Study in Slaughter (Schooled in Magic)

by Christopher Nuttall

  “There are other spells that you are also expected to master,” she continued. “One spell cuts down on your own...emotional reactions, which can interfere with your work. Another prevents further infection, although there are dangers involved with casting the spell. A third is a very basic truth spell. You’ll discover, if you go into healing, that quite a few people lie about what happened to them. This can be dangerous, particularly if knowing the cause of the injury is required to fix it.”

  Alassa stuck up a hand. “Can you give us an example of that, please?”

  Lady Barb didn’t look pleased at being interrupted, but she answered the question anyway.

  “Quite a few curse wounds come from trying to break into a magician’s property,” Lady Barb explained. “In that case, speaking with the magician who created the spell can be quite useful—but the victim may not want to be publicly identified as a would-be thief. Other curses, including those used by angry husbands or wives, need the active cooperation of the caster to break. And then there are the diseases that are spread through sexual contact, where we need to heal everyone involved.”

  She smiled, rather dryly. “Healing is a dirty job, no matter the prestige that comes with it,” she warned. “Those of you who wish to stay in this class can read An Introduction to Healing, which you will find in the medical library next door, over the rest of the week. You will find it a good introduction to what we are going to cover—and where it will lead. If you decide that you don’t want to carry on after reading the book you may leave. No one will hold it against you.”

  Emily watched as Lady Barb cast a handful of healing spells on Paddy, all more complicated than the spells Emily had learned last year. Some of them seemed automatic, others required careful fiddling...rather like dismantling a set of charms, she realized. Maybe the two disciplines were closer than she’d thought.

  “Formal classes will begin on Monday,” Lady Barb concluded. “If you don’t come back, I honestly don’t mind.” There were some chuckles from the students. “But if you do, I expect you to work.”

  Alassa tugged at Emily’s arm as the students began to disperse. “You coming to dinner?”

  “I need to talk to Lady Barb,” Emily said, quickly. She should have mentioned it to Alassa earlier, but there hadn’t been an opportunity. “I don’t know how long I’ll be.”

  “We’ll see you at dinner then,” Alassa said. She winked, mischievously. “I have teamwork to plan.”

  Emily rolled her eyes. Alassa’s new obsession might be fun for her, and those who enjoyed team sports, but not for anyone else. But then, Emily had never actually played...

  “Good luck,” Alassa said. “See you at dinner.”

  Chapter Six

  EMILY,” LADY BARB SAID, WHEN THEY were alone. “What can I do for you?”

  Emily hesitated. Lady Barb...was a complex person, someone who had seemed to dislike her at first, but had also helped her to overcome some of her demons. Her lessons in combat, both magical and physical, had been painful, yet they had also been very welcome. And she’d never known Lady Barb to be less than completely honest with her. No one else, even the Grandmaster and Void, had been so honest.

  And there was her resemblance to Sergeant Harkin...

  “I need to ask you a favor,” Emily said. She wasn’t sure what to say. “And I need some advice.”

  Lady Barb quirked an eyebrow, then nodded and strode over to a desk in the far corner of the room. It must have had some aversion spells on it, Emily realized as she followed her tutor, because she hadn’t realized it was there until Lady Barb had drawn her attention to it. There were two chairs, one on either side, both covered with books. Lady Barb motioned for her to take one of the chairs and started to transfer the books on the other to the table. Emily hesitated, then did the same for her chair.

  “Be careful with that book,” Lady Barb advised, as Emily reached for the final book. “You cannot open it until you have spoken the Healer’s Oath.”

  Emily nodded, feeling her fingertips skittering over the cover. “Why not?”

  “There are spells that...that can create obligations between those involved,” Lady Barb said, shortly. “One of the aspects of the Healer’s Oath is to put aside all obligations that might otherwise be assumed. Those who refuse to take the oath are not supposed to know how to cast the spells.”

  Her expression darkened. “Which may not have stopped them from leaking out,” she added. “But it’s difficult to know for sure.”

  She sat down on the chair and rested her elbows on the desk. “So,” she said. “What sort of favor can I offer you?”

  “I need an advisor,” Emily said. She knew that bluntness would get her further with Lady Barb than being coy. “And I need some advice.”

  Lady Barb studied her for a long moment. “Do you understand the obligations and rights of an Advisor?”

  “I think so,” Emily said, carefully.

  “You could come to me at any time, if you needed advice,” Lady Barb said, flatly. “I wouldn’t be able to share whatever you told me with anyone else, unless I believed that you posed a clear threat to others. But you would also have to listen to my advice on any subject...given your rather curious legal position, you might be better off without an advisor.”

  Emily considered it. Unlike Alassa and the other aristocrats in the school, she had complete control over her own wealth, rather than drawing a stipend from her parents. In absolute terms, Alassa was far richer than Emily, but she couldn’t control all of that wealth. And there were limits to what she could do, limits that Emily simply didn’t have. If she wanted to spend her entire fortune on ponies, there was no one to say no.

  “I was under the impression that it was a requirement,” she said, finally. “Is that actually true?”

