Ninth City Burning

by J. Patrick Black

  I spend the majority of this time struggling to hold in feelings of confusion and impatience. The trouble is not my reception here at school but the present subject of learning. As soon as Rhetor Svetli was satisfied I was unlikely to spring up and tear out the throats of her charges, she commenced a lecture on what she called the “laws of motion.” There has been a great deal of talk about “velocity” and “acceleration” and “kinetic energy,” all with accompanying graphs and figures, which I have dutifully copied despite not understanding a jot of it. I keep waiting for Svetli to segue into some area of magic, to explain how speed and vectors relate to conjuring fire out of thin air, but she only goes on making diagrams of falling apples and orbiting planets.

  After what I judge to be nearly a decade, I have reached the limit of my endurance and cannot restrain myself from asking when we’re going to learn a little magic. My question draws nervous titters from the class and a withering look from Rhetor Svetli. “We do not teach magic at the School of Rhetoric, Cadet Rachel,” she says. “If magic is something you wish to learn, I suggest you find a goat and attempt to read its entrails. Irrational mechanics,” she continues, once renewed giggling has subsided, “is part of your afternoon curriculum, as I am sure you can divine by consulting your schedule.”

  I am of a mind to inform this Rhetor Svetli that since my sister happens to be the one making the goddamn magic, I’ll call it whatever I goddamn please, but restrain myself by a firm exertion of will. Naomi has laid a strict interdict upon me not to embarrass her at our new school, and as I have already been found guilty of several infractions—among them publicly hugging and kissing her and calling her “Sunshine” within the hearing of others—it has been explained to me in no uncertain terms that any further misbehavior will see me tossed into the fire, where there will be great wailing and gnashing of teeth. Therefore, I muster the smile Papa imparted to me for use with people who, for reasons of politics, I am not allowed to whip bloody, and set myself dutifully to the study of so-called classical mechanics.

  The morning is a grueling one, and by the time Svetli finally lays down her chalk, my hand is cramped from furiously copying her entire oeuvre. Worse still, my labors have left me no wiser, as I discover when Svetli asks us to apply what she has taught us to a “problem set” of new and diabolical equations. Once I have copied these as well, I subtly reconnoiter the activities of my fellow cadets. While I plainly outclass them all in penmanship, to one degree or another each has succeeded in transforming Svetli’s set of jumbled numbers into the precious and sought-after answers. The boy seated ahead of me, a chubby, snub-nosed cutie, has long since concluded the first question with the simple answer of “52 kph.”

  “Hey,” I whisper. When he doesn’t seem to hear, I lean forward, close enough to touch him, and say again, “Hey.”

  He gives a start and looks back, first with terror, then murderous annoyance. “We’re not supposed to talk,” he says sternly.

  “Sure,” I agree. I reach over and point to his page. “But how’d you do that?”

  He rolls his eyes contemptuously, then returns to his work. “Magic.”

  The composition of the class has altered somewhat by the time of our fabled afternoon lessons in irrational mechanics. Only a few of us from Section B return, those with some talent in magic, while the rest are sent off to more theoretical pursuits on the subject, and the remaining seats are filled by other Sixth-Class cadets of the “revenni” persuasion. I look around for Naomi, only to recall that she will be off with Jax and their special tutor, an exceedingly strange man named Charles. I catch a few of the newcomers sneaking looks at me, and even one or two smirking in a way that leads me to conclude I have become the subject of fun.

  We have a new rhetor, Danyee, who is less of a sourpuss than her predecessor but still a good way short of friendly. Nevertheless, my dissatisfaction with her lesson is just as fierce. The first thing she does, after writing “Irrational Mechanics” across her blackboard, is instruct us to open our workbooks to Chapter Three. Fear seizes my heart then, and when Danyee begins to fill the board with strings of numbers and letters and symbols, if anything more obscure than those from our lessons in nonmagical motion, my disappointment is such that I fear I will expire on the spot. By the time Danyee divides us into groups of two for practical exercises, I am well into designing my escape from this heathen hellhole.

