Study in Slaughter (Schooled in Magic)

by Christopher Nuttall

  There was a faint sound of retreating footsteps and then nothing. Emily struggled to move, but the spell held her completely paralyzed. She cursed mentally, knowing that they were going to be humiliated when someone stumbled across them, even though she had a feeling that it was the only way to escape. The spell on her seemed completely resistant to her counter-spells—or she just wasn’t casting them properly. It was much harder to shape and cast a spell without using hands to direct it. Maybe the attacker hadn’t used so much power on Imaiqah...

  She’d been foolish, Emily realized. Hadn’t she learned by now to watch her back? But she hadn’t been alone...

  It seemed like hours before she heard someone coming up behind her. “Good grief,” Lady Barb’s voice said. A moment later, she stepped into view. “Give me a moment. I’ll undo the spells.”

  Emily felt magic tickling over her and shivered, the spell snapping completely a moment later. Feeling completely drained, she slumped against the stone floor and closed her eyes, trying to snatch a moment of peace. The magic pulsing through the floor seemed to repel her; reluctantly, she reopened her eyes and looked up at Lady Barb, who held out a hand to help her to her feet. Her legs felt so wobbly that she wondered, absurdly, if she were feverish.

  “That was a very nasty hex,” Lady Barb said, as she turned her attention to Imaiqah. “Who was it?”

  “I don’t know,” Emily said, slumping against the wall. It crossed her mind that the etiquette teacher would have had a few sharp things to say about her poise and she had to fight down a giggle. “I never saw her face.”

  It wasn’t Melissa. She was fairly sure of that, if nothing else. Melissa wasn’t only taller than the invisible attacker, she was also much less practiced. It was far more likely to have been someone from Martial Magic, except she didn’t know any girls from the class who might really want to hurt her. Even Aloha had accepted her after she’d defeated Shadye.

  “You might not have recognized her anyway,” Lady Barb said. She was casting a series of spells Emily didn’t recognize over Imaiqah’s transfigured form. “These spells are fourth year level, maybe even higher. I shall have words with the Grandmaster.”

  Emily shuddered. They’d been warned, in no uncertain terms, that the prank wars between students were not meant to involve the students from lower years. It made sense, particularly given Whitehall’s orientation on turning out sorcerers; the younger students wouldn’t be able to defend themselves against the older ones. There was a fine line, it seemed, between toughening someone up and bullying them. Emily had a feeling that the line was crossed every day. God knew that Alassa had been free with malicious hexes before she’d reformed.

  “My counter-spells didn’t work,” she said. “Why not...?”

  “The spells are designed to be resistant to standard countering spells,” Lady Barb explained, absently. “You need a more focused counter spell and....ah.”

  There was a flash of light and Imaiqah returned to normal. She was breathing heavily, but seemed otherwise normal. Emily had a sudden horrified vision of what might have happened if she’d been stuffed into a confined space, then left there until the spell wore off. Imaiqah would have died instantly when her body tried to expand...or would she have merged with the walls? She made a mental note to experiment, perhaps at a safe distance from everyone else. If two objects couldn’t share the same place, would there be an explosion if someone tried?

  “That...that was awful,” Imaiqah gasped. “I couldn’t cast spells at all.”

  “Nor could Emily,” Lady Barb said, darkly. She stood and helped Imaiqah to her feet. “I think it’s time we went to see the Grandmaster.”

  Emily shivered at her tone. She could almost feel a hint of pity for the person who had attacked them; Lady Barb would, eventually, track them down and then...? Older students who attacked younger students...somehow, she doubted the punishment would be as simple as a thrashing. Would they be expelled?

  But she attacked us both and almost killed us, she reminded herself. Should they not be expelled?

  The thought made her smile bitterly as she followed Lady Barb through the corridor towards the Grandmaster’s office. There was literally nowhere to send the expelled student, not until the Mimic was captured and the wards were taken down. Perhaps the Grandmaster would have to settle for imprisoning her in her room. Come to think of it, what did happen to students who were expelled from Whitehall? Back home, expulsions had been a joke. Here, she suspected they were far more serious.

