Study in Slaughter (Schooled in Magic)

by Christopher Nuttall

  “Stand on guard,” the sergeant ordered, as he lifted his sword. “And we begin.”

  He lunged forward, probing Emily’s defenses. Emily barely managed to raise her own sword in time to block his thrust, then found herself being pushed backwards by a series of slashes that threatened to cut into her chest. He was holding back, she knew, and yet he was overwhelming her with ease. She feinted, trying to take back the advantage, but he crashed his sword against hers and sent it spinning out of her hand. It was something she’d been warned not to try in a real battle.

  Emily dived for the sword, only to land flat on her face as he pushed her down to the floor. She gritted her teeth and tried to move, but he put his foot firmly on her back, trapping her in place. Escape was impossible.

  “Bad habits,” Sergeant Miles observed. “Why didn’t you draw your dagger when you lost the sword?”

  Emily flushed. “I didn’t think of it,” she admitted, finally. “I was just focusing on the sword...”

  “There are no such things as dangerous weapons, only dangerous men,” Sergeant Miles lectured, as he took his foot off her back and held out a hand to help her to her feet. “The weapon you carry may be the best in the world, charmed to help a hundred men win a thousand battles, but if you don’t have the right mindset to use it...you would find yourself helpless very quickly. What do you think would have happened if you had disarmed me instead?”

  “You would have still fought,” Emily said.

  “I would have gone for you,” the sergeant agreed. “In your case, you should have gone for your dagger—or turned and fled. Running was probably your smartest option.”

  Emily scowled at him as she stood upright, waving away his proffered hand. “You didn’t tell me that,” she objected.

  Sergeant Miles snorted. “Did I have to tell you the rules?”

  Rule one, Emily recalled. There are no rules.

  “I’m bigger than you, stronger than you and more experienced than you,” Sergeant Miles said. “You need to learn to fight smarter, not harder. There is no way that a slight girl like you will win a wrestling match with me. That tutor will feel the flat of my blade.”

  Emily suspected he wasn’t joking. “I’ll do more swordplay with you,” she promised. If nothing else, it would be a diversion from the yearning she felt in her soul. In hindsight, perhaps she should have refused to take the staff. “And I will have a few words with him myself.”

  “If he listens,” Sergeant Miles said, darkly. He picked up Emily’s sword and passed it to her, hilt first. “Clean it up, then replace it.”

  Emily nodded and carried the blade to the workbench. The sergeants insisted that all weapons be maintained by the students who used them, threatening dire punishments to anyone who dared mistreat a weapon. Taking care of one’s weapons, Sergeant Harkin had said, was the first step towards ensuring they took care of you. She found a cloth, wiped the blade clean, then started to oil it. As always, the smell made her feel as if she were at home. She had no idea why.

  “Good,” the Sergeant said, when she had finished. “Where do you want to go now?”

  Emily considered it. She hadn’t—quite—finished the barracks, but under the circumstances it hardly mattered. Master Tor could rant and rave all he liked; there was no point in Emily working on the barracks when it was unlikely that they would ever leave Whitehall. Once the food ran out, they would all starve. She wondered, absently, how human flesh would taste, before dismissing the thought angrily. It would be better to die than eat her fellow humans.

  Ah, a voice said, at the back of her head. Will you still feel that way when you’re starving?

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Have there been any other attacks?”

  “We found another body this morning,” Sergeant Miles said. “A fourth-year student, well out of bounds. The gods alone know what he was doing out alone—or who was there when the Mimic abandoned him and moved on to the next victim.”

  Emily scowled. The Mimic had yet another new face to play with and blend into the crowd. It could be anyone...

  “The Grandmaster is considering trying to trap it again,” Sergeant Miles added. “Perhaps if we pour additional power into the wards...”

  “Maybe,” Emily said. She’d had the impression that the Mimic had not found it difficult to break through the wards. “What if we used a solid barricade instead? I didn’t notice it going through the walls...”