  “It depends,” Lady Barb said, slowly. “There are some students who come to Whitehall when they’re much older, even though they would probably learn more from private study or an apprenticeship. They don’t really form the same relationships with their advisors. There are certainly no legal obligations there.”

  She shrugged. “I’d have to check with the Grandmaster,” she added. “But I would certainly be willing to give you advice.”

  Emily nodded. “I have a lot to talk about,” she admitted. “Do you know Jade?”

  “I believe you might have mentioned him once or twice,” Lady Barb said. They’d talked quite a bit while they’d been sparring in Zangaria. “What’s wrong with him?”

  “He hasn’t sent a letter for months,” Emily confessed. It was bothering her and she wasn’t even sure why. “I don’t know what to make of it.”

  Lady Barb stroked her chin, contemplatively. “Do you like him?”

  “I don’t know,” Emily said, feeling the old frustration welling up inside of her. She did like Jade as a friend; it had honestly never occurred to her that a man five years older than her would ask her out, let alone propose to her. “I just don’t know.”

  “You have become a baroness,” Lady Barb pointed out. “Your social station is much higher than his now, isn’t it?”

  Emily flushed. “He isn’t mailing me because he thinks I’m too grand for him?”

  “It is a common problem, although you do seem to do things to the extreme,” Lady Barb said, lightly. “Right now, it would be seen as presumptuous of him to court you, no matter how he—or you—felt. If he becomes a qualified sorcerer, he may be able to pick up matters again...”

  “Oh,” Emily said. “Men are impossible to understand.”

  She snorted at the age-old complaint. “Am I allowed to swear off marriage forever?”

  Lady Barb snorted too. “You’re a baroness,” she said. “Having children to carry on the family line is one of your obligations now. And you would have to marry before you could get pregnant.”

  Emily shook her head in tired disbelief. If King Randor hadn’t sprung it on her as a surprise...she might well have turned it down. But he’d timed it per
fectly and now she was trapped in a gilded cage, a prison that was no less a prison just because most of the bars were invisible. And anyone who’d been born in Zangaria would be delighted to uphold the obligations, if they became a baroness in exchange.

  “If you want my advice,” Lady Barb said, “write to him. Maybe you can build up a friendship again. But he may not be able to reply immediately in any case.”

  “True,” Emily agreed. “Can we talk about something else?”

  “You did start it,” Lady Barb pointed out. “What else can we talk about?”

  Emily considered, briefly, asking about Master Tor, before deciding that was her problem to solve. Instead, she reached into her pocket and found a handful of notes she’d scribbled down during her return to Alexis.

  “Void gave me an old spellbook,” she said, as she smoothed out the sheets of paper. “And I was slowly deciphering parts of the book. I came across some old spells I was planning to try out.”

  “I hope you deciphered everything,” Lady Barb said smoothly, although there was an undercurrent of concern in her voice. “Some of the older sorcerers had a nasty habit of deliberately mixing up the details, just to annoy their successors.”

  Emily nodded, ruefully. One large passage in the book, when she’d finally managed to decipher it, had turned out to be a recipe for beef soup. As far as she had been able to tell, there was nothing particularly magical about it at all. A second passage read like an extract from a badly-written pornographic novel. But she was slowly making progress on deciphering the rest of it.

  “I think so,” she said. “One of them involves bilocation, being in two places at once.”

  “That’s an old spell,” Lady Barb said. “Most sorcerers won’t risk using it, though. If they happened to move too far apart, they wouldn’t be able to reintegrate themselves and they would become two separate entities. Or they might fade away. I’d advise you not to try it. Even if you succeeded in using it, it could cause permanent damage to your mind.”

  “Oh,” Emily said, a little deflated. She’d hoped, despite herself, that the book’s secrets would be unique. “I meant to ask. Why doesn’t healing include dealing with damage to a person’s mind?”

  Lady Barb gave her a sharp look, as if she had expected her to be able to figure it out for herself. “Mental instability is associated, in general, with a particular kind of magician,” she said, sardonically. “I believe you killed one of them, once.”

  “Necromancers,” Emily said, flatly. “But surely not everyone who has a mental problem becomes a necromancer...?”

  “Any sort of mental problem carries a huge stigma,” Lady Barb explained. Her tone suggested it should have been obvious. “If someone in the family was insane, the entire family would be held accountable for his actions—even if magic wasn’t involved. When it is...well, suffice it to say that smart magicians, no matter how unstable, go out of their way to appear stable. Those that aren’t are often treated as pariahs by everyone else.”

  “So there’s no attempt to cure them,” Emily said, flatly. “And they’re allowed to sink further into madness.”

  “Trying to work with an unstable magician is very dangerous,” Lady Barb said. She looked up into Emily’s eyes. “Something you ought to bear in mind.”

  Emily cleared her throat, carefully. “I will,” she said. “Another spell was teleportation. I was hoping that you could help me to learn how to teleport.”

  “You don’t have the power reserves to manage it yet,” Lady Barb said. “You really shouldn’t be experimenting with teleporting at all until you reach sixth year.”

  Emily blinked. “Why not?”

