The gnothdiar’s other function is to be very sharp. I called my strength to its ultimate limit, the void node in each wrist burning hot as fire. Swinging down, I hit hard enough to pull me from my feet. The creature’s wards collapsed as I cut through them. My gnothdiar sliced through metallic armour. A blinding glare filled the space between us. Suddenly my gnothdiar felt no resistance. I’d sliced the creature in two, releasing a flood of stored arcane energy.
Almost, almost, but my wards did not quite collapse. They were forced hard against skin and clothing. I smelled chicken feathers. Patches of my clothing were reduced to ash. At the fringes, my hair was on fire, flames that flickered out. Spread on the ground all around me were shattered bits of steel and crystal, puddles of molten copper, and fluctuating glows that marked escaping magic.
Whatever it had been, it appeared to be dead. Before it was too late, I remembered to cast spell-breaker enchantments, one after the next, as fast as I could. The creature’s remnant trace magic vanished. It was not coming back. Dance of the Air, just for a moment, let me step over the body fragments and stand on unmarked sod.
My hands were shaking. I almost released my void nodes. Then I realized this could be a trick, an illusion to get me to power down completely. The skin in my wrists wasn’t quite to the point of blistering, but I had burns on the backs of both hands. I’m not a medico, but I do know to cast healing and cold spells on burned areas. I let my gnothdiar damp itself, not all the way but enough that the drain was no longer painful.
What just happened? This was supposed to be a minimum test of my knowledge of combat magic. If I’d stepped into the ring, without honoring House Triskittenion’s attitude toward mock duels, I’d now be dead. If I’d been from a House that didn’t take combat magic seriously, I’d be dead. If I’d’ve been most of the fellow students I’d watched, there might not have been enough of my body remaining to consign it to the Goddess of Fire. I’d cast a remarkable number of spells in almost no time at all. I’d been drilled in doing that; the drills had saved my life. On due consideration, I must have summoned considerably more Fire of the Presence, the power that underlies all magic, than I’d ever done before.
I was shaking. Post-combat response. If it weren’t for the honor of the thing, I’d rather have done without. I turned to face the docent who’d superintended my contest. He had some explaining to do. No. He was lying on the ground, bound, gagged, and in a suspension spell. He was also standing...One of them was a glamour.
“You!” the standing docent screamed. “You!” He added two impolite words. The first is physically impossible for a girl my age. The second? I’ve never shape-changed into a female dog.
“Take that back!” I snapped. Some insults cannot be allowed to stand. Those two words were one of them. His response was even less polite than what he’d said before.
“Death-Pride Honor!” I shouted.
His words fit the death-pride honor rules, and I’d invoked them. He added several cruder variations to his earlier insults. There could be no complaint if I now killed him. No, I did not plan to kill him. That would start a house feud. Sometimes accidents happen. He’d made this an Honor Duel, so no one could later complain about what happened to him. However tired I was, I called up all my defensive wards, and summoned again the void nodes on my wrists. I needed to play for time. Fighting strictly on the defensive should do that. Down at the far end of the Campus Martius, someone should have noticed my clash with the metal monster, realized that something was wrong, and come to investigate. If nothing else, the grass fire all around, lawn and bushes within a hundred feet being reduced to charcoal, should have been a mite suspicious. I didn’t remember when I’d torched them, but clearly I had.
“You’re dead!” he answered. “You got me expelled! Now, you die!” he shouted. OK, now I knew who he was under his glamours.
“Try again! I’m alive.” Rather behind the curve, I realized that he had indeed tried to kill me. I rattled down a memorized list of feuds of my House. Fourbridge was not on that very short list. Harold Fourbridge was a total idiot. Unfortunately, he was also training to be a combat sorcerer and was supposed to be good. So the folks at Violent House had said. Perhaps staying on the defensive would be inadvisable.
