The Alchemists Academy: Stones to Ashes Book 1

by Kailin Gow

  “If you are here seeking knowledge, know that this “statue” is the petrified form of the witch, Ervana, whose actions threatened my school. Her punishment was decided by myself, in conjunction with the school governors, and we fought hard to stop her. You can see the effect of that battle on the rest of the island for yourself. If you are here trying to undo the spell, tough. Nothing short of a fully fledged Chalice of Life will change her back, the school has the only known example, and I will add you to the statuary soon enough. If you are just here to gawk, don’t you have anything better to do than wander round a magically protected island, staring at those statues with few clothes on?” Wirt saw Priscilla blush. “Now go away, and leave the witch to her punishment, before the spell turns your toes into limestone.”

  That was Ender Paine, all right, and it seemed that time hadn’t really changed him much. As the image faded, Wirt wondered how serious he was about the last part, and decided that he didn’t really want to find out. They should probably do everything that they had come to the island to do and get off it before there was even a remote chance of the spell taking effect.

  “Does this actually tell us anything?” he wondered aloud.

  “I suppose,” Alana said, “that it gives us another reason why someone might want the chalice. You heard the image. It’s really the only way to bring her back.”

  “Would anyone want to?” Wirt asked. The others gave a kind of collective shrug, though Spencer looked thoughtful.

  “Father says sometimes that, in business, you can’t expect people to behave exactly the way you would. Just because it makes no sense to us to bring back a witch who attacked the school doesn’t mean it might not make sense to someone else.”

  “We should search nearby,” Spencer suggested at last. “There is always a chance that someone has hidden the chalice here until they can use it.”

  Wirt was not entirely convinced, but they still searched. In truth, there was not much to search. They looked behind a few plinths, and into knotholes on a few trees, but there didn’t seem to be anywhere that someone could reasonably have hidden a chalice, let alone its cauldron shape. In any case, it just didn’t feel right to Wirt. If you had this powerful item, then whatever you were planning on using it for, you would want to keep it close by, wouldn’t you? And if whoever had taken the chalice had come here with it, wouldn’t they have simply used it, rather than hide it away where anyone could find it?

  “I think,” Wirt said, “that we should get back. There’s nothing here.”

  “Plus,” Robert said, “We need to get out of here before whoever stole the chalice comes back.”

  That was a good point too. Out here, presumably no one would be able to help them if the thief should happen to show up, and since they would be someone with enough magical power to take the chalice in the first place, that probably wouldn’t be a good thing for the five of them.

  They hurried back to the boat, and this time Wirt helped with the rowing, so that they made it back to the beach outside Llew’s cave in half the time that it had taken to row out. They dragged it up onto the beach, and headed back into the dragon’s cave. Llew was not in his cave as they had expected.

  Having found nothing, thinking this was a dead end, they were eager to get back. They stepped into the base of the transport tube, thought about their respective rooms, and zoomed upwards.

  Chapter 12

  A lump of wood sat at the front of Mr. Fowler’s ever mobile and slightly scorched classroom, on a stand that let everybody there see it. Near it, Mr. Fowler and Ms. Genovia both stared out over the class. Wirt had his own block of wood, as did everyone else in the class. He peered out at them over it.

  “Now, class,” Ms. Genovia said. “Mr. Fowler has been kind enough to let us use his classroom for this lesson on combining magical disciplines. The lesson today is on the transformation of objects, and will combine elements of what you have already learned in your transmutation and alchemy classes.”

  “Which means that we get to change something’s shape before we accidentally blow it up,” Alana muttered under her breath. Wirt stifled a short laugh, while beside him, Spencer looked on intently.

  “Changing a living creature is difficult,” Ms. Genovia said, “but generally you are not making real changes to the types of tissue involved. The body does half the work for you, if you let it. To transform something inanimate, on the other hand, is somewhat trickier. You must know enough about the substances involved to be able to shape them to your will.”

  That, it seemed, was where Mr. Fowler came in. The white-ish robed wizard launched into a long discourse on the properties of wood, and on the alchemical processes that would normally be involved in transforming it into other substances.

  “Some… um, things are more difficult to achieve than others,” he said, “lead into gold, for example, seems to be beyond us as yet.”

  “With other substances, however,” Ms. Genovia put in, having apparently decided that letting Mr. Fowler keep going would mean that nothing got done, “it is possible to achieve things more directly. Observe.”

  The bulky teacher waved a hand, said a few words, and in place of the block of wood there sat a small trombone, which Ms. Genovia picked up and played. Badly. She put it back down on the stand, where it transformed back into a block of wood.

  “Unfortunately,” Mr. Fowler said, discretely cleaning out one ear, “transformations for more than a minute or two are much more complex, meaning that you have to use a much more involved process, possess an extremely great amount of power, or work that process on something with enough magic of its own to sustain the transformation. The mathematics of the decaying form are really very fascinating. I’m sure I have some chalk around here-”

  To Wirt’s eternal gratitude, Ms. Genovia chose that moment to interrupt again.

  “For today, though, all you will be learning is the simplest of transformations. Let’s get on with it, shall we? Boots to start, I think.”

