was. There were new Rithmatic lines. He’d solved his father’s quest, yet wouldn’t get paid for it—all of his father’s contracts of patronage had expired when no line had been produced within five years. Still, the world would be shaken by the discovery of a Rithmatic pattern that was so different from the others.

Father Stewart intoned something in Old English, barely recognizable to Joel as from scripture. Above, the apostles turned their springwork heads. To his right, down a hallway, PreSaint Euclid stood inside a mural dedicated to the triangle.

Joel was about to be one of the oldest nonconverts to ever go through the inception ceremony. The world seemed to be becoming a more uncertain place. The disappearances—probably deaths—of Armedius students made the islands bristle, and there was talk of another civil war. The realities of world politics were starting to seem more and more real to Joel. More and more
frightening.

Life wasn’t simple. It never
had
been simple. He just hadn’t known.

But how does Nalizar play into all of this?
Joel thought.
I still don’t trust that man.
Exton had expressed dislike of Nalizar on several occasions, but perhaps it was something to think about. Could he have framed Exton?

Perhaps Joel just
wanted
to find that Nalizar was doing something nefarious.

Father Stewart stopped talking. Joel blinked, realizing he hadn’t been paying attention. He looked up, and Father Stewart nodded, his thin white beard shaking. He gestured toward the chamber of inception behind the altar.

Joel stood up. Fitch, his mother, and Melody sat alone on the pews—the regular inception ceremony for the eight-year-olds wouldn’t come for another hour yet. The broad, vast cathedral hall sparkled with the light of stained glass windows and delicate murals.

Joel walked quietly around the altar toward the boxy chamber. The door was set with a six-point circle. Joel regarded it, then fished the coin out of his pocket and held it up.

The main gear moving inside had six teeth. The center of each tooth corresponded to the location of one of the six points. The smaller gear to the right had only four teeth. The one to the left, nine teeth, spaced unevenly. The three clicked together in a pattern, one that had to be perfectly attuned to work with the irregular nine-tooth gear.

Huh,
Joel thought, tucking the coin in his pocket. Then he pushed open the door.

Inside, he found a white marble room containing a cushion for kneeling and a small altar made from a marble block, topped by a cushion to rest his elbows on. There didn’t seem to be anything else in the room—though a springwork lantern shone quite brightly from above, mounted in a crystalline casing so that it cast sparkling light on the walls.

Joel stood, waiting, heart thumping. Nothing happened. Hesitantly, he knelt down, but didn’t know what to say.

That was another piece in this whole puzzle. Was there really a Master up in heaven? People like Mary Rowlandson—the colonist he’d read about the night before—believed in God.

The wild chalklings hadn’t killed her. They’d kept her prisoner, always stopping her from fleeing. Nobody knew their motives for such an act.

She’d eventually escaped, partially due to the efforts of her husband and some other colonial men. Had her survival been directed by the Master, or had it been simple luck? What did Joel believe?

“I don’t know what to say,” Joel said. “I figure that if you
are
there, you’ll be angry if I claim to believe when I don’t. The truth is, I’m not sure I
don’t
believe, either. You might be there. I hope you are, I guess.

“Either way, I
do
want to be a Rithmatist. Even with all of the problems it will cause. I … I
need
the power to fight them. I don’t want to run again.

“I’ll be a good Rithmatist. I know the defenses better than almost anyone else on campus. I’ll defend the Isles at Nebrask. I will serve. Just let me be a Rithmatist.”

Nothing happened. Joel stood. Most people went in and came out quickly, so he figured that there was no point in waiting around. Either he’d be able to draw the lines when he left, or he wouldn’t.

He turned to leave.

Something stood in the room behind him.

He jumped, stumbling back, almost falling over the small altar. The thing behind him was a brilliant white. It stood as high as Joel did, and was in the shape of a man—but a very thin one, with spindly arms and only a curved line for a head. It held what appeared to be a crude bow in one hand.

The thing looked as if it had been drawn, but it didn’t stick to the walls or floors like a chalkling. Its form was primitive, like the ancient drawings one might find on the side of a cliff.

Suddenly, Joel remembered the story he’d read from before, the tale of the explorer who had found a canyon where the drawings danced.

It didn’t move. Joel hesitantly leaned to the side and could see that the thing almost disappeared when looked at from that angle.

Joel leaned back to look at it from the front. What would it do? He took a hesitant step forward, reaching out. He paused, then touched the thing.

It shook violently, then fell to the ground, pasting itself to the floor like a chalk drawing. Joel stumbled back as the thing shot away underneath the altar.