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

by Christopher G Nuttall

  The talisman Topher held was not only a match to the one he had given Sappho, as he had originally made the two of them as halves of the same object. He carved them as one piece from a single piece of wood and strung the dream catcher nets from a single thong tanned, stretched, and cut from a single hide, then decorated both ends with feathers from his own magpie familiar since magpies were closely affiliated with the bridge between worlds. Only after it was completed did he break the two halves apart where the handles were conjoined. Using the principles of sympathy and contagion, ‘once touching, always touching,’ he hoped to catch Sappho’s dreams up into his own and use the magpie feathers to bridge the gap from his dreaming to hers.

  Since he was only in a trance and not asleep, he never left his place between the two warding circles. The sun grew brighter. He dreamed that Sappho stood up and started to sing. Then, as is the way of dreams, Topher realized that his surroundings had changed. The sun was brighter because the trees were gone. The warding circles were exactly the same but now they were on the peak of an isolated mountain. The bright open landscape below them was visible for miles in all directions. Nothing would be able to sneak up on them from this vantage point. Topher realized that this was Sappho’s idea of following Nancy’s advice and dreaming of someplace safe to do her summoning.

  Sappho’s kulning had an even more ethereal quality than when Topher had first heard it in the waking world. He could almost see her voice carry across the vast landscape below them, as if tiny indigo sparks traveled through the air. He dreamed that animals from all over the dream lands perked up their ears at the sound of her voice. Many turned away again when they recognized the song was for someone else, but others wandered closer, curious.

  Topher started to pace the circular track between the two wards, watching to see what kinds of creatures continued to approach as Sappho sang. Suddenly, outside the wards, where nothing had been, a small fluffy puppy appeared. It had not climbed the sheer cliffs but was simply there as is sometimes the way of dreams. The puppy was small and vulnerable, clearly the runt of the litter. It was exactly what Sappho had been looking for the day Topher took her to Duke Kaiser’s kennels.

  The puppy sat and looked up at Sappho, wagging its tail.

  Sappho smiled at it and stepped forward, only barely catching herself before crossing her circle of protection.

  The puppy whimpered and looked up at her. It laid down on its haunches a few feet beyond the outer ward and started to shiver.

  Sappho crouched down at the edge of the inner circle and started singing again. She stretched out her hand to the puppy, inviting it to come the rest of the way to her.

  “I am so cold and so tired,” the puppy whined to her. “It is such a long way to the top of your mountain. Come get me.”

  Sappho remained mindful of what Topher had taught her about using wards. They would fail to protect her if she broke them. Instead, she changed her kulning so that she sang strength and encouragement to the one she called.

  The puppy sat up again. It seemed to grow larger. With a stronger voice, it pleaded again, “Come get me.”

  Sappho’s foot inched forward and scuffed a break in the circle of the inner ward. Topher stepped in front of her to prevent her from breaking the second circle as well. She started to sidestep him as she continued to sing to the puppy as it grew. It was definitely getting larger. Topher grabbed her around the waist to prevent her from leaving the safety of the ward. Something worried him about the behavior of the animal that had come.

  When he looked over his shoulder at the puppy again, it had grown to full size. It was no longer a cute fuzzy malamute but a dark hairless dog-beast. It growled in frustration when the two teenagers stayed behind the ward, beyond its reach. This was not a familiar. The Keelut, a beast from Inupiaq legends, had come upon them in search of easy prey.

  Sappho gasped in fear when the beast revealed its true appearance. She searched Topher’s face with wide frightened eyes.

  Topher reached his right hand toward the beast as he continued to hold Sappho close. With all of his fingertips and thumb together forming a beak, he pointed at the Keelut and cried, “Argos.”

  The cantrip was supposed to trap its target in Glepnir Bands, bands of magical golden light that wrapped around the captive and prevented it from moving. Unfortunately, the Keelut disappeared before the golden bands reached it each time Topher tried. A split-second later, it would reappear at a different edge of the outer ward.

  Topher tried to cast three other cantrips. Every time, the beast seemed to blink out of existence and then reappear somewhere across the circular ward. It moved faster than Topher could think. Any spell that required aiming at the creature was not going to work.

  He pulled his wand from his pocket, a two-toned length of wood carved from diamond willow with a clear flawless diamond at the tip. While cantrips could be cast with a single word and gesture, spells from the other arts were more complicated and took longer to cast, like the dreamcatcher talismans he had made in preparation for this summoning. In order to be able to use other types of magic quickly in response to a threat, they needed to be cast ahead of time and stored in a gem.

  He pointed his wand at the Keelut and cast the spell to bind evil. Golden sparkles flew from the diamond at the tip of his wand and surrounded the Keelut. Unlike in the waking world, hints of the enchantment melody Topher had played on his saxophone lilted in the air with the sparkles. Still, the Keelut vanished before the sparkles could fully form into bands of while light to trap it.

  Golden sparkles flew from his wand again. Rather than chasing the Keelut this time, they followed the circular line of salt and iron filings of Topher’s outer ward. Once the circle was complete, the golden light seemed to pulse and expand to the tempo of the faint strains of the saxophone melody that repelled evil. The Keelut inched back slightly.

