Emily nodded, watching as he went through the cabinets one by one. The librarians she’d known—all the librarians she’d known—had been obsessed with keeping order. They had no choice. The slightest mistake could cause all sorts of problems, particularly when it snowballed out of control. They had to know where the books were going and when they were supposed to be returned. But this librarian had stopped keeping records, which meant... what? Had the library been closed? Or had they been busy elsewhere?
And a librarian who worked here would be a very competent magician, Emily reminded herself. Lady Aliya of Whitehall was no slouch. Emily had seriously considered asking Whitehall’s librarian for an apprenticeship, once upon a time. She might be needed elsewhere if an army was marching on the gates.
“Hah.” Jayson snapped open another cabinet, ignoring the scars that appeared on his hands. “Come and look at this, carefully.”
Emily leaned forward as he pulled out a large scroll. Magic crackled around his fingertips, trying to hex him into... something. Jayson countered the spells, muttering countercharms under his breath as he carried the scroll back into the main room and placed it on the librarian's desk. There were nearly a dozen spells on the parchment needing to be removed before it could be opened. Emily was morbidly impressed. Whoever had written the parchment really didn’t want unfriendly eyes to see it.
“A couple of the spells are already outdated,” Jayson commented, as he unfurled the parchment. “The readers found ways to counter them, five years ago. Whoever ran this library wouldn’t know it, of course.”
“They would have died before the charms were countered,” Emily agreed. “What were they hiding?”
She frowned as she studied the giant parchment. It was a diagram of the school, starting with the ground level and proceeding all the way up to the tallest spire. It didn’t show the nexus point chamber, or the catacombs under the school. And... her frown deepened as she tried to parse the notation. Someone had been scribbling notes on the parchment, in a language she didn’t recognize. There was a strange logic to it, something that nagged at her mind, but... she couldn’t work out what they were trying to say. What was it?
“That must be the library here,” Jayson said. He looked around, puzzled. “But it says the chamber is larger than it is.”
“It may not be drawn to scale.” Emily looked over his shoulder. The Great Hall looked smaller than the Schoolmaster’s office, even though she knew for a fact that wasn’t remotely true. “This could be just a rough map of the school, rather than...”
“Maybe.” Jayson didn’t sound convinced. “But they’ve been really careless, if so.”
He met her eyes. “And why would they try to hide it?”
Emily studied the map for a long moment. There were no secret passageways, not even servant corridors... she didn’t believe for a second they weren’t there. Magic schools always had secret passageways, hidden chambers that students could discover... it encouraged, she’d been told, the development of inquisitive minds. And even if there were no outright secret passageways, there would be servant corridors. It wouldn’t do for the servants to share corridors with the students. That would never do.
“I don’t know.” Emily shook her head, slowly. There were people who would happily classify everything, just to assert their power, but it had always struck her as a little pointless. Unless, of course, the object was to doubly hide anything important by burying it under a mountain of irrelevant nonsense. “What did they have to hide? None of this is remotely secret.”
“Maybe.” Jayson tapped the map. “Or maybe we’re missing something.”
“It could have been confiscated from one of the students,” Emily mused. She didn’t believe it. The parchment was too expensive—and the drawing too professional—to belong to a student. “But...”
“I don’t recognize the language either,” Jayson added. “Would you mind if I made a copy and sent it to my father? He might have better luck.”
“Please.” Emily couldn’t think of any reasonable objection, beyond a vague concern about what the unreadable words might say. “If we can figure out what the language actually is, we can start deciphering the rest of it.”
“They wanted to hide something,” Jayson said. “And the fact they were trying to hide this map tells us something too.”
“Yes,” Emily said. The map had to be important. The mere fact that it had been locked away, after being heavily charmed, was proof it was important. But how? “See if you can sketch out a couple of copies of the map too.”
“Yes, My Lady.” Jayson grinned at her. “Do you want me to do that? Or keep looking for more books?”