  Lady Barb stopped outside the Grandmaster’s office and tapped on the door. “Come in,” she said, as the door opened. “You’ll need to tell him everything.”

  “That isn’t the only thing I have to tell him,” Emily said. “I may have a way of catching the Mimic.”

  “Then talk about that first,” the Grandmaster ordered. He waved his hand and a pair of chairs appeared out of nowhere. “Take a seat and tell me what you have in mind.”

  Emily sat down, suddenly very aware that she was hot and sweaty. The fight had drained her, as she had tried to cast the counter-spell again and again. And her head hurt...

  “The Mimic is moving from victim to victim much quicker because it is using their magic,” she said, simply. “It’s actually burning up power just to pose as a magician.”

  The Grandmaster frowned, stroking his chin. “We have never heard of a Mimic posing as a magician before.”

  “Because it would need to move on quicker if it used magic,” Emily explained. Although...she did wonder why the Mimic hadn’t attacked during last term. Travis would have had to use a great deal of magic as he completed his fifth year and, assuming that he’d already been replaced, so would the Mimic. “This Mimic is in a place where it has to pose as a magician, forcing it to move from target to target. It faked the necromantic rites so we wouldn’t know what we were actually facing.”

  Lady Barb leaned forward. “But why is it leaving behind the bodies?”

  “I don’t know,” Emily admitted. All of the reports agreed that the original body crumbled into dust as the Mimic took on its form. “It might well have been injured during the attack on Whitehall, or...when it did whatever it did to the Warden. I don’t think it could have replaced him, could it?”

  “Perhaps we should be grateful,” Lady Barb mused. “If it had successfully replaced the Warden, it would have had access to the nexus point as well as the wards governing the school’s interior.”

  Emily scowled. The books had seemed to imply that Mimics were little more than beasts, if rather unusual ones, but everything she’d seen personally suggested that the Mimics were intelligent, stalking and killing their prey—and then doing whatever it took to cover their tracks. And yet there was something odd about the whole pattern. If the Mimic was aware of its own nature all the time, why didn’t it destroy the old bodies? But if it wasn’t...why didn’t it unknowingly report its own murders?

  But it did, she reminded herself. The people who found the bodies were actually killed and replaced by the Mimic.

  “The Mimic must be forced into a position where it burns up its power,” Emily said, leaving the puzzle alone for the moment. “If we have everyone casting spells and draining themselves, the Mimic should be revealed when it runs out of power.”

  “Test everyone in the school, one by one,” the Grandmaster mused. “And what is to stop the Mimic from moving on to someone who has already been tested?”

  “Seal off parts of the school,” Emily suggested. “Once someone is vetted, they can go into the sealed part of the school and wait there until we have tested everyone else.”

  “Clever idea,” Lady Barb said. She scowled. “You do realize that hardly anyone will like the idea?”

  Emily stared at her. “I can’t think of anything else,” she protested. “Can you?”

  Lady Barb shook her head. “You’re asking them to push themselves to the limit,” she said, darkly. “And drain themselves so completely that it will take hours, perh
aps days, to recover.”

  “They will all be tested,” the Grandmaster said, flatly. “Anyone who refuses to be tested may well be the Mimic.”

  “There will be more than one,” Lady Barb said. “Unless, of course, we are dealing with more than one Mimic.”

  Emily had a sudden vision of everyone in the school dissolving into mist and shivered. Cold logic told her that it was unlikely, but how much did logic truly apply to the Mimics? Could there be more than one Mimic in the school? There was no way to know.

  “I suppose we could have everyone bitten by the Death Viper instead,” she said, sardonically. It would be about as fair as the Spanish Inquisition’s favorite methods for determining guilt or innocence. “The person who survives is the Mimic.”

