“Finally: always–and I mean always–write down what you plan to do beforehand. There are notebooks in your desks; write down the planned experiment and stick to it. While carrying out the experiment, write down what happens; once the experiment is complete, write down what happened afterwards. Do not leave anything out, or someone trying to reproduce your experiment might run into trouble. Far too many alchemical developments have been discovered, lost and then had to be rediscovered because some damned fool of an alchemist didn’t write down what he was doing.”
Thande leaned back against his desk and grinned. “That’s enough of the boring part. Open your desks again and empty them out onto the top. Now, if you please.” He waited until the students had finished sorting out everything and then allowed his smile to widen, waving a hand in the air as he cast a spell. A recipe appeared in front of them, written in glowing letters that burned silently in the air. “Follow that recipe to the letter.”
Emily stared at the letters, and then down at the ingredients. If this was what passed for science in this universe ... none of them seemed to be genuine chemicals at all, merely items harvested from plants and animals. She laughed inwardly a moment later; chemicals could be harvested from plants, after all. Besides, if alchemists worked to unlock the magical properties of the natural world, it was possible that she was looking at the counterpart of the chemicals she’d been told about in science class at school. If only they’d been allowed to do more practical experiments ...
The first bag contained boiled potatoes. It was so mundane that she found it impossible to take seriously until she cut into the first potato and saw the strange pattern inside. The potato’s interior was infested with a purple spider web that sent a tingle though her fingers when she touched it. Wondering if it was a mutated potato–and therefore unsafe to eat–Emily started to cut it up into tiny pieces, following the recipe to the letter.
Thande walked from desk to desk, his eyes missing nothing. “Cut the grains finer than that,” he ordered one pupil, before moving on to the next. “The recipe says one piece of root.”
His voice hardened. “Or can’t you read?”
The boy flushed, unpleasantly. “I ...”
“Follow the recipe,” Thande snapped, all humor gone. “You can start fiddling with the ingredients when you have a handle on precision.”
Slowly, the experiment began to take shape in front of Emily’s eyes. Seven ingredients, each one weighed out perfectly ... rather like they’d done in Home Economics class. She almost giggled at the thought. Who would have thought that stupid class was actually useful?
Shaking her head, she wrote out what she’d done and then sat back, unsure what to do next. Nothing actually seemed to be happening in the marble bowl she’d used to mix her ingredients together.
“Now that you have completed your preparation,” Thande said, “you may start the experiment itself.” He nodded towards the far wall, which slowly lifted upwards to reveal another room beyond the first classroom. “Everyone find a desk with a portable stove, but do not put your mixing bowl on it yet.”
The second room was even more barren than the first; the tables looked as if they were designed to take everything from spills to minor explosions. Emily felt the additional protective wards as soon as she walked into the room and took one of the tables, trying to see how to light the stove. There seemed to be no easy solution until Thande stopped briefly behind her stool and clicked his fingers at the stove, which lit up like a bright candle. It felt surprisingly warm when she held her hand over the heat.
“When you start to heat the bowl, be sure to stir carefully,” Thande said, as he reached the head of the classroom. “Keep a close eye on what happens as you stir.” He paused. “You may start heating your bowl now.”
Emily picked up the bowl and carefully placed it on the stove, taking one of the spoons and using it to stir as heat spread through the mixture. Slowly, some of the ingredients started to melt into a messy puddle, which started to bubble and steam as she stirred. The other ingredients appeared unchanged ... but so did meat in a stew, at least at first. If it took time for food to cook, it might easily take time for an alchemical process to run its course...
Emily jumped as a thunderous crash echoed through the room. Down the table, the albino girl’s mixture had just destroyed itself. Emily almost forgot to stir as a second bowl also exploded, the protective wards safeguarding the students from harm. A moment later, her mixture fizzed sharply and turned into a black sticky mass, which hardened with terrifying speed. She soon found it impossible to stir it at all.
“Take it off the stove,” Thande ordered. Emily started. How had he managed to appear behind her without her even sensing his presence? “You’ll be cleaning the bowls afterwards, all of you.”
Emily watched as the final experiments ran their course. Only two students seemed to have successfully produced something, although she wasn’t sure what it actually did. Thande poured it out onto the table and invited them to look at the grayish material. At first, it seemed completely inert, then–when Thande poked it with a metal prod–it shimmered to life and became a mirror. Thande placed a tiny doll beside the material and they watched as the material slowly became a grey duplicate of the doll.
“Those of you who had an explosion probably added too much spice,” Thande said into the silence. “Precision is important. Those of you who created a black sticky mess didn’t cut the potato up finely enough. Precision is important. Those of you who managed to have your experiments catch fire unbalanced the bowl on the stove. Precision is important.”
There was a long pause, and then he nodded towards a door in the far end of the room. “You will clean your equipment carefully, rinse it with cold water and leave it to dry. Having uncontaminated equipment is also important.”