  The incantation proved to be fairly straightforward, as the turning people into things one had been. The main difference seemed to be in the details of the gestures. A slightly different twitch of the knuckles might produce a sword or a shoe, a butter knife or a dinner table. Wirt found this out the way most of the rest of the class did, by getting things slightly wrong as he struggled to transform his piece of wood into the boots required.

  Still, it was as good an effort as most other people managed. Alana’s first attempt resulted in an ugly looking blob of greenish stuff that turned out to be ectoplasm, when the two teachers tested it. Mr. Fowler did so with a test tube and something similar to litmus paper, while Ms. Genovia achieved the same results by the simple expedient of sticking her finger in the stuff and tasting it.

  “Not so much thumb action next time, I think. Try again.”

  After a couple of false starts, Spencer was the first to manage actual footwear, though Ms. Genovia was actually harder on his effort than Alana’s. Presumably, she felt that ballet slippers were in some sense even further from the boots she wanted than ectoplasm was. Spencer had turned a shade of red, seemly embarrassed to have produced them.

  Nobody succeeded in producing exactly what was required by the end of the class, and Ms. Genovia dismissed them with an exhortation to practice hard when they got a chance.

  Lunch inevitably brought things back to discussions of where the missing chalice might be. The three of them sat in a corner of the canteen, eating what the dryads’ crystal ball had decided they really wanted, or at least swapping it around until they each had something that they actually liked.

  “I think,” Wirt said, “that now we know more about Ervana, we need to find out if anybody here has some connection to her.”

  “And how do we do that?” Alana asked him. “Look through all the student records until we find something?”

  “Sounds like fun,” Spencer said. Wirt saw Alana wince good-naturedly.

  “The really depressing thing, S
pencer, is that you actually mean that, don’t you? I can just imagine you sitting among stacks of files with a big grin on your face.”

  “It’s not my fault if I’m just naturally organized.”

  “Naturally geeky, more like,” Alana said, though she smiled as she said it. Wirt found himself smiling too. There was something comfortable about the banter between the two of them, and it was strangely nice to be a part of something like that for once. To fit in. “Seriously though, do you think that people here would even let you look through the school records?”

  “Who said that we had to ask?” Wirt said. The others gave him a worried look. “What? How hard can it be to sneak a look at a couple of files?”

  “What if we got caught?” Spencer asked. “My father would kill me.”

  “We’d be expelled,” Alana said. “I can’t afford to risk that.”

  Wirt saw that they were serious. He shook his head. “All right then, we won’t do anything like that. I’ll bet that there are plenty of records that are publicly available though. There’s nothing to stop us looking through some of them to see if we can come up with a connection. If we can, then someone else will probably want to look deeper.”

  That, the others agreed, was a good idea.

  “So we’ll head to the library after lunch?” Spencer suggested.

  Wirt shook his head. “I’ve got another Transportation lesson.”

  Spencer frowned. “But I don’t remember that from your class schedule.”

  “This is an extra one. Special tuition.”

  If that didn’t completely satisfy Spencer, at least he didn’t argue. Alana gave Wirt a long look before declaring that she would try asking Priscilla’s mirror for information, as silly as it sounded. They were in a magical school, after all, which happened to be a giant tree.

  Wirt left too, though he did not head for the Transportation classroom. Instead, he rode the transport tubes, looking for the office of the harassed-looking board member with the briefcase, Urlando Roth.

  Wirt arrived in a hallway so dingy that it seemed to Wirt that no one would possibly have had their office there if they had any kind of choice in the matter. A single office door stood at the end of it, opposite what appeared to be a laundry room. There was a glass section in the door, with the words “U. Roth” painted on in peeling black paint. Wirt peered inside. No one. The room was spartanly furnished, with a desk, a chair, a large bouquet of flowers sitting in a rather battered vase, and several rows of rusting filing cabinets.

  Wirt tried the handle, and unsurprisingly found it locked. He tried the transportation spell. It was only in the second that the spell took hold that Wirt saw the faint sheen of a spell around the door, presumably a magical barrier of some kind. All he could do by that point was hope that his luck with that kind of barrier would hold. It did. One moment Wirt was standing in the corridor outside, and the next, he was in Urlando Roth’s office.

  Wirt doubted that he would have long before the teacher showed up. Breaking through that barrier must have set off some kind of alarm, at least. The best he could do was search as quickly as possible. Wirt decided to start with the filing cabinets. At least they were not locked like the door. He opened drawers, flicking through the files in the hopes that something would catch his eye. Nothing did. Wirt wished Spencer was here. This was where he would have come in useful. Spencer would probably have known just what they needed to look for, and might even have been able to make some sense of a filing system that appeared to be more of a store everything unit than an actual filing cabinet.

  Wirt pulled out a couple of files and looked them over, but he didn’t learn much about the missing chalice. On every other events going around at school, he learned too much. He learned all about the school’s budget deficit patterns over fiscal years in a dozen dimensions. He learned all about the school’s list of magical objects. They all seemed to be well-guarded and intact, except for the magic chalice.