  My addition to this class has resulted in an odd number of students, and because I am to blame for the confusion, as well as an untutored barbarian, I end up in the one group of three. Among my unlucky partners is none other than Chyffe. To my surprise, he bears me no ill will for stealing his desk and goes so far as to introduce me to our third member, a freckly boy named Kenut. The two of them graciously exclude me from the particulars of our assignment, conferring quietly over readings and equations while I observe from a distance. Eventually, however, they appear to reach an impasse. Their distress is such that I am moved to ask just what in the blazes they’re trying to do.

  Both regard me a moment, perhaps weighing just how much my limited intellect can handle, then Chyffe bravely sallies forth. “We’re supposed to be making light,” he says. “We’ve got to control the wavelength to get six different colors, and they’ve all got to match up so when we merge them together, we get one white light.” He accompanies his explanation with animated gestures toward his notebook. “We’ve worked out four of them, but we still have to do red and violet. Those are the hardest,” he adds gravely.

  “Well, let’s see what you’ve got,” I say. “Maybe I can help.”

  The boys appear dubious, but they oblige. At their instigation, four pebble-sized sparks flicker to life in the air above our congregated desks. I can feel the power used to do it, almost like a breath of wind.

  Kenut and Chyffe, though obviously pleased with their work, remain apprehensive. “We’re way behind,” Chyffe says. “Look. Elessa’s group already has all six.”

  The classroom has taken on a mottling of colored hues, tiny lights dipping and swaying over sheets of calculations. Most other groups have produced at least five.

  Now, here is something I can do. The smoky cloud of influence I first felt here in Ninth City has been with me all this time, alive and part of me, but idle, resting, as my legs will while I am seated at my desk. Now I summon it to motion, concentrating on the space above Chyffe’s notebook, pinching the cloudy essence into two needlepoints. Two sparks burn to life before me. I turn and flex their energy until one is red and the other purple. By observing the lights of other, more successful groups, I am able to adjust my own to the exact right hues.

  Chyffe and Kenut watch, mouths gaping, until at last, Kenut hollers, “Whoa! That was awesome!”

  These few words unleash a torrent of verbosity in Kenut. He proves to be a naturally gregarious person when not cowed to silence by an intimidating figure such as myself, all of which and more Kenut explains in lurid and excited detail in the last minutes of class, before inviting me to join him for supper at the cafeteria, a gesture Chyffe seems to consider a wild and reckless act of courage, though he agrees to come along. By the meal’s end, the three of us are thick as thieves.

  Kenut and Chyffe, and the rest of Sixth Class with them, have been intensely curious about me since yesterday, when rumors began to spread of a barbarian girl crashing like a frothing juggernaut through an F-Level obstacle course before going on to murder the Academy’s Praeceptor of Philosophy. I gather from Kenut and Chyffe’s description that there has been some embellishment surrounding my entrance evaluation, and the same proves true for perceptions of me personally. I am said to be fully two and a half meters tall, with arms like thighs, thighs like tree trunks, and a forked tongue capable of prehensile movement. Other, less reliable accounts report that I am a cannibal and drink blood for my morning repast, that I am a simpleton and have been seen marking my territory with urine, that I have six fingers o
n each hand and webbed feet. Kenut admits that seeing me in the flesh is something of a letdown, especially once I have presented my disappointingly ordinary tongue for inspection, but he is quick to assure me that the way I really look isn’t so bad, either.

  Now that my new friends have seen the articulate soul beneath my fearsome exterior, and been assured I would rather dine on cafeteria food than children’s brains, they accept me as one of their own. Chyffe eagerly brokers my admittance to the camaraderie of boys in Section B, where I am much admired for my record scores in physical training and the scars on my neck and ear, regarded as tremendously exotic in a place where most wounds heal quickly and without any trace. It is also to my advantage, I suspect, that I am the only female in Section B, Rhetor Svetli included, with any chest to speak of. The girls are not quite as friendly, but I plan to win them over by degrees.