  Lady Barb snorted. “Leave making snarky remarks to the princess,” she suggested, dryly. “She is much better at them.”

  Imaiqah leaned forward, nervously. “Ah...Grandmaster,” she said. “How many people in the school can’t use magic?”

  Emily stared at her, then blanched. She honestly hadn’t realized that there were non-magicians in the school. But she should have known. It hadn’t been that long since she—and Imaiqah and Alassa—had gotten in trouble for involving a servant in their pranks. Madame Razz had pointed out, sharply, that the servants weren’t there to be abused. And it had been abuse.

  “There are thirty servants in the school who don’t have any magic,” the Grandmaster said, slowly. “And there are twenty more who have very limited magic, not enough to merit a formal invitation to study.”

  Lady Barb used a word that Emily was sure would get a student in real trouble if they said it in public. She couldn’t blame the healer. If she was right, the Mimic could replace a servant and then wait for decades before taking another victim. By then, everyone in Whitehall would have starved to death.

  “Language,” the Grandmaster said, reprovingly.

  Emily thought, frantically. “What happens to a Mimic if it loses part of its body?”

  Lady Barb scowled. “What do you mean?”

  Deep Space Nine, Emily thought. They’d been searching for Changelings...and the simplest way to do it had been to take a blood sample. When separated from the main mass the blood reverted to the alien’s natural state. What would happen, she asked herself, if they did the same to a Mimic? Would the blood remain human or would it revert to gas?

  “We take blood samples,” she said. She explained as quickly as she could. “It might just work.”

  “Make it so,” the Grandmaster ordered. He looked over at Lady Barb. “Take young Imaiqah and start making the preparations to test everyone’s magic. Lady Emily...come with me. I have something I need you to try.”

  Emily nodded and stood.

  “There’s a different matter to discuss,” Lady Barb said, flatly. “Emily and Imaiqah were attacked by an older student. They could have been seriously injured if I hadn’t come along.”

  The Grandmaster scowled. “Do you know who?”

  Emily shook her head.

  “Then the best bet is to get the wards up and running as quickly as possible,” the Grandmaster said. “Without them, it’s hard to tell who did what.”

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  EMILY GRITTED HER TEETH AS THE Grandmaster led her down a hidden stairwell, plunging deeper and deeper into the bowels of Whitehall. She could feel the constant thrumming from the nexus point, beating like a drum inside her head. The Grandmaster looked unperturbed by the noise, as if he couldn’t hear it—or as if it welcomed him. Emily had looked for information on nexus points in the library, but she’d found almost nothing. Most of them were stored in the forbidden section.

  She looked at the Grandmaster as they stopped in front of a stone door. “Why are we here?”

  “I have been unable to take direct control of the wards,” the Grandmaster said. His voice was soft, but there was a grim undertone that chilled her to the bone. “Producing a new Warden will take months, if we could obtain the clay we needed to build the homunculus. You might be able to do better.”

  He faced her. “We’re running out of options here,” he added. “If we can take control of the wards, we can locate and trap the Mimic before it feeds again.”

  Emily blinked in surprise. “Again?”

  “We found Sergeant Bane’s body, not too far from where you dived out the window,” the Grandmaster said, tightly. “And we found two more bodies the following day.”

  “It’s eating its way through the victims quicker and quicker,” Emily said, grimly. “What are you doing to keep the others safe?”

  “We’re trying to keep them in groups,” the Grandmaster said. “But there are always idiots who go off on their own.”

  Emily flushed. If she hadn’t been alone in the barracks, she might not have encountered the Mimic. But then, at least they now knew what they were hunting. If they’d still been looking for a necromancer, the Mimic could have feasted to its heart’s content. For all she knew, she might wind up being lynched by terrified students. Or perhaps even the more doubting tutors. Master Tor would probably take the lead in blaming her.

  The Grandmaster turned to face her. “There are normally years of training to go through before anyone touches the nexus points,” he said. “But you’ve already done it once, back when you killed Shadye. I’m hoping that you can do it again.”

