Schooled in Magic 5 - The School of Hard Knocks

by Christopher Nuttall

  “She’s grown up,” Emily protested, defending her friend.

  “She would still be a brat if she hadn’t met you,” Void said. “And she would still have to tell him, if he ever asked. I think her great-grandfather didn’t like the thought of his family keeping secrets from him.”

  He smiled, then stepped backwards. “I’m proud of you, Emily.”

  “I failed so many people,” Emily said. Now the excitement was over, she found herself second-guessing her decisions. Had she done the right thing by keeping the key, then passing it to Zed? Or should she have proclaimed herself MageMaster and dared them to try to unseat her? “I...”

  “You found out the dread secret of Mountaintop,” Void said. “And you made sure the plans of your enemies were thoroughly disrupted. Mountaintop will need years to recover from this little... mishap.”

  He smirked. “Lady Barb will be out soon,” he told her. “Go back to Whitehall with her, have a hot bath and a long nap, and after that you can tell the Grandmaster everything that happened here. I have business to complete, but I dare say we will meet again soon enough.”

  “Wait,” Emily said. She could sense the magic holding them out of time starting to fray, but she had no idea when she would see him again. Void chose his own times and places to appear. “I... I need to ask you something.”

  Void lifted an eyebrow, then waited.

  “The... the Administrator implied that I might have inherited Shadye’s possessions,” Emily said. It still stung to contemplate the Grandmaster keeping that a secret from her. How much else might he have concealed that she had a right to know? “Is that true?”

  “It’s a possibility,” Void said, thoughtfully. “I would certainly have expected some other Necromancer to take his lands by now and none of them have, as far as we know. It’s possible there’s a security measure surrounding it that can only be broken by the person who killed him.”

  He shrugged. “Or Shadye might just have tried to ensure his fortress could never be desecrated, even after his death. He wouldn’t be the first sorcerer to try to keep his territory to himself.”

  “But he’s dead,” Emily said.

  “It’s rather unlikely that any Necromancer will be selfless,” Void pointed out. He smiled at her, revealing sharp teeth. “I suggest you discuss the issue with the Grandmaster. He will have a much better idea of what, if anything, you might have inherited from Shadye. I would caution you not to expect much, though. Necromancers are not known for owning vast collections of magical artifacts.”

  Emily nodded. The average Necromancer wasn’t a skilled magician, merely one who had decided to take a shortcut to power. Shadye had been little more than brute force wrapped in a limited amount of devilish cunning. Mother Holly had been smarter, Emily suspected; if she’d had more time and had less insanity, she might have managed to unite the mountains under her rule. But neither of them had had the power and control to become a Lone Power.

  “I would just like to know what he kept there,” she said, instead. “He might have tried to kidnap someone else before he came after me.”

  “He might,” Void agreed. “But I saw no evidence of another ritual.”

  He reached out and squeezed her shoulder, gently. “I’m proud of you, Emily,” he said again. “You’ve come a very long way.”

  Emily sighed, torn between a strange kind of pride–was this what it was like to have a father?–and guilt. “Did I do the right thing?”

  “Always do the right thing,” Void said. He turned and started to walk away, but his voice echoed in her head. “Even if it makes you bleed.”

  But that, she knew, was no answer.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  “THIS IS WHITEHALL,” EMILY TOLD FRIEDA. “I think you will like it here.”

  Lady Barb cleared her throat and looked directly at Emily. “We’ve assigned you a spare room for the next few days,” she said. “I believe that... Frieda would be better off sharing the room, at least until we decide what to do with her.”

  “She’s my friend,” Emily said. “And besides, where else can she go?”

  Lady Barb nodded. “I suggest you sleep,” she said, as she led them into the school and through a maze of corridors. Someone must have been altering the school’s interior, Emily decided, because they didn’t see a single student until they arrived in the dorms. “We’ll have to have a long chat tomorrow.”

