To Sir, with Love: An Unofficial Legend of The Secret World (Unofficial Legends of The Secret World Book 1)

by Blodwedd Mallory

  “That's...not really encouraging, Sir,” Carter responded, as she blanched.

  “I assure you that your magic has almost certainly not caused any immediately fatal injuries,” he said, reaching to stroke her hair in a clumsy attempt to assuage her, but she moved quickly out of his reach. He returned to his grim reminiscences.

  “This loose end has become a hangman's noose,” he said. “Exorcising the wraith calls for a ritual sacrifice. My...ritual sacrifice.”

  “No way,” Carter said.

  “No bloody way,” agreed Ms. Usher, standing straight up where from where she had been leaning over Carter’s shoulder looking at the office computer screen.

  Montag held up a hand. “In fact, it is the only way. In the realm of the Peacock King, blood calls for blood. Such is the price of foolish magic.” He said. “Hmm... I should like that for my epitaph.”

  Ms. Usher persisted, “This isn't going to happen, H.J.,” her Scottish accent making it sound like “haych jay.”

  “Obviously I defer to your massive brain on most matters of the occult,” she added, dryly. “But the only object lesson happening today is you learning about compromise.”

  “That sounds...painful,” he responded.

  “Less painful than making a pentacle from your entrails,” Carter said.

  Montag looked pleased. “You remembered the very book of curses. Truly a model student.” He moved to stroke her chin with his blue-gloved hand but stopped short of actually touching her.

  He paused, then added, “It may be possible to exorcise the wraith without giving it my life. However, there's no way to get around the fact that my blood will be needed.”

  That left me confused. Had he just agreed to compromise?

  Ms. Usher gave her head a little shake. “Well, that’s that, then. Go get a syringe.”

  Still stunned by the turn of events none of us moved. Ms. Usher spoke again, her accent growing thicker. “What? Are ya waitin’ on an invitation? He’s at it and yer all clatterin’ up the place. There’s a First Aid kit on the floor near the table.”

  Gypcie reached down for the kit, snapped it open, and dug through its contents until she found a syringe and medical tubing.

  “Take off your suit jacket please, Sir,” I ventured. “And roll up your shirt sleeve.”

  Montag drew his head back with a snap. Apparently, the exact procedural steps required for us to actually take his blood hadn’t sunk in. “Don’t touch!” he said with alarm. “Bodily temperatures make me queasy. Oh, and I’m pentaphobic. Can you avoid using your hands?

  “Sir?” I said with trepidation, wondering how we were going to draw his blood without our hands, as Gypcie approached him cautiously with the supplies. Montag backed away and strode swiftly to the window, turning his back to us.

  Ms. Usher put a hand on Gypcie’s shoulder. “No, jist haud on. The headmaster isn’t worried about the blood, girls; it’s people he doesn’t…oh never mind,” said Ms. Usher, taking the syringe and hose from Gypcie and stepping over to Montag. “H.J., you’re just going to have to bear it, and I’ll get your blood. For gods’ sakes, man. Don’t let them see you squirming.”

  In short order, she had Montag’s jacket off, his sleeve up, and a syringe full of his blood capped and ready to go. Montag looked a little sheepish at the fuss he’d caused.

  “Well, this is awkward,” he said, his voice strangely muffled. “Now we are acquainted.”

  “Perhaps I appear blasé to the human tragedy that surrounds us,” he cleared this throat and continued. “I am, largely. I believe one should focus on their strong subjects...empathy was never truly one of mine. Thusly, I must protect the Academy and its remaining occupants the only way I can appreciate: analytically.”

  “Then what do you want us to do with your blood, sir?” Carter said.

  “Oh no. I don’t want you to do anything with it,” he responded. “Wedd and Gypcie are sufficient to this task. You are far too dangerous to run off on a mission like this.”

  It would have been easy as a fellow student to envy Carter. She had magical potential that was literally off the charts, and it was evident to all of us attending Innsmouth Academy that she was the apple of both the headmaster and Ms. Usher’s eye, albeit for different reasons.