  “Good thought,” Sergeant Miles said. “I’ll suggest that to the Grandmaster.”

  Emily gritted her teeth. What sort of creature was the Mimic, that it could do so much and yet behave so oddly? And yet there was a certain cold intelligence to its actions. What was it?

  She stopped and stared at the crossbows hanging from the walls. What was it?

  The realization, when it came, made her break down into giggles. Sergeant Miles looked at her as if he thought she’d gone mad. In hindsight, the answer had been right in front of her nose ever since she’d faced the Mimic for the first time. If she’d stopped to think about it, she might have realized what the Mimic actually was long ago.

  “Tell me,” she said, recovering control of herself, “what is a Mimic?”

  Sergeant Miles scowled at her. “A monster,” he said, shortly. “Why...?”

  Emily shook her head. There was no clear proof, apart from a single observation, and yet she felt sure she was right. It was the only answer that made sense.

  “We thought of it as a beast,” she said. “A creature like a cockatrice or a basilisk, something weird, but something understandable. Why not? The world is full of creatures that have been warped by magic. Why not a shape-shifting ball of mist? But it isn’t!”

  Her giggles threatened to overwhelm her again. “It isn’t a creature,” she said, softly. “The Mimic is a spell!”

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  THIS IS THE LATEST VERSION OF the fingerprint spell,” Professor Lombardi was saying, as Sergeant Miles led Emily into the staff room. “It’ll find fingerprints—but it will also show the person who left the fingerprints, assuming they are in range. I think...”

  He stopped when he saw the Sergeant. “Miles...?”

  “Emily has deduced something about our enemy,” Sergeant Miles said, addressing the room as a whole. “Something none of us would even think of. Emily?”

  Emily took a breath, suddenly aware that some of the most powerful magicians in the Allied Lands were staring at her. If she was wrong...but she hadn’t been wrong before, had she? Her plan had found the Mimic, after all. It hadn’t been her fault that the wards hadn’t been as strong as they’d thought. But it was still a lot of weight to put on her...

  And Alassa will be Queen of Zangaria, she thought, tightly. What am I complaining about?

  She cleared her throat. “The Mimic is a spell, a very powerful spell,” she said, flatly. “It works on the same principles as necromancy, draining power from unwilling victims to fuel its passage through our world. Quite why it becomes a copy of the victim is unknown, unless the spell was intended to serve as the ultimate spy and simply got out of control.”

  “That’s impossible,” Master Tor said, stiffly. “A spell cannot act in such a manner.”

  “It would be very difficult,” Sergeant Miles observed, “but it might be workable, if one had enough power and skill. The faerie were beings of magic; they might have created the Mimics as yet another instrument of terror. Or perhaps we should look for a more human creator. Someone might just have been trying to make necromancy viable and lost control of what they created.”

  “It flinched away from a detection spell,” Emily said. “Why a detection spell when lethal curses just went through it? If I’d used the analysis spell, what would I have seen? The spell that makes up the Mimic?”

  “Or it might have killed you,” Lady Barb said. “If you know its secret...”

  Emily nodded, tightly. She was a target—but then, so was everyone else in Whitehall.

  “We
find it, again,” she continued, “and we cast the most powerful dispersal spell we have. And that should end its existence.”

  “Assuming that the spell isn’t protected in some way,” Sergeant Miles said. “There is no shortage of methods to proof a spell against being terminated. Otherwise wards would just be a laughing stock.”

  “But we have to try,” Emily insisted. “There’s no other choice.”

  Professor Lombardi was scribbling down notes on a piece of paper. “The Mimic might just be a combination of several different spells,” he said. “All fiendishly complex, mind you, but they should go together...but you’d need a vast source of power.”

  “Necromancy,” Sergeant Miles said, quietly.

  “It may actually be overfeeding,” Professor Lombardi added. He passed Emily a copy of his notes, which included the modified fingerprint spell. She glanced at it and stuffed it in her pocket. “There are too many students in the school.”

