Schooled in Magic

by Christopher G. Nuttall

  And then there were spells–natural and unnatural–infused into people, objects or even the empty air. According to Mistress Irene, mana was everywhere, allowing creatures to evolve into forms that could draw on it for themselves. She didn’t want to even guess at what sort of evolutionary history might have produced dragons, gorgons or elves, but it made a certain kind of sense. Maybe, just maybe, orcs and goblins were humans who had been warped into something inhuman by exposure to the magic field.

  “It’s a very good idea to test everything for infused magic before you touch it,” Mistress Irene said. “Your fellow students love playing practical jokes. One of them even managed to rig his friend’s textbook so that it would turn him into a frog when he opened the book. Most of them won’t be skilled enough to hide a spell-trap from basic detection spells directly, but there are plenty of tricks they can pull to make it harder to detect a hidden trap.”

  Emily looked down at the spell and nodded, before carefully casting it out loud. The room seemed to dim for a moment, just before a number of objects started to shimmer with an eerie red glow. She looked around, noticing the spells on the desk, the bookshelves, the globe and crystal ball in the corner ... and there were dozens clustered around the door. Some of them looked harmless, even in the red light, but a number looked downright ominous. She had the distant feeling that trying to take a book off the shelves without permission would be very dangerous.

  “Good,” Mistress Irene said. “Now, a second spell ...”

  It didn’t seem to do anything, at least at first, until Mistress Irene passed her a small goblet and invited her to repeat the spell. The red glow surrounding the goblet faded away into nothingness, leaving her looking down at a harmless object.

  “The simple spell for dispelling trap spells has a much shorter range,” Mistress Irene explained. “Should you be unable to remove a spell someone might have left on your property, bring it to me or one of the other tutors. Naturally, removing the more complex trap spells is a great deal harder.”

  Emily nodded. There would be no point in using any sort of spell to keep her property private if it could simply be dispelled. The spells crawling over Mistress Irene’s door looked a great deal more complex, suggesting that cracking them would be difficult, if not impossible. She wondered, absently, what they actually did to intruders. Freeze them in place, transform them into something else ... or kill them outright?

  No, she thought, that couldn’t be possible. Whitehall might take a more relaxed attitude to students injuring themselves and others than any school she knew back home, but there had to be limits.

  The second hour passed far more quickly than the first as Mistress Irene pushed her into memorizing and practicing a dozen different spells. One of them was a very simple defensive spell, enough to deflect many hexes and charms away from her body and soul. Emily shivered at the implications of students needing to know that spell as quickly as possible, forcing herself to keep it firmly in her mind. Another spell checked to ensure that a potion was safe to drink, although Mistress Irene warned her that it only picked up on potions that were lethal; she could still become very ill from drinking the wrong potion.

  A more complex spell, one that Emily couldn’t master in the first session, was designed to analyze other spells, allowing the caster to see how they had been put together by the original magician. Mistress Irene made it work with ease, but Emily couldn’t quite keep all the different variables straight in her head. Finally, Mistress Irene told her to leave the spell for now; they’d return to it in two days.

  “I’m going to permit you to enter the library and borrow books suitable for a first year student,” Mistress Irene said. “I know that students practice spells with or without our permission, so I’d just like to remind you that hurting another student will leave you–at the very least–unable to sit comfortably for several days. If you manage to hurt yourself, you’ll have us laughing at you as well.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Every student has a different level of power,” she added, a moment later. “Push your limits, but don’t push too far, too fast. If you feel unwell, or headachy, stop casting spells and rest; eat something sweet to replenish your energy. The kitchen staff will provide you with something to eat if necessary.”

  “Thank you, Mistress,” Emily said, finally. Her head already felt uncomfortable; when she stood up, her legs suddenly weakened and she had to grab the chair to keep herself from falling over. “I ...”

  “You’re going to the dining hall, where you will eat a large meal,” Mistress Irene said,. “This afternoon”–she produced a sheet of paper, which Emily took automatically–“you will be joining the History of Magic class, followed by a free period during which you are expected to study. You’ll begin proper classes tomorrow.

  “Fortunately, we start basic classes throughout the year, as we never know when someone knew is going to come to the school. But you have to test out of them before you can proceed.”

  Emily glanced down at the paper. It was a class schedule, written out in a neat, precise hand. The school day was divided up into eight periods, seven of them assigned to actual studies and one assigned for lunch. There were thirty minutes between classes, either to keep the students from becoming exhausted by giving them a chance to get something to eat, or to ensure that if one class ran late there would be no delay for the second class. Being tardy, she suspected, would earn one a detention at Whitehall–or worse.

  “I shall assign your roommates to assist you, as you are unfamiliar with our world,” Mistress Irene added. Emily gulped; she liked Imaiqah, but she had the feeling that Aloha would be much less willing to help a newcomer explore the school. “Imaiqah needs to retake two classes, so she will accompany you to Transfiguration and Mentalist Magic. Depending on how you progress, you may be moved up to a more advanced class within the next two months.”

