Fantastic Schools: Volume 2

by Nuttall, Christopher G.

  Still with no idea what was going on, Miranda followed Dougie as he opened a previously hidden door on the opposite side of the little room to the one she’d fallen into. The corridor behind was like none she’d ever seen before. Recognisably still part of Magwit’s, it nonetheless had the same dingy carpet as the room, and blank stone walls not enlivened by tapestries or portraits. It was a little better lit than the room had been, but by strange, cold, globular lights of a type she’d not seen before, not comfortingly-familiar flaming torches.

  Dougie ran, panting, and Miranda struggled to keep up. She’d always been more intellectual than sporting, unlike Gareth. Before long, though, the snaking corridor took them to where Dougie wanted, and he skidded to a halt. Miranda almost ran straight into him. He pointed. “There!”

  There was a large, dark window in front of them. In the room behind it, three ogres, great ugly beasts taller and bulkier than a man, were swinging their massive fists at the slight forms of Gareth and Will. Miranda’s hand went to her mouth. She’d fought alongside them before, of course, in the heat of the moment, but there was something about seeing it like this that made her realise just what peril they were in. She tried to meet Will’s gaze, but he looked past her, as though she wasn’t there. “They can’t see us?”

  “‘Course not,” Dougie said, unhooking the bulky black device from around his neck. He pulled on something, and a long, thin metal pole extended. “It’s one-way glass. Looks like one of those silly paintings from the other side.” He fiddled with complex-looking controls on the device. “Um…that’s better…I’ll go for that one,” he pointed at the nearest ogre, which was currently staggering back as a well-placed spell from Will exploded into red stars in its face. She’d taught him that spell, Miranda thought with a note of pride.

  He’d only spoken of slowing her friends down, so rather than act, Miranda continued to play along. “What are you going to do?”

  “Switch things up,” Dougie muttered.

  He fiddled with the controls. The ogre’s movements became more hesitant and jerky for a moment, then smoothed up. He was controlling it, Miranda realised with shock, as though he had enchanted it. But with some Normie device?

  Gareth hit one of the ogres with a jet of blue sparks that smashed it against the wall, knocking it out. Will was turning to face the second, probably assuming from the third’s jerky movements that it was wounded.

  She let out a little cry as Will parried what looked like a predictable move from the third ogre with a protection spell—but then Dougie flicked a control, and the ogre ducked under the spell. Its fist crashed into Will’s head with a sickening thud.

  “Will!” Miranda and Gareth both cried out at once, the latter’s voice muffled. Gareth’s shock was reflected in his latest spell losing cohesion, and a multicoloured spray smashed into the second ogre, in this case doing more damage than intended. The ogre collapsed in a spray of grey-green blood.

  “Um, where is it…?” Dougie muttered, hastily scanning a page of illegible notes. “Got it!”

  He flicked another couple of switches.

  The third ogre, absorbing a hasty spell from Gareth against its chest, tackled him to the floor just as a hidden trapdoor fell away beneath both of them. With a scream, he fell.

  Silence fell in the room, occupied now only by the corpses of two ogres and the still form of Will. He looked as dead as they were.

  “That should do—” Dougie began.

  Miranda’s first instinct was not to attack him, but to help her friend. She pulled her wand out and pointed it at the—glass, had he said? “Discutio!”

  “Wha—” was all Dougie managed before a streak of blue-grey light from Miranda’s wand shattered the glass into a thousand glittering fragments.

  It was the nature of the spell that the glass fell almost straight downwards from its frame, so she didn’t have to worry about it cutting into Will. Miranda bounded through the empty frame and into the room, immediately dropping to her recently-healed knees beside Will’s form. “Will!”

  Will woozily looked up, his eyes struggling to focus. “Miranda…bloody hell…” he managed, then slipped into unconsciousness.

  But he was alive. “Oh, thank G—” Miranda began, mopping his brow.

