by Alex Kosh
Ever since Naive started pulling his tricks, none of us had been very keen to take the place of honour beside him. The safest place was behind him, we knew that from experience. Tyrel had to sit at one side, so that he could see all of us, and we sat in a row. Naive was put as far away as possible in the corner.
“Why bother asking, when you already know?” Neville retorted angrily. “Or are you just checking in the hope that we’ve forgotten whose turn it is today?”
Yes, he had me here. It was definitely my turn today. I would have to place my life in serious jeopardy. Ah, if my aunt only knew ... but what could she know? Outside the Academy, only twelve hours had gone by since we started our studies! It staggered me just to think about it. A day went by in here, but outside it was only twenty minutes. It was crazy!
“Well, Zach, disgraced yourself again, did you?” Craftsman Tyrel asked me.
It wasn’t that he was mocking me, just that the system of training here was based on mockery.
“What can I do,” I sighed, “you know the extent of my abilities.”
“I do,” the Craftsman agreed. “And that’s why I tell you in all seriousness that you can win if you make a real effort. Power’s not that important,” he said, with a knowing look at Naive. “The important thing is what’s up here.” And he tapped me on the head.
The sound that made was rather hollow. I wasn’t sure if that was good or bad.
“Well, then it’s definitely a hopeless case,” Chas said in a low voice.
Alice snorted, but there was a glint of sympathy in her eyes.
“Sit down, lady and gentlemen, let’s get started,” Tyrel rumbled. “Today we’re going to change our usual routine and try something quite different.”
We quickly arranged ourselves on the floor.
“So far we have only studied how to weave patterns of fire, but today I’m going to teach you how to destroy them. These techniques are usually taught in the second year, but I think you could make good use of them now, and this lesson will be particularly useful for you, Zach.”
I nodded, although I didn’t really understand exactly what he meant
“Let’s take a perfectly simple fireball,” the Craftsman went on. “Chas, make us a perfectly simple fireball.”
Chas obediently created a smallish fireball in the centre of the hall.
“How can we deal this delightful bundle of sparks? We can put up a shield, we can dodge out of the way. What else?”
We fell quiet as we tried to think.
“Well, we can also destroy it,” the Craftsman went on after a pause. “And not by using the magic of water or air, you don’t know how to weave the spells of those schools just yet, but by using the magic of fire against it. Every spell has a weak spot. Watch.”
Tyrel gazed at the fireball, and then shot a small spark at it ... and the fireball disappeared. Dissolved into the air with a hiss.
We blinked in amazement.
“You did that with one little spark?” Neville asked.
“Of course,” Tyrel said with a smile.
“And how do you find the weak spot?” Alice, ever practical, immediately asked.
“A good question,” the Craftsman remarked. “The location of the weak spot is specific to each particular spell.”
I sighed in bitter disappointment. I’d been hoping I’d be able to give someone a pleasant surprise, but by the time I could find the weak spot in a fireball flying at me, my precious carcass would be roasted twenty times over.
“But how do you find it?” Alice persisted.
“That what we’re going to learn. I’ll work with Alice today, the rest of you split into pairs, and we’ll begin.”
Chas and Neville moved off into the furthest corner, leaving me to be mauled by Naive.
“First one of you creates an average-sized fireball, and then the other tries to find the weak spot. The fireballs should just hang in the air, at least ten feet away from both of you. That especially applies to you, Naive. You can locate the weak spot by the slightly different colour of the flame.”
“Wonderful,” I muttered under my breath. “Naive, you go first ...”
“Gladly,” Vickers junior said in a happy voice, and he created a fireball right in front of my nose.
“... at trying to find the weak spot,” I concluded, moving further away from the six-foot wide fireball that was scattering sparks in all directions. At least it was just hanging there without moving ...
I took a few deep breaths to calm myself and glared at the fireball. The fire looked perfectly ordinary – no special variations at all. Maybe our fiery boy didn’t have any weak spots in his spells? Was that possible?
I was so intent on studying the fireball that it was a while before I noticed it was moving slowly towards me.
“Hey! What are you doing?” I said, seriously frightened.
“Ah, sorry,” Naive replied. “I got distracted.”
He got distracted. The element of fire just happens to be the most dangerous one to study! The one that causes the worst injuries! And he gets distracted!
I cast a glance of angry frustration at Chas and Neville. Traitors. But they hadn’t managed to find any weak spots yet, either. And Alice wasn’t doing any better.
Well, at least I wasn’t the only one.
More out of despair and anger than calculation, I shot a small spark at Naive’s fireball. Its structure was basically like a fireball, only much simpler.
Pop.
The huge six-foot fireball disappeared with a strange squelching sound.
“I did it,” I said rather uncertainly as Tyrel walked up to me.
“Yes you did. Now do it again.”
“No problem,” I said breezily. “Let me have your spell.”
