Fantastic Schools, Volume 3

by Emily Martha Sorensen

  “You took out an entire wall of a House Hall?” Gudmundson challenged. “One of the most heavily fortified barriers in the Commonality?”

  “It appeared to me that it took itself down,” I answered. “It exploded through ward failure. In fact, I saw it do that.”

  “You attacked Fourbridge Hall!” Gudmundson accused.

  “I escaped from Fourbridge Hall, incidentally removing a few minor obstacles from my path and using standard methods to obscure my trail,” I answered.

  “Standard methods?” Gudmundson grumbled.

  “Standard methods,” I answered. “As discussed in Worrow’s Series On Combat, in particular pyrotechnics, explosions, and back fires. Notably the back fire that torched a big dining room.” I smiled at Gramps.

  He grinned like the mythical invisible cat. If Gudmundson didn’t know Augustus Primus Worrow was my grandfather, standing a few feet from him, I felt no need to tell him.

  “Overcaptain?” Heath intruded into the conversation. Gudmundson turned to face him. “While I need to research the details, I believe that I need to register a House Feud, or perhaps a House War, between House Fourbridge and perhaps its clients, and on the other side House Triskittenion and perhaps its clients.”

  “Is this necessary?” Gudmundson asked. “Registered Feuds or worse can be unfortunate.”

  “I’m not sure it is necessary,” Heath answered. He was interrupted by another especially loud eruption from Fourbridge Hall. “However, my memory says that failing to notify the Order of the Axe about a potential feud, as soon as possible, is at least severely deprecated.”

  “Of course it’s necessary,” Grandpa Worrow interrupted. “That pile of abominations--” he pointed at the pyre that had been Fourbridge Hall, “--assaulted my grand-daughter on her first day at the Academy, tried three times to murder her, once with a stolen illegal Class Four golem on which I have yet to hear of the legally-mandated summary executions, kidnapped and raped her,..and I could go on. My dear grand-daughter is Heir-Third to Triskittenion. The responsible party is the Fourbridge land-heir. This events manifestly constitute an undeclared House War, on which as a Master Combatant and Commander of our House Militia I request the intervention of the Order of the Axe. I believe you get to start by summoning a Peace Inquiry.”

  Gudmundson looked wild-eyed.

  “Apologies,” he said, “but I definitely need to consult with the Order’s Council of Chancellors. I’ve heard of intervention requests, but only as a historical note, and don’t know what the rules are.”

  “There’s a time limit,” Grandpa said. “A short limit.”

  “And if the rules so provide, I agree that your timing spell has begun its chant,” Gudmundson answered.

  “Perfectly fair,” Grandpa said. “And if the Chancellors give you a ruling within a day, the chant may legally begin then.”

  Gudmundson scrambled for the stairs.

  “What day is today?” I asked. “I was out cold for a while.”

  “It’s Oneday,” Heath said. “You were out for most of three days.”

  My heart almost stopped. I’d been angry before. Now I was terrified.

  “Oh, no!” I shouted. “I missed the Diagrams II exam! Professor Aspen never gives make-up exams!” Suddenly I had to sit down. I was shaking.

  “Horatio Aspen?” Heath asked.

  I nodded.

  “The bastard gave me a C because I misunderstood two of his questions. He never gives make-ups.”

  “A bit of a difficulty here,” Gramps said. “Perhaps I should chat up Chancellor Everbright. Long-time friend of my family, she is. I mean, if Dorrance penalizes you for getting kidnapped, that would make them a co-belligerent in the House War we look to be having.”

  “Gramps,” I managed, “I think maybe I’d better ask him myself, first. Today. Now. He did say he’d let us off if we had truly unique excuses, and since he’d only been teaching for twenty thousand years he was sure there were some still out there.”

  Heath looked at a wall chart. “It’s not yet sun-up at Dorrance,” he said. “To be there at the tenth hour, that’s the standard first office hour ...You have five hours yet.”

