Fantastic Schools, Volume 3

by Emily Martha Sorensen

  I checked one last time. Homework sets due tomorrow were ready to turn in; homework sets due three days hence on Eightday were mostly complete. I briefly remembered certain classmates of mine, astonished that I started on homework sets well in advance. Start at the last minute? What if something went wrong? They were a bunch of idiots!

  Lecture notebooks were in a neat row on a book shelf, the foolscap in-class sheets from which they had been generated lying in separate notebooks next to them. I’d done the readings and taken notes matching tomorrow’s lectures. A vigorous swim and jog back from the beach had certainly set my pulse pounding, even after a cool shower.

  My townhouse was up on a ridge, so from my top-floor view I could look across much of Dorrance Academy. Most Academy buildings are only two or three stories tall, those stories starting down on the Academy Plain, so I could peer over polychrome tile rooftops as far as the New School and the high surf breaking at the far end of the bay. In the distance the goldenstone granite of the Great Library was tinged with sunset bronze. The last rays of the setting sun reflected from facets of the quartz towers of the School of Theology, painting the towers with bright diamond speckles.

  I had the work I needed to do, prep for the Eightday exam in Diagrammatics II, and the work I wanted to do, comparing carefully Marchanti’s Metaanalysis with Kaspar’s Triangle Diagrams. Duty first. I’d read Triangle Diagrams one more time, looking for things I’d missed in the first careful read, then read carefully the chapters from Serene Master Aspen’s textbook, and finally start working problems – the ones for which he gave worked solutions – from his book.

  Well after dark, I’d made a last pass through Triangle Diagrams. I’d spotted a few bits I’d missed on the previous read. Marchanti’s triangle homework problems seemed much easier now that I’d slogged through a few square diagram problems for Serene Master Aspen’s homework. Supposedly it is easier to reduce a diagram, shrink the number of sides and combine interior nodes and lines, than it is to expand a diagram, turning a hex diagram into a sept diagram. That claim seemed to be true.

  My stomach growled. Loudly. It was well past dark. The refectories had all closed, but the three all-night bars were open. “Bar’ was a misnomer; they all had fine full-course menus. I slipped into my enchanted clothing, not quite armor but inconspicuously hardened. My gnothdiar went under my cape. Most of my fellow students would say I was going way overboard on obeying the arming rule. Most of my fellow students did not have an unresolved Death-Pride-Honor duel with a combat duelist. Harold Fourbridge might be banned from campus, but if I walked over to Harmony, at least once a month I found myself being followed by three or four guys. They were not very good stalkers, and fled if I turned to approach them, but they kept showing up.

  ***

  Rainbow’s Rest was my usual late meal spot. Some of their prices were a bit steeper than others, though they clearly made their money on the alcohol I did not consume. However, when I said I wanted my steak well done, they delivered it well done. When I wanted lamb chops so perfectly done that the meat was falling off the bone, they delivered. I didn’t see anyone I knew, but was happy to sit by myself and eat. Tonight, I settled for clam chowder loaded with clams and stir-fried vegetables. Then it was back home to study.

  The exam Friday matched another four chapters of Serene Master Aspen’s textbook. I’d already skimmed the earlier chapters as prep. A good hour before bedtime, I’d worked through the first chapter and started doing his worked problems, the problems with the detailed solutions in the back. Working problems is a totally terrible way to learn anything – your knowledge ends up being a patchwork cloth full of holes – but it is a wonderful way to check that you have learned what you read. First you work the problems that have solutions, without looking back in the book. Then you look in the back of the book at the worked solutions, and see what you did wrong. Some of Aspen’s solutions are baroque in their complexity. There seem to be much easier ways to get to the same answer. However, the strange solutions introduce really cool tools for problem-solving.

