Wundersmith, The Calling of Morrigan Crow

by Jessica Townsend

  Morrigan didn’t. She wasn’t sure what Ms. Dearborn meant by make yourselves useful. But in that moment, she would rather have put her hand into a tank full of flesh-eating piranhas than ask for an explanation, so she murmured along with the rest of them, “Yes, Scholar Mistress.”

  “Very convincing.” And with that, Dearborn turned on her heel and headed straight for the grand entrance of Proudfoot House, evidently expecting them to follow. “Our academic schedule follows the calendar year and is broken into two terms, the first beginning in spring and the second in autumn. During the summer holidays you are expected…”

  They trooped up the steps as the lecture droned on, and Hawthorne leaned over to Morrigan, “Lovely speech,” he whispered in her ear. “I feel all warm and fuzzy inside.”

  Their first lesson was to discover that deep beneath the five bright, elegant stories of Proudfoot House, the true halls of Wunsoc were dark and labyrinthine, and never-ending.

  “There are nine subterranean levels,” said Ms. Dearborn, leading them from the entrance hall down a long, echoing hallway. Her voice was brittle and businesslike, her shiny black heels loud against the wooden floorboards. Morrigan, Hawthorne, and the rest of the unit had to walk twice as fast as usual just to keep up with her.

  “Level Sub-One is dedicated primarily to dining, sleeping, and recreational facilities for academic staff and visiting adult Society members. Off-limits to you. On Sub-Two you will find the dining hall for junior and senior scholars, the Commissariat, and boarding rooms for senior scholars, who may live on campus if they wish.”

  A whirlwind tour of Sub-Two gave Morrigan a passing impression of daily life at Wunsoc. The scholars’ dining hall was a busy circular space with a comfortable, lived-in air, filled with a random collection of tables and chairs. At one end, small café-style wrought iron tables jostled for space with chipped, paint-specked rectangular slabs of wood and mismatched stools, while at the other well-worn armchairs were dotted around an enormous hearth.

  A few of the tables were occupied by senior scholars eating breakfast, reading the morning papers, and talking over shared pots of tea. Morrigan almost had to hold Hawthorne back when he caught a whiff of bacon.

  “I haven’t even had breakfast yet! Can you imagine?” he whispered to her, scandalized. “Went through the stupid door before I thought of it, didn’t I?”

  “Mmm.” Morrigan wasn’t really listening. She thought she could sense an urgency in the senior scholars’ murmured chatter, and wondered if they were discussing the disappearance of Paximus Luck. Ms. Dearborn led them through the dining room and out the other side to a bank of large brass spheres hanging from a rail, then whirled around to face them.

  “Our internal railpod network travels in all directions across all subterranean levels,” she said in a bored, almost mechanical voice. “These pods will take you anywhere in Wunsoc, so long as you have permission to be there, as well as to selected Wunderground stations outside the campus. Junior scholars are only to travel off-campus with explicit permission from a Scholar Mistress or their patron. Your imprint knows where you’re allowed to go. Strict maximum of one dozen passengers per pod.

  “Levels Sub-Three, Sub-Four, and Sub-Five comprise educational facilities for the School of Mundane Arts. Levels Sub-Six, Sub-Seven, and Sub-Eight are dedicated to the School of Arcane Arts. Sub-Nine is out of bounds to all scholars.

  “The seven of you who fall under my dominion as Mundane Scholar Mistress will obviously have no need to venture beyond Sub-Five, and therefore your permissions will extend no further than that. Miss Blackburn and Miss Amara—you will both be taking classes in the School of Arcane Arts. Mrs. Murgatroyd, the Arcane Scholar Mistress, will be along later this morning to take you there.”

  Once she’d ushered them all inside a single spherical brass pod, Ms. Dearborn pressed her W imprint to its glowing counterpart on the wall, then pulled a series of levers in a complex pattern that Morrigan tried—and failed—to memorize. They sank several levels down at a gut-churning, ear-popping speed. Then—to everyone’s surprise but Ms. Dearborn’s—the pod was wrenched forward, sharply to the left, backward, and then left again… then up, up, up in a lurching zigzag motion, the lights above the door flashing in a chaotic pattern all the while.

