Abaddon's Mark

Chapter Eight

Nendan sat in Maeno's workroom, watching as the spell mage played with his notes and refused to look at anything else. The words hung in the air between them. Maeno's self-accusations and his anger with himself for wanting, even for a moment, to cut Naena out of his life to protect her from herself.

Nendan couldn't imagine having to make that kind of difficult decision, the sort of guilt it would weigh on a soul.

"But what happened in the classroom isn't your fault, Maeno," Nendan said.

"Naena knows. She always knows."

"Sure, that I'll go with because she seems to," Nendan countered. "But what happened in the classroom was that someone attacked her with magic, and she happened to have a war mage spell all but prepared. If she hadn't had it done up, Graydon would have stepped in."

"Are you sure?" Maeno asked. "Because he was dismissed to a healer."

"Yes, I heard that too."

"What use am I if I can't help her?"

"Your job, right now, isn't to help her. It's to learn," Nendan said soothingly. "To learn all you can. If you want to help her, you need to arm yourself the way she does. Learn."

"No one can learn like Naena does. The speed she learns things at, the way she remembers all that stuff... it's impossible."

"It's really quite easy, depending on your method."

Maeno blinked at Nendan several times. Silence hung over the workroom for that amount of time. Nendan frowned a little, wondering what the issue was, why Maeno wasn't nodding along to his words.

"Don't you learn about memory palaces in first year?" he asked. "In research, Magi Yole comes in, and it's the only time you'll ever see his feet, and he explains it to your whole class."

Seeing the librarian's feet had caused quite a stir among the students in Nendan's class. Even for Nendan, who had seen Magi Yole out from behind his desk plenty of times yet never spotted his feet before.

"Magi Yole didn't visit my research class," Maeno said.

"Oh."

They stared at one another for a while once more. Maeno leaned forward slightly. His left ear turned just that little bit toward Nendan as if he were waiting for something.

"Right, memory palace. So, a memory palace is a place you build in your memory. Most people use Amos as their base because Magi Yole suggests it. As you're walking the halls, doing your thing, you store memories in things. For example, my first sexual experience is stored in a little trinket around a statue's neck. There are inscriptions along one hallway that no one can translate, into those I poured the knowledge of my work to learn the language."

"But Naena could do that before Amos."

"She uses something else as a palace then. Or, rare as it could be, the woman is smarter than your average mage. Not hard to see on the last part, considering so are you. She's been heard saying that her mother raised a stupid child but not a... no, raised a. Damn, what is it her mother raised?"

"I've heard stupid but not blind. And dumb but not stupid. Difference there being she was called dumb for not knowing how to read or write."

"Yes, that. You simply need to practice building a palace. The more often you attach memories to a thing, the easier you will find it."

"Oh, goodie."

"Don't get sassy with me."

"Yay," Maeno said with all the sarcasm he could muster.