Study in Slaughter (Schooled in Magic)

by Christopher Nuttall

  Shaking her head, she walked back out into the corridor—and swore out loud as she realized just how grimy she was already, before she had even begun cleaning the compartment properly. There was so much dust on her shoes that she was leaving footprints behind her as she walked. She found the cupboard Master Tor had mentioned and looked inside. There were brooms, dustpans, buckets, cloth bags and mops. No matter how hard she looked, she didn’t see anything resembling cleaning liquids.

  She took one of the brooms and bags and walked back to the compartment. There was so much dust that the only way to get rid of it would be to stuff it into the bags and then dump it in the incinerator, she decided. Magic could get rid of it instantly...she briefly considered trying to use magic anyway, then decided it wasn’t worth the risk. Master Tor might just come and supervise her while she worked, even if he didn’t think of a worse punishment.

  The dust proved surprisingly resistant when she started to sweep it into a corner. There was so much of it that it felt like sweeping sand, rather than anything else. Emily scowled, fighting down her anger; she knew from bitter experience that using too much force would only make it worse. She was gently removing the dust when she heard the door opening behind her. The hex hit her a moment later.

  Emily felt her legs start to jerk around madly. She fell over backwards and landed in the dust, coughing as it got into her mouth. Her legs kept twitching; one of her shoes flew off and landed somewhere in the corner of the room. Moments later, her hands started to flail around as well as the hex reached them, causing a dust storm to blow up around her. She had to fight down the urge to use magic to cancel out the hex, or strike back.

  “Well,” a familiar voice said. “I guess you can’t use magic.”

  Melissa, Emily thought. Her arms and legs were starting to ache, but the hex kept pushing them onwards. It was a simple hex to counter...if she used magic. Not for the first time, it struck her just how vulnerable someone without magic would be in Whitehall. They would be the butt of everyone’s pranks and jokes.

  She gritted her teeth as she felt the hex finally starting to wear off. Maybe, if Melissa got any closer...

  “I think I like seeing you being a servant,” Melissa added, lightly. She smirked down at Emily, running a hand through her long red hair. “It suits you, I guess. What would your subjects say, baroness, if they saw you grovelling in the dust?”

  Emily opened her mouth, then swallowed what she wanted to say.

  “I think they wouldn’t be very impressed,” Melissa teased. “But then, magic is the only true source of power. What are you without it?”

  She stepped closer and Emily lunged, remembering everything that she’d had hammered into her head by the Sergeants and Lady Barb. Melissa yelped and jumped backwards, then cast another spell. Emily found her hands and feet suddenly falling to the floor and locking themselves there, bound by an invisible force. She’d missed her opportunity to hit Melissa before she could react.

  “Yes, I definitely think I like you there,” Melissa sneered.

  She turned and walked towards the door, wriggling her bottom as she moved. “Bye, bye,” she called. “Have fun explaining why you did nothing for an hour.”

  Emily groaned as Melissa shut the door, then waited until she was sure that Melissa had just walked off, leaving her stuck to the floor. Bracing herself for a reaction from the wards—or Master Tor—she cast the counter-spell and almost sagged in relief when it worked perfectly. If she hadn’t been able to use magic at all, she would have remained trapped until the spell wore off—or until someone came to find her. The hour would have been completely wasted.

  She pulled herself to her feet and got back to work, resisting the temptation to use magic to speed up the task. It was bad enough that she’d already had to break the restriction once—and while she thought Master Tor might accept freeing herself as an excuse, she knew that he wouldn’t allow her to cheat on her assigned task. Instead, she resumed pushing the dust into the corner, wishing she had a vacuum cleaner. Or even...

  A thought struck her and she smiled. Maybe she couldn’t use magic directly, but there were other options.

  She made a note in her pad, then resumed her task, wondering who had told Melissa that she couldn’t use magic. Neither Alassa nor Imaiqah would have given her the time of day...but the Gorgon might have let it slip. No, she would have let it slip. She’d been furious with Emily.

