She leaned her head back against his shoulder. Her hair smelled of sea-salt. “Actually, I was wondering if you would like to share one with me.”
He gave her a quirky look. “The Captain’s cabin?”
“Nothing but the best,” she teased. As she turned to face him, her face sobered. “Aragon, I know what you’re thinking.”
“Now there’s a surprise.”
“You have a decision to make,” she insisted. “You don’t have the witchmark any more. You are not compelled to stay on this mad ship of mine. If you do…it will be because you want to. Only because you want to.” She moved away from his arms. “I want to go say hello to the Dark One and Vervain. Think about it.” She squeezed his hand briefly, and went to get herself some bubbled wine.
“Right,” said Aragon Silversword, staring out at the dark landscape. He had filched a coin from Daggar for this very purpose. He flipped it over his fingers now, considering his options. “Heads I get off this ship and get a life of my own,” he muttered. “Tails I do something I will probably regret.”
He threw the coin, and watched it spiral up into the air. It fell smartly into his hand and he slapped it hard against his other arm. Very slowly, he lifted his hand and stared into the face of Kassa Daggersharp. It was quite a good likeness. Some years older, of course. He traced the lines of the coin thoughtfully, reading the date.
Then he opened his hand, and let the coin fall into the darkness. They were crossing marshland, weren’t they? Hopefully the evidence would be gone for good. But he couldn’t forget it. An omen, perhaps? It had been heads, after all.
The real Kassa came forward, grabbing his arm. Her smile was warm and inviting, full of life. “Come on. You’re missing a great party.”
“I hate parties,” he reminded her, but let her draw him towards the others.
After all, he could pack his bags and get a life of his own at any time. It didn’t have to be tonight. Or tomorrow, for that matter. He could wait until the day after that. Or the day after that.
Aragon Silverword didn’t join in the laughing and singing with the pirate wench, the profit-scoundrel, the troll-raised mercenary, the sprite, the god, the Blackguard and the sheep. He still retained some standards, after all. He sat silently and watched Kassa Daggersharp enjoying herself, her dark red hair glinting in the silver light of their ship.
Kassa noticed him looking, and tilted her head speculatively in his direction. In answer to her unspoken question, Aragon Silversword leaned back against the mast of the Silver Splashdance and almost smiled.
INK BLACK MAGIC
Mocklore Chronicles #3
Extract from The Polyhedrotechnical College Prospectus of Higher Learning
You may have read stories about magic with rules — where good magic and bad magic are easily distinguishable from each other and the sorcerer saves the world every single time. Such stories are lies and fantasies.
Magic does not follow recipes. Magic is not a natural tool for humans. It cannot be borrowed or stolen or manipulated. It is a howling random force that will tear you apart without bothering to learn your name.
We have the misfortune to live on an island where magic is commonplace, where the landscape is a riot of colour and madness, howling spirits and flying fish.
Magic is in the dirt, in the air, in our blood. There’s more around than there used to be. One of these days our precious Mocklore Empire will surely fly apart in a cloud of golden smoke and purple sparks. This future is inevitable.
How do you protect yourself?
Carry a sword, not a wand. Never attempt to use magic, even if the end seems to justify the means. You will always pay for such use, with a headache or a stab wound or a flying sheep where a man used to be. If you possess natural magical ability, learning how to safely not use that power will be the most important thing you ever do.
I will not teach your children warlocklore or witchery. I will teach them to know their unknown enemy, to learn from the catastrophes of our past, to survive the orange mists and silver sparks and refrain from setting the world alight with green demon-fire.
I will teach them not to use magic, and the lesson may very well save their lives.
Yours sincerely,
Mistress Sharpe,
Philosophy of Magic
Department of Highly Improbable Arts
Vice-Chancellor’s Note: Mistress Sharpe’s Philosophy of Magic course is a prerequisite for many popular Second Year courses including Magic Studies, Alchemy, Neo-sorcery, Practical Mythology, Hedgewitchery and Creative Dance.