  “Adara, dear,” Gramps asked, “Are you up to a double shield?” I nodded affirmatively. “We’ll deep-gate back to Triskittenion house, feed you properly, then advance to your dorm so soon as I round up some more friends.”

  ***

  Not quite at the tenth hour, I marched over to Proscenium Hall. Gramps’ friends were bodyguards, people from a half-dozen Outremer houses, fully armed and armored. They wanted to be sure I was safe. My own wards were full up. We were followed at a distance by a half-dozen lictors, also heavily armed.

  I still wanted to know how someone had circumvented my wards, the Academy Wards, and the Academy blocks against gating on campus. All that had to wait until I negotiated with the Serene Master on replacing the exam. That was clearly more important. I had to do that myself. My heart was pounding. Aspen had a well-deserved reputation for being more than a bit crusty. I could ask for the makeup exam, but he was going to chew my head off.

  My bodyguards stopped a polite distance from his office door. I damped my wards, told myself not to be afraid, and marched to the door.

  “Ah, Miss Triskittenion.” Serene Master Aspen glowered at me as though I were a particularly vile species of mud-dwelling worm. “You missed your examination.” He drew out each syllable. “You get to propose a reason why you should be allowed a make-up exam. That has been done successfully before, most recently a little more than two thousand years ago. That time there was an escaped hrordrin. So, propose!”

  “I was stunned, kidnapped, raped, and managed to escape. My escape was based on diagram magic,” I said.

  “Entirely on diagram magic?” he asked. “We’ll get to escaped and kidnapped later, for which I need some evidence.”

  “Well, not entirely,” I said sheepishly. “The walls and windows I blew out were just power blasts. But I was in a real hurry.”

  “So tell me what you did with diagram magic to escape?” He tried to make his question sound interesting.

  “First,...” and I described being chained to the bed. “So I set an exact zero-draw diagram to pull a cut through in the wood.”

  “Hmm. Sugar and carbon black?” He actually sounded interested.

  “Umm...oh, I see how that works!” I exclaimed. “I didn’t think of that choice. No. I was much less clever. Cardboard, a spell I’ve been casting for a decade.”

  “Practice is good! Oh, your House is the papermakers. Making paper is what you do. Definitely the right decision!” he remarked. “I gather it worked.” I nodded. “And then?”

  “Ran quickly. Set distractions and backfires. I blew out a window, and set a room on fire behind me to end pursuit.” I put up a trio of images.

  “You torched someone’s Greater Ceremonial Hall?” he said. “Someone is going to be annoyed. The flame diagram, lots of power? Excellent! You saw the secondaries? Superb!”

  “Then I landed in a garden, with a heavily reinforced outer wall.” I put up another image.

  “I take it there was no open door?” he asked.

  “No. And I heard guards closing on me.”

  “So you took out the guards, then went to work on the wall?” he asked. “Actually, there was a choice of walls.”

  “No. I was running. Stop to fight means other people get to arrive and pile on you.”

  He smiled.

  “So I set the tetrachrome analytic diagrams. The outcome was a bit fuzzy; I was pushing them through my wards.” I put up one more image, what I remembered of what I saw.

  Aspen nodded approvingly. “You tell me what’s in that image.”

  “More layers of spells than I could resolve. Points where things were not set right, and power was leaking.” I marked several of those. “Then there were control structures, more than I could trace quickly. So I hit the ones that were leaking! Hard! Including this strange
thing that I didn’t recognize or see completely, except it seemed to be a control that was leaking badly.”

  “Vehalno surge disperser,” Aspen said. “They’re exotic. I’d have been impressed – unless your House defenses have one – if you recognized it.”

  “If that failed, I’d see if more stuff started leaking, or try brute force against the ground in front of the wall. Some wards take poorly to stuff being driven into them at high speed.”

  “Very sound. And?” Aspen asked.

  “It got very bright all at once. There was no wall, just broken rock. I ran for it,” I said.

  “Did you try analyzing, later, what else was in the wall?” he asked.

  “I will,” I said. “I stored my memories so I can later. I’ve been a bit busy being questioned and checked medically. I still need to reassure relatives I wasn’t seriously hurt.”