  Emily nodded. The schedule listed a dozen different classes for a first year, including Alchemy, Charms, Cryptozoology, Divination and Ethics. A number of periods had been left blank, but she wasn’t sure if they were free periods for private study or if Mistress Irene hadn’t assigned her to specific classes for those times yet. Two periods on Tuesday and Thursday had simply been marked sport. Emily scowled at the thought. She’d moved to a completely new world and she was still forced to attend gym class.

  Mistress Irene smiled. “You haven’t done that badly,” she said. “Void was right. You do have potential.”

  Emily flushed. “But I couldn’t master the analysis spell. I ...”

  The tutor laughed. “I’d be embarrassed if you mastered it without weeks of practicing. Do you know how long it took me to master it?”

  Mistress Irene shook her head. “Go to the dining hall and eat,” she ordered. “And then let your amulet guide you to History of Magic.”

  Emily nodded and left the office, thinking–as she left–that Mistress Irene wasn’t so bad after all. Perhaps she even had a heart of gold.

  Chapter Eight

  “HISTORY IS NOTHING MORE THAN A series of opinions about the past,” Professor Locke informed his class. He was a short, elderly man with long white hair, wearing a pair of spectacles through which he peered suspiciously at his students. “Who, I might ask you, won the Battle of Janus?”

  A male student raised his hand. “We did, sir.”

  Another student jumped up almost before the first speaker had finished. “No, we won!”

  Professor Locke smiled. “A perfect demonstration of the essential truth of my statement. The Battle of Janus was fought out between Umbria and Holm for domination of the city of Janus, and the trade routes that ran through the Janus mountain range. While Umbria was pushed back, allowing Holm to claim a victory, the battle was so costly that reinforcements from Umbria were able to push Holm back out of the city within the month.”

  His smile grew wider. “So tell me. Who really won the battle?”

  Emily considered the question while the more nationalistic
of her classmates argued the point. Destroying an empire to win a battle was no victory, as she’d learned playing computer games; a victory that cost an army could be fatal if there was no time to produce a second army. There had been a Greek King who’d fought the Roman Republic, she recalled, who had bemoaned his exceedingly costly victory in one battle–and lost the war.

  “The Allied Lands may have united to fight the necromancers,” the Professor said, “but they still disagree on many things. One of them is on history. No Kingdom or City-State shares the same view of history, which can be irritating if one happens to be a historian. And yet our history, which is shared even if they don’t want to admit it, explains why we ended up facing the necromancers today.”

  There was a long pause. “Thousands of years ago, the human race warred with the elves. The elves were magic, the elves were formidable ... but there were millions of humans. It was our time, we believed, and we no longer wanted to be dominated by the Fair Folk. So we warred with them until they were driven back into their hidden settlements and built the First Empire in the rubble of their empire.

  “But we made a dreadful mistake. We could have reached out to the orcs and goblins, offshoots of humanity created by the elves. Instead, also we warred with them, forcing them into an alliance with the remaining elves. Many years later, they returned and waged war on the First Empire itself. They destroyed the First Empire.”

  Emily shivered, remembering what she’d seen as the dragon had carried her from Void’s tower to Whitehall. Destroyed cities, including structures she was convinced hadn’t been produced by human beings; their populations slaughtered or driven away to starve. Had that been the result of the war against the elves, or had it had a far darker cause?

  “Those were terrible days,” Professor Locke said. “The elves raised countless monsters to lay waste to our lands. Millions died as fire-drakes blew their poisonous breath over human settlements, and giant crabs emerged from the seas to destroy harbors while mermen sank ships in the ocean. The only solution seemed to be to reach for far greater magic and so we did. We discovered that we could use murder to power our spells and use them to strike back against the elves. Eventually, we rallied and drove the elves to the brink of extinction.

  “But, as so often happens, the weapon we used to win the war turned in our hands. The necromancers were unable to channel the vast power they possessed without going mad, becoming monsters in human form. They didn’t want to stop drinking in the mana from thousands of slaughtered humans, or basking in the sheer joy of power. Eventually, they attempted to take over the Second Empire. The battle to stop them also shattered any hope of establishing a new human unity.”

  Emily considered it, wondering–absently–why murder was required. Why not a willing sacrifice? Would it have made any difference if the sacrifices had volunteered themselves to the necromancers?

  But Shadye had definitely been insane. No matter how genteel he’d acted, he’d planned to sacrifice Emily to the Harrowing, whatever that was. And his plan would have exploded in his face if Void hadn’t intervened.

  Professor Locke nodded towards the map on the wall. Emily studied it with interest; the continents bore little resemblance to anything she remembered from her own world. One vast continent was roughly the size of Europe, Asia and America put together, while a smaller continent to the south was little bigger than Australia. A network of islands–Japan and Britain put together, she decided–dominated the final part of the globe. They did know that their world was a sphere.

  But it didn’t seem to have a name.