  To Montag, she was a reminder of his younger self—a powerful novice in need of tutelage to ensure she was able to harness her talents with the kind of support that he lacked as a child.

  For Ms. Usher, the bond was something different, more maternal, perhaps.

  Carter had a mop of brown hair, cut short, just skimming the tops of her ears and framing her pixie-like face. She had been wearing around a gray Innsmouth Academy hoodie with a pair of skeleton-bone leggings since that first day. It was splattered with blood and gore now. Just like her face.

  But I didn’t judge. There were a few of us who owed her our lives—without Carter’s Major League psychokinesis, Innsmouth Academy would have fallen entirely in the first assault. Unfortunately, she had a few control issues which might be best described as thermonuclear. Ms. Usher had been able to put out all of the more significant fires so far.

  But, to be on the bench in the ninth inning? My heart went out to Carter as her face fell, and she turned back to the computer.

  Montag continued to lecture, oblivious to her distress. “If memory serves, and it always does, the answer to our dilemma lies in the copy of Extradimensional Assassins 101—the revised edition, of course—that lies on the third shelf of the fourth bookcase to the right of the north door.”

  “North door to what?” I asked.

  Gypcie elbowed me, rolled her eyes, and mouthed the word “library.” She may have also mouthed “you idiot.”

  Montag gave me a severe look. “I now completely understand that B minus you got in Spatial Geography as a sophomore, Miss Mallory. And to think I believed Mrs. Armitage was exaggerating about your inability to use a card catalog.”

  If I hadn’t known better, I might have suspected I heard a tinge of irony in his voice, but Montag didn’t do irony any more than he did empathy. Christine Armitage was our librarian. But she, like many others in the faculty, had gone missing in the initial assault. I snuck a glance at the sad pile of bloodstained staff badges that we had recovered so far, languishing on a dirty paper plate near Carter’s computer, and swallowed the feelings that welled up inside. It was still a little hard to get a grip on just how many people might be dead or worse.

  “Let us approach this problem analytically. First, find the book and see what it has to say. Then we can determine what course of action we need to pursue next. Now, run along. School is out,” Montag said and turned back again to the window. “You can come back for the blood when you’re done. It won’t do for you to get any of it on the books. Who knows how they might react?”

  Carter turned to us as we were preparing to leave. “Good luck out there. You’ll need it.”

  “And please no running in the halls,” Montag added. “They are quite slick with gore.”

  Ms. Usher put an arm around Gypcie and me and walked us to the entrance of the Administration Office.

  “Don’t mind him,” she advised us. “The Headmaster has never been one for compromise. But this crisis has made him more macabre than ever, and more determined to pay for his mistakes. I am counting on you both to carry out your own research and ease his burden. We can’t afford him to crack under the strain. We really can’t.”

  She shuddered, then added, “I pure hope this doesn’t put you off your further education.”

  The doorway of the Administration Office glowed with a giant blue defensive ward. By squinting just right, you could see the forms within it—the circle and triangle of the Academy’s seal, which bore more than a passing resemblance to the Illuminati insignia. No coincidence there: Innsmouth Academy, while it was open to students of all persuasions and creeds, was very much an appendage of the Eye. It was a doorway because the “open door” policy of the school appa
rently included the permanent removal of the actual door itself. Great for engaging your student body. For keeping out zombies, not so great.

  From the doorway, Gypcie and I could see the wooden floor of the front entrance hall and the staircases on either side with their wrought-iron and oak banisters. A partition wall, perpendicular to the stairwells, was directly to the west. It had lovely matching oak wainscoting and was painted a neutral beige, which showed the arterial blood spatter covering the blue and white Academy seal hanging in the center in shocking relief. I had no idea who it belonged to, and after two weeks of finding literally gallons of blood in all kinds of places, it was getting harder to not be numbed by the experience.

  To the left of the partition wall was the passage we would need to traverse to get to the library’s south doors. The east doors had been closed and locked since the incident last spring with the freshmen and the poltergeist. I peered around the corner. There was the Bingo cola machine, with the fire extinguisher on the wall to its right. And there was a committee of four familiars, squeaking, squawking, and generally loitering in our way.