  “Wait!” Dougie was climbing through the fame after her, his expression conflicted, his accent strengthening from emotion. “‘E called you Miranda…and…” He grabbed at the sleeve of her robe and stared at it, seeing it in good light for the first time. “Blue! We ain’t got no agents in Vauxhall…” His eyes widened. “You’re Miranda Carter!”

  So he knew her true name after all. Well, that didn’t matter, so long as she struck first. “Guilty as charged. Laqueus!”

  Dougie had been going for something in his pocket. Now, a pulse of green light leapt from her wand and expanded into a net-like grid of green lines, which wrapped around his hands and feet and flung him up against the opposite wall, next to one of the fallen ogres.

  Miranda kept half an eye on him as she checked the unconscious Will. He seemed to be as well as could be expected under the circumstances, and she didn’t trust her attempts at healing magic on him, so she reluctantly left him for now.

  “Right. Now you know who I am, what’s going on?”

  Dougie looked terrified. He shook his head frantically. “You’re a truman! I’ve been talking to a truman! Oh sh—” This time, he did not soften it to ‘sugar’.

  She ignored this. “True woman, if you please.”

  “No, you don’t understand—it’s not ‘true man’, it’s a word, my dad uses it to describe people like you…” Dougie abruptly clammed up. “No, I’m not saying anything more. I’m in enough trouble as it is.”

  That sentiment was so familiar to Miranda that she almost laughed at hearing it echoed back at her from this strange young man—boy, really. At least, someone else was in trouble for a change. But things were too serious right now.

  She hesitated. They’d been taught last year that this spell was forbidden, or at least heavily restricted in practice, and for good reason. But things were desperate, and anyway, the teacher who’d told them that had turned out to be working for Lord Skallheim anyway. Miranda pointed her wand at Dougie’s immobilised form against the wall, furrowed her brow as she visualised whips and chains. “Ambacto!”

  “Zzzt!” Dougie’s head was slammed back against the stone; Miranda winced despite herself. “I won’t…I can’t…” His will struggled with the spell for a moment, then succumbed. “I…”

  “What does ‘truman’ mean?” Miranda said, her voice soft and commanding.

  “I…don’t know,” Dougie managed a literal answer. Miranda shoved her wand forward, intensifying the spell. “I mean, I don’t know where my dad got the word from…ugggh…it means one of you, a wizard who doesn’t know it’s, ughhh…” His voice shrank to a quavering whisper as he tried, unsuccessfully, to clamp down his own lips. “It’s all a big con.”

  “A what?” Miranda almost lost control of the spell through shock. She remembered Normie Born students who’d talked about the conjurers who did what Normies called magic, which was all just trickery and playing off people’s expectations. “A confidence trick? Don’t be absurd! Of course, magic’s real, what am I using on you right now?”

  “Don’t…understand,” Dougie whispered. “The magic’s real, but…nobody really knows how it works or why only a few people can do it…four hundred years ago this place was built so you mutants would all be trapped in here chasin’ shadows rather than out there enslavin’ reg’lar humans…”

  That was too many revelations at once. It said a lot about Miranda that the point she immediately latched on to was: “Four hundred? You mean by Magwit and...”

  “Nah,” Dougie managed. He seemed to have resigned himself and wasn’t fighting the spell anymore. “That’s all faked. There was no Magwit or Vauxhall or the others…made up later. Think my dad said this was set up by Isaac Newton…he was the last one
who was both a magician and a scientist…he wanted science to win. A lot neater. Numbers. Predictability. Theory.”

  Miranda lowered her wand. “There’s magical theory,” she said uncertainly. She’d read ahead in her books about it often enough. Except it had never quite seemed to…

  “Nah,” Dougie repeated. “That’s the con part. The other con part. By the time you get up to the level your teachers are, they let you in on the secret.” He groaned. “Shouldn’t be saying…” Miranda’s wand shot up warningly again. “Nobody knows how magic works. It just does.” He winced. “That was the other reason this place was set up by Newton, I think, to try to find if there were any underlying principles, but they never got very far with their studies…”

  Miranda found herself suddenly angry.

