Study in Slaughter (Schooled in Magic)

by Christopher Nuttall

  “Sit,” the healer said, pointing to a chair. “I’ll have food brought up to you in a jiffy.”

  “Thank you,” Emily said, sitting down. “What’s happening out there?”

  “Absolute panic,” Kyla stated. She peered down at Emily, casting a series of medical charms. “The Mimic could be anyone.”

  “And we’re trapped,” Emily finished, glancing back at the window. “How many hexes have been thrown in the last few hours alone?”

  “Too many,” Kyla said, darkly. “I’ve spent too much time fixing idiots who have been hexed by their classmates.”

  She walked over to a cabinet and reached inside, removing a tray of food. “Eat this,” she ordered, passing it to Emily. “And make sure you eat until you’re bursting.”

  Emily nodded. The food didn’t look very appetizing, but it smelled remarkably good. Lady Barb had talked about Healer’s Mush, a porridge-like substance that helped the body to heal quickly; Emily realized, as she dug into the food, that Lady Barb hadn’t exaggerated the effects. Every bite made her want to eat more, until she had definitely eaten as much as she could. And yet she still wanted more.

  “Most of it will help fuel your recovery,” Kyla informed her, as she ran a series of checks on Emily’s body. “I’d advise you to try to take it easy for the next couple of days. Your body was badly depleted of magical reserves even before you jumped out a window.”

  “Take it easy,” Emily repeated, rolling her eyes. “How am I meant to do that?”

  A thought struck her as she looked down at the bruises and she felt a stab of guilt. “How is Melissa?”

  Kyla didn’t seem surprised by the question. “I fixed the remaining damage and sent her to bed,” she said, flatly. “I believe that she was...rather unhappy with you.”

  “Sergeant Bane healed her,” Emily said, and then scowled. That wouldn’t have been the real Sergeant, but the Mimic. It could perform magic, then. Did it copy the magical skills of the person it replaced, or did its powers grow as it moved from victim to victim? “I’ll talk to Lady Barb about it later.”

  “Indeed you will,” Kyla said. She passed Emily a new set of robes. “I suggest you go back to your bedroom, take a shower and then get some more sleep. And watch your back out there.”

  “Thank you,” Emily said. She pulled on the robes and inspected herself in the mirror. They didn’t fit her perfectly, but it was hard for someone to notice unless they looked very closely. “I will.”

  She stepped out of the infirmary and headed down the corridor, unable to escape the sense that something was terribly wrong. There was hardly anyone, apart from the Mediators, in the corridors. The handful of fellow students she saw gave her a wide berth, as if they thought she were contagious. It wasn’t any better being thought a Mimic than a murderess and apprentice necromancer. By the time she reached the dorms, she felt thoroughly depressed.

  Madame Razz glanced at her as she entered the corridor, then nodded towards the common room. Emily peeked inside and saw a handful of students who were reading a list of instructions from the Grandmaster. Students, he said, were to take an emergency charm and trigger it if they saw the Mimic. There was a dire warning added to the bottom stating that anyone who triggered the charm as a practical joke would be expelled. Under the circumstances, Emily couldn’t help wondering what they intended to do to get someone out of the building. The wards were almost completely impregnable.

  The students gave her fearful looks as she scanned the list of instructions, depressing her still further. She knew that she had never been entirely popular—even before she became a baroness, she’d beaten a necromancer—but this was different. At least they weren’t aiming hexes at her back, she told herself, as she took one of the charms and headed out of the room. Maybe, after she’d had a rest, she could go to the library and look up whatever they had on Mimics. There had to be a clue there, something they could use to find and trap the creature before it killed them all.

  Or before we run out of food, she thought. Whitehall’s students consumed a vast amount of food every day, far more than anywhere in Zangaria. How long would it be before the kitchens ran out of food supplies? They’d have to go on rations as soon as possible.