1
Magic is a Bad Bad Thing
The dream was about heroes — impossible heroes with rippling muscles, ink-black eyes and amazing powers. They crashed! and banged! their way through the city, conquering villains with a biff! and a thwack! and a pow!!! Good triumphed over evil with swashbuckling ease. The heroes saved the world again and again, pausing only to exchange witty repartee or to redesign their colourful costumes. In a world of heroes and villains, everything was simple.
Egg woke up, fumbling for a spare piece of papyrus. He scribbled frantic notes with a scratchy pen. The ink in the bottle had scabbed over and made blotchy blobs across the page. Egg barely noticed the mess, too intent on the outline of a new super-villainess, an insect woman with glowing eyes and sensuous hips.
As he squinted to see the page, Egg realised that he was sitting in darkness. Outside, across the cobbled square of the student residence, the clocks struck the hour. Twelve long, sonorous notes drummed out of the tallest clock tower, a frothy confection of ivory spirals, glass runes and marble-white stonework. Three short, piping notes rang out of the middle clock tower, a solid piece of grey granite with gargoyles. Finally, four squeaky pips emerged from the shortest clock tower, a pink assortment of bricks swamped by bright purple ivy. Thirty-four minutes past midnight.
The clocks rang about twelve times a day, never exactly on the hour. When they had first been built they rang constantly, calling out the exact time at every minute of the day. Approximately four hours (and twenty-eight minutes) after the clocks began their noisy refrain, a delegation of students armed with axes, chisels and woefully inadequate padded earmuffs had persuaded Vice-Chancellor Bertie to impose the current restrictions.
Egg lit a lantern and stared at the papyrus, blowing on it to dry the ink. Where did they come from, these pictures in his head? He had never met a super-villainess before — although his mother did have some very strange friends — and yet he knew exactly what one looked like. He also knew which of his heroes would meet her first, and how that tale would tie in to the overall story arc.
What he didn’t know was what to do with the story when it was finished. Everyone knew stories were for telling aloud, for spinning over an open fire or singing in a tavern. Hardly anyone wrote stories down, and no one drew stories in pictures like Egg did, with little bubbles to show that people were talking. The closest equivalent were the humorous hieroglyphs that you found scratched on walls, but they tended to be about sarcastic cats and amusing situations involving the workplace. They weren’t about heroes.
Someone knocked, banged and thumped on the door. Egg was vaguely aware that they had been doing so for some time. He padded across the room in his pyjamas and bare feet and opened the door.
A girl stood on the other side, her hand raised to knock again. She had the face of a heroine, the kind who gets rescued against a background of flame and intrigue. Her eyes were blue, her ponytail was blonde and her smile was angelic. “Is this Sean McHagrty’s room?” she asked.
Egg slammed the door and went back to bed. “Go away!” he shouted as the knocking started up again.
“That’s not very polite!” the girl yelled from the other side of the door. “Oy!”
Egg stomped across the floor again, shooting an accusing glance at his roommate’s bed. “He’s not here,” he said as he pulled open the door. “His suitcases are here, but they haven’t even been opened. I
moved in three days ago and I haven’t seen him. The only evidence I have that Sean McHagrty actually exists is that you are the twelfth girl today who has asked after him.”
The angel with the ponytail stared at Egg as if he were insane. “I know he’s not here,” she said slowly. “I asked if this was his room.”
“Oh,” said Egg. “Yes, it is.”
“Good.” The girl pushed past him. She was carrying, Egg noticed with alarm, an overnight bag. It was pink. “Is this his bed?” She selected the spare bed and bounced experimentally on it.
“Yes,” said Egg. “Um, what are you doing?”
“I’m moving in,” said the girl. She took some things out of her overnight bag and headed into the tiny wash chamber. Her towel and flannel were also pink. “Won’t be a minute. Feels like I haven’t cleaned my teeth in a month.” She closed the door behind her.
Egg stared helplessly at the closed door. He wanted to barge in after her and demand an explanation, but an inner voice sensibly informed him that you couldn’t do that to girls in wash chambers. Plus, the so-called wash chamber, which he and the mythical McHagrty shared with the occupants of the room next door, was little more than a large cupboard with a copper washtub, a small water pump and a hole in the floor. There wasn’t room for more than one person in there.