  ***

  I took my breakfasts in Standard Hall with the Army Houses’ recruits. Usually I sat with the folks from Violent House. These were mostly first- and second- year students, people like me. However, all the Army Houses had the same rule. If you tampered with your unaging spells before you moved into a House, that being year three, you were out, no longer a recruit. You’d given up on casting powerful spells. Breakfasting with guys (and more than a few gals) who were for sure not sizing you up for tampering with your unaging spells was a lot more fun than eating at the General Magic table. Also, they reacted with respect rather than covert smirks when they discovered I generally wore armor-enchanted clothing and carried a gnothdiar to satisfy my weapon requirement. Besides, I could get in line, take my tray, say ‘Army House Standard Breakfast’ and find it was a lot cheaper than eating elsewhere.

  “So, Adara,” Gwendolyn Norville asked across the Violent House breakfast table, “have you considered joining us for morning martial skills training?” The Army folks all did combat magic drills before breakfast.

  “A little early for me, thanks,” I answered. That was true, even if I was being polite. I can get up at half past dark, but I don’t like to. A bit before dawn is more my style, just before the sky changes color, made easier by the very long days, close to twenty-eight hours, of the Academy. Also, I’d joined them a few times. They did great warmups, but then they skipped the high-energy drills afterwards, spellcasting to power levels so high you felt your nerves were on fire. I did that on days we did not have classes.

  “But you’d get your second void node sooner,” she added.

  I bit my tongue. I’d done that a long time ago. Gramps Worrow’s training almost never killed anyone, but it for sure made you stronger. You kept reaching for more and more power, and after a while you gained another void node.

  “I’ll get another node, soon enough,” I answered. “How is your forging class doing? Better, I hope?” She’d been complaining about that, so I’d distracted her from her line of thought.

  Soon enough, breakfast was over. I marched off to my morning classes. The Perception class with Lab exercises would be straightforward. Metallurgy was fun. I was not at all looking forward to Serene Master Aspen and Diagrammatics. It is not true that Aspen kills students for asking stupid questions, but his glowers would kill a dragon. And I’d done something to annoy him. Nonetheless, Diagrammatics is a critical course for where I want to go, so off to Diagramatics I would be. Diagrammatics was my last class of the day.

  “Remember, the exam is this Eightday.” Serene Master Aspen gave us his usual unconvincing smile. “Please try to go beyond memorizing your homework solutions,” he added. “If you want to pass, anyhow.”

  Memorizing homework solutions, I thought, never works. How can anyone believe that? I suppose that approach is less dumb that the fellow student who had told me she was sure she was getting an A, because she’d worked each of the homework problems five times – not five different problems, the same problem five times – so she had to know everything she needed to know for the exam. At some point, I had asked her ‘why did you multiply by two there?’ The answer ‘because the Professor’s solution says so’ seemed inadequate. It was not ‘the area of the square is twice the area of the interior triangle’, and, surprise, she bombed on the exam, the course, and soon thereafter was rusticated.

  I walked up to him as he was packing his lecture notes, the notes into which he almost never looked. “You wanted to see me, Sir?” I asked.

  “Ah. Yes. Adara Triskittenion, second year student, major in Practical Magic, recently smashed to flinders an illegal golem,” he said.

  “Yes, sir,” I said. Where was he going with this? The golem was last year.

  “I thought I’d identified who was in each of the four homework ‘study’ groups.” He put a deep sneer into the word ‘study’. “I realized your answers didn’t match any of them, exce
pt sometimes there is only one path that takes you to the answer. Joining a study group is perfectly legal, and no secret, but which one is yours?”

  “None, sir,” I answered. “I almost made that mistake my freshman year, but my brothers had warned me it was a very bad idea. Other people do most of the work, and you don’t learn much of anything.”

  “You’re doing all the work yourself, then?” he asked. he looked doubtful.

  “And using the library,” I answered. “Though finding basic books on diagram magic is a bear. I’ve paid to copy a half-dozen, including yours.”

  He nodded politely. “That’s what we’d like all our students to do. Use the library. So few do. Where did you find that last solution?”

  “It’s Marchant’s development of triangle diagrams. I just rewrote it for squares,” I said. He gave me an odd look. “I had to start at the beginning, basic principles, but the process was the same.”

