by Kailin Gow
“Apparently.” Ms. Lake’s smile widened. “Though frankly, I just don’t think that Mr. Bentley likes the idea of his son having to share with anyone. After all, Spencer was in a single when you showed up, remember.”
Wirt nodded, though he couldn’t help a glance across at Roland Black. He had a feeling that things wouldn’t be quite as peaceful as they had been around Spencer. And judging by the way Roland was looking at him, he shared the same sentiment.
A moment later, Roland gave voice to it. “Ms. Lake,” he said. “There must be some mistake. I thought I was supposed to a single room. How can Spencer Bentley get one when I cannot?”
Ms. Lake put a hand on Roland’s shoulder. “Spencer’s father put in a request for that room months ago, when Wirt first appeared here at the Academy, Roland. As such, his request took priority. You boys will simply have to share for now.”
Wirt couldn’t believe that his friend would have wanted a room alone that badly and not said anything. Of course, it sounded like Spencer’s father had a lot to do with it, but even so, couldn’t Spencer have stood up to him over it?
Roland still seemed just as unhappy, looking at Wirt with a skeptical expression. “Ms. Lake-”
“Roland.” Ms. Lake didn’t raise her voice as she cut the boy off, but it was clear that she wasn’t going to tolerate anything more from him. “I am sure that you and Wirt will get along wonderfully. After all, the two of you share many interests.”
“We do?” Roland looked at Wirt like he couldn’t imagine what sort of interest Wirt could possibly share with someone like him.
“You do. Besides, Wirt knows almost every corner of the academy, and will be well-placed to show you the ropes.” Ms. Lake appeared to think for a moment. “We have quite a nice collection of magical climbing ones in the collection of artifacts at the moment, actually, so you might even be able to take that one literally. Wirt, you must do what you can to make sure that Roland settles in. After all you know what it was like when you first got here.”
“What, Ms. Lake? People plotting to take over the school and trying to kill me?”
Ms. Lake sighed. “I was actually thinking of what it would have been like without someone to show you around, Wirt. You do remember that part, don’t you?”
Wirt could remember. It had been Spencer who had pulled him under the desk before the beginning explosion of his first alchemy class. Spencer who had explained how to use the transport tubes, and Spencer who had introduced him to Alana and Priscilla on his first day. In fact, without Spencer, Wirt doubted he would have lasted very long at the school, and not just in the usual sense. Thanks to its headmaster, the Alchemists Academy wasn’t a place that believed in a safe learning environment for its pupils.
In fact, other people had been instrumental in getting Wirt through those first days. He was in a place where nymphs ran the kitchen and turning one another into things was a course requirement, where the librarian was some sort of bright green Thing and the internal transport system could deposit the unwary almost anywhere. Wirt didn’t want to think about some of the things that might have happened to him had he not had the help of his newfound friends. He guessed he owed it to the new boy, and to Ms. Lake, to make sure that Roland Black knew about the dangers.
“I’ll do my best, Ms. Lake,” Wirt promised.
“Good,” the school’s second in command said. “I know you’ll have fun. I’m certainly having an interesting time of things with Ms. Burns as my new roommate. One of the joys of having an elemental fae around: there’s actually someone who doesn’t mind the bottom of a lake for sleeping quarters. I haven’t had so much fun in years.” Ms. Lake thought for a moment. “Centuries, possibly. Now, I can’t hang around. I must see how all the other new students at the school are settling in. Some strange boy tried to bring an owl. Would you believe that? And another one started skimming stones on my lake. Honestly, I hate having things thrown at me.”
“Yes, Ms. Lake,” Wirt agreed, and the teacher seemed to realize that she was wasting time.
“Well, that’s all sorted out anyways. Now, if you want me, I’ll probably be in my office at some point. Good luck, Roland. Don’t forget your first transportation class, Wirt.”
With that, she left, closing the door behind her. Wirt sat back on his bed.
“So,” he said, “do you want the complete tour of the place now or later?”