Emily followed the other pupils into the washroom, feeling her nervousness return as she tried to wash her bowl and spoon. The sticky mess resisted her best efforts until Thande passed her a soap-like substance that washed the bowl clean. Alchemy was an interesting class, but it wasn’t her most alarming class of the day. Her first Martial Magic class was coming up rapidly and she would be the youngest and most ignorant pupil on the field.
God alone knew what would happen to her.
Chapter Fourteen
EMILY FELT UNCOMFORTABLE AS SHE CHANGED into the semi-uniforms they were expected to wear for Martial Magic. It had been hard to get used to wearing robes, but after four days she’d found that they were preferable, in some ways, to her normal clothes. They not only concealed everything, they enforced a certain equality among their wearers. The uniforms, on the other hand, were tight-fitting and itched in embarrassing places. It didn’t help that the only thing separating the four girls in the class from the twenty boys was a very thin partition.
But they would keep her warm. Owing to the high level of magic in the air surrounding the castle, Aloha had warned her, the weather could change with terrifying speed. It might be raining one moment and then sunny the next.
“Remember what I said,” Aloha muttered as they finished dressing and headed for the doorway leading out into the field. “You mess this up for us and I’ll make sure that you suffer.”
Emily shivered as the boys ran ahead of her towards the middle of a grassy field where the Sergeants were waiting. She’d asked around, but all she’d been able to find out was that the Sergeants only taught one class at Whitehall and never had anything to do with anyone outside their classes. Emily couldn’t decide if that was a good sign or not, but as they came into view she had to fight down the urge to swallow hard, or to run.
The first Sergeant looked thoroughly intimidating.
He motioned for them to form a line as he studied them, his one good eye catching Emily’s before he looked at the next student. The Sergeant looked like a gym teacher from hell. He was easily the most muscular man Emily had ever seen. His left eye was missing, leaving burned flesh and scars that seemed to have becom
e part of his skin and his right eye kept flickering around the field, as if he expected to be attacked at any moment. There was no hair on his head at all.
The second Sergeant looked rather more reassuring. He was a short man with brown hair, a friendly face and–as far as she could tell–an undamaged body. She met his eyes and realized that, no matter what he looked like, there was a formidable personality in there just waiting to explode.
“Greetings,” the first Sergeant said. “My name is Sergeant Harkin. This is Sergeant Miles. I served in the Rangers as a Pathfinder, then as a Sergeant, for twelve years; Miles served as a Combat Sorcerer for nine years. We have both fought the monstrous armies raised by the necromancers, which means, for those of you who care to understand, that we know what we’re talking about. Those of you who still think you know everything need to forget that attitude right now.
“Whitehall insists that we give you all a written test. This test will have no bearing upon your potential skill as a soldier of any kind, even if you intend to try to become an officer, so we will be happy to hand out cheat sheets to anyone who wants to pass the exam with a perfect score. The reason we offer these is because the exams are not important to your success. I intend to graduate you all as potential combat sorcerers and we don’t have time to waste.”
Emily heard gasps from four of the boys. They looked older than her–they were older, unless they’d advanced faster than Emily believed to be possible–and they would be coping with endless tests and exams as their studies solidified into specialties. Being told that an exam was useless ... it would be a shock, even though Emily had grown up in a universe where almost all basic exams were useless. The Sergeant had merely put it into words.
“There are three sections to Martial Magic: Drill, Tactics and Magical Combat,” the Sergeant continued. “Drill is where you young children learn to obey orders, and then how to keep your bodies primed for the fight. You do not want to have an unhealthy mind in an unhealthy body if you intend to follow a military career. Some of you will not be used to the concept of obeying orders. We suggest that you forget that attitude as well. You cannot be trusted to issue orders unless you first understand the need to obey them.
“Tactics studies military combat and operations throughout the ages and how to apply them to the current situation. Instead of a written exam, you will be tested in the field and given practical problems to solve. We will be judging you on how quickly you adapt to a sudden change in the situation, how well your plan works when it actually encounters the enemy and how you manage to convince your classmates to follow orders. Failure need not be a problem as long as you learn from your mistakes.
“Magical Combat involves magic specifically designed for military uses,” he concluded. “You may have used charms, hexes and jinxes in your earlier years; they are nothing more than jokes compared to the curses written specifically for military use. A charm intended to make a person’s clothes fall off their body is a practical joke; a curse intended to maim or kill an enemy is a lethal weapon.
“As we know that you are young students, we will not move on to Magical Combat for several weeks. This is so that we can run you through Drills and Tactics and teach you little monsters how to obey orders before you start experimenting with military spells. We want you to develop the discipline to handle the spells before you blow up yourselves, your classmates or–most importantly–us.”
His voice turned to ice. “This is not a place where you can horse around without consequences. The spells you will learn here are not jokes. Seeing that you are young and therefore idiotic students, the first person to misbehave in this class will be stripped naked and horsewhipped from here to the burned oak”–he pointed towards a tree in the far distance–“and back again. If that isn’t enough to deter you from misbehavior, any further examples will result in immediate expulsion from the class. This is your first and last warning.
