Study in Slaughter (Schooled in Magic)

by Christopher Nuttall

  Lady Barb stabbed the knife into Paddy again. “This time, try to remove the curse first,” she said. “Go.”

  Song cast the revealing spell, then a series of counter-curses. Emily watched as the curse faded away into nothingness, although she could tell that it wasn’t a particularly complex curse. Paddy made sounds of distress as Song worked, causing her to bite her lip as her work proceeded. Finally, she cast the healing spell and pulled out the knife. The wound closed, but Paddy seemed to be no better. Moments later, he shuddered and expired.

  Lady Barb reset him and took back the knife. “The standard healing spells are not capable of fixing such damage,” she said. “You need more complex spells to save someone who has been stabbed. The body wants to heal, but it needs direction and those directions provided by the standard spells are...insufficient.”

  She looked up, eying her students. “Determining which kind of spell is required to deal with the wound is a vitally important part of your task,” she added. “Standard healing spells require little power, beyond the first casting. More complex healing spells can leave you drained. Yet using the standard ones can be disastrous, if the wound is too deep or the body is too badly mauled. If you don’t know for sure, use the more complex spells—but be careful that there are no hidden curses. You don’t want to start doing two separate tasks at the same time.

  “This”—she waved her hand in the air, causing a line of spell components to appear in front of them—“is the most basic form of advanced healing spell,” she continued. “You’ll notice that it bears a strong resemblance to curse-breaking spells, particularly the sections that allow you to control it directly, rather than allowing it to operate on its own. As you can probably imagine, these spells require a great deal of concentration.”

  She smiled, then returned the knife to Paddy’s chest. “Princess Alassa, why don’t you try to cast it first?”

  Alassa nodded and stepped forward. She removed the curse first, then carefully cast the healing spell. There was a moment when magic flared around her, then Paddy let out a cry and blood splashed everywhere. Alassa jumped backwards, too late. Bright red blood stained her robes and hair.

  “Too much power,” Lady Barb said. The blood vanished a moment later. “Healing requires skill as well as power.”

  She held up a hand. “For those of you who look sick, I should remind you that healing is not a very clean art,” she added, dryly. “Blood, guts and gore will be common if you go into healing. Grow a strong stomach or give up now.”

  Emily had seen horror ever since Shadye had dragged her into a whole new world, but there was something different about working on a living body. Two other students tried, both getting a little further than Alassa before Paddy expired. Lady Barb didn’t seem angry at the failures, although she lectured the third student on not repeating the same mistakes as the prior students. When it was Emily’s turn, she stepped forward, cast the spell and her mind plunged into Paddy’s body.

  The experience was deeply disconcerting. Curse-breaking allowed her to see the curses; healing, it seemed, allowed her to see everything inside the simulation of a human body. It felt almost as if she had placed her head under the water. Everything was so loud that she couldn’t help wondering if she had plugged into Paddy’s nervous system, at least to some extent; she was aware of the damage to his body without quite knowing how she was aware of it. But actually healing the damage was much harder. Basic healing spells would simply have knitted the wrong parts back together and caused worse problems in the future.

  She concentrated, but the wound refused to heal properly.

  Careful, she reminded herself. But it didn’t get any better.

  “None of you managed to heal him,” Lady Barb said, when they had all finished. “I cannot say that I am surprised. Making the spell work is one thing, actually healing someone is quite another. By the end of the term, however, I expect you to have mastered the art.”

  Alassa stuck up her hand. “You expected us to fail?”

  “It takes months of experience to perform an advanced healing spell successfully,” Lady Barb said, flatly. “I did not expect you to heal him on your first try.”

  She motioned for them to return to their desks, then stood in front of the classroom at parade rest. “You will realize, of course, that the experience of working inside a person’s body is rather hard to master,” she said. “For your homework, you are to practice exploring each other’s bodies—using the spell, I shall add quickly—and getting used to the sensations that come from being inside someone else.”