  So far, it had not tried to cross the ward. Topher assumed that it could not cross it and knew better than to try. That meant they were safe within the circle, but they were also trapped.

  “Just wake up,” Topher counseled her quietly. “This is a dream.”

  “Yes,” the Keelut growled, “wake and go about your business. Now that I have smelled you, I can track you through the worlds and hunt you wherever you go. I will only be the hungrier for it when I devour you.”

  Sappho clutched Topher in terror and buried her face in his chest.

  Topher frantically searched his memory for tales of the Keelut. There was little that people knew about it. Strange dog tracks that ended suddenly were all most people ever saw of it. Now Topher understood that where its tracks ended suddenly, the Keelut stepped into the dreamlands. This creature had the same power that Zoe Forrest could use to step between the waking and dreaming worlds or perhaps it had meant that it could travel to any of the worlds on the World Tree like the lords of the fey. If that were the case, there really was no place they could be safe in the waking or dreaming worlds once they left the wards Topher had drawn back in the clearing where their bodies still rested. There was no known means of catching or stopping this creature in any recorded myths.

  “Sing,” Topher whispered to Sappho. “This is not the one you meant to call. If we are stuck here, you might as well do what you came to do.”

  Sappho looked up at Topher and wiped away her tears with a trembling hand. Her voice trembled as well. It took her four tries before she could dredge up the courage to resume her kulning in spite of the bloodthirsty beast prowling around the outer warding circle.

  Topher changed his grip around her waist to allow her to stand straight so her voice could ring high and clear across the dream landscape. She turned to look out over the terrain below her mountaintop with her back against Topher’s chest for support. Her voice grew stronger. Her song was different yet again. Topher could tell that now she summoned a specific being with purpose where before she had been merely calling in the naïve manner that invited doom upon so many novices.

&n
bsp; Ignoring the Keelut was an insult that combined with its frustration and hunger to drive it into a rage. It lunged at them with a fierce roar.

  The golden light flared at the same time that a giant white blur barreled into the Keelut’s side mid-leap, driving it across and over the far edge of the mountain peak. A loud crisp clap of thunder resounded across the dream landscape a second after it disappeared, quickly followed by a second. Clouds rolled across the sky to follow the thunder.

  “My brave mistress,” whispered a deep, compassionate voice.

  A giant shaggy mountain goat stepped daintily across the dream ward to nuzzle Sappho’s hip.

  “How did you get across…?” Topher gaped.

  The mountain goat lifted his narrow head to address Topher, “It is a defining part of my nature to cross boundaries. I am made partly of warding stuff.

  “Wake now, mistress,” he addressed Sappho in his deep solemn whisper, “and call me to you once more. The danger is gone.”

  Topher and Sappho stood in the sunny clearing at the foot of the Bartlett Hills surrounded by trees. Hesiod stood over the carcass of a large beast at the edge of the outer warding circle and fired again with his rifle. He then switched to his shotgun and fired a round directly into the open wound at point blank range, making sure that all the salt and iron pellets penetrated deep into its flesh.

  Sappho let out a trembling breath and looked from Sod to Topher. She swallowed once and began to sing her third kulning from the dream. Shortly after she began, a large mountain goat ram with no bell stepped through the trees and nudged her hip.

  “That’s what was supposed to happen?” Sod asked stoically. “Well it’s a good thing you asked me to play along with you two. I don’t know what this thing is, but I am pretty sure I can get Fish & Game to believe it’s a black bear with mange.”

  Four days later, Topher escorted his first scholarship recruit, Themistocles Ferguson, and his sister and their familiars through a series of Walking Glasses to the Hudson Highlands in upstate New York where they took a ferry to the magical island that concealed Roanoke Academy for the Sorcerous Arts.

  He and a proctor led them through gardens and past the reflecting pool to the primary building on the campus, a large spired castle known as Roanoke Hall. First Temmy, then Sappho entered a seven-sided room with walls covered in shelves adorned with a wide variety of objects. By choosing an object from one of the shelves, the proctor was able to tell them which of the seven dormitories would be the most suitable place for them to live and study during their first year.

  The serious young Themistocles and his Alaskan Malamute familiar, Archimedes, would be in for a shock living with the Alchemy students in Raleigh Hall. Sappho and her mountain goat familiar, Heimdall, on the other hand, were sure to be very happy in Marlowe Hall, the conjurer’s dorm. Topher made sure that each of the siblings were settled and promised to collect them for dinner before he went to unpack his own things in his dorm room in Dee Hall.

  Sappho shyly followed Topher back out toward the campus commons.

  “Thank you,” Sappho chirped when she caught up with him. “This place is even more beautiful and amazing than I imagined.”

  “I am glad I could bring you here,” he assured her.

  “Now that we are here,” Sappho continued reluctantly, “is your job done?”