“Both,” Emily said. She considered, briefly. “Look for books first—anything to do with mirror magic, or Heart’s Eye itself. Whatever you find, put it aside for me. Don’t let anyone else into the library, even other magicians...”
“As you wish,” Jayson said. He let out a long breath. “I’m going to need to recruit help, eventually. Magical help.”
Emily nodded, sourly. “Perhaps we can hire students from Whitehall or Mountaintop,,” she said, although she knew it would be chancy. They’d have to learn how to remove dangerous hexes... if they didn’t know already. That wouldn’t make them popular with the local librarians. Gordian wouldn’t be pleased either. “Or perhaps someone from another library.”
“We can try.” Jayson grinned. “Some of them will see it as a challenge. Others... well, we don’t want them anyway.”
“No,” Emily agreed. She wanted librarians who loved their job. Thankfully, very few people studied library magic unless they intended to go into the field. “We certainly don’t.”
Chapter Nine
“I THINK THIS WILL BE YOUR bedroom,” Hoban said, later in the day. “If, of course, we can get the door open.”
Emily frowned. Hoban stood in front of a wooden door, his wand touching the wood as he cast a series of complex detection and curse-removal charms. Frieda leaned against the wall some distance away, watching him warily. There were scorch marks on her shirt and trousers, a grim reminder that some of the traps were nasty. Emily hoped she was all right. Frieda had so much experience with pain—physical and mental—that she wouldn’t complain, let alone seek help, unless it was serious.
“This is meant to be the Schoolmaster’s bedroom,” Hoban continued. A green light flared over the door, then faded as he muttered a countercharm. “His body might be inside.”
There was a flash of light. The door fell off its hinges and crashed to the ground. “Oops.”
Emily had to smile. “Oops?”
“There was magic wrapped up in the hinges,” Hoban explained. “I accidentally cancelled those charms as well as the protective spells.”
“No worries,” Emily said, as he led the way into the bedroom. “I don’t have to sleep here.”
“It’s a status thing,” Hoban commented. “The biggest bedroom goes to the most powerful person in the school.”
Emily shrugged. “Mistress Irene will have it, then,” she said. “When she comes.”
Hoban looked up at her, his face suddenly serious. “You have to make a good showing, whatever you feel inside. If you don’t take the biggest room, people will start wondering why... and you won’t like some of their answers. Better to leave the room empty when you’re not here, rather than let people start thinking that Mistress Irene outranks you.”
“I’ll discuss it with her,” Emily said, stiffly.
She looked around the room with interest. It was smaller than she’d expected, although quite respectable compared to the student bedrooms in Whitehall. A large wooden bed sat in one corner, sheets and mattress long since dust. Mirrors hung from three of the four walls; the fourth, not entirely to her surprise, was covered in bookshelves. She felt a flash of hope, which faded as she realized that only one of the shelves held books. The remainder were crammed with trinkets and devices she didn’t recognize.
Frieda chanted spells
to remove the dust as Emily, feeling vaguely guilty for prying, peered into the bathroom. The Schoolmaster had a private bath as well as a shower, a luxury beyond words for the vast majority of the population. There was no sign of anything personal in the room, just another pair of mirrors. Emily saw her reflection and frowned. The reflection frowned back. She looked worse than she felt.
She tested the taps, more out of optimism than any hope they’d actually work. Nothing happened, not even a dribble of water. She wondered, as she automatically turned the taps back off, just where the water had actually come from. An underground reservoir? There weren’t any rivers close to Heart’s Eye, according to the maps. There hadn’t been any rivers anywhere near even before the desert had overwhelmed the region. She made a mental note to check before they ran short of water. The school would be untenable if they had to transport water hundreds of miles just to keep themselves alive.
Although we could set up a water tank, she mused. They could ship in enough water to live, if they used magic to purify it after every use. And perhaps a reservoir.
“We’re going to have to find the source of water,” she said, as she walked back into the bedroom. “It must have come from somewhere.”