  Check. Deal with familiars, then navigate to the library.

  “If they weren’t so gross and shiny,” Gypcie groaned. “That one looks like it’s pregnant, and the stitches are coming loose on that Surgical Specimen.”

  I nodded, gagging a little. It was a strange thing. Every student was required to create at least one familiar in the first year. And maybe it was like having children. Your own were pretty cute. Everyone else’s were disgusting.

  The process of creating a familiar involved building it out of biological materials, which is just marketing-speak for corpses. Optimally, you found a fresh one without too much wear-and-tear. Then, you shaved the body, head to toe, as the thaumaturgical reagent necessary to keep it animated was flammable. After that it was just a matter of covering the body in a thin coat of the aforementioned flammable reagent, to protect it from further decay and give it that lovely shiny appearance. Once you had preserved the body, you had to destroy any remnants of the former personality in the frontal lobe of the brain by taking a thin hammer and spiked chisel to the inner corner of the eyes.

  Other than the delicate legal line one had to walk to procure the necessary ingredients, getting through that much of the process was gruesome, but pretty mundane. Anyone with a strong enough stomach could do it. But the gifted students of the Academy could take that process one step further.

  Once the preparation was accomplished, you had to perform a small ritual to exert your magical Will on the body and donate a portion of your own anima and life force to animate it. To be successful, that donation was permanent, thus creating a human-sized ambulatory drone which could be used not only to pass your basic exams but to clean your room, do your laundry, and other tiresome tasks. Depending on how handy you were with the chisel, some of the familiars could even do more advanced tasks, like homework.

  Having to share your living quarters with the noisy things for the semester was a drag, but otherwise, the whole process was kind of cool. Still, after the semester was up, many of the students preferred to temporarily or permanently retire their Mini-Mes in the basement under the main hall, to be able to sleep through the night undisturbed again. And as a result, there the familiars had languished. In some cases, for years.

  But…once the students started dying, the force of their Will on their animated creations died as well. The familiars, which had been innocuous, if somewhat annoying, turned feral and vicious. The crafty ones—the ones that probably earned their humans A’s in Algebra—were the worst. Gypcie and I called them Igors. They had retained enough intelligence and awareness to plot. They had learned how to open doors to escape. And to set traps for the unsuspecting.

  Looking at the group by the Bingo cola machine, it was impossible to tell if we had drones or plotters in front of us. I mean, individual familiars basically looked alike unless they were yours.

  “We’re going to have to bait them to the wards,” I said. Gypcie nodded in agreement. We’d done this drill before. “Do you want to run, or shall I?” I asked her.

  “I’ll go. You got it last time.”

  She stepped through the ward into the main entrance hall area, stomping her feet and shouting. “Hey, dummies! Over here!”

  Three of the familiars, all Anatomical Specimens, immediately turned and charged, arms out, toward her. She jumped nimbly across the threshold, over the ward, back into the administrative office, while each of the pale drones ran shrieking into the ward, incinerating on contact. The outcry raised the hair on the back of my neck, and the stench of their burning bodies made me wrinkle my nose in disgust. Three brightly glowing anima charges remained when they were gone.

  “Darn it, we should have had the W.A.N.D. Anima manipulator to collect those,” Gypcie said, panting, not from exertion, but from the adrenalin rush of risking her neck. “I’ll go grab it from the table.”

  She turned and hurried into the back section of the office. I saw her grab the manipulator and stop to talk to Ms. Usher and Carter. I looked back out the doorway and saw that one familiar remained standing by the Bingo cola machine. Like Frankenstein’s monster, it was sewn together from multiple parts, with seams covering all the joints. Across its stomach area, the stitches were loose, leaving a gaping hole where purple clumps of its small intestine were visible, undulating as the creature swayed.

  Oh great. A plotter. Just our luck. If it was smart enough not to be drawn in by Gypcie’s yelling and stomping, we had a problem on our hands.

  “Still one?” Gypcie said as she returned, looking out the doorway herself. She collected the anima charges using the W.A.N.D. for later use to charge wards. No sense in wasting any resources.