  She pushed the door open and stepped into the room. The Gorgon was seated at her desk, working her way through a set of papers, while Lin was lying in her bed, reading a book. Neither of them paid much attention to Emily, for which she was grateful. The last thing she wanted was more attention—and suspicion. She sat down on her bed and started to pull off the borrowed robe. It would have to be returned to Kyla before the end of the day.

  “I heard you jumped out of a window,” the Gorgon said, turning to face her. She looked utterly inhuman, the light catching her snakes in a manner that chilled Emily’s blood. “What really happened?”

  “I jumped out of a window,” Emily said, tightly. “It was the only way out.”

  The Gorgon lifted an eyebrow. “Why didn’t you run down the corridor instead?”

  “It had me trapped,” Emily said defensively. There had been something about the whole experience, she decided as she considered everything that had happened in retrospect, that suggested that the Mimic had effectively hypnotized her. She’d read, somewhere, there were predator animals that could mesmerize their prey, but she’d never heard of it happening to humans. “I couldn’t think of another way out.”

  She finished undressing and walked into the bathroom. Some of the Healer’s Mush had already worked, she realized as she glanced into the mirror. Most of the bruises had disappeared, although the remainder looked as though they would take much longer to fade away. She hadn’t been so black and blue since her first session of hand-to-hand combat with Lady Barb. Shaking her head, she stepped into the shower and allowed the water to wash the sweat from her body, then washed her hair. By the time she stepped out, she was feeling almost human again.

  “Walking around naked isn’t a good idea,” the Gorgon said, dryly. “They’ve been searching our rooms at unpredictable intervals.”

  Emily snorted, wondering if they thought that would do any good. A Mimic was impossible to distinguish from its victim until it was too late; random searches might trap a necromancer or someone experimenting with forbidden magic—or drugs—but she doubted they would actually help solve their problem. She hadn’t even realized that male tutors were allowed into female bedrooms until Master Tor had come charging into her room...although she did have to admit that he’d had a very good reason.

  She pulled on her underpants and the bra—made in Zangaria, a threaded note proclaimed—and then pulled a basic robe over her head. Somehow, she didn’t feel like dressing up when there was a Mimic on the loose. Besides, she wasn’t going to go back to the barracks, at least not for a few days. If they were going to be trapped with a murderous Mimic, the detention seemed to have become more than a little pointless as well as cruel.

  And educational, she thought, sourly. It certainly taught me a few lessons.

  Shaking her head, she sat down at her desk...and froze. Someone had been rooting through it again...and the spells she’d used to protect it had completely failed. Emily swore out loud, checking where she’d left the books. Someone had moved several of the textbooks, hunting for something else. It wasn’t as if any of her textbooks weren’t carried in the school library.

  The Gorgon gave her a sharp glance. “Language,” she snapped. “Watch your tongue.”

  Emily rounded on her. “Have you been touching my desk?”

  “Why,” the Gorgon sneered, “would I touch your desk?”

  “Someone has been touching my desk,” Emily snapped back. “And what do you care about my language anyway?”

  “If one of us gets in trouble, we all lose room points,” the Gorgon said, in a voice she might use to explain something elementary to a baby. “I happen to want something a little more comfortable than this rickety chair. Your little exploit, whatever it was, cost us every point we had.
We currently do not have the points to get anything when the time comes to turn them into furniture.”

  Emily scowled. It seemed like a simple trick to push the students into behaving themselves—and policing one another, at least when they were in their rooms. She could afford to outfit every room in Whitehall with fancy furniture, as could many other pupils. But it was against the rules.

  “At the moment,” she said, controlling her temper with an effort, “it doesn’t really matter.”

  “Maybe it doesn’t matter to you, baroness,” the Gorgon hissed. “And maybe it doesn’t matter to a Child of Destiny. But it does matter to those of us who don’t have vast fortunes or places to go after they graduate.”

  Emily flushed. She knew what happened to most students when they graduated from Whitehall, but where would the Gorgon go? Would she fit in with her fellow Gorgons after leaving Whitehall? Many students from poorer backgrounds were seduced into joining the establishment by attending Whitehall and having proper plumbing and food for the first time in their lives. Emily might well be the only student whose living conditions had taken a step downwards since coming to the school.