  But how can I blame her? Emily asked herself. She would have been just as angry, if their positions were reversed. I got her trunk searched.

  She scowled, fighting down another cough as dust billowed everywhere. It was going to be a very long two weeks.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  THE NEXT FEW DAYS WERE AMONG the worst in Emily’s life. When she wasn’t in class, or accompanied by her friends, almost everyone seemed willing to launch a hex or two at her unprotected back. She rapidly lost track of the number of times someone had stuck her to the floor, turned her into a small animal or object...or befuddled her mind. In the meantime, she was still working on cleaning the barracks. There was little time for anything else.

  It didn’t help that the Grandmaster and his staff made absolutely no progress, as far as anyone could tell, in tracking down the Warden’s murderer. The students who couldn’t account for themselves on the day of his death were questioned, but nothing was discovered apart from a handful of student rivalries and an underground ring producing large batches of numbing potion for the students. Alassa pointed out, when she heard about it, that they were the last group of students who would want to remove the Warden. He had ensured that they did a roaring trade.

  None of the tutors seemed any happier than their students. They snapped at students who stepped out of line and seemed to be competing to see who could assign the worst detentions imaginable. Emily kept as quiet as she could—she already had one endless detention - but other students found themselves balancing books, standing on their heads or even serving as test subjects for interesting alchemical experiments carried out by Professor Thande. No one seemed to be in a very good mood—and they all blamed Emily. It was a relief to be walking towards Blackhall for the second time, accompanied by Aloha.

  “I need you to do something for me,” Emily said, as they walked. Sergeant Miles had gone on ahead—to prepare the mansion, Emily assumed—and Sergeant Bane had just told them to walk to Blackhall, rather than taking them there himself. “Can you produce a sucking spell?”

  “It’s second-year charm,” Aloha said, dryly. She hadn’t joined in the torrent of accusations—and hexes—that had been thrown at Emily, but she had kept her own counsel. “You should be able to do it for yourself.”

  “I want one that funnels through a hoop,” Emily said, carefully. She dug into her pockets and produced a diagram she’d drawn earlier. Reverse engineering a vacuum cleaner hadn’t been that difficult, at least on paper. The real question was how well it would work with magic. “Can you do something like this?”

  Aloha frowned. “I suppose I could,” she said, shortly. “What’s in it for me?”

  Emily sighed. “What would you like?”

  “Twenty gold pieces, plus whatever I have to spend to obtain the hoop,” Aloha said. “And why do you need it in the first place?”

  “To suck up dust,” Emily said. Master Tor had forbidden her from using magic, but he hadn’t said anything about charmed objects. “I have far too much dust to remove from a room.”

  “I heard,” Aloha said. She put the piece of paper in her pocket as Blackhall came into view. “Just don’t let me down this time, all right?”

  Emily nodded. Aloha was much better at charms and other forms of detection and defensive magic than Emily, at least for the moment. Aloha had successfully taken the first orb from Blackhall, one of only three students who had succeeded on the first try. After that, Sergeant Miles had said, the test was going to get harder. Much harder. And Emily hadn’t even passed the first one.

  Sergeant
Miles waved to them as they walked up to the mansion. “This time, you will be going in together,” he said, as if they hadn’t already guessed it. “Your objective is to recover another orb from the building and get it outside. Should you be trapped or stunned, you will have failed...”

  “We understand,” Aloha said. They’d all heard the same lecture several times by now, but the Sergeants never seemed to refrain from repeating it. “We won’t screw up.”

  “You were nearly caught in the infinity trap.” Sergeant Miles reminded her, tartly. “Don’t make the mistake of thinking yourself invincible.”

  He nodded towards the door. “You may as well go in through the front door,” he said. “Good luck.”

  “We’ll check the rest of the doors and windows first,” Aloha muttered, as they walked towards Blackhall. “We don’t want to take his word for anything.”