  Emily had to fight down a giggle. She wasn’t the only one.

  “Yes, we sniggered at it too,” Lady Barb said. “And it is funny. Failing to master the spell, on the other hand, will cause you to fail this class. Is that so funny?

  “You are not to attempt to wound each other so that you may practice healing,” she added, tartly. “None of you are anything like ready to actually heal. I would also suggest that girls work with girls and boys work with boys. It’s often easier to heal someone of the same sex as yourself, if only because you will have an instinctive understanding of how their bodies work.”

  There was a loud groan from the rear of the room. “Detention,” Lady Barb said, aiming her words at one of the transfer students. “Healing is serious business. How many times do I have to repeat myself?”

  Emily scowled, inwardly. She disliked being naked in front of someone else, even her closest friends. Alassa, for all her regal dignity, had no real problem undressing in front of servants, male or female. The idea of undressing in front of someone she barely knew...luckily, she could practice with Alassa and Imaiqah. Practicing with the Gorgon might have been possible, but her body might be significantly different from a normal human. She’d have to check before she asked.

  Come to think of it, she asked herself silently, did she even need to undress?

  “You will also look up case studies of cursed weapons and precisely what they did to their victims,” Lady Barb continued. “I will expect five rolls of parchment from each of you at the end of the month, covering the most common ways to curse a weapon and how they can be detected and countered. There is, alas, no shortage of material.”

  Emily winced. Another essay?

  “Now,” Lady Barb said, once they’d written down the essay title. They knew from experience that having to ask for it later in the month would not be well-received by the tutors. “We will take a look at mundane ways to deal with injuries, all of which you will be tested on later in the year.”

  She launched into a long lecture on basic sanitation that, apart from a few odd points, seemed workable. Emily listened, fascinated, as she talked of tiny monsters in the air that spread disease—germs, in other words—and how they could be stopped. Even something as simple as making sure that everything was clean and washed regularly in boiling water, Lady Barb pointed out, would cut down on the risk of infection. Emily had known, intellectually, that some people in Whitehall knew about germs, but she had never looked at what they knew before. There just hadn’t been time to look at everything.

  They could have shared this knowledge with the world, she thought, sourly. I didn’t have to tell them anything about germs. They already knew.

  But the knowledge didn’t seem to be very common, outside Whitehall. Some of the city-states she’d seen had been remarkably clean, others had been ghastly—and the conditions of the peasants in some of the kingdoms was appalling. Even King Randor had to use toilets that Emily wouldn’t have installed in a prison. The stench alone should have been lethal.

  She stuck up her hand and waited for Lady Barb to call on her. “Why don’t you tell everyone about the...little monsters?”

  “Because there are limits to what we are allowed to tell people,” Lady Barb said. She couldn’t have missed the accusation in Emily’s tone, but she didn’t respond to it. “And because even when we do, there is so much nonsense out there that it is hard to make any headway.
”

  That, Emily decided, made no sense. She could see kings or other aristocrats deciding that the great unwashed should remain the great unwashed, even if they did catch diseases and drop dead in terrifying numbers, but why would they want to deny themselves the chance to live healthier lives? But then, they did have better food and drink than the peasants—and access to healing magic. They might reason that they didn’t need to take better care of themselves, like a girl Emily had once known who went for liposuction every year.

  But Emily had introduced the concept of basic sanitation and it had spread wildly...

  She mulled it over for the rest of the class, while Lady Barb talked about the dangers of trying to transfer blood from one person to another. They didn’t seem to know about the different types of blood; Emily made a mental note to use the memory spells to recover what she’d heard and forgotten about them. She could write it all down and give the information to Lady Barb.

  “While healing,” Lady Barb concluded, “you must remember that a person’s life is in your care. A single mistake could kill him.”

  She smiled at the class, then clicked her fingers at the door. It opened with an audible click.

  “Master the first part of the spell as quickly as possible,” she ordered. “Once you have it mastered, we can proceed.”

