Study in Slaughter (Schooled in Magic)

by Christopher Nuttall

  Sheer panic blasted through her and she stumbled backwards, regaining some strength as she staggered away from the Mimic. It didn’t seem to care; it merely glided after her, pushing her down the corridor. If it had killed and replaced Sergeant Bane—she’d never heard of a Mimic simply being a shapeshifter, although she didn’t know much about them—it wouldn’t have any trouble doing the same to her. Desperately, she lifted her hand again and threw a hex at the Mimic. The spell passed right through the entity, as if it were made of fog...or if it weren’t really there. An illusion?

  She’d used an illusion of a Mimic before, but she hadn’t managed to duplicate the sense of being drained. How could she?

  Emily forced herself to concentrate and threw another spell, one of the handful of completely lethal spells she’d been taught—and warned never to even think about using, unless it was a matter of life or death. There was a brilliant flash of red light, but when it faded the Mimic was still there, advancing on her. Emily panicked and cast the first spell that came into her head, the magic detection spell. The Mimic lit up with bright light.

  For a moment, it seemed to hesitate—as if the spell, unlike something far more lethal, had done real damage. And then it resumed its path towards her, billowing out to block her line of retreat. Emily gasped, then swore as she bumped into the wall and started to press her way towards the window. She hadn’t even realized that she was being herded until it was too late.

  Do something, her mind yammered at her. Get out...

  The Mimic’s pulsing was almost hypnotic as it reached out towards her. Emily could feel its magic humming as it prepared to dine, to absorb everything she was...it was clear, now, why it had claimed the Warden as its first victim. Without his constant monitoring of Whitehall’s interior, the Mimic could pick off the students and staff one by one—and remain completely undetectable. No one had come to investigate the lethal spell she’d used, any more than they’d realized when she’d freed herself from Melissa’s hexes. Master Tor hadn’t realized that his order was largely unenforceable...

  Her life started to flash in front of her eyes as the Mimic touched her mind. Her first memories, the few moments of happiness she’d had, her abduction from Earth...somehow, the thought of Void and Shadye gave her strength. She was not going to allow the Mimic to get the better of her, even though everyone knew them to be almost indestructible. There had to be a way out. She looked over at the window, then pulled herself forward. It felt as if she had been walking for miles—the Mimic was already draining her life from her—but somehow she made it to the window and stared out over the forest. Behind her, she felt the Mimic closing in for the kill.

  There was no time to be careful. She climbed onto the ledge and lost her footing, falling out of the window. She caught a brief glimpse of the Mimic, filling the corridor like fog, then she plummeted down towards the ground. Her mind cleared the moment she was away from the Mimic, but it was hard to cast spells—any spell. The creature had drained her magical reserves, even if it hadn’t managed to kill her. She tried to grab hold of the wall, only to be repulsed by a burst of magical power. Whitehall was designed not to let someone climb up the walls.

  Transfigure yourself, she thought, desperately. If she could turn herself into a bird, or something tough enough to survive the fall...but she barely had enough magic left in her to light a candle. The ground came up with terrifying speed and she knew, with absolute certainty, she was dead...

  And then something caught her and slowed her fall at the last possible moment. She still hit the ground hard enough to hurt, badly. The world spun around her and faded from view...

  “Emily,” a voice snapped, out of the darkness. It sounded familiar, although the haze of pain made it hard to recognize it. “Can you hear me?”

  Emily nodded, weakly. Her entire body felt as if it had been smashed into jelly; there was a faint haze in her mind that made it hard to think. It took her several seconds to remember what she’d seen...and what she’d done, in order to escape. Jumping out of a window nine levels above the ground...if she hadn’t been desperate, it would have been near-suicide.

  “You’ve been quite badly hurt,” the voice said, “but we’ve fixed most of the damage. Can you open your eyes?”

  Emily hadn’t even realized that they were closed. There was a flash of blinding light as soon as she opened them, forcing her to screw them tightly closed again. A hand touched her shoulder lightly, then tapped her forehead. Emily opened her eyes again, squinting against the glare, and saw Lady Barb leaning over her. The combat sorceress looked badly worried.