  Angry at whom? Dougie? No, not really. Angry at herself, at this system…

  She’d always wondered why, when she had read so much about magic, that when it came to the crunch, Will and Gareth (who always tried to copy their homework off her, when they did it at all) seemed to be more capable in fighting off the Wideawakes or the Lifetolls or whoever it was this week. Or ogres, she thought, looking down at the smashed-up form next to Dougie. The grey-green blood had stopped flowing. The head had fallen away, revealing a rectangular green object covered with metallic gleams. Some sort of machine, then. A machine Dougie could control. A machine Miranda couldn’t understand, because she’d wasted her life learning the made-up theory of a chaotic, meaningless power rather than one that anyone could use. One which rewarded a person who studied it, and punished one who did not. The power of science and technology…

  She took a step back, feeling suddenly dizzy. Where had that thought come from?

  It was as though the floodgates had opened. Images, ideas, sensations flooded her mind. Wonders she had never dreamed of; great tall buildings of glass and steel, winged vehicles riding towers of flame into the sky, a spinning disc of silver that produced music without instruments, plays without actors…

  Dougie was suddenly standing on the floor again. Her Laqueus Charm had faded. He extended one arm. “That Ambacto spell works two ways,” he said through gritted teeth. So some of his thoughts had entered her mind directly. “Come with me now. We need to go and see my dad.”

  Miranda briefly tried to fight his will, but on some level she rather wanted some answers from someone who knew more anyway. She followed him.

  Miranda stared down through the one-way glass window, eyes huge. Gareth stood there, confronting the familiar skeletal-thin, bone-white figure of Lord Skallheim. Gareth defiantly refused to surrender the jeweled belt buckle of Arundel Vauxhall, an artefact of power that Will had bought as an anonymous curio in a pawn shop back in their first year and had lain undisturbed in his drawer ever since. That sort of thing kept happening to them.

  Now Miranda knew it did for a very good reason: because it had been planned that way. There was no Vauxhall, the jewels were just jewels, and twenty minutes ago, Skallheim had been in the makeup room, complaining about his contract.

  Dougie’s father, Supervisor Alexander, bore a strong family resemblance to him. He gave his son another stern glare.

  “This is all my fault,” he intoned, still keeping one eye on the confrontation between Gareth and Skallheim. “You weren’t ready. I shouldn’t have left you.”

  Dougie gave a long shrug. “What were the chances of her stumbling across…?”

  “Well, quite,” Alexander grumbled. “Could have been from one of our damn plots.” He looked over at Miranda. “This throws quite a wrench into our plans, Miss Carter.”

  Miranda opened and closed her mouth. “I’m sorry?” she suggested in rather sarcastic tones. “I’m sorry that it’s a little inconvenient for you that I’ve discovered that my friends and I are living a lie!”

  “A very profitable one, though,” Alexander sighed. “Look, what Dougie told you was correct. This castle was built to trap all the mutants—uh, wizards in one place so you didn’t try enslaving humans, or ‘Normies’ as you would say.”

  “Oh, come on—enslaving?” Miranda asked. Yet her retort rang hollow in the inner cathedral of her own uncertainties.

  “Oh, yes,” Alexander nodded. “There used to be real ogres and Penate goblins and imps—before your ancestors worked or hunted them all to death. Mass extinctions.” He shook his head, his eyes distant. “So they started turning to human slaves instead, till Newton found a way to fool them. Fortunately, nowadays we can fake all those old magical races with technology. Damned expensive, though,” he added ruefully, looking at the green-stained circuit board (as Miranda had learned it was called) from one of the destroyed ogres. His gaze inevitably slid to Dougie.

  “At least, I managed to delay Stoke enough,” Dougie protested. “If I hadn’t sent the ogres, he’d have turned up while you were still coaching Skallheim through his lines.”

  Alexander sighed. “There is that.” He nodded to Miranda. “That would have been good work, if you hadn’t created a problem ten times bigger in the process.”