  “Understood,” Emily said. It felt so good to step back into a Whitehall room, even though it was much smaller than Raven Hall. But then, there were only three beds in the room. “I have a great deal to tell you.”

  “I’m sure you do,” Lady Barb said. She gave Frieda a long look, then nodded. “Make sure you both get plenty of sleep. We’ll send you food when you awaken.”

  “You don’t want us to leave the room,” Emily said. She met her mentor’s eyes. “Are we prisoners?”

  “We would prefer not to let anyone know you’re back until we decide what to tell them,” Lady Barb said. “And I think you’re smart enough to understand why.”

  She left the room. Emily tested the door and discovered, not entirely to her surprise, an alarm hex sliding into place. It wouldn’t bar the way if she really wanted to get out, but it would make it impossible for her to leave without alerting Lady Barb. Muttering a curse under her breath, she turned to Frieda and motioned for her to take one of the beds. Frieda obeyed, gazing at Emily worshipfully. Emily sighed inwardly, then lay down on her bed and closed her eyes. Sleep fell over her like a shroud.

  It felt like bare seconds before she opened her eyes, awakened by the smell of food. Frieda was devouring a large plate of bacon, eggs and toasted bread, wearing a robe someone had to have sent up from the school’s supplies. Emily sat upright, then smiled at her former Shadow. Frieda looked embarrassed, but unrepentant. It was hard to blame her for eating when she had the chance.

  Emily stumbled to her feet, walked into the washroom and showered, thoroughly. When she had finished, she found a spare robe hanging from the door and pulled it on, shaking her head in private amusement. They might be prisoners, of sorts, but it was a very comfortable cell, complete with a handful of books. And yet she knew it would pall soon enough.

  “Don’t worry about a thing,” she said, as the door opened to reveal a servant carrying another plate of food. “No one will hurt you here.”

  Frieda’s eyes were suddenly very serious. “I owe you my life,” she said, as the servant retreated. “I would have died without you.”

  “You did get yourself into trouble,” Emily reminded her. “Why didn’t you listen to me?”

  The younger girl reddened. “It... it wasn’t what I wanted to hear,” she confessed. “And I didn’t really believe there was any choice.”

  “Don’t do it here,” Emily said. “This isn’t Mountaintop.”

  “I won’t,” Frieda said. She met Emily’s eyes. “My life is yours, you know.”

  “Your life is your own,” Emily said. The devotion in Frieda’s voice bothered her at a very primal level. “Just... just don’t waste it, all right?”

  They must have been under observation, for Lady Barb entered the room as soon as Emily had finished eating her breakfast. “I need you to come with me,” she said, shortly. “Frieda will have to remain here, for the moment.”

  Emily sighed, then climbed to her feet and followed the older woman out of the room and through another twisting maze of corridors. This time, they saw several students as they walked, two of whom Emily knew from last year. They waved to her and, shyly, she waved back. It felt wonderful to react without fear of discovery.

  “You’ll be asked a great many questions,” Lady Barb said, as they stopped outside the Grandmaster’s office. “I suggest you answer as honestly and completely as possible.”

  “As if I would do anything else,” Emily said. “And I have some questions of my own.”

  Lady Barb nodded, then opened the door. Inside, she saw the Grandmaster, Sergeant Miles,
Master Grey–who scowled at her for a chilling moment–and two men she didn’t recognize. She couldn’t help wondering if one of them was Void, but neither of them radiated the sense of power she had grown to associate with the older sorcerer. Indeed, one of them was close to being a mundane. She took the seat in the center of the room and braced herself as best as she could. There was no way this was going to be an easy discussion.

  It took nearly three hours, according to her watch, before the first set of questions came to an end. Emily had a pounding headache by the time the Grandmaster called a halt, mainly from answering the same questions over and over again. She knew, from Martial Magic, that asking the same question repeatedly made it harder for someone to maintain a lie, but that was no consolation. It was enough to make her wish she’d never used a spell to ensure that truth spells simply didn’t work on her.