Roland just looked at him.
“Come on,” Wirt said. “You heard Ms. Lake. I’m supposed to show you around.”
“You think I need that?” Roland demanded. He sounded faintly insulted at the prospect of having to learn something from someone like Wirt.
“Maybe not, but there are things you need to watch out for. This school can be a dangerous place if you aren’t careful.”
Roland shrugged. “I can look out for myself. The last thing I need is someone tagging along after me trying to cramp my style and taking up all the space. Talking of which…”
He sat down at the desk, working on the network of silver strings like it was a musical instrument, though no sound came out. Roland’s face was a mask of concentration as he did it.
“What are you doing?” Wirt asked, partly out of interest, and partly to make sure that his new roommate hadn’t decided that turning him into something was the best way to get around the space issues.
“I’m finishing unpacking, of course.”
Wirt didn’t understand what the other boy meant until he reached into the network of wires, his hand disappearing to the wrist, and started to pull out objects one by one.
Chapter 4
The first thing Roland pulled out was an electric guitar, which was dark blue and dangerous looking, with strange, sideways mounted volume controls. He put it up on the wall and, much to Wirt’s annoyance, the tree extruded a couple of hooks for Roland to hang it on. A skateboard followed next, getting a spot in the corner of the room.
After that, the things that Roland pulled out of the silver network of wires became a little stranger. There was a lead box that looked like it had seen better days, and a brass compass with an intricate collection of symbols etched into its lid. There were a few more books, and there was a set of different-colored stones linked together with string.
“Roland,” Wirt said. “Is there much more? Your stuff is taking up all the space.”
“Like you need much of it.”
Finally, Roland pulled out a sphere the size of a basketball. At first glance, it seemed to be black, but Wirt could see flashes of other colors too, as though they were swirling just under the surface. As he watched, the movement of those colors seemed to accelerate, and as it did so they started to shine through, glowing in a way barely restrained by the outer layer of the ball.
“What’s that?”
“It’s called a quantum ball,” Roland said, spinning it idly between his hands until the colors beneath the surface shone like stars. “It’s used for playing hyper-leap.”
“Hyper-leap?” Wirt asked. “Is that some kind of game?”
Roland nodded. “They don’t play it much now. You throw the quantum ball at your opponent, and they have to use transportation magic to get themselves away. If they just try to run, the ball follows them.”
“And when it catches them?” Wirt asked.
“It disintegrates them. Scatters their constituent atoms across the hundred kingdoms.”
Roland made to throw the ball at him, and it was all Wirt could do to keep from reacting. The other boy laughed and put the ball down carefully. It faded to black as he did so.
“Not bad,” Roland said. “Most people run screaming.”
Wirt didn’t say what he would have liked to do to Roland in that moment. Instead, he looked at the ball, just sitting there on the floor.
“It’s safe like that?”
“Sure. It doesn’t do anything until someone with magic spins it up to speed for the game.”
“And you’ve played hyper-leap? For real,
I mean?”
Roland shook his head. “My father did, though. They used to play it here in the academy. That was his ball.”
Wirt wasn’t sure he wanted to ask how many of his fellow students Roland’s father had disintegrated. Knowing the academy, he wouldn’t have gotten into any trouble for it, however many it was. Even Ms. Lake tended to take quite a rough and tumble attitude to learning, while Ender Paine…
Wirt had seen what the school’s permanently acting headmaster was capable of last year, when he had turned Ms. Preville to stone without so much as a second thought, and handed Urlando Roth over to the school’s mysterious ‘governors’. Wirt had seen the statues of them near Ender Paine’s office. They had been the sort of things that would probably have driven most stonemasons mad carving them. For all that he dressed like some sort of harmless stage magician, the man was deadly.
“So why are you here, Roland?” Wirt asked.
The other boy gave him a sharp look. “What do you mean?”
“Here at the academy. You must have transferred in from another school, so why switch now?”