He continued calling me names when he launched his first attacks. Bad habit. Impolite words distract you from your focus. Lightning. Fire. Death commands. I countered with spell breakers. Those are slower to cast, not to mention I was a bit worn out. Once and again, he burned through one or two of my wards. I dropped the limit locks on my void nodes. Grandpa Worrow had warned me: Only drop you limit locks in extremis; the nodes will supply the power you need to keep your wards up but may well kill you at the same time.
Harold switched to interleaved attack and ward breaking spells. For all his ego, he was really good. But I’d drilled against Grandpa Worrow, who’d written books on combat magic, books I’d studied. Carefully, I saw the flow of his attacks, waited half an instant, and hit him as hard as I could with ward-eating spells. He was as good as the simulacrum I’d just smashed, maybe better. His wards still burned, but they did not go down. He invoked more and more outlandish attacks, some I’d only read about. At least he didn’t try grappling with me; he for sure outweighed me by a lot.
It was very definitely time to go on the attack, before he found something I couldn’t counter. My hands were on fire. My gnothdiar glowed, incandescently bright, as I hit him with the most powerful attacks I could find. His wards wavered but did not crumble. He was screaming impolite words at the top of his lungs. Hopefully, that was interfering with his thinking. It would be nice, I thought, if the Marshal-at-Arms noticed what was happening and showed up here.
I saw a weakness. I timed my attacks to hit exactly when his did, targeting not him but his sword. It shattered. He dropped back and pulled something from his backpack. It was a teal cone the size of a trumpet. A treldiar! An enchanted spellcaster vastly more powerful than a conventional gnothdiar. My gnothdiar is not conventional, thank you, but not that unconventional. Where had he found it? What was my response? The one weakness of a treldiar is that it takes time to activate.
Defense was no longer an answer.
“It’s no good if I break it first!” I shouted.
I ran at him, gnothdiar held before me, sending rapid-fire, blindingly bright, deafeningly loud, but surely ineffective bursts of ball lightning at the cone. He held it high, concentrating his wards to protect his spellcaster while it powered up. I only needed a few steps to reach him. At the very end, he must have recognized that my fireballs were a feint. He began to move his shields to protect his body. My gnothdiar, backed by all the shield-breaking spells I could remember, sliced through his wards, and whacked the top of his head. A stun spell dropped him, unconscious, on the ground.
Cautiously, I stepped back. Now I had an audience, one well back from the circle. What was I supposed to do? A gentle neutralization spell released the spells on the docent. He braced himself on a bench and staggered to his feet.
“He tried to kill you,” the docent observed. I still didn’t know his name. “And he attacked me. Why? It makes no sense.”
“Tried,” I said. I was pushing into the zone of total exhaustion. I realized that the light in my eyes was my gnothdiar, burning bright as incandescent steel. I damped it but stepped back from Fourbridge. Yes, I did set a hand-smashing spell in my sword. If, impossibly, he became conscious and grabbed my gnothdiar, he would lose his forearms. Nonetheless, better safe than sorry.
Very rapidly I was surrounded by people, all trying to speak to me. One of them was the Marshal-at-Arms. I’d met Master Monserrate once.
“I can’t hear you,” I shouted. “Too many voices, all at once.”
Marshal-at-Arms Master Monserrate shooed the audience away. I began to describe what had happened, had to start over twice when groups of lictors arrived, but finally reached the end of my story. The lictors took Fourbridge into custody. The docent’s descr
iption of events more or less matched mine.
“He said he was going to kill me,” I said, “and tried to make his words come true. He called me a...." I used the two words. "I called Death-Pride Honor. He failed. I won,” I concluded.
From the back and forth between the lictors, it seemed I’d managed to smash a combat golem, not to mention draining its Presence reserves to the point that it was about to collapse, even before I cut it to ribbons.
“You could have died,” Master Monserrate countered. “Why didn’t you run?”
Unfortunately, that was a good question. Too good. Fortunately, I had an answer. “House Triskittenion does not flee. It conquers. And, truthfully, I was too busy killing the thing to wonder if maybe this was not your test.”
