The Zero Curse

by Christopher G. Nuttall

  The room filled up slowly. Akin and Isabella entered together, Akin heading towards me while Isabella sat at the rear of the room. I did my best to ignore her gaze, burning into the back of my neck, as Akin sat next to me. She’d get over it eventually, wouldn't she? She had six years to rebuild her position, then a guaranteed place in High Society. I knew I wouldn't be so lucky, unless I built a massive network of my own. The lack of power would prove a major impediment when I grew to adulthood.

  “It’s five minutes after we were due to begin,” Akin muttered. “Perhaps we’re in the wrong room after all.”

  “Our timetables say Room 6B, Building Seven,” I said. “What about yours?”

  “The same,” he confirmed. “But ...”

  The doors swung open. I turned to look as I heard a rattling sound. An upperclassman was pushing a wheelchair through the doors, carefully manoeuvring it past the desks and up to the front of the room. He turned it slowly, bringing the passenger into view. I stared in disbelief as my mind tried to grapple with the sight before me. The passenger - the tutor, I assumed - was ... was strange.

  He - or she? I couldn’t tell. He was strikingly androgynous. The face was neither masculine nor feminine; the hair a shade too long to be a man, but too short to be a woman. The clothes were baggy, a bizarre mix of colours and styles ... it took me a moment to realise that even the materials were mixed, a blend of noble silks and rough commoner cloth. I wasn't even sure of his - or her - age. The tutor had to be in his twenties, at least, but it was hard to be certain. My gaze seemed to slide over the tutor’s features. I couldn't tell anything about him for sure.

  It could be a glamour, I thought, as the tutor’s assistant strode past me and left the room. I reached into my pocket and found the spectacles. Perhaps if I look at him through them ...

  I lifted the spectacles out of my pocket, only to have them yanked out of my hand by an invisible force. The tutor held up a gloved hand, caught them neatly and placed them on the desk.

  “Naughty, naughty,” the tutor said. Even the voice was androgynous. Too deep to be feminine, too light to be male. “Talk to me after class.”

  I tensed as I heard snickers from behind me. Alana, Isabella ... probably the rest of the class too. A detention barely five minutes after class had been due to start ... it was a new record, probably. Maybe the teacher was just establishing his - or her - authority. Or maybe he - I decided I’d consider him a he, until I knew better - wanted to keep his secrets to himself. I wondered, sourly, just what I would see if I had a chance to look at him through the spectacles. His true face, perhaps?

  He’s in a wheelchair, I thought. What happened to him?

  I couldn't think of an answer, save for a particularly horrific curse. A magician capable of teaching at Jude’s would have no trouble paying for a pair of new legs, if whatever had happened to them couldn't be fixed. Perhaps there was a curse on his legs that had wielded itself so tightly into his magic that it couldn't be removed. It was the only answer I could think of that made sense. And yet ... there were all kinds of experts at Jude’s. Surely, someone could have come up with an answer.

  “Let us start with a question,” the tutor said. His wheelchair squeaked loudly as he rolled forward. “There is a book on the shelf above my head. How can I reach it without magic?”

  “Use a summoning spell,” Alana muttered.

  “I said without magic,” the tutor snapped. The class snickered again, louder this time. “No magic. How do I reach the book?”

  I silently considered the problem. No magic ... I could have pushed a table into place under the bookshelf, then climbed on it, but a man trapped in a rickety wheelchair couldn't hope to get out without help. Get someone else to do it? That might work, if he found someone tall enough. He’d dismissed his assistant, but I assumed he could call the assistant back. Or ...

  “Use a bat to knock it down,” Gayle Fitzwilliam suggested.

  The tutor smiled. “Do I have a bat?”

  No, I thought.

  I stuck up my hand. “You ask one of us to do it,” I said. “We put a table under the bookshelf and climb up to get the book.”

  “Good thinking, I have to get it for myself,” the tutor said. “No magic. How do I get it?”

  I glanced at Rose, who shrugged. No magic ...? I couldn't see any way a wheelchair-bound man could reach the bookshelf, not without help. The problem seemed unsolvable, unless he was hiding a walking stick somewhere around his person. I certainly couldn’t see one ...

  “Watch and learn,” the tutor said.

  He stood. We stared at him in shock as he walked over to the shelf, reached out casually and picked up the book. And then he turned to face us.

  “The solution was obvious,” he said. “And yet, none of you realised it because of the flaw in your thinking. You assumed that I was stuck in the wheelchair. And you were wrong.”

  He dropped the book on the desk. It made a satisfying BANG.

  “Assume, as the saying goes, makes an ass out of you and me,” he added. “If you learn nothing else from me, learn this. The assumptions you make, the assumptions you don’t think to question, will eventually get you into trouble.”

  I nodded, slowly. How many people had assumed I had magic? And how many people had assumed that the secret of Objects of Power was something other than the truth?