“Probably an underground lake,” Hoban said, echoing her thoughts. “That’s what they do at Stronghold. Too many enemies who might try to cut the school off from the rivers.”
Emily gave him a sidelong look. “You went to Stronghold?”
“I was never interested in a military career,” Hoban said. He gave her a twisted smile. “But I learnt a great deal there, starting with the fact I wasn’t interested in a military career.”
“I bet some of the training comes in handy,” Emily said. Hoban wasn’t her cup of tea, but he was still handsome... in a rugged kind of way. Frieda was lucky. Hoban would probably have no trouble keeping up with her. “How much of it do you use?”
“Dismantling traps was part of my training,” Hoban said. “And running for my life, when something went wrong. I once had to jump out of a window because someone had rigged an entire house to blow up when I cut the wrong wardline.”
“Ouch,” Emily said.
She looked around the room. “I won’t be sleeping here tonight,” she said. “I’ll bed down in the dorms.”
“We’ll have to find a new mattress,” Hoban agreed.
“I’ll make a note of it.” Frieda took a notebook from her pocket and suited action to words. “We’ll have to bring them in from somewhere.”
“Once we set up a portal, we can bring in anything we want.” Hoban winked at her. “And go anywhere, too.”
“I wish that were true,” Emily said. She’d seen the equations. In theory, portals could be expanded to any size. In practice, the power demands rapidly became impossible to surmount. It would be difficult to channel enough power from the nexus point without overloading the containment spells and destroying the portal spellware. “But we can bring in most of what we need, once we get organized.”
She quickly inspected the books, frowning in displeasure once she realized they were just old textbooks and a couple of manuscripts. Perhaps they’d belonged to Edmund, back when he’d been a schoolboy. They would have been outdated forty years ago. Or maybe he’d been studying them for purposes of his own. She’d learnt the hard way that some of the older books included information that wasn’t offered in modern textbooks. She had no idea why.
I’ll have to go through them later, she thought. She was starting to wonder if the necromancer had stripped the school of useful tomes, although the library was such a mess that it was impossible to be sure. There might be something hidden I can use.
“We’d better go down,” she said. Her stomach rumbled, reminding her she hadn’t eaten in hours. “We need to eat.”
“Good idea.” Hoban grinned. “I must say, all this hunger does give one an appetite.”
Emily smiled at the weak joke, then turned to lead the way back down the stairs. Master Highland seemed to have claimed a smaller bedroom for himself, judging by the way he was steadily dismantling the protective wards. It looked as through all the rooms had been sealed from the inside, but... there were no bodies. Emily slowly shook her head. It was possible, she supposed, that the bodies had turned to dust, but it didn’t seem likely. They should have found skeletons, if nothing else. The necromancer hadn’t even opened half the bedrooms.
Master Highland joined her as they walked downstairs. “You’ll be taking the master bedroom?”
“Tonight, I’ll be sleeping in the dorms,” Emily said. She knew what he’d think of that, but she didn’t care. “I want to give all the private rooms a thorough inspection before we start handing them out like candy.”
And we might be better off staying together, she added, privately. They were in no danger, as far as she could tell, but she felt uneasy at the thought of being alone. If someone goes wandering off, we might never find them until it’s too late.
The dining hall reminded her of Whitehall’s, although it was considerably smaller. The students had eaten in shifts, she guessed, rather than sharing a single large dinner. A couple of apprentices were bent over a fire, stirring a giant cauldron of stew; Yvonne was standing behind them, issuing orders. Emily was surprised she could cook, although she knew she shouldn’t be. Yvonne’s mother would have taught Yvonne before Yvonne rebelled against her gender—and the expectations society placed on her—and became a craftswoman. She was probably a better cook than Emily. She could hardly be worse.
Yvonne looked up as they entered. “It’s ready, more or less,” she said. “Can we leave the fire going overnight?”