  Emily waited until the rest of the class was gone—she didn’t share Alassa and Imaiqah’s next class—and then stood. “I need to ask for some advice,” she admitted. “I overslept this morning...”

  “Careless,” Lady Barb said. “Which classes did you miss?”

  “Advanced Charms,” Emily replied.

  “That’s bad,” Lady Barb said, dryly. “Annoying an expert in Charms is never a good idea, I’m afraid. Do you have a good excuse?”

  Emily blinked, then explained. “I took a sleeping potion last night,” she said, and outlined what had happened in Blackhall. “It didn’t work perfectly...”

  “The phobia spell is very good at getting under the victim’s skin,” Lady Barb said, when Emily had finished. “Luckily, it wasn’t a Nightmare Curse. Those things are damn near impossible to remove without a great deal of luck. I’m impressed you threw it off as well as you did.”

  “I don’t feel that I did well,” Emily said. “I failed the test.”

  “You’ll learn from the experience,” Lady Barb grunted, in a manner that suggested grudging approval. “I would suggest going to see Professor Lombardi now and explaining what happened. He will probably insist that you review the material for today. He’s much more easy-going than the one who taught me.”

  Emily winced at the thought. Professor Lombardi didn’t seem to have the abiding sense of dislike that pervaded all of Master Tor’s dealings with Emily, but he was a fussy precisionist who didn’t hesitate to strike his student’s hands when they made a mistake. Emily could see his point—a single mistake could be disastrous—yet part of her also resented the public humiliation. Visiting the Warden was almost preferable.

  “Oh, yes,” Lady Barb assured her. “Old Professor Shanks liked to use naughty students as test subjects. He’d have the victim stand at the front of the class and everyone else would practice their hexes on him.”

  Emily gulped.

  “I’d go see Professor Lombardi now,” Lady Barb said. “And Emily?”

  Emily looked up at her, questioningly.

  “You did very well yesterday, whatever you may think,” Lady Barb assured her. “Pushing the limits is always a good idea. Even when you fall flat on your face, you learn something from the experience.”

  “Thank you,” Emily said. “I’ll try to do better next time.”

  “By the end of the year, you should be walking through Blackhall without problems,” Lady Barb said. “And if you can’t...you have quite a few years of schooling ahead of you. You could repeat that class without problems.”

  Emily thought, briefly, of Jade. If he’d failed Martial Magic’s first year, he wouldn’t have had a second chance. His hopes of an apprenticeship would have been dashed. Why hadn’t he done it earlier? It wasn’t something she felt comfortable asking him.

  “I’ll do my best,” she promised. She turned and walked towards the door. “And thank you.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  THE REST OF THE WEEK WENT by very quickly as the students fell back into the comforting routine of classes, homework, eating, sleeping and using whatever time they had left for more entertaining pursuits. Alassa and Imaiqah spent most of their free time practicing with the team, leaving Emily to work on her homework as well as her private research project. It was frustrating, at times, trying to figure out how the enchantment spells went together, but she refused to surrender and ask her professors for advice. She wanted to solve it on her own.

  Her new trunk arrived on Saturday, along with a note from Yodel asking for written permission to emigrate to Zangaria. Emily wrote out a note for Bryon, then signed it with the seal she’d been given by King Randor. Only Emily or her heirs, she had been assured, could actually use the seal. Alassa had demonstrated by trying to stamp it on a sheet of parchment, only for the seal to be completely illegible. Emily sent the note back down to Dragon’s Den, then started transferring her books, clothes and other supplies from her borrowed trunk to the new one. There was so much room in the trunk, Yodel’s instructions assured her, that she could hide an entire library inside and no one would be any the wiser. She had just completed the transfer when Alassa opened the door and stuck her head into the room.

  “Aren’t you coming to the game?”