“You didn’t try screaming ‘Not fair. Not fair!’?" a lictor asked.
I did not quite glare at him. “The world is not fair,” I said. I couldn’t quite believe someone was making me quote that aphorism.
“True,” Master Monserrate said. “You have clearly passed the test, if not the one I had set, and need not trouble the Campus Martius again.”
“The perfect test stretches every student to her limits,” I added. “This one was beyond perfect.”
Monserrate gestured at the area outside the circle. “That was a very nice lawn, too.”
“Apologies,” I managed. “I was a bit busy. I didn’t notice.”
“Better busy than dead,” Master Monserrate observed. “House Fourbridge will, I fear, be annoyed. I shall emphasize to them that this boy had been expelled for cause, assaulted a docent, tried to murder you, and lost a duel on a matter of death-pride honor, he having offered the insult. Saving this idiot from the headsman will cost them a pretty penny in weregild.”
“Thank you,” I managed. There is a point where you are dead on your feet and forcing yourself to stand straight. I was there. “Are there more questions?” I asked the lictors.
“No,” Master Monserrate decreed. “There are not.”
I had remembered to pocket the treldiarin my cloak. Several lictors levitated Fourbridge and marched off with him. Another lictor helped me to the Infirmary, which put solid healing spells on all my burns, removed the smell from my hair – I now have very short curls – and confirmed I had no other serious damage. My clothing was in ruins; the infirmary lent me an outdoor robe. I staggered home, dropped into bed, and slept the day around.
Dorrance Academy is certainly an interesting place, but some of its people are nicer than others.
George Phillies is Professor Emeritus of Physics (“I retired to write full time. So far, so good,” he says), retired politician (on the ballot for US Federal office twice), and President of the National Fantasy Fan Federation, the world’s oldest national SF club. He edits four SF fanzines.
Phillies has to his credit seven SF novels (most recently Airy Castles All Ablaze), a short story collection, five books on board game design, four books on political finance, a statistical mechanics textbook, the definitive monograph on polymer solution dynamics, and more than 170 scientific research papers, most on light scattering spectroscopy and polymer dynamics. He lives in Worcester, Massachusetts, with his cat, an enormous board wargame collection, and large flower gardens.
The Ascendant Cup
Thomas K. Carpenter
Welcome to the Hundred Halls! This story is about a student in the The Order of Honorable Alchemists Hall, but it is only a part of a much larger universe of books about a modern magical university. Currently, there are three complete series which tell the stories of students from Arcanium, Assassins, and Gamemakers Halls with more series in the works. If you'd like to learn which Hall you might be in, go to the Hundred Halls website (www.hundredhalls.com) to find out.
The Ascendant Cup
The list was only six names long.
Kara Wilde tapped on the plaque with a half-chewed, aquamarine polish chipped fingernail on the empty spot where she hoped her name would reside in a little over a month.
“You’ve been staring at that list for a donkey’s years, Kara,” said Nefimi in her posh London accent. “You’re not thinking of signing up, are you?”
Kara turned to her best friend, Nifemi Oni, wearing a black and white silk polka dot blouse that made her ebony skin shine. The gold bangles had fallen down her wrist as she cupped her chin in thought.
“There’s only been six winners in almost a hundred years,” said Kara, fiddling with a little music box with a cuckoo bird painted on the front.
“Oh, luv,” said Nifemi, tapping her ruby nails on her chin. “You is. You always repeat facts about whatever you thinking about doing.”
“I am,” said Kara, nodding tightly, while Nifemi’s gaze narrowed as she noticed the music box in her hand.
“Blimey, what’s that for?”
Kara shook her off. “Nothing. Don’t worry about it.”
Nifemi’s expression grew grave, her lips squeezed to thin lines.
“You really serious about making a go for the Ascendant Cup? I mean, you’re bloody brilliant when it comes to mixing, but with your family history, I didn’t think you’d come a million miles from this contest,” said Nifemi.