“For Constant Stew?” Emily tried to hide her grimace. Constant Stew was economical and very healthy, but it quickly started to taste foul . “Yes, if you like. Just check that the flames can’t go any further.”
“Yes, My Lady.” Yvonne managed to give the impression of being sarcastic, without actually saying anything Emily could reasonably find offensive. “I’ll see to it personally.”
“We’re going to need proper cooks,” Master Highland said. “And an entire staff to see to our needs.”
“They’ll have to be hired, once we clear the school of traps,” Emily said. She carefully tested the wooden chairs, then decided she was better off sitting on the floor. Some of the chairs felt flimsy, as if they’d break under her weight. “Put together a list. We can start making inquiries once we’re ready to go.”
Yvonne stepped through the door, carrying a giant pot. “Ready to eat?”
Emily’s stomach rumbled. “Yes, please.”
“It smells... funny.” Master Highland sounded concerned. “What is it?”
“It’s an old family recipe,” Yvonne said. “The ingredients are a secret.”
“Really?” Master Highland glared at her. “And why, precisely, is it a secret?”
Yvonne gave him a sweet smile as she started to ladle the stew into bowls. “Why, they all died when the stew was first served. Eat up?”
Emily had to smile. “I’m sure it will be fine,” she said. The smell was better than she’d expected. “And we have to go to bed immediately afterwards.”
“We also have to set up a bathroom,” Yvonne said. “We can’t keep using buckets.”
“No,” Emily agreed. She glanced at Master Highland. “We’ll have to fix the plumbing. And find where the water came from, originally.”
“Good question,” Master Highland said. “I never thought about it.”
“Well, of course.” Yvonne sounded amused as she took a bowl for herself and sat on the blanket. “The water has to come from somewhere, doesn’t it?”
“You can inspect the plumbing tomorrow,” Emily said, hastily. “Do you have any other concerns?”
“Not as yet.” Yvonne shrugged. “I dare say we’ll have plenty of concerns tomorrow.”
Emily nodded and started to eat. The chicken stew—with potatoes, vegetables and spices—tasted better than she’d expected to
o, but it wouldn’t be long before it started dissolving into mush. Constant Stew became soup, eventually. She reminded herself, sharply, that she should be glad to have it. There were beggars in the streets who would sell themselves into slavery for one solid meal a day.
“Just keep yourself and your apprentices out of trouble,” Master Highland grunted. “We don’t want anyone getting hurt.”
“My apprentices know to be careful,” Yvonne said. Her face twisted in irritation. “Do yours?”
“Yes,” Master Highland said, flatly. “They also sense magic before they actually run into it.”
Emily tuned out the discussion as she finished her stew and stood. “I’ll be going to the dorms now,” she said, nodding to Frieda. “Don’t go wandering the school after dark.”
“That’s quite late here,” Master Highland observed. He waved a hand around the windowless room. “And how could you tell, anyway?”
“See you tomorrow,” Emily said. She hoped Yvonne would have the sense to go back to the dorm herself, before the lights started going out, but... as long as she was with a magician, she should be fine. She just hoped the constant sniping between Yvonne and Master Highland wouldn’t get out of hand. “We can start opening up the workshops after breakfast.”
Frieda followed Emily as she headed to the stairs. “We opened two of the dorms and checked them, thoroughly,” she said. “They should be safe enough.”
“One for the girls and one for the boys, then,” Emily said. “It won’t be fun, but we’ll survive.”
“Somehow.” Frieda looked downcast. “Did you bring any potion? I mean...”
Emily could guess. “The rest of my supply is in my trunk,” she said. She wasn’t sure where it had gone, in all the confusion. It was probably still in the Great Hall, if someone hadn’t carried it up to the dorms. “You’ll have to start buying your own. Or get him to buy it for you.”
“I can make it,” Frieda said. “All I need are the right ingredients.”
“You’ll have to order them,” Emily warned. She touched Frieda’s hand, gently. “Be careful, alright?”
Mirror Image (Schooled in Magic Book 18) Page 9