  “Questioned?” Aspen asked.

  “The Capital Order of the Axe OverCaptain. People from my Family Council. Representatives of the Outremer Council. Others,” I ended.

  “Capital? Oh, wait, you didn’t mention. Where were you claiming you were held prisoner?” he asked.

  “Capital,” I answered. I pulled from my carryall a copy of the Capital Intelligencer. EXTRA! it read on top. “Fourbridge Hall destroyed.” Someone had captured an image of the central spire on its way down. “In there. Their wards weren’t well isolated, so the building explodiated itself.” The headlines went on. “Triskittenion Heir kidnapped! No trace of her location!”

  Aspen spent a couple minutes reading the newspaper. “The Order of the Axe believed you?” he eventually asked. He was now using his normal tone of voice, not his ‘you are a living proof of the existence of negative IQ’ voice.

  “When I finished escaping, I was wearing a pair of boots,” I said. “And a bathrobe I borrowed on the way out, a robe with an identity tag, proving it recently came from there. Rape Third is stripped naked and no more. If need be OverCaptain Gudmundson will testify that I had been stripped.”

  “Definitely a truly unique excuse,” he announced. “Write up a complete analysis of their wall wards, as much as you remember, no fair asking for help, and I’ll take that as the analysis section of the exam. Your use of the tetrachrome scan shows you understood the recent part of the course. Your path in your homework solutions to solving the square diagram problems was truly clever, enough to prove you are actually understanding the material. If you do the analysis properly, you will get an Excellent on the exam.”

  Excellent is the grade above A, a grade rarely given. He pointed me at the door. I stood and backed out of the room. I had feared I was bearding the dragon in its den, but he once he discovered I actually had a unique excuse he was entirely friendly.

  George Phillies is Professor Emeritus of Physics (“I retired to write full time. So far, so good,” he says) and retired politician (on the ballot for US Federal office twice), He lives in Worcester, Massachusetts, with his cat, the world's largest board wargame collection, and large flower gardens. He is also President of the National Fantasy Fan Federation, the world’s oldest international SF club and President of AHIKS, the world's oldest and largest intercontinental board wargaming society, He edits four SF fanzines, namely Eldritch Science (fiction), Tightbeam (reviews, all genres), The National Fantasy Fan (club news zine), and The N3F Review of Books Incorporating Prose Bono,

  Phillies has to his credit seven SF novels, namely This Shining Sea (tween superheroine), Minutegirls (politics and giant space battles), The One World (Amazon swords against Conquistador matchlocks), Mistress of the Waves (economics), Against Three Lands (not-quite-medieval Japan against not-quite-Europeans), The Girl Who Saved The World (tween superheroine), and Airy Castles All Ablaze (more of the tween superheroine), five textbooks on board game design, four books on political campaign finance, a statistical mechanics textbook, the definitive monograph on polymer solution dynamics, and more than 170 scientific research papers, most on light scattering spectroscopy and polymer dynamics.

  The School for High Fliers

  By Rhys Hughes

  I love detective stories and occult stories, and I have long wanted to write a series of stories about an incompetent occult detective. Clumsy Carnacki is the son of a successful occult detective and feels compelled to match his father's achievements, but the truth is that he should have chosen a different line of work. “The School for High Fliers” is his first adventure to be accepted for publication. I have written a few others but they haven't seen print yet, and I am planning more. Of course, the fact he is incompetent at his profession doesn't mean he is an inadequate person. Clumsy seems a rather lovable character to me, and I hope this is the way he will come across to readers.

  The School for High Fliers

  Clumsy Carnacki was an amateur detective who tried to solve cases that involved ghosts and monsters and demons, but he wasn’t very good at it. Most of the ghosts got away, the monsters, too, and the demons weren’t even aware that any attempt had been made to ‘solve’ them. But Clumsy persisted. His father had been a superb occult sleuth, rather famous in his day, and Clumsy wanted to be just like him.