  “You took an insane dive out of a window,” Lady Barb said, tartly. “If one of the Mediators hadn’t managed to catch you, you would have smashed yourself to a pulp. As it was, you broke about a dozen bones when you hit the ground. I’ve fixed the damage, but you really should stay in bed for the next few days. What were you thinking?”

  Emily hesitated, unsure. She was in the infirmary, but what had happened to get her there?

  And then she remembered the Mimic.

  She caught Lady Barb’s arm. “Mimic,” she said, as clearly as she could. Her voice sounded mushy to her ears, as if her jaw had smashed by the impact. “There’s a Mimic in the school.”

  Lady Barb paled. “Are you sure?”

  “I saw it,” Emily insisted, through the haze threatening to cloud her thoughts. “It killed Sergeant Bane, took his place...”

  She remembered the pattern she saw and swore, inwardly. They’d deduced that the killer was targeting the people who discovered the bodies, but the killer had already killed them and taken their place. Danielle had to have been the Mimic when she reported finding her boyfriend’s body; Kay had to have been the Mimic when she’d been right next to Sergeant Bane. And a Mimic wouldn’t have had any trouble posing as the person it had killed until it encountered its next target.

  Somehow, she forced herself to keep speaking. “Didn’t anyone see it?”

  “You dived out of the wrong window for that,” Lady Barb said, grimly. “I have to speak to the Grandmaster.”

  “It was up by the barracks,” Emily said. How long had she been in bed, unconscious? Had the Mimic found someone else to consume after Emily had escaped? “You have to find it!”

  “Finding a Mimic isn’t easy,” Lady Barb said. She reached out and touched Emily’s forehead, very lightly. “This hasn’t been an easy term for you, has it?”

  Emily shook her head, mutely.

  “I’m going to put you back to sleep,” Lady Barb added, briskly. “You really need time to rest and mend.”

  “No,” Emily said, frantically. Panic bubbled up in her mind, again. “It could come for me...”

  “I think it won’t risk coming after you when there are so many people nearby,” Lady Barb said, shortly. She pointed a finger at Emily’s chest. “And you really need to heal.”

  The next thing Emily knew was that she was surrounded by the Grandmaster, Sergeant Miles, Master Tor and Lady Barb. There was no longer any sunlight streaming through the windows, she saw, as she looked towards them. Instead, there was an inky darkness that seemed somehow too dark to be real. She’d always admired the night sky from Whitehall—there were no lamps or anything else to cause light pollution—but she couldn’t see the stars. There was nothing outside at all.

  “We found Kay’s body,” Sergeant Miles said, curtly. He sounded exhausted. “But we haven’t managed to locate Sergeant Bane at all.”

  “The Mimic took his place,” Emily said. Her thoughts still weren’t very clear, but she could remember his form dissolving into the pulsing mist. “I don’t know what happened to it.”

  “We checked the barracks carefully, finding nothing,” Sergeant Miles said. “You were the only one who saw the Mimic.”

  Emily stared at him. Didn’t they believe her?

  “Finding a Mimic isn’t exactly easy,” the Grandmaster said. “I don’t believe that it has ever been done successfully.”

/>   “But this one is behaving oddly, even for Mimics,” Lady Barb added. “They don’t normally leave bodies behind, let alone bodies with knives in them. I don’t understand why it would even bother leaving the bodies as anything more than dust.”

  “Everything else fits, though,” the Grandmaster said. “The bodies were completely drained of energy. Even a necromancer wouldn’t produce such an effect.”

  “But I have never heard of a Mimic trying to frame someone else,” Sergeant Miles argued. “We assumed there was a necromancer because the bodies appeared to have been killed by a necromantic rite. But why would a Mimic try to hide?”