  “Because you don’t have the power,” Lady Barb repeated, patiently. “It takes years of training and experience to build up the reserves necessary to teleport—even then you’ll be completely drained when you materialize at your destination. Casting the spell isn’t all that is required; you need power and discipline to keep your destination in mind at all times. A teleport spell that goes badly wrong could easily kill you outright.”

  “Or plunge you into the middle of a mountain,” Emily muttered, and shivered.

  “Precisely,” Lady Barb agreed. “You need to spend more time flexing your muscles and building up your power reserves before you start teleporting. And even the most capable magicians have never managed to do more than two or three hops in quick succession. Those who tried to go further often drained themselves completely.”

  Emily considered it, carefully. It sounded as though a magical battery was required, but there was no such thing, not really. Sure, wards could be anchored in metal or stone—and human flesh—but they didn’t hold power indefinitely. And stealing someone else’s power through necromancy meant insanity. She hadn’t seen Shadye teleport—the only sorcerer she had seen teleport was Void—but the price was too high to risk it.

  Why couldn’t raw magical power be stored? What happened to it when someone tried?

  It fades away into the background, she recalled. It had seemed such an obvious solution, too obvious not to have been tried in the past. But building up a reserve of raw power seemed impossible...as long as the power had somewhere to go. A thought struck her and she opened her mouth, then closed it again as she decided to do some research. She wanted to prove that it worked first, before sharing it with anyone else.

  “There was a third spell,” Emily said, changing the subject. “But none of the descriptions made sense. The only thing I was clear on was the name. What is a Pentagram Spell?”

  Lady Barb’s eyes went very hard. “I would like to take a look at that book,” she said. “Would that be possible?”

  Emily hesitated. Part of her suspected that Lady Barb could be helpful, part of her felt that showing it to anyone else would be a really bad idea. And besides, it would ruin the fun of cracking the code for herself. Now that she had started to unravel it, she didn’t want to pass it on to someone else, at least until she had copied down all of the interesting spells.

  “I would prefer not to show it to anyone,” she said, finally. “I’m sorry...”

  “I see,” Lady Barb said. There was a long, uncomfortable pause. “A Pentagram Spell - the Pentagram Spell—is a spell used to deal with rogue magicians. It effectively destroys their magic completely, leaving them powerless. If a sorcerer was convicted of magical misdeeds, the spell could be used to punish them—and prevent them from posing a danger to anyone else.”

  Emily shuddered, then asked the obvious question. “Why wasn’t it used on Shadye?”

  Lady Barb snorted. “Because it takes five sorcerers to cast the spell and the victim has to be tied down,” she said, dryly. “And because getting five sorcerers to cooperate is about as easy as herding cats, with the added disadvantage that they might turn you into a small hopping thing if you annoyed them.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “I would strongly advise you never to suggest to anyone that you read the instructions for the spell,” she added. “It will be held against you.”

  “Thank you,” Emily said. She could understand why the other students would be horrified. Not all of them were aristocrats; it was magic and magic alone that had brought them to Whitehall. “Do you have any other words of advice?”

  “Be careful,” Lady Barb said, simply. If she was offended at Emily’s tone, she didn’t show it. “And if you need advice, my door is always open.”

  Her lips quirked. “Although if you waste my time,” she added, “you will regret it.”

  “I understand,” Emily assured her.

  “Do you?” Lady Barb said. She looked down at the desk for a long moment. “Do you know what dark magic really is?”

  “Evil magic,” Emily said.

  “Define evil,” Lady Barb countered. “Almost all of the spells at this school can be turned to evil purposes, given a little imagination. Don’t you know that by now?”

  “Yes,” Emily said. Just because a spell was intended to counteract gravity and make it easi
er to move heavy boxes from one room to another didn’t mean that it couldn’t be used for pranks. “I know what you mean.”

  “Dark magic is never an easy subject to define,” Lady Barb allowed. “The simplest definition is magic used with bad intentions. The problem is that people rarely wake up one morning and decide that they’re going to become evil. Instead, they inch towards the darkness step by step, justifying their actions until they reach a point where they no longer even feel the need to justify themselves. There are certain spells that are darker than others, true, but even the simplest of spells can cause real trouble if used with dark intentions.”

  She stood. “Power brings its own temptations,” she added. “Watch yourself.”

  “I will,” Emily assured her. “And thank you.”

  “Thank me by being a diligent student,” Lady Barb said. “My last experiment with teaching was not a great success.”

  Emily nodded and left the classroom, walking back towards the dining hall while mulling over what Lady Barb had told her. Casting the teleport spell wasn’t the problem; the problem was summoning and directing enough power to make it work. It required intensive mental discipline, she realized, which might be why the necromancers didn’t simply teleport over the mountains and into the Allied Lands. They lacked the discipline to make it work.

  But they store vast amounts of power in their wards, she mused. I wonder what might happen if...

  She tensed as she spied Melissa at the other end of the corridor, but the young sorceress merely scowled at her before stepping into the dining hall. That was a pleasant change, although Emily didn’t expect it to remain that way for long. Melissa and her coven had jinxed and hexed Emily, Alassa and Imaiqah over the last year and no doubt they’d do it again this year. Some of their pranks, if taken too far, might have been truly dangerous.