  Emily sighed inwardly, but stood. She’d half-hoped that Professor Lombardi’s revision notes from the class she’d missed would provide an excuse, yet all he’d really done was revise some of the charms they’d studied last year and made sure that their spellwork hadn’t slipped while they’d been on holiday. Emily had already mastered the basic charms, although she’d gone through them all one by one, just to make sure. She didn’t want to irritate the professor again so soon.

  “Coming,” she said, as she sealed the trunk. She cast a wistful look at the notes on her desk, then decided to leave them till later. “Are you facing Cat’s team?”

  “No,” Alassa said, as they left the room and headed down to the arena. “I think we’re facing the Stompers. Gar’s team. At least there will only be one set of opponents.”

  Emily smiled, ruefully. Gar had been a fifth year when she’d come to Whitehall, but he hadn’t been in her first Martial Magic class. She only knew of him because everyone kept pointing him out as a great Ken player and nothing else. A jock, in other words. Emily wasn’t even sure what someone like that could do outside Whitehall, not when there were few championship games outside Kingmaker. And Kingmaker was a Chess-like board game.

  But Ken requires some skill and cunning, she reminded herself. Maybe he excels in other areas too.

  The arena seemed even larger than she remembered as Alassa pointed her towards the stands. There were hundreds of students there, chattering happily amongst themselves as they waited for the game to begin. A number of students were tossing balls around inside the arena, although it looked like a piece of harmless fun rather than an early game. Alassa winked at her, then headed off towards the changing room. Emily, wishing that she had bought a book, found a seat and sat down, waiting for the game to begin.

  It seemed like hours before the referee finally blew the whistle, evicting the students from the arena. Emily covered her ears as his magically-amplified voice bellowed out over the stands, announcing the Stompers and their new challengers, the Upstarts. Emily had to laugh; she’d known that Cat and his fellow Captains had termed Alassa’s team the Upstarts, but she hadn’t realized that Alassa had taken it for her own. If they won, the joke would be on their opponents.

  The arena seemed to sparkle to life as the two teams marched inside. Alassa’s face was set in a firm expression of grim determination, while most of the others looked rather nervous. It was imposs
ible to blame them. The game they’d played during the tryouts was simplicity itself, compared to the regular version of Ken.

  “Take your places,” the referee ordered. “Captains...shake hands.”

  Emily watched as Alassa and Gar shook hands, both of them trying to do as much harm as possible. Alassa was good at hiding her feelings, but Emily could tell that she’d been hurt; Gar looked too thick-headed to notice if someone had crushed his hand into a pulp. Emily briefly considered what sort of spells she could throw at him, before realizing that it would be futile. The arena wouldn’t allow outsiders to do more than point and laugh at the players. It seemed, she decided, that cheating was only permissible if it was done by the players—and if they weren’t caught at it.

  “On five,” the referee said, as the Captains returned to their places. “Here come the balls!”

  The spectators cheered as twenty balls plummeted down into the arena, their colors already flickering between green, yellow and red. Several players moved to trap balls, but no one tried to pick them up. Being hit by another ball while carrying one could mean being removed from the game completely, depending on the precise color. Emily smiled as the referee blew his whistle, marking the start of the game. Immediately, the Upstarts grabbed balls and started to throw them at their opponents.

  It was lucky, Emily realized, that there was only one opposing team. If there had been four teams in the arena, she had a feeling that the three older teams would gang up on the Upstarts and try to force them out of the arena. Even with only one team, it was clear that the Upstarts were badly outmatched by the more experienced players. Or were they? Gar’s team seemed to be largely composed of show-offs, while Alassa had worked hard to convince her players to work together.

  Even so, the Stompers were brutally aggressive. They pushed through the corridors, trying to overrun the Upstarts. Their main target seemed to be Alassa herself, unsurprisingly, but that had clearly been anticipated. While Alassa was dodging balls, several of her teammates managed to score. The Stompers, irritated by the fact they might lose, redoubled their efforts, including throwing a handful of jinxes towards the opposing players. One of them was so blatant that the referee blew his whistle and sent the offending player off the field.