“For the first three weeks, any of you who wish to leave this class may do so without consequences. After that, anyone who leaves–either of their own accord or by being expelled–will have a disastrous effect on their squad-mates. The military is not a place for rogue assassins or lone wolves. The military is a place where you must be able to depend upon your fellows and have them depend upon you in turn. Half of the exercises we will make you do will be impossible to solve without working together. If your fellows are in trouble, help them. If you can’t think of a solution, work with them. You never know who will come up with a good idea in the field.”
The Sergeant’s single eye fell on Emily and she shivered. “For those of you who are of the fairer sex, be aware that we make absolutely no distinction between boys and girls in this class. There are combat sorceresses who have been a credit to the army. They all went through the same course and passed with flying colors. None of them found it easy. If you have problems or injuries–if any of you have problems or injuries–I expect you to inform us before it becomes a major problem. You’d be surprised at just how many famous soldiers swallowed their pride in training and admitted that there was a problem.”
His face twisted into an unpleasant smile. “That’s enough blather from me,” he said, pointing one finger towards the burned oak in the distance. “All of you, when I give the order, run to that oak and back here.” There was a pause. “RUN!”
Emily jumped, just as the line of students broke up and started to run towards the oak. Catching herself, she ran straight towards the oak, feeling her heartbeat racing as she ran. Her entire body started to ache a moment later, as if she hadn’t run in years ... and she hadn’t, apart from a handful of gym classes. The ground felt slippery and unsteady under her feet. Everyone, even the other girls, were ahead of her. She would have cursed Void aloud if she had been able to catch her breath. If she’d known that she would be called upon to do physical exercise, she would have practiced running before the first class.
“MOVE,” a voice snapped in her ear. Sergeant Miles was directly behind her, carrying a baton which he used to aim a swat at her rear. Emily somehow managed to avoid the blow and kept running as he lifted his voice. “THE ENEMY IS BEHIND YOU! RUN!”
The burned oak seemed to stink of dark magic as she ran around it and back towards their starting point. Some of the boys were slowing down, although they were all still moving as fast as they could, well ahead of her. Aloha, Emily noted, was doing very well indeed. The girl would have had plenty of time to practice.
Sergeant Harkin was counting out loud as the runners raced past him and screeched to a halt, several skidding and falling backwards onto the grass. Emily barely managed to outrun one of the younger boys in the class to come in second to last.
“Pathetic,” Harkin said. He seemed to be condemning all of them, not just the ones who had come in last. “Absolutely pathetic. And to think that you are all the great hope of the future.”
His voice sharpened as he pointed into the distance. “Do you know what lurks over those peaks?”
Emily followed his finger southwards. Perhaps she was imagining it, but there seemed to be a sensation of doom from where the necromancers were lurking, awaiting their chance to fall upon the Allied Lands like wolves on unsuspecting sheep. It was a reminder that their society was at war, even if the Allied Lands seemed to prefer squabbling amongst themselves for the time being. The book Emily had read, produced by the History Monks, had made it clear that the only thing that had prevented the necromancers from winning already was their own disunity, and their tendency to fight each other from time to time. United, the necromancers would have crushed the Allied Lands a long time ago.
“We are at war,” Harkin snapped. “There are monsters out there that could tear you apart with their bare hands. You have to work hard to develop yourselves so you can stand between the Allied Lands and the devastation the necromancers would bring to your friends, your family and everyone else! Follow me!”
He spun around and marched off in the direction of a dark forest, part of White
hall’s grounds. “This forest is off-limits to everyone, unless you happen to be taking Martial Magic,” he thundered, still moving. “Do not bring your friends here for fun.”
Up close, the forest looked ominously dark and shadowy. Emily could sense ... something within the tangled trees, a hint of magic that might manifest into something dangerous for any unwary travelers. After what Professor Thande had told them, it was easy to believe that some of the countryside had been forced to evolve by mana, becoming hideously dangerous. Who knew what lurked inside the forest?
“You two, work together,” Harkin snapped, pointing at two of the boys. “You two ...”
He kept assigning partners, assigning Emily to a boy who looked five years older than her.
“I’m Jade,” the boy said, sticking out a hand.
Emily shook it gravely. At least he wasn’t spending time checking out her chest, unlike too many boys on Earth–and her stepfather, when he was drunk.
Jade smiled at her. “I hear that you are a Child of Destiny?”
Emily flushed. “Don’t believe everything you hear. I am ...”
“Am I interrupting something?” Harkin demanded, appearing right in front of them.
Jade and Emily exchanged glances before Jade spoke up. “No, sir?”
“Good,” Harkin snapped. He glared at all twelve pairs. “All you have to do is get from one end of the forest to the other. We will be waiting on the other side to see who comes out first, and who gets so badly stuck that we have to rescue them. Any questions?”
There was a long moment of silence. “First team, then,” Harkin said. He jabbed a finger at Jade and Emily. “In you go, carefully.”
The interior of the forest was dark, so dark that the temperature dropped sharply the moment they were under the leafy canopy. It looked surprisingly normal, yet Emily couldn’t escape the sensation that there were watching eyes all around, following their every move.
Schooled in Magic Page 14
