Fantastic Schools: Volume One (Fantastic Schools Anthologies Book 1)

by Christopher G Nuttall

  Master Courtenay rattled through the names of the other people at the table. He had a superb memory, or these people had been eating together for a long time. “You’ll eventually hear from each of us,” he concluded, speaking directly to me, “how we each became interested in the study of magic itself, not its boring applied uses. But the custom Dairen has already followed is that we invite newcomers to say how they became interested in General Magic. Often, they were inspired by a junior faculty member here. Some were inspired by a traveling tutor. And you? You don’t have to answer.”

  “I was seven,” I answered. “I heard of General Magic, a bit, and knew it was what I wanted to study.”

  “That’s the silliest thing I’ve ever heard in my life,” a tall girl near the head of the table snapped. Winterhold, I remembered, her name is Janice Winterhold. “How can you possibly say that?” she asked. There were nods of agreement from around the table. “Seven? For a decade I studied dance magic as lead student of a Serene Master. He was positive there were better ways to find new dance spells, and asked me to find them.”

  “Because it’s true?” I countered. I was met with frowns.

  “My grandfather,” the boy sitting next to Janice said, “was an expert in gesture magic. He trained a team that captured three hrordrin. He spent hours tutoring me, but not as many hours as I finally wanted. So when we became young adults, we made adult decisions about a vocation. I decided to be here.”

  “What happened when you were seven?” Serene Master Courtenay asked.

  “I heard about Ettore’s paradox,” I said. “Not very clearly. Just enough that it sounded fascinating, and decided that was what I wanted to make the center of my life. Much later I learned it was called ‘General Magic’.”

  “You think you’re going to solve that Paradox?” Janice challenged. “When people have been trying to solve it for thousands of years?” Her friends, that was most of the table, nodded agreeably.

  “Weren’t you lucky,” the boy next to Janice asked, “that Fourbridge didn’t call your bluff? I mean, you can’t power that gnothdiar, can you?" That was the fellow who said I had carried a peldiar. He hadn’t quite been holding hands with Janice, but it was clear they were close friends, so he was standing verbally behind her.

  “My gnothdiar is a bonded implement,” I said. I gestured with my left hand. Every channel in the gnothdiar came up in the same instant, their glows illuminating the table. “Bonded to me. I bonded with it by driving all its channels at the same time, up to their power limits, while casting other spells and setting wards.” Janice looked skyward. She obviously didn’t believe a word I was saying.

  “We’ll get to see you do that next week,” the boy said. “I’m Abner Whitfield, by the way.” He said it as though I was supposed to know who he was. “First-year students show up on the Campus Martius, show their combat magic, get placed in classes.”

  “We’re supposed to know combat magic?” Dairen asked. “That’s not in the admission rules.”

  “Everyone knows...” Abner began.

  “No, the young man is correct,” Master Courtenay said. “You’ve never studied combat magic, Dairen?”

  “My family builds instruments. Fancy lenses. Time fractionators. Nothing violent,” he mumbled. He looked more frightened than ever.

  “Let’s talk about this later, Dairen. After lunch?” Master Courtenay said. “There are special rules. You’ll be fine.”

  “Different question,” I said. “General library access? I see that textbooks get bought, but I like to read. The library rules say ‘standard ward passage’, but nothing mentions how the ward passage is set.”

  “You saw your advisor this morning?” Courtenay asked. I nodded agreement. “You should have signed a promise to obey the Academy’s rules. Did you? This goes for you, too, Dairen.” We both agreed we had. “The wards are renewed daily. Tomorrow you have full library access. Despite megallenia of fairy tales, the library actually does not have restricted shelves. There are a lot of books that make you prove you’re up to understanding them, before they let you open them, but you can take them off the shelf safely.”

  “That includes books on fixed-spell alteration methods,” Abner added. I must’ve raised my eyebrows. What was he talking about? “Methods for altering your personal spells, your agelessness spell.”

  “Alter my agelessness spell?” My tone of voice didn’t make it sound like a question. That sounded remarkably dangerous. Did he think I was dumber than a bag of hammers?