  Perhaps they should summon a demon, she thought, as Sergeant Miles chased the two strangers out of the room. He could tell them the truth.

  “Here,” Lady Barb said. She pushed a glass of fruit juice into Emily’s hand. “Drink this, and relax.”

  Emily obeyed. The slightly bitter taste suggested that a painkilling potion had been slipped into the drink, but her head was too sore to care. Whatever it was, it worked; the pain slowly faded to a dull roar. Lady Barb sat next to her and waited, watching her patiently. The Grandmaster, his eyes hidden behind his cloth, seemed to be doing the same.

  “Emily,” Lady Barb said, “why Zed?”

  “Because he had no attachment to any of the quarrels,” Emily said. She’d taken the time to think of a justification, knowing that someone would ask that question. But she hadn’t taken that into account at the time. “He wasn’t angling for the job, so he could reform Mountaintop without having to tend to the interests of one quarrel or another.”

  She paused. It was true... and yet she wasn’t sure it was her true reason. Had she viewed it as a belated apology for getting him fired? Or as a way to keep him from continuing his experiments? But she had to admit he was a better man than she’d thought. It wasn’t everyone who had seen a chance to poison the person responsible for destroying their reputation and chose to resist temptation.

  And he will owe me, she thought, in the privacy of her own mind. Who knows what that could be used for, in the future?

  “A reasonable argument,” the Grandmaster said. “However, the consequences of damaging Mountaintop so badly may be disastrous for the Allied Lands.”

  Emily glowered at him. “They were using students to power their wards,” she said. In hindsight, she had no idea why the founders had thought it was a good idea. The demand for power would have kept rising and, eventually, someone would have noticed that students–all commoners–were going missing. “They could not be allowed to continue.”

  Lady Barb coughed. “And you expect Zed to fix that problem?”

  “I think he will look for alternatives,” Emily said. “There are other nexus points they can access, if they’re willing to work for them.”

  “Yes,” the Grandmaster agreed. “But, until then, there will be a shortfall in trained combat magicians.”

  Emily felt a sudden flash of tired anger. “Are you blaming me for this?”

  “No,” the Grandmaster said. “But we may the only ones who don’t. There will be consequences for this, Emily.”

  “I know,” Emily said. “But would you have preferred me to do nothing?”

  The Grandmaster shrugged, expressively.

  “I will arrange for your... young friend to be enrolled in First Year,” he said, instead of answering the question. “She will, I am sure, be a credit to the school.”

  “She has power, talent and determination,” Emily agreed. “She will be great.”

  “And she seems quite taken with you,” Lady Barb said. There was a hint of amusement in her voice. “You should be careful.”

  Emily sighed, then nodded.

  “You pose a harder problem,” the Grandmaster told her. “You might be well-advised to wait out the rest of the year rather than rejoin your friends.”

  Emily shook her head, mulishly. She’d never really had friends on Earth–she’d certainly had problems learning how to be a friend herself–but she’d missed her friends more than she cared to admit. Part of her wondered if they’d discovered they could remain friends without Emily; part of her was afraid to ask. It wanted her to slip away and never return to Whitehall out of fear of what she might find.

  Angrily, she told that part of her to shut up.

  “I would prefer to remain with them,” she said, as evenly as she could. “I thought the schools followed the same basic curriculum.”

  “With some minor changes,” the Grandmaster said. “I should warn you that you will have to be tested, then work very hard to catch up with your friends. You might be better advised to repeat the year, depending on your grades.”

  “Much of what you do in Third Year leads into the Fourth Year,” Lady Barb put in. “You might not have an easy time of it.”

  “I’ll take the chance,” Emily said. “And besides, if I do badly, I can always repeat the year. Can’t I?”

  “You can,” Lady Barb confirmed.

  “Very well,” the Grandmaster said. “We will give you a couple of days to recover, then have the class tutors run placement tests for you. If they say you have a reasonable chance of catching up and passing Third Year, you will be allowed to do so. But if they don’t, Emily, you will be held back and start Third Year with the current Second Years.”