Roland shrugged. “Why does anybody come here? It’s meant to be the best place to learn if you want real power. It’s definitely the best place to come if you want to work with royalty or big business afterwards. I did a year at the North Star Academy, but this place is better, so why wouldn’t I want to come here?”
Wirt nodded. That made sense. Certainly, it fit with what everyone else there had told him. The Alchemists Academy was the place to learn magic, and produced most of the major advisors to royalty, thanks to its association with Merlin. Momentarily, Wirt thought of his dream again, but dismissed it. Compared to the kind of things that happened at the academy every day, one odd dream was nothing.
“Do you still want to give me that tour?” Roland asked.
The honest answer to that was no. Not after Roland had already turned Wirt down once, not to mention scaring him with that quantum ball of his. Wirt, however, could guess what it would be like sharing a room with someone for the next year if they didn’t at least try to find some common ground. Besides, Ms. Lake had asked him to.
“Sure, just follow me and try to stay close. The school is big enough that it’s easy to get lost.”
“I know,” Roland said. “The tree’s transportation system has hundreds of thousands of pathways.”
“That’s right.” Obviously the new boy had been doing his homework. Wirt set off, starting by showing Roland the dormitories and the cafeteria. Wirt couldn’t help noticing that everywhere they went, Roland attracted stares. Approving ones from the girls, mostly. Wirt couldn’t help thinking that they had never looked at him like that. Well, except for Alana, and that had only been once.
Wirt did his best to explain how the kitchens in the school worked, and that you only ever got what you were given, though it seemed that Roland knew that too. That was hardly unexpected, given that he had presumably already had at least one meal there, but he could at least have attempted to look interested.
Wirt decided to get a few of the more functional areas of the school out of the way. He showed Roland where some of the teachers kept their offices, noting as he did so that Urlando Roth’s no longer had his name on it, and then headed to the reception area outside Ender Paine’s office, where there were benches for those students awaiting the headmaster’s displeasure, and the statues of the governors seemed to glower down at them in their weird, inhuman guises.
Roland didn’t seem bothered. “You should see some of my more distant relatives,” he said with a yawn. “Besides, they’re only statues.”
Wirt wasn’t so sure about that. He’d heard them whispering about him as he’d left Ender Paine’s office once, after all. That wasn’t something he felt like sharing with Roland though. It wasn’t something he even wanted to remember if he could avoid it.
“Does this place have a gym?” Roland asked, and Wirt resisted the urge to sigh. All the places that could be reached through the tree, from Llew the dragon’s cave to who knew where else, and his roommate was just interested in somewhere to play sport? Still, Wirt went along with it. He more than went along with it. After so much time travelling around the school during the summer, he was more than equipped to show Roland all the gyms he could ever want and more.
There was one place with a floor of sand over stone, where curiously old-fashioned weights lay in the corner and a teacher in a robe that was closer to a toga sat permanently engrossed in thought. There was what appeared to be a woodland glade indoors, where rubber bands hung from the branches to give students resistance as they worked. There were fencing salles and tournament lists, weight rooms and something called the ‘Golden Gym’ where leprechauns kept people running along rainbow treadmills in the hopes of reaching the pot of gold at their end. There was a full-sized arena, and there was even a dungeon complex, where more heroic students worked out by dodging traps and fighting whatever creatures they ran into along the way.
And there was a simple, ordinary gym, with a sprung wooden floor and enough space for a basketball court with some bleachers. Roland had seemed to like almost all the spaces Wirt had taken him to, but this was obviously his favorite. He took a ball out of a rack at the side and started to shoot hoops from increasingly difficult locations, making most of the shots with ease.
“You want to play?” Roland asked. “One on one?”
Wirt knew that he ought to shake his head and move on. After all, growing up in England, basketball wasn’t exactly the sport everyone played, so it wasn’t like he had had much chance to practice. On the other hand, playing a quick game with his new roommate would probably do a lot more to help them get along than refusing.