  “This class is Questioning Assumptions,” the tutor added. He waved a hand at his outlandish garb. “Why did I choose to dress like this? To wear my hair like this? To shave my face and hide my wrinkles? Why?”

  There was a long pause. No one wanted to try to answer. I thought I knew the answer, but I wasn't sure. The tutor - he still hadn't given us his name - had deliberately set out to mess with our minds. Our clothing presented us as young students; male and female; his clothing presented a collection of very mixed messages. Male or female, noble or peasant, rich or poor ... he simply didn't fit into any of the established patterns. I felt an odd flicker of envy as I touched my braided hair. No one cared about the colour of my skin or my eyes or my hair, but if I wore it a centimetre too short I could be sure of some very astringent criticism indeed. A girl who shaved her head - or a boy who grew his hair too long - would be shunned by High Society.

  Alana stuck up a hand. “Because you wanted to confuse us.”

  “Precisely,” the tutor said. He clapped his hands, loudly. “If I’d worn tutoring robes, you would have drawn one set of assumptions about me; if I’d donned golden silks or sackcloth and ashes, you would have made two different sets of assumptions about me. And your assumptions would have been badly flawed. What’s to stop a commoner wearing noble clothes?”

  I felt Rose stifle a laugh beside me as an uneasy mummer ran around the classroom. In theory, commoners were barred from wearing silks; in practice, if the commoner could obtain noble clothes, what was to stop him wearing them and claiming to be nobly born? There were so many noblemen in the kingdom that a commoner who looked and acted the part could probably get away with it for years, as long as he was careful. Who was going to write to someone on the other side of the country, just to check a low-ranking nobleman’s bona fides?

  “It's against the law,” Isabella said.

  “Yes, it is,” the tutor agreed. “But tell me ... how is the law enforced?”

  “The Guardsmen or the Kingsmen would arrest a fraud,” Fredrick said. “He’d be hung.”

  “But how would they know that a man with a noble bearing, with all the social graces of a born aristocrat, is a fake?” The tutor’s gaze swept the room. “Their eyes would see a man who fitted the part and they would look no further. Why would they? Their assumption would be that anyone who looked the part actually was the part.”

  “No one could do that for long, surely,” Isabella said.

  The tutor smiled at her. “It's been done,” he said. “There have only been a handful of cases, but it has happened. A person would step into High Society, claiming to be minor nobility from the ot
her side of the country ... as long as they looked and acted the part, no one would be suspicious of them. Ah, there was even a father and daughter team who conned a number of society ladies before they absconded with their ill-gotten gains. How did they get away with it? No one thought to question them before it was too late!”

  He paused. “Any questions before we continue?”

  Akin stuck up a hand. “Yeah,” he said. “How do we know you’re the real tutor?”

  I fought to hide a smile. Akin was probably going to be in detention for the rest of his life, but ... it was a good thought. How did we know the tutor was a real tutor? Sure, he’d walked into a classroom he’d clearly prepared for us, but that didn’t prove anything ... did it? If someone could walk into High Society and fool all the society dames like Great Aunt Stregheria, why couldn't a fake tutor walk into Jude’s and convince the Castellan that he was qualified to teach?

  The tutor surprised us by laughing. “Very good, young man,” he said. “You’ll go far.”

  His voice was suddenly serious. “For the record, I am Magister Niven. And, also for the record, I’m not always going to be honest with you. You will get into trouble if you take everything I say seriously, without checking it for yourself. Why? Because some of the things I will tell you will be true and some will be lies. Your grades will depend on just how good you are at telling the difference.”

  Bella choked. “That doesn't make sense!”

  Magister Niven smirked. “Why not?”

  “You’re the teacher,” Bella protested, when no one else tried to answer. “You have to tell us the truth.”

  “I don’t recall seeing that line in my contract,” Magister Niven informed her. “But let us consider your argument. I am a teacher, therefore I am authority. And authority should always be straight with you, right?”

  Bella hesitated, then nodded.

  “Wrong!” Magister Niven clapped his hands, again. “Authority can be wrong. Sometimes, a person in authority can be mistaken. A person who believes a lie, and who repeats the lie, does not do so out of malicious intent! And yet, he is repeating a lie! You force him to drink a truth potion and he will still repeat the lie, because he does not know it is a lie. There are books, books written as recently as five years ago, books you can still find in the library, which include untruths. Did those writers lie to you?”

  I shook my head. They’d told the truth, as they’d known it. But future generations had discovered that their concept of the truth had been very limited. Magical knowledge was still advancing ...

  “And that is just the milder form,” Magister Niven added. “Authority is also often more interested in maintaining itself than determining the truth. A person who clings to his authority - which may or may not be based on a known lie - is unlikely to want to do anything to weaken it. You may discover that proving your tutors wrong is a good way to get into trouble.