  “So we starve it,” Mistress Irene said. “We isolate the students from it and let the monster starve.”

  “Assuming it can starve,” Sergeant Miles said. “We don’t know how often it needs to eat.”

  The Grandmaster held up a hand. “This leaves us with one final question,” he said. “How do we catch it again?”

  “We do the same test we did before,” Master Tor said, simply. “We just get ready to cast the dispersal spell before it can break free.”

  “Except that there will be a riot if we try,” Mistress Irene said. “And it would be hard to blame them.”

  Emily shuddered. The events of the last magical testing had scared everyone in the school, even the pupils who hadn’t seen the Mimic directly. Mistress Irene was right; if they tried to gather so many people close together, the students would riot.

  “There’s another possibility,” she said. “I go out alone and let it come after me.”

  Lady Barb snorted. “Are you out of your mind?”

  “The Mimic has been going after people out on their own,” Emily pointed out, carefully. “I intend to give it a target—me. It knows that I was meant to be cleaning the barracks...”

  “It can’t think that you are meant to go back there now,” Sergeant Miles snapped.

  “Why not?” Lady Barb asked. She gave Master Tor a dark look. “Someone else did.”

  “It may not think at all,” Emily said. “But I can’t think of any other way to catch the creature.”

  “And if you fail,” Lady Barb said grimly, “you will be the next person to be killed and replaced.”

  “I know,” Emily said. “But what other choice do we have?”

  She listened to the argument between the tutors, surprised at the sheer level of venom that showed up in their words. It had always seemed to her that the tutors kept up a united front, even when they had private disagreements; the Grandmaster had certainly not overruled Master Tor when he’d decreed Emily’s punishment. But now they seemed to be on the verge of hexing each other—or worse. If a fourth year student could take both Emily and Imaiqah, what could the tutors do? She didn’t want to find out.

  “ENOUGH,” the Grandmaster bellowed, using magic to project his voice through the room. “I see no other alternative.”

  “But a dispersal spell,” Master Tor said. “How can it work?”

  Sergeant Miles huffed. “Do you think anyone else has ever tried?”

  The Grandmaster glared them both into silence. “Emily,” he said, “are you truly willing to do this? To take the risk of merely being its next victim?”

  Emily nodded, not trusting herself to speak.

  “One of us should do it,” Lady Barb said. “This isn’t a task for a student.”

  “We all know that she is no ordinary student,” Master Tor said. “I...”

  “THAT. WILL. DO.” The Grandmaster scowled at them. “Apart from Sergeant Bane, the Mimic has not gone after another tutor. It may fear what we could do to it, if we were pushed against the wall. Emily is the most logical person to serve as bait. Myself, Lady Barb and Sergeant Miles will be nearby.”

  Emily wasn’t sure if she should feel honored or not. “Thank you,” she said, quietly. “I’ll go now.”

  Lady Barb came after her as she stepped out of the staff room. “You don’t have to do this,” she said, quietly. “I...”

  “I need to do it,” Emily answered. “Get ready to come after me.”

  The corridors felt completely empty as soon as she stepped away from the dorms, as if the students and staff were cramming themselves into a small part of the school. Emily looked around as she slowly made her way up the grand staircase, peering into the shadows as if they might hide the Mimic. Even the omnipresent thrumming of the wards seemed muted, somehow, as if the power were draining away. What would happen, she asked herself, if the school were completely dead?

  She hoped—prayed—that they were following her as she reached the correct floor and glanced down the darkened corridor. There was already dust gathering on the floor, despite the wards and runes that should have kept it moving down and out of the castle. Emily wondered, absently, if the next pupil to get in trouble would have to sweep the corridors, before remembering that the servants would probably deal with it. They just didn’t get paid enough to work in a magic school.