“Okay then.”
It took ten seconds for Roland to block him hard enough to send Wirt skidding to the floor, and things didn’t improve from there. Roland scored basket after basket, and he clearly didn’t believe that basketball was meant to be a non-contact game either. By the end of it, Wirt was battered, bruised, and only too eager to call a halt to the whole business of giving Roland the guided tour.
If anything though, the game seemed to have made Roland all the more eager. He was certainly grinning by the end of it, slapping Wirt on his bruised back and telling him it was a good game. Great, Wirt thought, all he had to do to make friends was let himself get bounced across most of a gymnasium floor.
“So,” Roland said, “where to now?”
Wirt shook his head. “Actually, I was thinking that we should get back. I mean, I’ll have a class to get to soon, and I’m pretty sure you will too.”
Roland looked down at his watch. It was an expensive one, of course, with about half a dozen different dials crammed into one face. “So that it can tell the time in six different dimensions,” Roland explained without being asked. “And we’ve got plenty of time for one more stop if we hurry.”
“Where did you have in mind?” Wirt could think of plenty of places around the school that were best avoided, from the rooms Ender Paine kept hidden within his hat to the island that housed the stone garden.
“Well, Ms. Lake did say that you should show me these ropes of hers.”
“You want to go to see the school’s collection of artifacts?”
Roland shrugged. “Why not? From what I hear, there’s some really impressive stuff in there.”
“I’m not sure that they’d let us in without a teacher,” Wirt suggested. He didn’t want to go rooting around through that collection. Not after the trouble the cup of life had caused last year.
“Well, we could go and get Ms. Lake,” Roland suggested. “She’s the custodian of the artifacts, isn’t she? Or we could just go. We have her permission, after all.”
Roland seemed eager, but Wirt wasn’t. Instead, he couldn’t help thinking about how much Roland knew about the school. Had anyone told him that Ms. Lake looked after the artifacts? Wirt shook his head. It was probably nothing. Even so…
“Roland, w
e really don’t have time. Come on, I’ve still got to collect some notes from our room before class.”
Chapter 5
Wirt’s next class was a transmutation one with Ms. Genovia. The big, bluff woman spent much of the class showing them how to transform pumpkins into more useful things, from a telephone directory to a small carriage.
“If you have your pumpkin with you, you’ll never be short of options. Plus you can make such wonderful soup from it, of course.”
Wirt worked hard on his, since he’d always been quite good at transmutation. Roland was in the same class, and appeared, if anything, to be even better than he was. That definitely impressed Alana, who sat off to one side having very little success in countering the pumpkin’s natural tendency to spring back to its original shape. Roland actually ended up giving her some tips, and Wirt couldn’t help noticing the jealousy with which Spencer looked at the other boy from across the class as he did it.
Wirt was just happy when Alana finally succeeded in transforming hers into a small antique telephone for a whole ten seconds. As good as Alana was at other subjects, she had always been far better at constructing glamours than at actually transmuting things. It had to be hard on her that the school’s main glamour teacher, Ms. Preville, was gone now.
After the class, Wirt made his way down to the cafeteria for lunch. He still ached from his basketball game with Roland. Apparently, his new roommate didn’t mess around when it came to sports. His old roommate, meanwhile, had made it down before him, and was sitting alone at a table off to one side. Wirt collected his lunch, which turned out to be goulash, and went over to join Spencer.
“What did they give you?” Spencer asked as he sat down, then looked and winced. “Bad luck. I hear that someone went and gave the nymphs a crystal ball subscription to some kind of world cooking channel, so it’s not going to get better, either.” He nodded down at his plate, which held some kind of rice and curry dish.
As they both picked through their lunch Wirt and Spencer were quiet. Wirt guessed that the other boy was waiting for him to say something about their change of rooms, while Wirt was trying to come up with something that didn’t sound too much like an accusation. After all, when your closest friend suddenly wanted to change rooms, what did that say about what he thought about you?