  Emily nodded. It would be annoying if they discovered that there was an easier way into the house around the back. But when they checked, they discovered that the rear door and windows were absolutely crawling with spells, while the door had been altered to make it impossible to get inside by using a shrinking spell. The front door was heavily warded too, but at least it seemed doable.

  “Let me take the lead here,” Aloha ordered, casting a series of detection spells. “You watch what I do and stand ready to assist if necessary.”

  “Most of them seem odd,” Emily said, as the spells became visible. “They’re not stopping us from opening the door.”

  “Yeah,” Aloha said. She touched the doorknob carefully. Nothing happened. “That’s what bothers me.”

  She stepped backwards, picked up a stick and carefully edged the door open. Emily braced herself, expecting something to leap out of them, but there was nothing apart from a long corridor stretching away into infinity. Aloha stepped inside, one hand raised in a defensive gesture, then nodded for Emily to follow her. None of their detection spells showed any sign of unpleasant surprises.

  “No carpet,” Emily muttered, as she edged her way past Aloha. If there was a problem ahead of them, Aloha would have a better chance of helping her than the other way around. “And no magic at all.”

  “Make a light globe,” Aloha suggested. She cast a detection spell as soon as Emily obeyed. “The detection spells are working perfectly. There isn’t any magic in the corridor at all.”

  They shared a long glance. If there was no magic, what else did the sergeants have in mind?

  Aloha cast the seeker spell into the air and frowned. “Upstairs, again,” she said. “It can’t be that easy, can it?”

  “I doubt it,” Emily said. “Let’s go.”

  They inched their way down the corridor, casting new detection spells every few seconds. Nothing showed up at all, not even a hint of magic in the walls. It made no sense at all; last time she’d been in Blackhall, the whole building had been glowing with magic. She took another step forward, and another...and then the floor dropped out from under them and then fell. Emily heard Aloha cry out as they plunged into darkness and landed on something soft.

  She cast a light globe into the air and looked around. They had landed on a pile of cushions, carefully placed to catch the people who fell through the trapdoor. She looked up, but saw nothing apart from a stone ceiling that seemed completely solid. The walls were solid stone too; the only way out, it seemed, was a large metal door directly ahead of them.

  Aloha pulled herself off the cushions and cast a light globe of her own. “It looks like a prison,” she said, softly. She marched over to the door and checked it for magic. “I don’t even recognize half the spells keeping this door closed.”

  Emily couldn’t disagree. One set of spells seemed determined to prevent them from opening the lock, while the others protected the door, preventing it from being broken down by force. They were tangled so closely together, she realized, that unlocking them might be almost impossible, certainly for anyone other than the designer. From the look on her face, Aloha had come to the same conclusion.

  “Trapped,” she muttered. “But there has to be a way out.”

  Aloha looked over at the chains. “Maybe one of us is meant to be hooked up,” she mused. “If the wards think that one is a prisoner...”

  Emily snorted. “Do you think that’s likely?”

  “Secret lairs created by sorcerers can be thoroughly weird,” Aloha pointed out snidely. “Can you think of anything else?”

  Emily looked around. The walls seemed solid—she cast detection spells anyway, just in case one of them was an illusion—and there was no way to open the trapdoor in the ceiling. She was tempted to start hurling spells at the lock, hoping to break it through brute force, but it would be a good way to exhaust herself even if she succeeded. And then she took a careful look at the door and burst out laughing.

  Aloha glared at her. “What’s so funny?”

  “The hinges,” Emily said, as she walked up to the door. “The hinges are on the inside.”

  It took several moments to use a manipulator spell to unscrew and remove the hinges, but when they were gone the door just fell inwards, allowing them to escape. Outside, there was a dark corridor and a ladder leading upwards. There didn’t seem to be any way up apart from using the ladder, so they checked it carefully and removed a number of hexes before clambering up into the next level. Even a simple hex could have stopped them both if they’d been caught on the ladder.