Kara squeezed her eyes shut momentarily. “That’s why I have to do it. Between the doctor’s visits and the week she can’t work every month, she’s going to lose her place back in Lubick. She’s always been there for me; I need to do this for her.”
“Why not wait until you graduate? You’ll be able to get a job and buy back her place,” said Nifemi.
“That’s almost three years away,” said Kara gripping her hands into fists, mentally willing the water works away. “I need the money now for her treatments.”
The corners of Nifemi’s eyes creased. “You never explain what happened to her when she tried to win the Cup.”
Kara stared at her worn sneakers, trying not to compare them to Nifemi’s glossy heels. “It wasn’t good, but at least she survived with her life, not like mom.” She sighed, lifted her head. “I won’t have competition at least.”
Nifemi’s eyes widened with alarm.
“What?” asked Kara.
“You heard? Seraphina’s gonna sign up, and so is Lex,” said Nifemi.
Heat rose to Kara’s cheeks. “Why is Seraphina entering? Her mom won back in her day, it made their family fortune, and Lex? His family is rich already.”
“You know as well as I do that winning the Ascendant Cup is more than that greasy green stuff,” said Nifemi, rubbing her forefinger and thumb together rapidly.
“Don’t I know it,” said Kara, knocking a strand of auburn hair away from her forehead.
“Kara, luv, I know you think you need to do this contest, but you’re only a third year. It’s bad enough even for experienced fifth years like Lex and Seraphina. Don’t do it, please. It’s bad business. Nothing but death and misery. As the head of your fan club, I can say with utmost sincerity that you don’t need to do this. I don’t want to lose my best friend.”
Kara put her hand over Nifemi’s. “Thanks, Nife. I appreciate it, but I have to join. I can’t let anything more bad happened to Gran.”
Nifemi skewed her mouth to one side. “What about you? You already lost a mother to the contest. Don’t lose your life too.”
“I have to,” said Kara. “I’ve been preparing my whole life to do this contest.”
“As a third year?” asked Nifemi.
“A little ahead of schedule, but I’ll deal,” replied Kara.
Nifemi crossed her arms like a school teacher about to lecture an unruly student. “Then you win this bloody thing. No messing around.”
Heavy with thought, Kara replied, “Deal.”
The next day, she was invited to a meeting with Patron Celesse D’Agastine, who would lay out the rules for the contest. The hall patron rarely visited, since she was busy running her multinational alchemical lifestyle companies, but Kara had met her on enough occasions that introductions weren’t necessary.
“Good morning, Patron D’Agastine,” said Kara as she entered the gilded room filled with fountains and birdcages on the fifth floor.
The patron cut an imposing figure: the kind of blonde hair that seemed to be made of sunlight, features carved by sorcery and enhanced by alchemy, a face that graced a million fashion magazines. She was a walking billboard for the hall motto, “Perfection is attainable.”
“Cut the formality and call me, Celesse, will you dear?”
“Yes...” Kara almost said ma’am but caught herself and added, “Celesse.”
“The others are waiting but I wanted to have a word with you before we started. Are you sure you’re ready for the contest? This is the first time a third year has ever put their name in the hat, and after what happened to your mother and grandmother in their days...I know Jeanine would be heartbroken to lose you like she did her daughter.”
The use of her grandmother’s personal name was a stark reminder that despite Celesse’s supermodel looks, she was well over a hundred years old. It was strange for Kara to think that she was the third generation to join the Honorable Order of Alchemists and that Patron Celesse had known each of them.
“I know the risks,” said Kara, holding her chin high. “But I plan on winning the contest.”
“Does Jeanine know? Not that I will tell her if you haven’t, but I want to know what to expect should that day come,” said Celesse.
“I did,” said Kara as her heart fluttered in her chest. “She wasn’t happy, of course. She never expected to raise me after my mom died, especially in her condition, nor does she want to lose me, too.”
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