  Aspen nodded politely. “Very good. Carry on! Do well on Eightday.”

  “Yes, sir.” I had not done well on the first exam, and needed to make up lost ground. Doing poorly on a second exam would be very bad news. I dropped my carryall over one shoulder and headed back to my townhouse.

  It was a beautiful day. There was a pleasant, very gentle breeze, the air sweet as wine. Squirrels chittered in the trees. A lone sheep nibbled at the grass, pruning it short in preparation for the fall rainy season, its path dictated by a groundskeeper’s spell. I had two hours before dinner, time enough for a vigorous swim before I dug into homework and note-rewriting. I waved hello to friends. There came an odd breeze and shadow...

  Blackness.

  ***

  All at once, I was awake. It was pitch dark. No, I thought, your eyes are closed. I tried to open them. Nothing happened. My lids weren’t stuck together. Nothing moved. Time to get up. I tried to prop myself away from the pillow. I couldn’t move at all. OK, deep breath. I couldn’t. Was I breathing? Yes. I was breathing the shallow inhalations of deep sleep, my heart ticking over slowly. What was wrong with me?

  “Adara. Don’t try to move.” The words crossed my field of vision. “This is Grandpa Worrow’s kidnapping script.” OK, I’d forgotten that script, something he’d given me years ago, when I legally became a landheir. The script was mostly designed to deal with unmen. Every so often they managed to drug and kidnap someone. Whoever had kidnapped me had managed to trigger it.

  I relaxed. All at once, the script gave me awareness of what was happening. Someone had plastered me with wards to keep me unconscious and unable to use my magic. The script eventually put up a skin layer that mimicked my mind, so I appeared to be asleep. It also took complete control over my breathing, heartbeat, and all my muscles, so a medico scanning my body would report that I was unconscious. It recorded what happened to me...no, the script only triggered after I was out cold and in some sort of a box. Whoever moved me used good levitation spells; I didn’t feel myself being jostled. How long? The script didn’t have a clock. I might have been out for minutes or hours or days. My stomach said hours, a fair number of them. Unfortunately, there are a standard set of medical emergency spells for treating people who are unconscious; they transport food to your stomach and deal with other unpleasant issues. If my captors had used them, I could have been out cold for some time now.

  Occasionally there had been people moving near me, but they were scrupulous about not talking. There had been a door opening and closing. My sense of touch said I was lying on a quality sheet wearing more or less no clothing. My arms were stretched left and right, with something cold and smooth around each wrist, covering my void nodes. Shackles, enchanted. They were damping the nodes. More shackles covered my ankles and the nodes there. I tried listening, as hard as I could. I heard nothing. No one coughed or breathed or walked across the floor. I could feel a draft of chill air across my scalp. Enchanted bedsheets and a blanket were keeping me warm. Just as well, because I was wearing absolutely no clothing; I’d been stripped naked.

  Grandpa Worrow’s script kept my muscles from tensing, but the shadow of terror still crept across my thoughts. Unless I was really lucky, no one except my kidnappers knew where I was. At some point...soon...they would demand I do something, or use spells and torture to break my mind until I cooperated. Then, that being what happens in kidnaps, they would kill me and dispose of the body.

  The script recorded noises in the room. I listened to what it remembered. It sounded like two people coming into the room every so often, checking on me, then leaving and closing the door. The last time they’d done that was recently; I had a while to make my escape before they checked on me again.

  I’d never prepared for this sort of combat. I could feel their wards pressing against me. There were really heavy-duty spell dampers, shackles on my void nodes that would keep me from drawing on them, and a few spells that monitored my heartbeat and breathing. If I tried doing something active, those spells would trigger. I poked the script so I could risk opening my eyes. The place was dark, but not pitch-black. Light glowed around the top of a door. There had to be a faint night light in one corner. I saw no sign of anyone else in the room.