  “Would it be really so bad for wizards to go into Normie society now?” Miranda protested. “I saw things when that spell connected me with your son’s mind. Your, your ‘technology’ is advanced now…lighting better than torches, machines that can cook your dinner without needing goblins and ovens…” She clutched her blue robes against herself and shivered. “Central heating…”

  Alexander actually smiled. “We live better lives than you do, you mean? Oh, yes, that’s true now. Didn’t use to be.” He sighed. “But your magic can still mess with minds. And no, we don’t want any part of the society you live in touching ours.”

  “What’s so bad about it?” Miranda protested, her words again sounding unconvincing even to herself.

  Alexander ticked off fingers on his hand. “Casual racism, unthinking acceptance of a ruling class, contempt for outsiders and social inferiors, incuriosity in how the world works, a willingness to bend or break your own rules at the drop of a hat…” He smiled at Miranda’s indignant expression. “We really had to try hard with our agents to make you think they’re the bad guys. They’re really just the handful of mutants we can actually trust.”

  He sighed. “Poor old—well, you know him as Ilvint—he nearly had a nervous breakdown when someone made an unwise joke we’d ask him to eat a puppy for the next film.” He shook his head. “No, Hummerhorn agrees that if the time for you to become aware of the hidden world outside ever arrives, now is not the time.”

  “Professor Hummerhorn knows about this?” Miranda asked in shock.

  “He’s a lot wiser than most of you,” Alexander conceded. “He knows that, as you said, our technology has advanced while your magic has stayed stagnant for centuries. If it came to war, we’d wipe you out now.”

  Miranda shivered. “Then why don’t you?”

  Alexander hesitated. “That question was asked, once,” he muttered. “A few years ago, when Governments started inquiring where all the money for this place was going. Sending in agents to make you chase your tails and not worry about the outside world…there was a person called Mrs. Thatcher,” he shuddered in a way not unalike the way many wizards did at the mention of Skallheim. “She demanded this place turn a profit…and then someone had the bright idea of filming all the stuff you wizards get up to…”

  “Filming it? You mean those enchanted pictures…” she hesitated, thinking again of the confused mass of concepts that had been pressed into her mind. “Those screens. I thought you were just spying on us.”

  “It started out as that,” Alexander explained. “But, well, turns out the Normie kids love your adventures. They just think it’s all faked, of course.”

  “It is all faked,” Dougie murmured.

  “Not the acting,” Alexander corrected him. “Very good method acting. The novelisations sell well, too—we get those out earlier because of the time it takes to do the editing and the special effects.”

  Miranda
had a vague idea of what he meant by the latter. “Special effects? But we have real spells?”

  “Don’t blame me, blame the American test audiences,” Alexander grunted. “Takes us forever to paint out all the colourful sparks and replace it with someone just being flung up in the air or something.” He shook his head. “You’re very popular on the internet, you know, Miss Carter.”

  “What’s an internet?” she asked guardedly.

  “You don’t want to know,” Dougie grunted.

  “No, I really do!” Miranda protested, quite sincerely.

  Alexander waved the point aside, then pointed at Miranda. “Enough of this. What are we going to do with you, Miss Carter?”

  Miranda looked down at the scene below. Gareth had defeated Skallheim once again, but an enigmatic clue had been left suggesting that all was not what it seemed. It would, she knew from experience, all become clear during the next school year.

  The next film.

  “I’ll make a deal with you,” she told him. “I’ll go back in my box and pretend that all of this matters for another two years, if, when it’s all over, you’ll let me leave—you can break my wand, I promise I’ll never do magic again.”

  She picked up the boxy device Dougie had shouted into before. “I want to spend my life finding out how stuff like this works.” She looked up at him, her eyes defiant.

  Alexander studied her. “A very generous offer. But why shouldn’t I just get Ilvint or Blades to put a memory charm on you and send you right back to work, oblivious to all this?”

  Miranda shivered as she met his gaze. “Because, contrary to popular belief, memory charms are actually very prone to failure after a few years,” she said, trying to keep her voice steady.

  Alexander grinned. “I suppose all that research of yours was good for something after all.”