There was a splash, and some vigorous, frothy, teeth-cleaning noises. “I’m Clio,” shouted the girl, indistinctly. “Clio Wagstaff-Lamont. Who are you?”
“Egg,” he said, still a little stunned. “Egfried Friefriedsson.”
She opened the door and stuck her head out. Her mouth was still rather frothy. “From Axgaard? Awesome. You don’t look like a warrior.”
“I’m not,” he said. “Not a warrior. Or from Axgaard, really. It’s just where my dad comes from.”
“Oh, okay.” A slender arm reached out to grab Clio’s overnight bag and then vanished with it back into the bathroom. Egg heard rinsing and spitting noises, and a lot of quiet rustling. He backed away from the door and sat on his bed, sliding his inky papyrus page into a folder full of similar pages. He shoved the folder into a drawer and hovered by the window for a while, trying to look casual.
Clio emerged from the bathroom. “This is how it’s going to work, Egg. Your precious roommate has seriously hooked up with my precious roommate, which means I’ve been locked out of my own room for two days while they discover the wonders of — well, shagging. Apparently it’s something special. Who knew? I’ve tried sleeping in the library tower and I’ve tried sleeping in the corridors but it’s just not working for me. Since classes start tomorrow and I don’t want to fall asleep during them, I thought to myself, where is there likely to be a spare bed in this town? Then I said to myself, aha! Sean McHagrty is not in his bed, therefore his bed must be empty. Is any of this making sense to you, Egg?”
“Um,” said Egg. He was still trying to cope with the fact that the angelic, ponytailed heroine had unexpectedly transformed into a peculiar creature with pink hair-curlers dotted all over her head and an old-fashioned white nightdress which covered her in lace from neck to wrist to ankle. It gave the overall impression that she was a large, queenly piece of sharp-cornered furniture.
“I live with my grandmother,” Clio explained. “She packed this for an emergency, and I’m pretty sure she’d consider sharing a room with a boy to be a complete and utter emergency.” She preened a little. “You won’t be tempted to ravish me.”
“No,” said Egg quickly. “Certainly not!”
Clio frowned. “You don’t have to be quite so fervent about it!” She climbed into Sean McHagrty’s bed and tucked herself up to her chin. “I don’t suppose you tell stories?”
“I write stories,” said Egg, thinking of inky scribbles. “Sort of. I draw them, like humorous hieroglyphs only without jokes.”
Clio yawned and pulled more blankets over her. “Sounds good. Tell me one.”
“They’re not the kind of stories you just tell.”
“Tell me one anyway.”
Egg shot an anxious look at the drawer where he had shoved the latest in a large collection of untidy papyrus folders. He tried to think of the right words to explain just how private his stories were, and how they couldn’t just be read aloud like any old ballad. By the time he found the words, Clio had fallen asleep.
The Polyhedrotechnical College was the only higher education institution in the little Mocklore Empire. This was unsurprising, as most people still went by the old apprentice system, and actual qualifications were viewed with extreme suspicion. The College itself had only come into existence fifty years earlier because an entrepreneur named Cluft Cooper thought he could make his fortune by selling education. The former Emperor Timregis, then in the early days of his reign, had poured money into the project on the condition that he got to choose the architectural designs.
The result was a town, spilling out on both sides of the Great Mocklore Road. Due to the Emperor’s peculiar architectural whims, Cluft was a town like no other. It was crammed with towers, buttresses, mysterious hidden passages, upside down cottages and — due to its student population — lots and lots of taverns. Cluft eventually became an independent city-state in its own right, which was the Emperor’s reward to Vice-Chancellor Bertie Peacock for inventing the postgraduate thesis.
The Polyhedrotechnical College was made up of four Departments: Aristocracy, Profit, Certain Death and Highly Improbable Arts. The Department of Aristocracy had only recently changed its name from the Department of Nobility, since there were too many over-literal parents who had questioned whether subjects such as History of Torture, Advanced Posturing and Dictatorship were noble, strictly speaking. Aristocratic, certainly.