  Thirty-two states were part of the Allied Lands, if she was reading the map correctly. Most of them were grouped to the north of the largest continent, with a handful in the smaller continent and islands. Below them, there was a wasteland; it had to have been where Shadye had attempted to sacrifice her, after she’d been kidnapped from her world. She remembered the barren lands she’d flown over and shivered. The battle to stop the necromancers might as well have been fought with atomic bombs. It might even have been kinder in the long run.

  “The necromancers fled into the dead lands to the south,” the Professor said. “There, they built their strongholds, grew their slaves and eventually mounted a new assault on the Allied Lands. Their threat is overwhelming; given enough time, they will produce more armies of monsters to turn against us and crush the Allied Lands. The only thing that has saved us so far is their disunity. We cannot expect them to remain disunited forever.”

  Their disunity? Emily wondered. She’d had the impression that Shadye was acting independently of the other necromancers. He’d certainly not summoned any others to join him in sacrificing her for power ...

  One of the students stuck up his hand, interrupting Emily’s thoughts. “Can we not keep them disunited, Professor? We could offer to dicker with them if they fought each other ...”

  “It has been tried,” Professor Locke said. He tapped a darkened patch on the map. “The King of Halers believed that he could buy off one of the necromancers, an unpleasant fellow called Gower. Gower was sent hundreds of the king’s subjects as sacrifices in the hope that it would buy the king’s independence. But Gower wormed his way into the kingdom’s power structure and turned the nobles against the king, the peasants against the nobles and the army against everyone. Eventually, Halers was so badly wracked by civil war that the necromancer was able to walk in and take over.

  “Gower destroyed the kingdom. His monsters wiped out the remaining nobles, before killing enough of the peasants to keep the rest thoroughly cowed, those that didn’t flee in time. Now, it is a source of monsters and magical sacrifices for the necromancers, all because a king was foolish enough to believe that a necromancer could be bribed into good behavior. We cannot negotiate with the necromancers. All we can do is muster our own power and prepare for the coming struggle.”

  Emily knew–looking at the map–that it would be difficult. Void had told her that the necromancers were slowly outflanking the Allied Lands, but he hadn’t managed to convey just how desperate the situation was. If the necromancers managed to cooperate long enough to mount a major offensive, they could drive up through the mountains and split the Allied Lands in half. They’d then have access to vast resources–and humans for sacrifice–that they could use to crush the rest of the Allied Lands. And then they could turn their attention to the other continents.

  “We do have some advantages,” Professor Locke said. “Most importantly, necromancers are driven insane by the sheer power they channel through their minds. They have been known to lash out at each other without premeditation, as well as planning betrayals for reasons that only make sense in their own addled minds. Their power levels also slowly kill them as their brains cannot tolerate the pressure they put on them for long. As they grow older, they are forced to channel more and more power to keep themselves alive, slowly becoming undead lich-creatures. The true horror of necromancy is that eventually they will run out of humans to sacrifice and die out, leaving the land behind them a waste.”

  Emily spoke before she could think better of it. “Did the elves teach the first necromancers how to become necromancers?”

  Professor Locke studied her for a long moment, thoughtfully. “And what, young lady, do you mean by that?”

  His gaze was disconcerting. Back home, she would rarely have been called to justify herself to anyone at school. Here ...

  “If necromancers need a constantly increasing supply of power merely to keep themselves alive,” Emily said, hastily formulating her thoughts, “eventually they’re going to run out of power.”

  “As I said,” the Professor reminded her, impatiently.

  “Well ... yes, but they have to know that,” Emily countered. “So why did they even start, back when their brains were presumably not addled by necromancy? They had to have realized that necromancy would eventually exterminate the entire human race. But the elves might have given them the idea knowing that the human race would either
have to abandon necromancy or destroy itself. Either way, they would win.”

  “An interesting theory,” Professor Locke said, finally. “And quite possibly accurate.”

  He leaned back, thoughtfully. “But tell me ... how could we have beaten the elves without necromancy?”

  Emily knew better than to continue the argument. She simply didn’t know enough to make a good case one way or the other. And if necromancy had made the difference between victory or defeat, even the alien-minded Fair Folk of fantasy novels would have hesitated before giving such a weapon to humanity. Unless they believed that humanity would discover it for themselves anyway...she shook her head. That way led madness and a lifetime of raving about conspiracy theories on the internet.

  “As I said at the start, history is really nothing more than opinions,” Locke said, turning back to the class at large. “Can anyone tell me when the Treaty of Umbria was signed?”

  A burly-looking male student put up his hand. “Ninety years ago, Professor. It bound the Allied Lands together into a united force to defend us against necromancers.”

  “True enough,” Locke agreed. “Why didn’t the rulers of the Allied Lands unite into a Third Empire?”

  Emily could guess at the answer, but left another student to try her luck. “Because the bigger kingdoms intended to dominate the little kingdoms,” the student said. “The little kingdoms knew better than to subordinate themselves to the bigger kingdoms, which would have more power in a united empire.”

  “You mean that your puny kingdom didn’t want to commit to the united defense,” one of the boys muttered. “Your people have always been cowards ...”