  “Working for O.I. was just a summer commitment.” He searched Sappho’s nervous expression and nearly fell over himself again when she bit her bottom lip. He smiled slowly at her and continued, “Now I can go back to my real job, what I should have been doing for the last five years, being your old friend Topher Evans and keeping track of when you might need me.”

  Erin Furby is a graduate of the St. John’s College great books program and an avid role player. She has been a contributing beta reader for the Books of Unexpected Enlightenment series and attended Roanoke Academy for the Sorcerous Arts under the name Iris Meadowsweet.

  Deep School Tuition

  Denton Salle

  There are a lot of magic schools people talk about these days. But very few want to discuss or even admit the existence of the oldest. Mentioned in legends for centuries, the Deep School produces very capable witches. Of course, there is a cost. But really, it’s not that bad. Really.

  Deep School Tuition

  When May first heard about the Deep School, she was skeptical. She had tried Wicca, Daoism, Shamanism, and even Tantric Magic, the latter which seemed to be an excuse for the “master” to sleep with as many women as possible. The sex was good, and some of her classmates, which leaned heavily toward male, were excellent in the sack. But the damned stuff didn’t work.

  And working was the point. She was in marketing, which was incredibly competitive because, let’s face it, it wasn’t like you needed any special skills or a lot of smarts. Most of it was common sense. Hell, you didn’t even need to work hard. Just give the impression you did and if things didn’t work, well, the market was soft this year. Or the market was contracting. Lots of lies could cover up the fact you weren’t really doing anything different or unique.

  You could make it work. One could always swap a bit of special attention at the National Sales Meeting to get some old guy to tell your boss what a great job you did. Or you could make up a harassment claim like she did to get that asshole fired, who saw through the smokescreen. His boss was easy: a little extra attention and some lube in the parking lot kept him happy. The HR rep was a bit harder: the old biddy actually wanted a relationship. Well, women like her were easy to lead on.

  She walked down the sidewalk in the Short North to the address. The snow from yesterday’s storm was mostly cleared from the walk, and the upscale restaurants were open. This gave her hope. After all, those other “magicians” barely could afford rent, never mind a place in this part of town. Not a great indicator of any sort of power when you couldn’t pay the bills. A way to clear the rest of the obstacles from her career path without leaving evidence. One working curse was all she wanted.

  No one bothered her. She learned early on if you were going to use these tactics, you needed to look “safe.” She always dressed demurely. Made your complaints more believable. The groups of young guys walking by barely gave her a glance. Good. Last thing she needed was some dude wanting a relationship. They were good for one-night stands, if that long.

  May really wished this Deep School was the real thing. She knew that magic existed. She had seen what her grandmother could do. The old hag refused to teach. May needed that edge, and if it required some sort of oath to an imaginary being to learn it, well, it wasn’t the first lie she told. Wouldn’t be the last either.

  She followed her GPS to the address she was sent. Weird, that. After months of digging, some guy came up to her in a coffee shop one evening and just dropped a card on her iPad. A very good looking, very well-dressed guy. High-end tailored suit, Italian shoes, leather overcoat. Dark glasses, even at night. All the card said was the Deep School in red letters on black, with an address, a date, and a time written on the red back. Nothing else. He didn’t talk or anything. She tried to catch him outside but he seemed to vanish.

  The neighborhood was very trendy and the address led to an expensive high rise. She entered and took an elevator to the 14th floor. She gasped a bit when the doors opened. Whoever’s suite this was, it took up the whole floor. This was the kind of wealth she expected real magicians to have, not the low-rent places she had been before. A young woman in a fitted business suit, the skirt coming to mid-calf, moderate heels, and perfect make-up was waiting there.

  “Excellent, you are right on time,” she said. “The master, I mean Dr. Faustus, will see you now.”

  “Faustus?” May asked. “That’s an odd name. Seems like I should know it.”

  “It’s an old German name,” the girl answered. “Heck, there is even a hotel named that in Fredericksburg, Texas.” May caught the twang in her voice then. The girl smiled and pointed to the red door. “You can go into th
e office.”

  May pushed the heavy door open, marveling a bit the color was the wood and not paint. The room on the other side spoke of wealth and luxury. Fine Persian rugs partially covered a hardwood floor. Antique furniture decorated the rooms. The walls, done in exotic wood wainscoting and rich wallpaper above, were hung with paintings. Strange paintings. She recognized one as that weird Dutch painting. A voice, cultured and accented with a tint of German, broke into her thoughts.

  “Ah, I see you like my Bosch. What do you think of the Bruegel?

  “They are interesting,” May answered. Her mind raced. If she remembered right, and these were originals, they were nearly priceless. She turned to see a gray-haired man, clean shaven, and dressed in a tailored suit, standing still by a desk at the end of the room. His face was surprisingly gaunt and lined but the five-thousand-dollar suit and Italian shoes were what held her attention. Behind the table desk of some dark wood with gold inlays, he looked extremely wealthy. The desk itself looked like something from a museum. On top, it held only a tea pot and two cups.

  “Come, sit, and tell me why you are interested in the Deep School,” he said, sitting behind the desk. It was politely said but still felt like a command.

  As she sat, he spoke again. “Tea?”