  But then, the company is better, she thought, ruefully.

  “If we get out of this alive, I’ll try to be a better roommate,” Emily said, tiredly. She couldn’t blame the Gorgon for being angry with her, but this was going too far. “Do you know who has been touching my desk?”

  “Touching someone else’s desk is bad manners,” the Gorgon reminded her. “I wouldn’t have touched your desk unless it was on fire.”

  Emily scowled, but accepted the rebuke. In Whitehall, touching someone’s personal possessions and notes was a severe breach of etiquette. It was rare for someone to even grant permission for someone else to touch their possessions. In all of her time at Whitehall, Emily honestly couldn’t remember someone allowing someone else to open their trunk and retrieve an item. Alassa and Imaiqah certainly had never told Emily that she could use their trunks.

  She swung back around and stared at the desk, then cast a series of revealing charms. The wards and hexes she’d placed on it were still there; they’d just failed to bite at all. Emily inspected them as carefully as she could, but if there was something wrong with them it was beyond her ability to detect. And that meant...

  “Gorgon,” she said, “would you mind testing the hexes?”

  The Gorgon eyed her through snake-like eyes. “You don’t trust your own handiwork?”

  “No,” Emily said, as she stood up. It was humiliating to admit it, but there was no choice. “I think I messed up the charms.”

  “Fine,” the Gorgon said.

  She stood, walked over to Emily’s desk and sat down on her chair. There was a flash of light and she froze solid. Even her snakes stopped moving. A skilled magician could probably break free, even if they couldn’t move their hands, but she doubted that a second-year student could.

  “It works,” Emily said, as she performed the counter-charm. “I’m sorry...”

  “Perhaps now you can shut up,” the Gorgon said, tartly. She stood, her snakes hissing around her, and headed back to her desk. “And don’t lose us any more points.”

  Emily sighed, wondering just who was poking through her desk. Master Tor? He certainly should have the skills to take her wards down and then rebuild them—or at the very least neutralize them long enough to search her desk. But why would he need to spy on her when he could search her possessions at any moment? Why would he run the risk of being caught in a female bedroom alone? Surely Madame Razz would ask a few pointed questions if she caught him.

  She scowled down at the desk, mulling over her options. The fingerprint detection charm might work, if she could remember where she put the note. She’d wanted to copy it into her own spellbook, but there hadn’t been time. Instead, she’d left it in her desk. Carefully, she searched through the set of papers and blinked in surprise when she realized that she couldn’t find it. The spell was completely missing.

  Her blood ran cold. Fingerprint detection charms were unknown in Whitehall...or at least they had been unknown, until Emily had suggested using one. If someone had taken it, did that mean that they knew what the charm was intended to do? Had they hoped it would prevent Emily from recreating it? But that seemed absurd. Emily could have recreated her own work—and in this case, all she had to do was ask Professor Lombardi for a second copy.

  She ran her hand through her hair, then looked to see what else was missing. Nothing was, as far as she could tell. They’d only taken the fingerprint charm. And that meant...what?

  “I told you to be quiet,” the Gorgon said, sharply. “Do I have to turn you into stone to shut you up?”

  Emily flushed. She hadn’t realized that she’d been mumbling aloud.

  “I’m going to the library,” she said, and stood. “I’ll see you at dinner time.”

  “Take someone with you,” the Gorgon said. “Not me.”

  Emily looked at Lin, who barely looked up from her book. Her silent roommate clearly wasn’t going to come with her, or get involved in the argument. Shaking her head, Emily picked up a handful of books she’d intended to return to the library and walked out the door, then headed three doors down the short corridor to Imaiqah’s room. It was closed and, when she pushed her hand against the charm, it refused to open.

  “I think she’s playing Kingmaker with some of the others,” Madame Razz said, from behind her. “They’re in the games room, if you’re interested.”