  The shackles were attached to chains leading to wooden four-by-four beams attached to the sides of my bed. The chains were attached to solid-looking bolts that appeared to pass all the way through the beams. The tops of the shackle plates didn’t look to be heavily warded. If I could touch them with my fingers...I know some contact spells that could deal with them, except I had no way to reach around and touch. The spell dampers hashed anything I might try to project, not that I could put any power into them, not to mention that they’d warn my guards if I tried anything. They were also visibly set to try to scramble any spell pattern I started to set up around me, before I could set it completely. I’d need to summon a spell, exactly, all at once.

  Sometimes, Grandpa Worrow had taught, patience was the best solution. Right now, patience was the wrong answer. I had to escape before they got around to torturing me. What I needed was a spell that would release one of my hands. It had to be truly low power, something that did not vaguely resemble a combat spell, so it wouldn’t bother their spell dampers. ‘Really low power’ and ‘escape’ didn’t appear to match very well.

  I tried very hard to think. That’s never been my strong point. Some people do that, I’m told. They work their way through a problem step by step to a solution. For me, when I’m doing homework, sketches of answers just appear from nowhere. I started considering the spells I knew. Almost all of them would be damped before I could finish setting them. Finally, I saw the unobvious. The posts holding my chains were wood. The least disturbance I could set was a spell for summoning cardboard out of wood. That spell left in the paper everything that had been present in the original wood. You didn’t even put power into that spell. If you did it right, exactly no power was required. Once I transformed a slice of beam to sheets of paper, the beam would be cut in two.

  I readied the spell. Then I saw the mistake I had almost made. I needed to make a vertical slice. A horizontal slice would cut the beam in two, meaning that when I cut the beam the top half would fall, loudly, to the floor. Ever so gently, I began to turn a slice of the beam linked to my right hand into cardboard. I had to make haste. If I were caught now, I couldn’t defend myself.

  I felt the chain begin to sag and pulled, hard.

  The chain and the heavy bolt that had been driven through the beam landed on my sheet. At a touch, the spells locking my shackles fell away. My hands were free. Leg irons and a collar I hadn’t noticed lasted a few more instants.

  I summoned all my void nodes, hard as I could. The wards they’d put on me were wavering. Grandpa Worrow’s little trick had its limits, which I was breaking. Very soon the guards would hear alarms going off.

  Now what? Sloping ceiling beams and cold air from above showed I was under an outer roof, someplace where the season was not spring. The roof was massively warded, as was the outside wall of
the room. Blasting through that looked to be a major project, not something I could do in a few moments. Someone had spent a great deal of time warding the room’s door.

  Gate out? There were wards blocking shallow gates to the Purple Sea. A Deep Gate? Gramps had warned me. That was a total desperation move, and I was not yet totally desperate.

  Trying to move soundlessly, I slid from under the sheets. They’d taken every fragment of my clothing. I spotted my boots under the eaves. Someone looked to have forgotten them. I took a few moments to slip my feet into them. Once I escaped, outside, cold, naked, well, that’s why there are weather spells, but running in bare feet with people chasing you was not a great idea.

  How could I get out? At a guess, the attic had a central corridor, with rooms to each side. There were doubtless guards beyond the door. One of me versus two adults, probably combat trained and with spellcasters, was a losing proposition.

  I had to do something else.

  The partitions between those rooms looked flimsy. They weren’t warded, either.

  I needed to distract pursuers. I faced perpendicular to the corridor and put up hard shields. Screeches in the distance were alarms. Something had finally noticed I was free. My blasting spell took down the partition behind me. A second, third, and fourth blasting spell, each louder than the last, took down the next three partitions, farther and farther back. I heard no screams; those rooms had been empty. Combat spells at the ready, I used a much quieter cutting spell to open a modest gap into the room in front of me.

  The next room was a dump for old furniture. Its door was unwarded. I dissolved the door latch, enough it would appear to have rusted shut. Then I dodged around the furniture to cut through to the next room. I slipped through and sent fireballs back to where I’d been imprisoned. My bed, stack of cardboard, floor and walls started burning, vigorously. A shove largely closed the gap I’d opened. I’d set a false trail with the blasting spells. Anyone guessing I’d come this way would first find a rapidly spreading house fire.