  It was a lost cause, but he never gave up. It was the only thing he truly enjoyed. And one evening, as he was returning from a failed effort to put an imp back into a bottle, a shudder ran through him. He stood aside to let the other shudders continue their run without obstruction, and he knew instinctively it was going to be a long night. The shudders were invisible and silent, but he imagined he heard them laughing at him. Depressed, he continued to his house and opened the door.

  The moment he stepped over the threshold, he felt that something odd was happening. The rug in his hallway was a tattered thing he had bought in a market on holiday many years ago.

  So why did it feel so soft and luxurious beneath his feet?

  He stood on it and wondered.

  Then he stepped off it and crouched to inspect it more closely. It was much thicker than he remembered. It had turned into a higher quality rug in his absence. This was most curious!

  Yet as he extended a finger to prod it, he was astonished when it lifted itself off the floor and floated out the open door. He stumbled after it, but it was already ascending out of reach.

  He stood for a few moments with his mouth agape.

  Not only was the rug thicker and softer than it should be, but now he saw that the pattern on the underside had changed. Instead of the abstract swirls of faded colour, there was the outline of a strange bird, majestic and beautiful and also somewhat imposing.

  Clumsy took a deep breath and reminded himself of his calling in life. This was another chance to solve a supernatural mystery and prove that he was almost as great as his father had been.

  He hurried to the shed where he kept his bicycle, unlocked it, wheeled it out, mounted the saddle, and began peddling as fast as he could after the flying rug. The streets were very quiet at this late hour, and there was little traffic. He made good progress. The rug was floating serenely through the air and seemed in no particular rush.

  “It’s not aware that I’m following it,” Clumsy said to himself, and he took care not to give himself away by ringing his bell or pulling too hard on the squeaky brakes. The moon rose, and the rug was illuminated more clearly. It looked just like a big crimson bird that flew without flapping its wings. There was something mysterious about the twinkle in the eyes, and this was especially odd because it wasn’t a real bird, only a picture made from threads. Clumsy panted with effort.

  He wasn’t an especially fit person, but, luckily, his route was flat. At a junction, he almost collided with another cyclist. Both riders swerved and braked sharply and growled in annoyance.

  Then Clumsy blinked and cried, “Bounder!”

  “Yes, I am,” came the reply.

  Bounder was one of Clumsy’s friends. They both frequented a special club where supernatural matters would be discussed for hours, and all the members would take turns tel
ling ghost stories that were true. “What are you cycling the streets at night for?”

  “I was chasing a carpet,” answered Bounder.

  “That’s a coincidence!”

  Bounder explained, “My rug suddenly decided to fly out of a window, and I resolved to follow it. But it went too fast, and I lost it. I was thinking about turning back when I caught sight of it again. There it is! Sorry, but I must chase after it. Goodbye!”

  “Wait a moment,” said Clumsy, spluttering in dismay. “That’s my rug up there, not yours. It flew out my door. I am chasing it, and I was doing a good job of keeping up with it, too.”

  “But it’s getting away,” replied Bounder.

  “Yes it is. Come on!”

  Clumsy started pedalling again with Bounder right behind him. It was lucky for both of them that they didn’t have too far to go. The carpet flew over a high wall and began to descend.

  “Look! It’s landing in the grounds of that building.”

  They stopped next to the wall.

  “What is this place?” Clumsy wondered.

  “I have no idea,” said Bounder before frowning and adding, “But why do you say the rug is yours and not mine? Is it possible that two rugs both flew off on the same night?”

  “That’s the only logical explanation.”

  “What can it mean?”

  Clumsy shrugged and leaned his bicycle against the wall. He walked alongside the wall looking for a gate or some other means of entry, and his friend followed him. There were no streetlamps here, and it was very dark despite the moon. It was a deserted spot in an area of the city that neither Clumsy nor Bounder had visited before.

  The wall formed a vast square around whatever was inside. The bricks were too smooth to climb, and there was no gate or door anywhere. The friends made nearly a full circuit of the square before they suddenly came across a rickety wooden ladder leaning against the wall. A man was in the act of climbing the rungs to the top.