  “Yep. The Surgical Specimen. It looks like a fast learner too. Stupid pre-magical med students. Someone must have made themselves an Igor.”

  “Ugh.”

  Gypcie stepped outside the ward a second time, sending the plotter a look of challenge. It stepped forward abruptly, causing her to jump back inside the office in alarm. The familiar tittered in amusement. Gypcie and I looked at each other with concern. This one was starting to freak us out.

  “Shall I shoot it?” Gypcie asked. She was pretty fond of her new Soviet-tech Harmonizer pistols and rarely passed up a chance to use them.

  “You’re just going to fire your gun down the hall?”

  “I can’t help how much noise the shot itself will make. But, if I hit this little bugger straight-on in the belly that should stop any ricochet with its spine.”

  I raised an eyebrow at her. “It’s your shot if you can make that.”

  Gypcie stepped forward again beyond the doorway, squared her shoulders, and raised her pistol. She stabilized her right hand on the pistol grip with the other. Then, she straightened her right arm, lined up the sites down the barrel, took a deep breath and held it, placed her finger on the hair-trigger, and squeezed.

  With a loud bark, the bullet flew from the barrel and slammed into the plotter’s midsection. The familiar buckled slightly on impact, a round hole blossoming. Foul-looking fluid—ironically the color of Bingo cola—splashed out of the wound all over the Bingo dispenser. The specimen stood up and started to cackle.

  “Ewwww.”

  “Yeah, that’s not going to work,” I said, looking at the blackish purple fluid dripping slowly down the soda machine.

  “Well, the good news is we didn’t get a bum rush from a bunch more. Shall I try shooting it in the head?”

  I immediately visualized brain matter splattered all over the passage. I was never drinking Bingo cola again. “I don’t think that will work either. We have to get it to the wards, or we’ve got to burn it. Any part of its body that we don’t destroy is just going to keep moving,” I said. “And my nightmares are vivid enough already, thanks.”

  “How far would you say it is from the corner to the Bingo machine?” Gypcie asked.

  “Eh, about 15 meters.
Why do you….” The penny dropped. Could I pull the Surgical Specimen to us with my chaos evulsion skill? It was a higher order ability that enabled me to drag targets to me using chaos magic. I’d just learned it a few weeks ago in Defensive Magic, but it was definitely worth a shot. “Gypcie, you’re brilliant! I don’t think I can do mass evulsion right the first time yet, but thankfully, there’s just the one.”

  She grinned, adding. “If you can pull it near the office ward, I can hit it with a fireball and use its stitches for kindling.”

  I gave her a thumb’s up. No problem. Well, OK, a little problem. Sometimes trying to use chaos magic under pressure resulted in, shall we say, unpredictable results for me. Sure I knew enough to pass my final exams, but the perfecting of any magical skill set was the work of a lifetime. I wanted to use just enough chaos to make the Surgical Specimen tend to move our way, not bend probability to the point I created paradoxes. Magically, it was the difference between using tweezers or an ax to get a sliver out. And, I tended to get axes as often as tweezers when I tried.

  But I could do this!

  Gypcie moved into position behind the ward. She would pitch the fireball as soon as I successfully grabbed the specimen and ducked back into the office out of her line of fire.

  I stepped out from behind the ward and peeked around the corner to ensure our little Igor friend hadn’t gone walkabout. There it was, seemingly having lost interest in us, swaying back and forth drunkenly in front of the cola machine.

  First I rolled my shoulders and cracked my neck. I needed to be as relaxed as possible. I pulled my weapon—an aged bronze disk—off my back where it was strapped to use as a focus. The focus was well-used indeed, with ragged edges and many bumps and scratches; it was a relic of early-Celtic culture, with stylized chaos streams stamped into the metal in the shape of an elaborate triskele.

  Most of the time, just having the disk on my back was sufficient for me to use chaos magic, but it never hurt to have it in my hands when I was trying something challenging or new. I ran my finger over the raised chaos streams on the bronze relic and allowed my vision to narrow, pulling my awareness inside, looking for the seams in reality. With an act of Will, I took myself out of my Time and streamers of movement manifested, the trails of probabilities glowing in my mind’s eye.