  “I was desperate,” Emily protested. “I needed to find some way to strike back at him.”

  “And you did,” the Grandmaster said. “And we are desperate now. In less than a month, we will have to lower the wards or starve to death. We have to catch the Mimic now.”

  He turned back to the door and started to unlock the wards, one by one. Emily watched with some admiration; the spellwork was far above her head. The last time she’d opened the stone door, Shadye had been using her as a puppet. She hadn’t been truly aware of what she’d done to get inside. The memory made her shiver as the last of the wards unlocked, allowing the door to click open. She stepped forward, drawn by the power of the nexus, and into the room.

  The Grandmaster placed a hand on her arm. “Be careful,” he advised, softly. “Stronger magicians than you have been overwhelmed by the nexus.”

  Emily nodded. The nexus chamber was immense, a giant cave filled with glowing pillars that reached up towards the building far overhead. They looked almost organic, she realized, as if they’d grown out of the nexus and merged into Whitehall. The sense of power surrounding them was utterly overwhelming, calling her onwards at the same time as it repelled her. It made her wonder, suddenly, just how practiced the magicians who had tamed the nexus had actually been. They had to have been truly brilliant.

  “It takes years,” the Grandmaster said, when she asked. “A single flash of power can destroy all of their work in a heartbeat. They need to monitor the nexus, focus its power and then channel it into the wards. Done properly...it can be very rewarding.”

  And if it isn’t done properly, the results can be disastrous, Emily thought, remembering how Sergeant Harkin had talked about the dangers of tapping nexus points. He’d told her about an experiment that had caused an explosion, one that had devastated the country for miles around. Given the sheer level of power she could feel in the chamber, it was surprising that it hadn’t cracked the planet in half. She had the strangest sense that the nexus was actually alive and looking right back at her.

  She staggered against the Grandmaster, who held her upright.

  “I had the same reaction when I first came here,” he said. “Was it so extreme when you killed Shadye?”

  “I don’t think so,” Emily said. “But I was desperate.”

  The Grandmaster smiled, then nodded to one of the pillars. “I think you had a great deal of help from the spells that govern the nexus,” he said. “Thankfully, the Warden wasn’t destroyed at the time. But now...”

  He scowled. “I need you to try touching the power directly,” he added. “And be careful.”
r />   Emily looked at him. “What—exactly—do you want me to do?”

  “Scan the school,” the Grandmaster said. “If the spellwork is still in place, you should be able to rebuild the wards and take control.”

  It didn’t sound like a very good idea, Emily realized, but there wasn’t much choice. She stepped forward, eying the pillar, and gently touched the crystal with her bare hand. Strange lights ran over the structure, but nothing else happened until she tried to pull her hand away and realized that it was stuck. Moments later, there was a sudden surge of power and she was suddenly very aware of the entire school. Whitehall was, on some level, a living entity, one that existed on a very different plane to humanity. The sudden awareness almost sent her staggering backwards, but she couldn’t break the contact...

  The wards were in ruins, she realized, as she tried desperately to focus. It hadn’t been so hard last time, had it? She couldn’t recall—the experience had faded from her memory quickly—but she was sure that it had been easier to control and direct the power flowing from the nexus and into the school. This time, it either refused to heed her or was powerful enough to burn her mind. There was a wave of red-hot pain...

  ...And she found herself in the Grandmaster’s arms, staring up at the crystal ceiling high overhead. Her head hurt, but the pain seemed almost illusory, as if she were imagining having a headache rather than actually having one. She reached up and touched the side of her head, feeling almost fragile. The memories of touching the nexus had already faded away.

  “You were pushed out,” the Grandmaster said, softly. “It didn’t allow you to make contact properly.”

  Emily nodded. “I can try again,” she said, although in truth she would have preferred to put some distance between herself and the nexus. “But I don’t think it likes me any longer.”