  Emily winced. Whitehall didn’t really have a stigma attached to students who repeated a year–it was more important to master the basics than move on to later years without a solid grounding–but it would hurt to see her friends moving ahead without her. There was little contact between the years; they’d talk to her, she was sure, yet it wouldn’t be the same.

  “Very well,” she said. She would just have to work hard. At least she’d spent plenty of time reading ahead, both at Whitehall and Mountaintop. “I’ll do my best.”

  “I’m sure you will,” the Grandmaster said. “I think a break to answer the call of nature would be appropriate here, don’t you?”

  “I have a question,” Emily said, before he could motion her out of his office. “Why didn’t you tell me that I might have inherited Shadye’s lands?”

  “We don’t know if you have inherited anything,” the Grandmaster said, slowly. “Magical ownership is a complicated issue at the best of times, Emily, and there was no reason to expect Shadye to own anything you could safely use. We expected a rival Necromancer to take Shadye’s lands in short order, and were silently grateful when nothing happened. It didn’t seem wise to risk upsetting the balance.”

  Emily felt her eyes narrow. “Would telling me have upset the balance?”

  “Perhaps,” the Grandmaster said. “We understand little of the magics surrounding ownership, Emily, as I hope would have been explained to you. You becoming aware you owned them might have triggered a free-for-all, if there was any reason to believe that Shadye owned anything worth taking. Or there might be nothing there, but the other Necromancers are merely concerned about the prospect of running into the Necromancer’s Bane.”

  He sighed. “If you wish, we will take a trip to the Blighted Lands this summer,” he added, “and see what might have been left there.”

  “I thought you couldn’t leave the school,” Emily said.

  “I would have to pass the wards to Mistress Irene,” the Grandmaster explained. “You could not go alone, young lady. I’d prefer to send a small army of magicians with you, but that would risk drawing too much attention.”

  Emily nodded. Shadye had deployed a vast army of orcs, goblins and other monsters to attack Whitehall, all of which had been bred in the Blighted Lands. Some of them would still be wandering around, looking for trouble. And then there were the other Necromancers. If she wasn’t on the top of their list of people to kill, she would be very sur
prised.

  “I could accompany you,” Lady Barb said. “Sir...”

  “We will see,” the Grandmaster said. “I don’t want to risk more people than strictly necessary.”

  He paused. “One final question, Emily. What happened to Aurelius?”

  “I’m not sure,” Emily confessed. “Or Nanette, who was also Lin. I last saw them both stunned and wounded, but they could have survived.”

  “I suppose,” the Grandmaster said, clearly dissatisfied.

  Emily toyed with the bracelet around her wrist, then looked up. “Will they be allowed to remain at Mountaintop?”

  “It would depend on the new MageMaster,” the Grandmaster reminded her. “Zed might believe that keeping them there is a sensible precaution. On the other hand, he knows how Aurelius schemed to evade his oaths and arrange the death of his predecessor. He might want Aurelius as far from Mountaintop as possible.”

  He sighed, heavily. “So passes glory. One day, we will be gone too.”

  “Of course,” Lady Barb said, tartly.

  She motioned for Emily to rise and follow her out the door. Outside, a pair of students were waiting to see the Grandmaster, looking more than a little guilty. Emily wondered what they’d done, then decided it wasn’t important. All that mattered, now, was getting back to her friends and doing her level best to catch up with the rest of the Third Years.

  “You did well,” Lady Barb said, once they were alone. “I’m proud of you.”

  “Thank you,” Emily said. She had come to think of Lady Barb as a mother, of sorts. Maybe not someone who would cosset and spoil her, but someone who would always be there to offer advice and help her solve her problems. Being away from her had hurt, too. “How many more questions will there be?”

  “They’ll sit down and have a solid think about what you told them,” Lady Barb said. “And then they will devise new sets of questions and interview you again–and again. Once they think they know everything, they’ll go off and write long, boring reports that no one will ever read.”