  At last the pod came to an abrupt halt and the nine members of Unit 919 all smashed into the wall. Ms. Dearborn was tall enough to steady herself by holding on to one of the looped leather handles hanging down from the ceiling, and she didn’t seem bothered that none of the children could reach them.

  “Sub-Three. School of Mundane Arts.” The pod door opened and she led them down a long, empty corridor with a polished wooden floor. Morrigan felt dizzy and nauseated, but she tried to keep up.

  “This level is dedicated entirely to what we call the Practicalities,” continued Ms. Dearborn. “Medicine, cartography, meteorology, astronomy, gastronomy, engineering, unnimal husbandry, and so on. Those everyday, earthbound interests most vital to keeping the world running. Also on Sub-Three you’ll find the laboratories, the observatory, the Map Room, lecture theaters one through nine, the zoological facilities, the test kitchens, and, of course, the hospital.”

  The Scholar Mistress took them into a darkened lecture theater where a professor called Dr. Bramble was giving a talk on the “Ethical Responsibilities of the Modern Unnimologist” to some visiting Society members from around the Seven Pockets. Beside her on the stage was what looked, at first, like a huge pile of dirty white rags in a basket, but turned out to be—

  “A Magnificat!” said Morrigan, nudging Hawthorne’s side. Ms. Dearborn instantly turned to glare at her, and Morrigan pressed her lips together, staring determinedly at the stage below until she felt the Scholar Mistress’s gaze shift away.

  “It isn’t enough to believe one is acting in the best interest of a species,” Dr. Bramble was saying to her audience. She reached out to give the creature an affectionate scratch under its chin. “One must consider the individual.”

  “It’s not as big as Fen,” Hawthorne whispered from the side of his mouth.

  “I think it’s a baby,” replied Morrigan, as the cat bared its fangs at the audience in a manner half-threatening, half-adorable. “Oh, look!”

  But Ms. Dearborn whisked them on, and down to the next floor.

  “Humanities,” she announced when they reached Sub-Four. “Comprising philosophy, diplomacy, languages, history, literature, music, art, and theater.”

  She led them through dozens of classrooms, studios, art galleries, music rooms, and theaters on Sub-Four before they made their way down to Sub-Five, home to what Dearborn referred to as the Extremities—the third and final branch of the School of Mundane Arts.

  Whereas the previous floors had the calm, formal atmosphere of a museum or university—all broad corridors, high ceilings, and polished wood floors—Sub-Five had the unpredictable, slightly chaotic air of a place where anything could happen.

  Dearborn showed them an entire wing dedicated to learning the craft of espionage (they caught five minutes of a workshop titled “Faking Your Own Death”), a noisy martial arts dojo (where, on the first morning of term, several scholars already had broken bones), and—to Hawthorne’s delight—the enormous, cavernlike dragon stables and arena where he would be spending much of his time.

  Morrigan was just thinking that Sub-Five felt a bit like the Hotel Deucalion, when an older boy came running toward them from the other end of the hall.

  “Scholar Mistress!” shrieked the boy as he ran to catch up with Ms. Dearborn and the group, his long, braided hair flying behind him, eyes bright and wild. “Scholar Mistress, please may I talk to you?”

  “Not now, Whitaker.”

  “Please, Ms. Dearborn,” said the boy, leaning over, hands on waist, trying to catch his breath. “Please, you’ve got to talk to Murgatroyd. She said she’s going to shave my head tomorrow because my unit failed our last Civic Duty exam. But it’s not my fault, she—”
/>   “Entirely your own problem.”

  “But she said”—the boy whimpered—“she said she’s sharpening her razor blade tonight.”

  “I don’t doubt it.”

  “Please, couldn’t you talk to her or—”

  “Don’t be absurd. Of course I can’t talk to her,” hissed Ms. Dearborn. She closed her eyes and cracked her neck to the side. Morrigan winced at the sound. The older boy flinched away, drawing in a sharp breath. “You are a whitesleeve, Whitaker. A student in the School of Arcane Arts. Must I remind you that I am not your Scholar Mistress? It’s up to Mrs. Murgatroyd to discipline her students as she sees fit. Now, get to class before you make it worse for yourself. She’ll be here any minute.”