  “If you’re afraid to do it to yourself,” the fellow sitting closest to me said, “there are people who can do it for you. The last University Council determined agelessness alteration, growing up early, was allowed by student rules.”

  “It is, however, a remarkably impressive way to kill yourself,” Master Courtenay observed. “For all that a considerable fraction of everyone in earshot, not including me, seems to have done that.”

  Finally I connected the links. Against stupidity, the gods themselves struggle in vain. Yes, it is possible to adjust my agelessness spell, the spell that holds me at my current physical age as a young adult for as long as I want, following which it is relaxed so that I age physically into a grown-up, and then never get any older. Relaxation does all sorts of bad things to your ability to command the Presence, so that you cast a spell to heat your cocoa, and the resulting column of fire consumes you and the neighboring building. That’s dangerous during the transition. Once you finish aging, there’s no problem. The longer you wait, the stronger your control of the Presence, for the rest of your life, becomes. Curiously, few people are willing to wait. Thank you, I thought, I prefer to wait. I’m in no hurry. Actually, I was in a lot of hurry, in particular for lectures to start.

  “Oh, got it. Thanks, but I’m happy the way I am,” I said. Janice’s eyes bugged out. She shook her head. I could see head shakes propagate very gently down most of the length of the table. “When do the open lectures start? And where?” Those were lectures from visitors, people who talked knowledgeably about something specific. There were glances back-and-forth, followed by silence.

  “Proscenium Hall is the old alchemy building,” Master Courtenay said. “Unofficially, it’s where faculty interested in general magic congregate. If you wander the halls a bit, you’ll find where the announcements are posted. That’s also where our regular classes are held, a minor detail you cannot tell from the normal class schedule.”

  “Thank you!” I managed. Master Courtenay was clearly worth cultivating, but the rest of these people seem to have their own interests.

  I turned to my food and listened carefully. There was a lot of gossip. Finally, most people stopped eating. I’d been talking, so I was just reaching dessert.

  “Beach?” Janice asked. “For regulars? Master, you’re always welcome to join us.”

  “Thank you,” Courtenay answered, “but I like to stand at a safe distance and watch the waves break. While fully dressed.”

  “Dairen,” I said, “If you’d like to learn a few defensive wards, I’d be happy to show you.” I tried to smile at him. He looked down at the table.

  The mob stood up and headed for the door, ignoring Dairen and me. Already these folks didn’t seem to be entirely likeable people. Master Courtenay rose and headed down the table toward us. Dairen shrank in his chair.

  Courtenay nodded at me. “Janice thinks the world runs exactly a certain way. And since you have the brains not to want to tamper with your personal spells, you may not find her friends to be very friendly to you. As for you, Dairen, if you really have not studied combat magic at all, there actually is a process for transferring to the New School. You might well be happier there. You’d need faculty endorsement, which we would give.”

  Dairen tried to square his shoulders. “Thank you, sir, but my parents said I should study here.” Something in that remark clicked into my memory. “They thought, since my House double tithes to the Order of the Axe, there’d be no issue of my
safety.”

  “Sigil!” Master Courtenay and I spoke almost in unison.

  “Better that I take care of it now,” he said.

  “Thanks for the advice, Master,” I added. “Do people here discuss General Magic very often? I listened to them talk, and heard all sorts of things, but never school-type things.”

  “Alas, no,” Courtenay said. “For all that we are the General Magic table, General Magic is rarely discussed here. Or anywhere else. Truthfully, General Magic is mostly studied by lesser heirs of very wealthy houses, so the heirs can say they studied successfully at Dorrance.”

  “I’m actually a third heir,” I said. “But when I’ve heard people who simply wanted papers stamped, so they didn’t work very hard, how did they do it?”

  Courtenay laughed. “Subjects have lectures. At the start, the lecturer will give a short summary ‘what you need to know’. If you know that and no more, you earn a ‘Gentleman’s Pass’. There is then a short recess. Students staying behind, if any, are interested in the serious material.”