  Kenut and Chyffe lay public claim to me as their partner for exercises in irrational mechanics, and for a time we are the cream of Rhetor Danyee’s class. Chyffe has a knack for working out the nuts and bolts of just about any problem Danyee can throw at us, while Kenut is an artful translator, able to talk me through the steps required. All I have to do is sculpt the world and its powers according to Kenut’s instructions, adjusting according to my own instincts, then enjoy the envious glares of any cadet near enough to witness. While I doubt our reign can continue forever, I expect it to end only when Rhetor Danyee decides to break our group apart. Instead, it suffers a slow decline, beginning with the day Danyee announces we are to begin learning “infusion.”

  Until now, our study of irrational mechanics has been restricted to a broad category known as “manifestation,” which as far as I can tell just means doing things with magic—excuse me, thelemity. To quote a local expert, namely Rhetor Danyee, manifestation concerns the creation of “impermanent artifices,” which is to say magic that will work only with the active involvement of its creator. I have the feeling that manifestation is where my true talent lies, and I am not eager to venture into new territory. Danyee’s first lecture on infusion only confirms my fears.

  The discipline of infusion involves the study and manufacture of “permanent artifices” that, once created, will continue to act on their own until whatever task they’ve been set is complete. There are innumerable methods of infusion, most of which revolve around reciting a lengthy set of instructions and giving these life by means of thelemity. It would be confusing enough, even if the language used were not so arcane as to be nearly unintelligible. Thelemity does not respond to plain speech, it seems, and so we are taught to rely on bizarre dictionaries of terms, phrases that loop and zigzag and turn back on themselves, and interminable patterns of repetition. I lose my grip on the idea about halfway through my first lesson and never get it back, instead trusting Kenut and Chyffe to carry me through.

  I succeed in convincing myself that my failures with infusion are of no consequence. The field of battle is no place for lengthy artificing, and it is a rare situation where a soldier will be called upon to create a paper windmill that turns indefinitely of its own volition, as we do at the end of that first class. I have plenty of experience with this kind of excuse, as I have already made it with my other failings at the Academy, which have been numerous and severe. In barely a month, I have already proven myself a fine dunce in a variety of sciences, both theoretical and applied. But in the practical art of manifestation, I remain unmatched in all of Sixth Class, and that, I reason, ought to be enough for whatever sort of warrior they train in this place.

  Not everyone’s opinion of me is quite so indulgent as mine. Rhetor Svetli, who in my first days at the Academy made noises to the tune that I have no business in her class, now treats me as a void into which knowledge vanishes without any hope of return. Worse still, Rhetor Danyee doggedly insists on attempting to engage me in learning. Her thesis is that the only way to really produce great feats of thelemity is to master the theory behind it. She is right, at least to a degree: Already I have watched Kenut and Chyffe and others around me progress by leaps and bounds, and while I am still well ahead, the gap is narrowing. Perhaps I would have more patience if Danyee’s lessons did not sound like a foreign language to me. On top of that there is my pride, already smarting from seeing me landed here in this land of Lilliputians. It has a way of speaking for me if I’m not careful, and when Danyee starts in with that superior tone of hers, the result is usually a good deal of glibness from me and on occasion a smart little magic trick conjured to show just how well I can do without her instruction. But though I’d never say so to Danyee, I have my doubts, and never more so than when I first encounter the subject of irregular energies.

  “Irregular energies” is the term used in irrational mechanics for the sort of power never posited or credited to exist before thelemity arrived to upend our general notions of reality. Those forces observed to govern the world throughout most of its history, such as light and heat, gravity and electricity, we refer to as “regular energies.” With thelemity’s aid, we are able to generate and control these in uncanny ways, but in all other senses they remain Nature’s accustomed tools. But thelemity has also given us powers Nature herself never conceived or if she did thought it better not to mention. These are our irregular energies.