  “We need to go up another level,” Aloha said. She nodded towards a second staircase, leading up to the upper levels. “And look! It is absolutely crammed with hexes.”

  Emily heard the exasperation in her voice and smiled, tiredly. “Maybe we can climb up the banister,” she said, after a moment. “Or...”

  Aloha looked at the rotting wood. “I wouldn’t care to try,” she said, as she cast a second set of detection spells. “Let’s see what we have here.”

  It took nearly twenty minutes to remove enough of the hexes to allow them to make their slow way up to the next level. This time, there were three possible directions to go, but only one of them seemed to lead them towards the orb. Emily hesitated, wondering if the sergeants would have expected them to take the direct path, but Aloha strode onwards before she could find the words to suggest that they do something else. The moment she joined Aloha in the corridor, the door slammed shut, cutting off their line of retreat.

  “Drat,” Aloha said, out loud. “And the spells are back in the walls.”

  Emily nodded, casting detection spells of her own. Someone was quite determined that they make their way down the corridor to face whatever was lurking at the far end. Aloha created a light globe and sent it drifting down the corridor, hoping to spring whatever trap waited for them before they got too close. But nothing happened. Carefully, they inched their way down the corridor...and inched their way down the corridor...and inched their way down the corridor...

  Aloha bit off a nasty word in a language Emily didn’t recognize. “Stay here,” she said, and walked ahead of Emily into the darkness. A moment later, Emily heard someone behind her and spun around...to see Aloha. “They’ve rigged the entire corridor with some kind of labyrinth spell.”

  “A hamster wheel,” Emily muttered. No matter how far they walked, they wouldn’t get anywhere. It was a very neat trap. “Cast a dispersal spell?”

  “On three,” Aloha muttered back. “One...two...three!”

  They cast the spell together, feeling a long moment of resistance as the spell on the corridor struggled against it...and then shattered. Emily felt her head spinning and closed her eyes; when she opened them, there was a wooden door at the end of the corridor. It seemed as though it had never been any more than five meters from end to end.

  “Follow me,” Aloha said, as she checked the doorknob—and then opened the door. Eerie green light washed out. “I...”

  She stopped, dead.

  Emily stared, unsure of what had happened. Something seemed to have captivated Aloha, holding he
r spellbound...and utterly mesmerized. If Emily hadn’t been behind her, she might have been caught too. There was something about what little she could see of the light that was almost hypnotic. If she looked at it for too long, she would be trapped too.

  Bracing herself, she came up behind Aloha and pushed her hand over her friend’s eyes. Aloha started, then twisted around until she had her back to the light. Emily pushed her gently forward until they were close to the source of the spell, then cast the strongest dispersal charm she could. The eerie light vanished, revealing another treasure chest, positioned in the center of the room. Sunlight was streaming in through a large glass window.

  “I...thank you,” Aloha said, as she staggered to the floor. She sounded disorientated—or drunk. “I...I just couldn’t break free.”

  “If it had been just one of us,” Emily said, “we would have been caught and trapped.”

  Aloha nodded. “Thank you,” she said. She sounded stronger, thankfully. “Why...why do you want the suction spell anyway?”

  “To suck up dust,” Emily said. She was sure that she had already explained. “I can’t use magic...”

  “Use runes,” Aloha said, flatly. “There are quite a few that repel dust. Draw them on the floor with chalk, then let them do their job. It’s slow, but it will work.”

  “Master Tor said no magic,” Emily said, slowly. “I thought an enchanted hoop wouldn’t count...”

  “Neither would runes,” Aloha insisted. “Draw the runes in the right place and the dust will inch towards the corner. Done properly, it will even start cleaning the rest of the floor.”

  “I could get rid of the spiders that way too,” Emily mused. “There are runes to repel insects...”

  “You might want to check with Mistress Kirdáne,” Aloha warned. “If the spiders have been there for decades, they may object to being moved.”