  “Some people don’t stay behind?” Dairen asked in surprise.

  “You really should transfer to the New School, Dairen,” Courtenay said. “If you don’t object, I should contact your parents. Their standards are the same...their library is less-than-well-organized at advanced levels. The transfer process is transparent.”

  Dairen nodded agreement. “Whatever my parents say,” he said.

  That wasn’t what I wanted to hear about Dorrance, but you have to live in the world that is. The better library sounded to be the one here, which sounded to be the right choice.

  “Thanks for explaining where lectures are,” I said.

  “Most everything you actually need to know about taking classes is on bulletin boards,” Courtenay said, “someplace or other in the Hall. But Dairen and I need to take care of something, something good for you, young man, something your parents paid for.”

  We all stood.

  I had a week before classes started. I prowled Proscenium Hall, finally realizing I needed a map with floor plan. The corridor layout was bizarre. Rooms were all named, sometimes with different names on different doors. A dismaying number of bulletin boards lurked in odd spots.

  I finally found the central office and made friends with the Administrative Scribe, a charming, elderly woman. Elena Bonafortuna had all sorts of useful advice. Giving her a few quires of quality paper didn’t hurt. No, she explained, there were no maps. No, there was no unified lecture schedule. Yes, there were other serious students, but she had no idea who, or where to find them. There was a bulletin board for students. That might help, if I could find it. She did, however, have the actual class schedule. I managed to reach a few lectures. I hid in the extreme back, told myself I would not understand much of what I was hearing, and took notes. While my memory was fresh, I copied my notes into more permanent notebooks.

  I also prowled the library. Master Courtenay had said the New School’s library was less well organized. I had trouble imagining how that could be true. There seemed to be no records as to what was where. That had to be wrong. Finding the records must have been one of these little puzzles left in the path of students. For the most part, volumes corresponding to a particular course of study were in a single hall, but not always. There was a Hall for Governance, a Hall for Theology, two Halls for Construction, and on and on and on. There was even a Hall for History. I reminded myself to look for books on summoning paper.

  Marchesi’s seven volumes on bone wands, very hard to miss in their glow-brightly-in-the-dark scarlet jackets, were in four different halls. I did find a copy of Ettore’s book. The Librarians had it hidden behind the front desk. Apparently every so often someone would appear and try to burn the book, on the belief that if the book were destroyed, Ettore’s claims would be disproven. Providing the paper for a copy made a significant dent in my supply, but an hour later I actually had a copy of Ettore’s A Mathemagical Paradox.A glance inside said that some day I would understand it, but that day was not yet.

  I made a point of visiting each of the Eating Clubs. I was a bit reluctant to visit Violet House, but they were very polite. I’d saved their House from embarrassment. Violent House was actually fun. They’d had run-ins with Harold Fourbridge. The fellow who asked me which spells I’d had behind my back was a bit startled when I told him. Then one of their members, Kimberly Lane – the Lanes are neighbors of ours – decided to give me a second introduction to the lunch group. “This is Adara Triskittenion, whose solo hunt brought home the heads of three...” she paused for effect “...night terrors.”

  I summoned an image of my bedroom, the skulls on the walls. There were loud cheers.

  I also ate at each of the Refectories, returning once a day to Miller’s Refectory and the General Magic table. I was excluded from most of the conversations. I listened carefully when they discussed watching the other first-year folks at the table being tested on the Campus Martius. The combat magic tests sounded to be complete jokes, but they all went out to watch and cheer our fellows on. I hadn’t heard about the custom until now.

  Dairen had vanished. I felt really sorry for him. I did ask Master Courtenay where he was. Apparently, the local Order-Master of the Order of the Axe had taken a personal interest in seeing he was someplace safe.