  The lights should have come on as she walked into the corridor, but nothing happened. Emily hesitated, straining every sense for a hint of the Mimic, then cast a light globe into the air. The barracks door was right ahead of her, firmly closed. Emily muttered a second spell and the door opened, revealing that the dust had been slowly urged into a corner by the remains of the runes she’d drawn. Melissa hadn’t managed to damage them all.

  Emily reached for the mop automatically, then stopped herself and dug into her pocket for her notepad. It was almost full, she realized as she found a place to sit; she would have to have a new one sent to her by the papermakers in Zangaria. A notepad that would have cost less than a dollar on Earth was luxurious in Whitehall, even if the paper-making process was growing cheaper every month as they worked out the kinks. In time, she was sure, it would replace parchment completely.

  She swore inwardly as she remembered what she had intended to discuss with the Sergeant—and then forgotten. Most spells designed to throw objects towards their targets could be easily cancelled—and the object, deprived of its propulsion, would drop out of the air. But with a little twiddling the spells could impart velocity, just like a cannon ball. It would keep going after being fired until gravity finally asserted itself—or until it hit something. That would be a nasty surprise for sorcerers who thought that a basic ward would keep them safe.

  Carefully, she jotted down the concept. If she were consumed and replaced, it was quite possible that the Mimic would give the notepad to the Sergeant—all unknowing. Or that he would find it on her body. She added a few extra notes of her own, then wondered if she should write a letter to Imaiqah and Alassa. There was so much she wanted to say that she hadn’t been able to tell them in person. And she hadn’t even gone to see Imaiqah to say goodbye.

  What would death be like? She’d never really been religious—it was hard to be religious when there seemed to be no justice in the universe—and she had always believed that death would be the end. There had been times when she had welcomed the thought of oblivion, back when she had considered suicide. And yet...it would be the end. There would be no afterlife, no heaven or hell.

  Or maybe there was an afterlife. She’d never had time to really study the religions in Zangaria, let alone the rest of the Allied Lands, but there were a thousand different concepts of life after death. Maybe one of them would welcome her. Or maybe they would all see her as a stranger to their world. There were times when she knew she didn’t truly belong.

  She regretted, now, not seeking help and safety after her stepfather had started to make her life a misery. She could have escaped—or found help for her mother. But she’d never had the confidence to try. If Shadye hadn
’t kidnapped her...

  ...She might well have died on Earth. Or wasted her life.

  And she waited.

  She glared down at her notepad an hour later, wishing that she had thought to bring a book. It would have been better than just keeping company with her own thoughts, particularly the darker ones about the other mysteries puzzling her. Who had been going through her desk? Who had attacked Imaiqah and Emily in the corridor? And who had been spreading rumors about her...

  Not that they really needed to bother, Emily thought, sourly. There’ve been rumors about me ever since I arrived, carried on a dragon’s back.

  Master Lombard’s second fingerprint spell was a vast improvement over the first, she realized as she pulled it out of her pocket and studied the spell. Carefully, she cast it and smiled when she saw her fingerprints all over the barracks. She tested the second half of the spell and felt her smile widen as she saw hazy lines running from the fingerprints to her fingers. Given time, this spell might revolutionize forensic magic.

  Until someone figures out how to break the links, she thought. Or if they start wearing gloves...

  There was a creaking sound from the door. Emily looked up sharply as a figure appeared, peering towards her. She was surprised to realize that she recognized him as one of Cat’s friends, the one who had told her to go away at breakfast. He looked thoroughly unhappy with Emily, but there was something wrong with him. His body was moving as though it were a puppet with half of the strings lost.

  “You...friend...has...charmed...Cat,” he said, slowly. He seemed to be flipping from one mode to another and back again with terrifying speed, as if he were caught between two minds. “He...is...with...her...now.”

  Emily slowly stood upright, feeling a chill run down her spine. The Mimic’s natural personality—if it had one, as humans understood the term—and the human mindset were fighting for dominance. If it was the Mimic. Someone could easily have hit him with a spell intended to turn him against Emily.