  “Earlier, I mentioned that con men had been known to pose as nobles - and successfully fool people who had been raised from birth in High Society. And yet, many of you found it impossible to believe me. Perhaps, after I told you to take everything I said with a pinch of salt, you thought I was lying. And the reason you thought I was lying, I suspect, was because you had been told from birth that the noble-born are special. You didn't want to believe that a commoner could fool you because that would suggest that you weren’t special.

  “And yet, there is another reason. The Grand Dames of High Society wouldn't want to admit, not even in private, that they were fooled. Their authority rests on their ability to decide who is in and who is out, who has the right bloodlines and who doesn't, who is suitable marriage material and who isn’t ... they don’t want you to think that their abilities might be flawed because that would call their authority into question. Authority works to preserve itself.”

  He paused. “Can any of you give me an example of authority acting to preserve itself?”

  Great Aunt Stregheria, I thought. She doesn't want to give up a shred of her power either.

  I kept that thought to myself. Magister Niven had steered us into uneasy - if not dangerous - waters. I found it hard to believe that High Society knew what he was teaching us. The Castellan would be in trouble if the Grand Dames ever found out. And yet ... the secret would be out, the moment one of us wrote home. What did that mean? Did the Castellan know what we were being taught?

  “Three hundred years ago,” Magister Niven said. “John Lollard.”

  There was a collective intake of breath. The tutor ignored it.

  “A poet and preacher during the time of the Peasant Uprising, a man many called mad,” he said. “Lollard asked a simple question, time and time again; when Rome built and Rime sowed, who was then the gentleman? Authority - in the form of King Rickard and his aristocracy - made no attempt to answer the question. They could not. Instead, they killed Lollard and his followers. The copies of his poems were rounded up and burnt. Only a handful survived the purge.”

  He paused. “Lollard was not executed for writing bad poetry. He was executed for pointing out that the king and the aristocracy had no natural authority over the kingdom, when they claimed otherwise. Authority chose to perpetrate a lie rather than have a honest debate. They believed they would lose. Perhaps they were right.”

  I swallowed, hard. It wasn't safe to question the king’s right to rule. I’d been brought up to believe that the king did have a right to rule, gifted by our ancestors. And yet ... why did he have the right to rule? Did he have the right to rule?

  “This class will teach you how to isolate and question your assumptions,” Magister Niven said, moving back onto safer ground. “You will be graded by your ability to back up your assertions with facts, figures and reasoned arguments ...”

  Akin nudged me. “I can argue with the teacher!”

  “Yes, you can,” Magister Niven said. He clearly had very sharp ears. “But you had better put forward a coherent argument. As amusing as it is to read an essay that consists of nothing but insults aimed at me, I’ll still fail anyone who writes it. I don’t want you to parrot what you’ve been told back at me, either. I want you to actually think about the material.”

  I felt torn. I liked the idea of arguing and debating with the teacher, but ... I couldn't help feeling a little nervous. What would we be discussing? I wasn't sure I wanted to know.

  Magister Niven reached under his wheelchair and produced a stack of envelopes. “There is a sheet of paper in each of these,” he told us. He clicked his fingers. The envelopes flew into the air and darted towards us. “I have written a specific statement on each of them - a different statement. Your homework, due on Friday, is a short essay proving or disproving the statement. Use as many words as you feel appropriate. You are not to collaborate on this. I will know and you will regret it.”

  I caught an envelope and held it. It felt surprisingly light.

  “I think I’ve taxed your brains enough for one session,” Magister Niven added. “You are dismissed. Except you, Caitlyn. Remain behind.”

  “Hah,” Alana muttered.

  “I can wait behind,” Rose said.

  I hesitated. “It might be a while,” I said. We had potions immediately after Magister Niven’s class. And there was no clock in the room. I wasn't sure what time it was. Rose might only have a few minutes before the bell rang. “Get something to drink. You might need it.”

  “Okay,” Rose said. “Good luck.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Magister Niven waited until the rest of the class had left the room, then sat back down in his wheelchair. “Do you know,” he said as the door closed, “why I asked you to remain behind?”

  A number of smart answers ran through my head. I dismissed them.

  “Because I wanted to see through your glamour,” I said. He was turning my spectacles over and over in his hands. “I would have known what you were trying to hide from us.”

  His lips curved into a sly smile. “Here,” he said, passing
me the spectacles. “What do I look like?”

  I donned the spectacles and peered at him. There was no visible magic, not even a standard protective spell. He hadn’t used a glamour ... he hadn't used anything. The appearance he’d presented to us was real.

  “You didn't hide your appearance,” I said, dully. “I don’t understand.”

  “I wanted you to stay behind because I wanted a chat with you,” Magister Niven said. “You gave me the opportunity to hold you back without raising too many eyebrows.”

  “Oh,” I said. I could see the logic, but I wasn't pleased. “What do you want to chat about?”