  The boy backed away from the Scholar Mistress, looking sick, before turning and running back the way he’d come. Morrigan swallowed as she watched him leave. Was the notorious Murgatroyd really going to shave his head? Was that allowed? She glanced around—the rest of Unit 919 looked equally distressed.

  And tired too. Having woken at dawn, walked what felt like hundreds of miles through the mazelike subterranean campus, and eaten only two biscuits all day, Morrigan thought she might simply collapse where she stood and be unable to get up again. Just when she’d decided she must ask when the tour would be over (or when they’d at least be fed), Ms. Dearborn brought them back to a bank of railpods.

  “Blackburn and Amara,” said Ms. Dearborn. Cadence returned Ms. Dearborn’s unflinching gaze, but Lambeth was looking up at the ceiling, frowning. Morrigan wasn’t even certain she knew she was being addressed. “Mrs. Murgatroyd, the Arcane Scholar Mistress, will be along shortly to continue your tour of Levels Sub-Six through Sub-Eight.”

  Part of Morrigan felt envious that Cadence and Lambeth would see parts of Wunsoc that were forbidden to her and the others… but another, much more insistent part of her hoped this meant the tour was nearly over for her and her fellow graysleeves.

  “Once Mrs. Murgatroyd arrives,” continued Dearborn, “the rest of you will make your own way back through the subterranean levels and outside to the steps of Proudfoot House, where your conductor will be waiting to escort you home. I trust you can manage to find your way back to the ground floor from here.”

  No chance, thought Morrigan. She turned to Hawthorne, who looked equally alarmed. Were they supposed to have memorized what Dearborn had done in the elevator with all those levers?

  “How come they get to go home already, when we have to stay?” asked Cadence.

  “Oh, poor you,” snapped Thaddea, rolling her eyes in disgust. “Must be so hard, having such a special-snowflake talent that you get to see three whole floors the rest of us are banned from. I’m positively aching with sympath—”

  “Oh dear,” Lambeth murmured, still gazing up at the ceiling. She held up a finger, just like she’d done at the station. It was hard to tell if she was demanding silence or testing the direction of the wind. “Here she comes.”

  “Can somebody please make her stop that?” muttered Mahir. “She’s creeping me out.”

  “Quiet.” The Scholar Mistress’s voice hadn’t lost its bite, but Morrigan thought she suddenly seemed nervous. She was pulling at the cuff on her left sleeve in a tense, agitated way. Morrigan wondered if she too was afraid of the infamous Mrs. Murgatroyd. She was not at all comforted by this thought.

  “While we’re waiting, let’s go over some housekeeping,” continued Ms. Dearborn. “You are responsible for ensuring that you have the correct clothing and educational items for your lessons.” She paused here, closing her eyes momentarily and cracking her neck to the side. Morrigan winced. “Should you require something, be it rosin for your instrument, or a set of scrubs, or a machete”—she eyeballed Archan, Anah, and Thaddea by turns—“then you must either ask your conductor to arrange it, or make a formal written request yourself, using the forms provided at the… at the Commissariat.”

  Here Dearborn paused once again, and something strange happened. Squeezing her eyes tight as if to block out a bright light, she hunched her shoulders up high and rolled them back slowly, twisting her neck like an eel underwater. Morrigan heard the woman’s spine crack all the way down, a series of tiny pops in quick succession, and she cringed; the sound of it made her skin crawl.

  She glanced around at the others. Their faces mirrored her own rapidly deepening horror. What was wrong with the Scholar Mistress?

  “If your failure to do so… results in… your exclusion from lessons,” Dearborn continued, eyes still closed, her chin jutting out from her neck at a strange and unnatural angle, “then it is entirely”—she made a funny, gurgling noise in the back of her throat, such an awful sound that Morrigan jumped backward in fright—“entirely your own lookout, and you’ll find… there isn’t a soul in this campus who will… sympathize… with your plight.” The glass-slick voice was all but gone. She spoke in a frightening, guttural rasp that had an awful singsong musicality about it. It sounded… wrong. “Correct, Mrs. Murgatroyd?”

  Dearborn opened her eyes.

  Morrigan gasped. The rest of her unit had turned in the other direction, confused, expecting to see Mrs. Murgatroyd the Arcane Scholar Mistress approaching. Morrigan alone had noticed what they’d all missed.