  Emily remembered—dimly—the handful of classes she’d taken last year on Magical Creatures. Mimics couldn’t be killed, if she recalled correctly—or at least no one had ever tried to do it and come back to report. They killed someone and copied their body so precisely that they could take their place for weeks, perhaps months or years. And, as they copied their victim’s memories and personality too, the change was almost impossible to detect until the Mimic resumed its natural form. They were the stuff of nightmares.

  “I wish I knew,” she said, out loud. “Can we track it down?”

  “Maybe,” Lady Barb said. “No one knows much about them, but there’s a general consensus that they can go quite some time without having to change their form. This one, however, seems determined to kill every few days.”

  “Maybe it’s injured,” Emily mused. If it had attacked the Warden...it suggested a certain level of intelligence. “Are Mimics intelligent?”

  Lady Barb gave her a sharp look. “No one knows,” she admitted. “They certainly seem capable of posing as their victims...”

  The Grandmaster held up his hand. “For the moment, I have altered the wards and sealed us within the school,” he said. “We will be unable to leave until we find and contain the Mimic.”

  Emily stared at him. “You’re locking us all inside with that...thing?”

  “Watch your tone,” Sergeant Miles growled.

  Emily flinched. Sergeant Miles had lost his best friend when Shadye had forced Emily to stab him—and now he might have lost Sergeant Bane too. He might well blame Emily for Sergeant Bane’s death, even if he knew it wasn’t her fault.

  “There’s no choice,” the Grandmaster said. “The Mimic could be any one of us.”

  “And none of the students will be welcome in the Allied Lands until they are proved to be human,” Lady Barb added, tartly. “Or us, too.”

  “You can’t be serious,” Emily said, in disbelief. “We can’t all be the Mimic...”

  “Emily, people are terrified of Mimics,” Lady Barb said, softly. “And with very good reason.”

  Emily nodded, unhappily. If a Mimic could replace a person so exactly that there was no easy way to spot the substitution, the first real sign might come when it dissolved into mist and searched for its next victim. She could imagine a wife sleeping next to a husband...and then waking up to see her husband resuming his natural form. It made her wonder if the Mimic kept the memories of those it had killed, or if it forgot what it had been when it returned to its natural form.

  “It must forget,” she mused out loud. “Or why would it play at being human?”

  Lady Barb quirked an eyebrow. “Emily?”

  “The Mimic,” Emily said. “While it isn’t in its natural form, does it remember what it really is?”

  Travis had been interrogated, Emily recalled, and nothing had surfaced to suggest that he was anything more than the jerk he’d seemed. But if she assumed that the Mimic had killed Travis and taken his place during the Battle of Whitehall, when the wards were down, it suggested that the Mimic had been able to pass for a student...simply because it had forgotten it was anything else. Master Tor’s lectures on truth spells and their limitations suggested that a liar couldn’t be detected if he didn’t know that he was lying.

  “No one knows,” Lady Barb said, softly. She looked down at Emily, thoughtfully. “Can you cast a spell for me?”

  Emily blinked. “Which one?”

  “Any,” Lady Barb said.

  Something clicked in Emily’s mind. “You think I’m the Mimic?”

  “It’s a possibility,” the Grandmaster admitted. “Danielle would have been replaced; it was the Mimic who reported finding Travis’s body, not his former girlfriend.”

  Emily stared at him in absolute horror. If she were the Mimic, would she even know that she was? Might she have been replaced before she hurled herself out of the window? She hesitated, then cast a simple light spell. The ball of light shimmered into existence and hovered over her bed.

  “But that may not prove anything,” Sergeant Miles said, grimly. “If Travis was replaced when the Mimic escaped, he still would have had to perform magic in classes. I know he was studying and using spells in Martial Magic and I really don’t see how he could have faked them.”

  Lady Barb nodded in agreement. “So that proves nothing,” she said. “The Mimic could be anywhere. Or anyone.”

  “I am not the Mimic,” Emily said, sharply.

  The Grandmaster gave her a sympathetic look. “Would you know if you were?”

  “We’ve had to seal the school,” Lady Barb said, changing the subject. “Could that have been the objective all along? Did someone introduce the Mimic into the school?”