  “Thank you,” Emily said. There was no point in disturbing her friend. Imaiqah loved Kingmaker and had taken to Chess like a duck to water, after Emily had introduced it. “I’ll find her later.”

  She walked to the door and headed to the library. There had to be something there, she told herself, some way of finding a Mimic before it could kill everyone in the building. And there were ways to trap them...but they had to be found first. She was so intent on the possibilities that she didn’t even notice the Mediator until she walked right into him.

  “You should watch yourself, girl,” he said. “This isn’t a safe place any longer.”

  “No,” Emily agreed, quietly. “It never was.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  THE LIBRARY WAS ALMOST EMPTY, EMILY discovered when she stepped inside, apart from a couple of sixth-year boys who were working their way through a pile of textbooks. They gave Emily sharp glances, but apart from that they completely ignored her. Emily was silently grateful as she walked over to the desk and smiled at Lady Aylia. The librarian looked as tired as everyone else.

  “Half the books in the library are out,” Lady Aylia said, by way of introduction. “What can I do for you?”

  “I was wondering what you had on Mimics,” Emily said, lowering her voice automatically. “Is there more than I saw in the textbooks...?”

  “Mostly restricted,” Lady Aylia said. “I shall consult with the Grandmaster.”

  Emily nodded and wandered over to the shelves, looking for anything that might be interesting or helpful. She couldn’t help noticing that almost all of the books on hexes, jinxes and practical jokes had been taken out; the recent spate of infighting, she guessed, had encouraged the students to do more research. The only discipline that didn’t seem to have been raided was history, something that struck Emily as sad. She had always loved history, if only because it had been an escape from her life. And the history of Whitehall was fascinating.

  It was hard to be sure, but she suspected that real history didn’t really go back as far as Professor Locke suggested. There were so many myths and legends about the time of the faerie that it was difficult to know what might be real and what might be myth, all the more so because there had been so many deliberate purges of knowledge over the years. Officially, the records dated back over three thousand years, but Emily suspected that they were only reliable up to about five hundred years ago. But there was no way to be certain.

  She felt a tug and turned to see Lady Aylia
waving her back to the desk. “I spoke with the Grandmaster,” the librarian said, when Emily approached. “He has authorized me to allow you access to the books.”

  “Thank you,” Emily said.

  “Go into study room five,” Lady Aylia ordered. “I’ll bring the books to you there.”

  Study room five was larger than the study room she’d used last year, when the Grandmaster had allowed her to read a series of texts on necromancy. It was empty, apart from a table, three chairs and a poster on the wall threatening dire consequences for anyone who tried to remove the books without permission. Emily had done enough work in the library to know that trying to remove a restricted book would trigger the wards, which would immobilize the thief until he could be dealt with. There was no way to know if the Warden’s death had affected those wards.

  Lady Aylia entered seven minutes later, carrying a stack of books in one hand. Most of them looked to have been recently handled, probably by the Grandmaster or Lady Barb. Thankfully, none of them felt as evil as the books on necromancy, just dusty and old. The librarian put them down on the table, worked a series of charms to remove the protections on the books and then left the room, leaving Emily alone. Carefully, she picked up the first book and read the title. A Mimicry of Mimics.

  The author, she very rapidly decided, had never actually encountered a Mimic. Most of the text seemed to be a list of reported sightings, complete with some attempt at analysis. Emily skimmed it carefully, but saw nothing that she hadn’t already known. The only oddity was a report that some Mimics, in human form, behaved oddly before reverting to their natural state. But there was no clear idea of what was odd.

  Did Sergeant Bane act oddly when he was a Mimic? She asked herself. Should he have done something other than dragging me off down the corridor?

  It was impossible to know. Instead, she read the rest of the book, frowning at some of the nastier comments about people who might be Mimics. The writer had suggested that someone who acted oddly should be scrutinized, just to be sure they weren’t Mimics...which probably didn’t help people suffering from mental illnesses. Someone unpopular could be lynched because the locals believed that he or she was a Mimic, just as suspected witches had been burned in Spain under the Inquisition.