  A few days later, I received a directive, when and where to report on the Campus Martius. I went over the day before to survey. My assigned location was a good mile out from the places where other students were being tested. Each student was put up against a simulacrum, a creature of straw and twine, something barely able to walk. A good number of them did not take the exercise seriously. They got pummeled by a bag of straw and the feeble spells backing it. Others seemed to have an unclear idea of what they were supposed to be doing. Many had clearly only been in mock duels in which you were expected to pull your blows. If I’d quoted the family doctrine on kicking a man in the head, ‘best done while he’s flat on the ground; he can’t dodge as fast’, they’d have been distressed.

  The rules were simple. Each location had two warding circles. You stepped into the outer circle, raised the circle, prepared your weapons and spells, and stepped into the inner circle. The docent grading your skills raised the inner circle. At some point, probably not instantly afterward, you were attacked by a simulacrum. You were expected to defend yourself.

  The next day my time in the ring came. I’d mentioned to the General Magic table where and when I had my test. Unlike the other first-year students at the table, I did not have an audience. Grandfather Worrow had drilled into me: There are no mock combats, except between fools. Mock combats teach you bad habits. I am not a fool. I was about to face a straw scarecrow, but I would face it with the readiness I would have had if I faced a barbarian horde. I stepped inside the outer circle and felt its shields rising behind me. I checked my wards, summoned my left- and right-hand spells, opened the void node on each wrist, and stepped across the inner circle, grumbling under my breath that I was not allowed to reach for my gnothdiar before combat started. OK, it’s a realistic test on being ambushed.

  At first, nothing happened. There was supposed to be a target dummy. It was missing in action. I cast a weak sight spell, enough to spot something invisible. Nothing.

  The attack came from directly behind me, strong enough to drive me down onto one knee. My gnothdiar was most useful if I drew it, difficult when my right hand hit the ground almost hard enough to break my wrist. Reflexively, I released a half-dozen spell-breaker and warding spells, followed by area fire and lightning spells, all directed straight behind me.

  The scarecrow, whatever it was, caught two of the spell-breaker spells and sent them back in my direction. My own wards swallowed them and powered up. Someone was fond of pyrotechnics. Lightning spells left behind the smell of sweet metal. Blinding lights and screeching noises tried to tear at my senses. Sorry, the last time that trick worked on me I was four years old, when I could barely cast any spe
lls at all. That time, I countered the trick by kicking big brother Heath in the stomach. Hard. This time, I pushed up with my right leg, struggling to stand, casting Dance of the Air to help me get off the ground. Standing, I fell back into pure defensive combat, each finger on my left hand releasing a separate ward. Now I was on my feet. With my right arm, I managed to touch my gnothdiar hilt. The sword leaped into my hand. I pivoted and took two steps back. Every combat master teaches you to charge at the enemy, the better to create threats. I stepped back to create surprise.

  I faced a vaguely manlike creature of shiny metal and glittering lights, surrounded by a haze of warding spells. A straw-filled scarecrow it was not. I could see its attacks, lightning and fire, striking the ground where I had stood. They were powerful and very tightly focused. I sprang to the side well before the creature realized I had moved.

  Sharp, I thought, Sharp. I called the most powerful destructive spell I knew, backing it with both hands and gnothdiar, directing it straight against the creature’s core. The air between us trembled and bent. Its wards would not go down. I drew on my void nodes, sending all the power I could reach against the creature. My wrists burned where the nodes touched my skin. Its wards would not go down. I interleaved a dozen attack spells with ward breakers. Its wards remained intact. All this time, it was directing spells at me, spells as sophisticated as mine, backed by more power than I could call without careful preparation. My wards did not go down, either.

  The creature turned and charged. I jumped to the side. Our wards collided, sending me tumbling across the circle. The creature outweighed me by a lot. It wasn’t weak, either. I rolled, landed on my feet, and hit the creature with a half-dozen ward-eating spells. They bit, turning the creature’s wards into incandescent flame. Those wards still stayed up. The creature threw itself at me, arms out-stretched, trying for a tackle. I faked a move to the left, but jumped right. My gnothdiar delivered more ward-breaking spells. I swung, two-handed, my gnothdiar connecting with the creature’s back as we passed. Tutor had warned me I shouldn’t rely on speed or brute strength. I’m still not that slow or that weak.