  “There is no known way to control a Mimic,” the Grandmaster said, flatly. “It is much more likely that we’re hunting the Mimic that escaped the zoo during Shadye’s attack on Whitehall. And we have to find it before it wipes out everyone in Whitehall.”

  He turned and made his way towards the door, then stopped. “Lady Emily,” he said, “thank you for alerting us to the threat. Stay here, get better...then see if you can think of any way to trap the creature.”

  Sergeant Miles followed him, leaving Emily alone with Lady Barb.

  “You can’t think that I’m the Mimic,” Emily protested. The very thought was terrifying. “I told you about it...”

  Lady Barb shrugged. “There’s no way to know just what it might be thinking,” she said, “assuming that it is thinking at all. We know so little about them. No one even knows where they come from. Gorgons and orcs and other such creatures are warped humans, but a Mimic is something else entirely.”

  “A monster,” Emily said. From what she could recall of the lectures, even the suggestion that someone might be a Mimic had led to that person being lynched—or worse. It was stupid, given what a Mimic could do, but it happened. Maybe she should be glad she was in the infirmary. What would her fellow students do if they thought she was the Mimic?

  “Quite,” Lady Barb agreed. “The Grandmaster is currently working on ways to trap it. There are wards that can be used to confine it, then we can seal it in a trunk like you did with the Cockatrice.”

  She smiled. “I need you to go over everything that happened since Sergeant Bane revealed his true nature to you.”

  “That he’d been replaced,” Emily corrected. Sergeant Bane had an alibi for the Warden’s death, she was sure. Even if he didn’t...it didn’t prove that he’d been the Mimic all along. “It could be anyone now.”

  “Yes,” Lady Barb agreed. Her voice was very flat. “It could.”

  Emily shook her head in disbelief. A Mimic. Why couldn’t it have been a bloody basilisk? A giant snake with a weakness for rooster cries would have been easy to find and kill. A Mimic, on the other hand...

  No one even knew if they could be killed.

  Chapter Thirty

  EMILY LOOKS DOWN AT HER HANDS. They seem normal, yet she knows there is something badly wrong. A thought is nagging at the corner of her mind. It is...what? She cannot focus; the thought isn’t really there. And yet...her hands are shimmering with light. As she watches, they dissolve completely into glowing mist. A terrible hunger fills her and she turns, searching for her former classmates. Now, they are nothing more than sources of food...

  Emily snapped awake, staring around
her desperately. A nightmare. It had just been a nightmare...and yet there had been something about it that had reached down inside her and touched the very core of her being. Her entire body was soaked with sweat, even though she was wearing nothing more than a light hospital gown. The nightmare had left its mark on her soul.

  She looked around. The infirmary appeared to be deserted, apart from a couple of first-years who were both fast asleep. There didn’t seem to be anyone else in the ward. Emily swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood upright, despite feeling shivers running through her entire body. She clung onto the bed until the shakes faded away, then staggered towards the large mirror and peered into it. Her own reflection looked back at her.

  Emily had never been particularly vain—any tendency she might have had towards vanity had been drummed out of her by exposure to Alassa, who never managed to have so much as a hair out of place—but she was still shocked by her own appearance. Her face was pale, while her hair was stringy and unwashed and there were bruises all over her body, barely visible through the gown. She touched one lightly and felt a brief ache, before realizing that the healer had fed her numbing potion. If she hadn’t, her entire body would be hurting.

  “You’ve looked better,” a blunt voice said from behind her.

  Emily spun around to see Kyla, the healer, scowling at her.

  “I’ve looked worse too,” Emily said, tartly. “When can I leave the ward?”

  “You really need to eat and then lie down for another hour or two,” Kyla said. “After that, I think you could probably leave if you wanted to. But it isn’t very pleasant out there.”

  Emily looked over at the window and shuddered. The darkness was still there. Her internal clock had improved radically since she’d come to Whitehall, even though she’d been given a clockwork watch, but it was hard to tell just what time it was. A glance at the clock hanging over the door told her that it was early morning. It felt like the middle of the night.