  For our first lesson in irregular energies, Danyee introduces us to a force called “akyrity.” She has chosen it specially because we cadets have a deal of experience with it already from our time on the firing range. Akyrity is the primary ingredient in “null,” the artifice that comprises our lazel’s most popular ammunition. I had imagined null to be some deeply complicated concoction, but as Danyee explains, it is made almost entirely of akyrity, albeit with several important refinements. We will study how this power is packaged and amplified and stabalized for use in combat during our fifth class year—for now Danyee only wants us to learn its laws and properties and have some hands-on practice.

  I know what it means when Danyee begins talking of properties and laws, and settle in to wait while she fills her blackboard with the usual scrawlings, rousing myself only once she begins circulating handfuls of unshelled peanuts, intended as victims for our practical exercises. I watch Kenut and Chyffe work away at their legumes with excruciating slowness, devoting minutes on end to shaving away a single snowflake-sized sliver from the outer shell. When they and the rest of the class have about exhausted themselves, I decide it is time to sail in. I draw in my steam-like cloud of influence, concentrating it around the peanut I have chosen for destruction. But for the first time since I took up manifestation, I find myself unsure what to do next. In the past, I have always been able to bring off whatever effect I chose, even one I had never tried before. So long as I knew the general specifications, it was like molding a sculpture from clay with a rough drawing to go by: not always perfect, but usually close enough. Here it is as if I have been tasked with bringing out some impossible shape, one that looks fine on paper but won’t work in the world of solid things. I hover, searching for some inroad or beginning, feeling the scrutiny of Rhetor Danyee and the whole class as well. Finally, I pounce, and though the peanut does disappear, it is not with the whitish shadow of akyrity I saw other cadets produce, but a rollicking explosion that leaves a dark black smear in the center of my desk.

  Kenut and Chyffe assure me this poor performance was a fluke. Everyone has bad days, and soon no peanut will be safe from me. But at our next session, as my friends pop off pill-bug-sized bits from their targets, mine continue to evaporate in puffs of yellow fire. It isn’t long before most everyone around me can obliterate a peanut’s shell with hardly any damage to the fruit inside, while I continue to fill the classroom with fragrant, roasted bits.

  It is my first real failure in what I had come to consider my area of expertise, and though Kenut and Chyffe seem to consider my disgrace unimportant, my confidence is shaken. I worry that I have reached the limit of my ability, that I am destined to be surpassed by
the children of Sixth Class, a group known in Academy parlance as Dodos. I even consider going to Rhetor Danyee and prostrating myself, swearing to follow her tutelage, though I know she will insist I devote as much time to learning algebra and chemistry as I do to violent magic. I can endure all that and more if it is the only way of becoming the soldier I need to be. And then I discover the magic of animation, and I wonder how I could ever have worried at all.

  Animation is one of the many strange disciplines of magic made possible by irregular energy. As Rhetor Danyee describes it, animation is “a process of thelemic manipulation whereby human vitality is extended into an inanimate object,” meaning that animation, properly used, lets you take something and move it like part of your own body. Danyee mesmerizes us with a series of impressive demonstrations, riding a chair with animated legs at a crisp trot around the classroom, encouraging a potted plant into a vaguely indecent, belly-waggling dance, causing a human shape to rise from a bowl of ordinary water, even inducing her own hair to stand on end.

  For our own experiments, Danyee provides us with a claylike substance known as “bloog.” According to our rhetor, bloog is a highly complex invention and not the unappealing slime we might easily mistake it for. Different materials pose different levels of resistance to animation, and bloog is made to be as easy to animate as possible, seemingly at the cost of texture, appearance, and smell. We roll the bloog into long, thin sections, our faces screwed up at the distinctly rancid odor, then hold one end, trying to force through enough of our will to set the other end waggling. Most cadets achieve no more than a listless and erratic jerking, but my first try yields the impatient flick of a cat’s tail.