  Dearborn was… different. On their own, the changes were subtle: a sloping curve to her shoulders, a deepening of the hollow in her cheeks. Her ice-blue eyes had lightened to a dead, murky, pale gray, the color of a flat winter sky, and sunk farther into her skull. The topknot on her head was no longer a shining silver blond, but white—stark and stripped of color. Her lips—purpling and cracked—peeled back in an unpleasant leer, revealing a mouthful of sharp brownish teeth.

  Morrigan fixed her wide eyes firmly on this new face, watching the ghastly transformation unfold. Her creeping, confused horror turned to understanding.

  “Just so, Ms. Dearborn,” rasped the woman, answering her own question.

  So this was Murgatroyd.

  The students of the Mundane Arts began to edge their way out and, not for the first time that day, Morrigan was very glad to be a graysleeve.

  CHAPTER SIX

  MISSTEPS, BLUNDERS, FIASCOES, MONSTROSITIES, AND DEVASTATIONS

  Dragonriding ALL MORNING!” shouted Hawthorne the next day, throwing a fist in the air. “YES!”

  They were pulling into Proudfoot Station, but Miss Cheery had to wait for the two trains in front to drop off their scholars and clear out from the platform before she could move into place and open the doors of Hometrain 919.

  “I’m glad you’re excited,” Miss Cheery said to Hawthorne. The members of Unit 919 had spent the trip to Wunsoc passing their timetables around, excitedly comparing the many interesting workshops, lectures, and classes they’d be attending that week. Morrigan was particularly looking forward to her lesson on Thursday morning, the curiously titled “Opening a Dialogue with the Dead.” Miss Cheery added, “But don’t wear yourself out too much in the arena. Notice you’ve got a three-hour class in Dragontongue after lunch?” She tapped a finger on his timetable. “You wanna be fresh for that; it’s a tricky language.”

  Hawthorne’s fist dropped from the air. He looked down at his timetable, nose scrunching up. “Why would I need to learn Dragontongue?”

  Miss Cheery widened her eyes at him. “I know. Nevermoor’s most promising junior dragonrider, trying to communicate with the ancient reptiles who take his life in their talons every day? What a mad idea.” She snorted. “Hawthorne, don’t you reckon it might be useful to talk to a dragon?”

  “But… I do talk to them,” said Hawthorne. “I’ve been riding since I was three. If you don’t believe I can make a dragon take orders, come and watch me—”

  “Oh, I know you can,” said Miss Cheery. “I saw your trial. But all that time you’ve been learning how to make a dragon understand you, have you ever tried to understand a dragon in return?”

  Hawthorne looked at her as if she’d sprouted antlers.

 
“Dragontongue’s an amazing language,” she continued. “I learned some myself when I was a junior scholar. And look—Mahir will be taking the class with you. That’ll be fun!”

  Hawthorne leaned over Mahir’s shoulder to see.

  “But he only has to do one hour!” Hawthorne protested.

  “Well… I thought it might be decent to give you a head start, that’s all. Our Mr. Ibrahim already knows a bit of Dragontongue—don’t you, Mahir?”

  “H’chath shka-lev,” said Mahir, bowing his head seriously.

  Miss Cheery looked impressed. “Machar lo’k dachva-lev,” she replied, bowing in return.

  “What does that mean?” Hawthorne grumbled, eyeing the pair of them with suspicion and, Morrigan suspected, a little jealousy.

  “It’s a Draconian greeting,” Miss Cheery replied, and when Hawthorne looked even more confused, she added, “Draconian’s just another name for Dragontongue. H’chath shka-lev means ‘long may you burn.’”

  Hawthorne made a face, and so did Morrigan. Long may you burn sounded more like a threat than a greeting.

  “And the polite response is Machar lo’k dachva-lev, meaning ‘I burn brighter knowing you,’” continued Miss Cheery. “To dragons it’s like… you’re wishing someone good health, and they’re thanking you for your friendship in return.”

  Thaddea was scouring her classes, looking increasingly annoyed. “Miss, how come I don’t have any cool dragon stuff in my timetable? It’s not fair. I love dragons.”

  The conductor took a seat on the couch next to Thaddea, leaning in to look over her shoulder. “Well, you do have other cool stuff.”