Egg sat in the draughty Second Lecture Hall, waiting for a lecture. He was quite enjoying higher education so far. He had chosen a general degree, with first year subjects from each department. He was taking Perspectives of the Profithood, Basic Number Crunching, Introduction to Aristocracy, Social Study of Heroes and Villains, Philosophy of Magic and Tavern Skills.
The lecture hall was full of seventeen year olds screaming, gossiping, whispering and laughing. None of them paid attention to anything but each other.
The lecturer walked in from the back of the hall, striding down the steps in a long, heavy skirt. Her petticoats rustled. Her big black boots made a ringing sound as they struck the floor. She stood at the lectern and arranged her papers, cleared her throat. “Magic,” she said in a firm, musical voice, “is bad. Very, very bad. There is a reason that this course, Philosophy of Magic, is compulsory before you take any other magic-related course within the Polyhedrotechnical College. My job is to drill into your sweet little minds the very important fact that magic should never be used unless it is the absolute last resort and sometimes not even then. Magic cannot be safely used At All. It is unreliable, deadly dangerous, and in almost all test cases, more trouble than it is worth. Any questions so far?”
Her audience stared at her. She was a statuesque figure in crimson and black. Her hourglass figure was cinched in by a firm leather bodice and her skirts spread out in a wide, full circle. She had huge golden eyes, a dark red mouth and scarlet hair tied up in an attempt at a respectable bun, though several loose curls escaped around her neck. She was not like the other professors.
Her name, they had been told, was Mistress Sharpe. One look at their scrolls for Social Study of Heroes and Villains told them otherwise. This woman was famous. The main topic of gossip among the students was the question of why she, of all people, was here. She had been a pirate, a criminal and a witch. She was young for a professor, but no one doubted her authority. Everyone was terrified of her — or madly in lust with her. There were some seriously kinky rumours about Mistress Sharpe. The latest was that she kept a sheep in her bedroom.
“The trouble with magic,” said Mistress Sharpe, addressing the first year class with a steady golden gaze, “is that it doesn’t work. This is why witches stick to the milder forms of
magic such as herbalism and hedgewitchery, while warlocks rarely resort to magic at all, preferring to spend their time on mathematics and needlework. When you use magic — large or small — something always goes horribly wrong.”
Mistress Sharpe’s golden eyes changed focus suddenly, staring at a lad in the third row who had been making a disbelieving face. “Yes? Clifford. You have something to say?”
“Well,” said Clifford, blushing a little. “You can’t say that, can you, miss? You can’t say magic never works, that it always goes wrong. It must work sometimes.”
“Nope,” said Mistress Sharpe.
“But if you follow the rules?”
“Aha,” said Mistress Sharpe. She emerged from behind the lectern. “That is a very interesting point, Clifford. The rules of magic. What are they? Can you think of one?”
Clifford, his bravery swiftly departing, slumped in his chair. “Um, harm none, miss?” he suggested, his face blazing.
“That’s a good one,” said Mistress Sharpe. “Of course, it applies equally well to non-magical activities, we should hope. Yes, Yarrowstalk?”
A girl in the back row lowered her hand. “Please miss,” she said. “Don’t witches have special categories that make their magic work better? Like hedgewitches, or hearthwitches. Isn’t that a kind of rule?”
“Yes,” said Mistress Sharpe. “Very good. A seawitch’s magic, for example, is intensified by being close to salt water. If she casts a spell at sea, it will be ten times stronger than at any other time. But — and I can’t stress this enough — it still wouldn’t necessarily work. Even when you do everything ‘right’, magic does not always choose to obey you. It is a random, unpredictable force of chaos. The seawitch’s spell might go wrong. If it went wrong while she was at sea, it might go ten times more wrong. There is no way of guaranteeing that magic will work, or that it will work in the way you want it to, which is why it is better not to use it at all. Yes, Moonweaver?”
Mocklore Box Set (Mocklore Chronicles) Page 55