  In desperation, he turned to Urlando Roth’s desk. There was not much on it. The bouquet of flowers sat in quite the most hideous vase Wirt had ever seen, a grey, stubby vase with knots and crevices that seemed to drag down the beauty of the blooms within it by its very presence. The card on them read “to my darling A, a present”, which only said to Wirt that the teacher had a middle name. Urlando Adam Roth? Urlando Adrian Roth? It didn’t really improve matters, though it did make Wirt wonder who would send the accountant flowers.

  The other pieces of paper on the desk turned out to be essays which had not been graded. One was on “the probabilities of magical chaos”, while the other was about “predictive magic”. Wirt had more sense than to try and read them, in case his head exploded.

  It was time, he suspected, to get out of there. Wirt took a last look around, trying to see if he had missed anything, and then started to concentrate on the hallway outside. He saw the door start to open, and mumbled the words to the Transportation spell as quickly as he could. Wirt’s last sight, before he transported past him and ran for the transport tube, was of a red-faced and out-of-breath Urlando Roth (Aidan? Albemarle?) rushing in with all the anger of someone who had just had their personal space broken into. Wirt was very, very glad that he had gotten away in time.

  Chapter 13

  It took some effort to locate the others, because it turned out that the school had more than one library where they had arranged to meet. As a result, before he found his friends, Wirt found himself passing through a large open space filled with shelves littered with ladders propped against them, through a room with a multicolored stone floor where scrolls peeked out of pigeonholes nestled in the walls, and even through a library that looked like a garden nursery filled with small trees growing in tubs.

  He finally found Spencer and Alana in a circular reading room overstuffed with oversized armchairs, where a sticky blob of greenish goo sat in the middle of a stone pit, spectacles perched incongruously on a vaguely nose-like protrusion.

  “Where are the books?” Wirt asked, and Alana held up a thin folder.

  “If you ask the librarian, it will fetch what you want. Actually…” she turned her attention to the green blob, “could you give me the next stack of essays, please?”

  The green blob quivered for a moment, then turned until the spectacles faced a patch of space somewhere beside Wirt’s head. Wirt flinched instinctively as a rope-like green tentacle lashed out from it, disappearing through a shimmering patch of air just inches from his right ear. For a brief instant, Wirt thought that maybe he was under attack, but the others seemed unconcerned by it. A second later, and the tentacle pulled back like an angler pulling in their line, another folder stuck to the end of it. The green thing passed it to Alana.

  “Thank you.”

  “What is that thing?” Wirt asked. Alana shrugged.

  “It’s a Thing. Come on Wirt, you can help.” She indicated another of the armchairs.

  “I thought you were going to ask Priscilla’s mirror for help?” Wirt said.

  Alana shrugged. “It was being irritating, and told me that looking it up myself would be good for me. Still, it suggested that maybe I should look at the old essays of those teachers who were students here once. Apparently, they never throw anything away here.”

  “So here we are,” Spencer walked up, “reading through things like “seven variations on toad spells”. Ms. Genovia only got a B for that, incidentally.”

  “She has obviously practiced since,” Wirt said. Alana nodded her agreement.

  “How did your ‘Transportation class’ go?” she asked. “Please tell me you weren’t caught breaking into the records.”

  Wirt saw Spencer’s eyes widen.

  “You really-”

  “Yes,” Wirt said. He was not surprised that Alana had guessed. “I didn’t find anything very useful. Not unless you count the fact that someone has sent Mr. Roth flowers or that he seems to have a middle name beginning with A.”

  “What?” Alana asked, so Wirt starte
d to explain about the note, but Spencer interrupted.

  “Eureka!”

  Wirt hadn’t known that it was possible for a Thing with no real face to give disapproving glares, but this one managed it. Spencer muttered a hasty apology before holding up an essay. The title was slightly more catchy than Ms. Genovia’s frog one, and slightly more relevant too. “Ervana: Enemy or Friend?” was written across the top, along with the name of the student who had written it: Ms. Preville. Alana took it from Spencer, and started to read through it.

  “This is for her history of the hundred worlds class,” Alana said, “so Ms. Preville would have been what? About our age? She argues here that Ervana was not as evil as people have made out, and that it was actually Merlin who was the evil one, manipulating Arthur into taking over and maintaining his position through violence, then setting up this school to increase his own power. She tries to suggest that Ervana’s attack on the school was actually her trying to save it.”

  “I bet she didn’t get a very good mark,” Wirt guessed. Alana shook her head.

  “Actually, she got an A. I can only think that she was good at messing with people’s heads even then, because no teacher would have given her an A otherwise.”

  “So Ms. Preville is behind all this,” Wirt said. “We should tell someone.”

  “Maybe,” Spencer replied. “I’m not sure I would want to be thrown to the Headmaster on the strength of one student essay.”

  Spencer had a point. Besides, Wirt suspected that things wouldn’t be quite that easy. They could accuse Ms. Preville, certainly, but all she had to do was say that it was silly, and that there was no evidence of her actually having taken the chalice, and then it would be the three of them in trouble, rather than her. Besides, unless she was stupid enough to have it hidden in her sock drawer, accusing Ms. Preville didn’t do anything to help them recover the chalice.

  “I think,” Alana said, “that the best thing we can do now is-”