To be quite honest, I was absolutely certain I wouldn’t be able to do it again. And I couldn’t. In fact, when the class ended, no one but me had managed to do anything of the kind. The Craftsmen expressed the opinion that it was probably too early to teach us this lesson after all. We felt offended.
It was almost “night”, so our team made short work of supper and we all went off to sleep. I didn’t see Alice to her room, for the simple reason that every time I tried to do it, she disappeared. And apart from that, every time I suggested visiting her, I received a categorical refusal. But surprisingly enough, that didn’t stop her accepting my attentions and coming to visit me ... although the two of us were never alone, there was always someone else there. What is it with girls? Especially vampire girls ...
“Why does he keep picking on us like that?” Chas asked in exasperation as the two of us walked along the corridor. “Anyone would think we were a bunch of dunces. Alice is a real child prodigy, and Naive’s a genuine arsonist boy-wonder. But that’s not good enough for Tyrel.”
I didn’t say anything for a moment, while I tried to understand what Chas was so annoyed about.
“He’s right, though,” I answered eventually. “You’re all doing great, but what about me? I still haven’t won a single training session.”
Chas stopped dead in his tracks.
“So what? Is that what really matters? None of us can weave spells as well as you can. You might not have much power, but you know how to use it a lot better than we do.”
“That’s easy for you to say, you win your duels. How do you think it feels to keep losing one after another?”
“Not too good, I’m sure,” Chas agreed. “But today you managed to find the weak spot in Naive’s fireball; you just need a bit of practise and you’ll be fine.”
“Where are we going to practise?” I almost shouted. “The meditation halls are all booked for every last minute of the day, and they won’t let us into the Hall of Low Power because we used up our time allocation ages ago.”
Chas nodded in agreement, but, being Chas, he just had to find some way round the problem.
“Then let’s do it the simple way,” said Chas, looking round cautiously to make sure no one was
listening. “Let’s go to your room.”
“Why my room?” I protested, realising immediately what he had in mind.
“I don’t get it – who needs this, me or you?”
“Me,” I admitted dismally.
I had a feeling we could run into trouble. But without constant practise there was no way I was going to pass the exams. Ha, what am I saying? ... just practising wouldn’t be enough, I had to come up with something special. Romius had tried to help me by recreating the state I’d slipped into when I took the entrance tests, but it did no good. I listened to my music, meditated, remembered my dreams detail by detail (although it was the strange vampire who was interested in my dreams, rather than Romius), but nothing helped. At least I’d only spoken to that vampire with the stupid sense of humour a few times. There was something I didn’t like about him ... and I hadn’t seen much of my uncle recently, either, he never seemed to be around.
The room was a real mess.
Chas cast a sceptical glance at the books and clothes scattered all over the place.
“We need to rake all this clutter into the corners to make sure a spark doesn’t set anything on fire.”
I agreed with him on that. I wouldn’t want my textbooks on tactics or energetics to get burned by accident.
Just to be on the safe side, we moved the bed into a corner of the room as well.
“Right then, I create a small fireball, and you try to extinguish it,” Chas suggested.
“Don’t you remember them telling us we could only practise magic in the meditation halls and the Low Power Hall, under the supervision of a Craftsman?” I reminded him gingerly.
“Forget that,” Chas said, preparing to create his fireball. “Who’s going to find out? And how?”
“I don’t see how they can,” I agreed, but that doubt was still gnawing away somewhere inside me.
Chas created a fireball in the middle of the room; I heaved a deep sigh and started walking round it in circles. I was concerned about breaking the rules, but I was even more fed up of losing all the time. And Chas was right, I needed to add a new trick to my arsenal, it would come in very useful.
Only it was really hard to find the special spot on that round ball of fire. There were so many different shades of red, staring at them made my eyes water. How could I find that damned weak spot?
Of all the possible ways of searching I chose the simplest – good old unscientific hit-and-miss. Why hadn’t Tyrel suggested we try that? Trial and error was the surest method of all!
Chas sat down on the bed and opened a book on tactics.
“You get on with it, and I’ll read.”
“Of course,” I agreed, without even thinking.
It must have been about an hour before I heard that familiar sound again and the fireball disappeared.
Pop.
“At last,” exclaimed Chas, who was dozing over his book. “Do you remember what spot you hit?”
“No,” I replied honestly.
“Then have another try,” Chas said with a shrug and created another fireball in the middle of the room. “I’ll get some sleep, if you don’t mind. Wake me up when you put it out.”
And before I could answer, he brazenly stretched out on my bed and fell asleep.
It’s great to have the support of a true friend.
Okay, so now I had to try to think logically. In order to “pop” someone else’s spell, all I had to do was create one little spark about a quarter of an inch across and hit the right spot with it. But it was hard to find the right spot. So, if I didn’t want to keep on searching until I fainted from hunger, I had to program the spark to search out the vulnerable spot for itself. But once it touched the fireball, my spell would disappear too. So I had to make it seek out the weak spot without any contact ... and that meant by identifying some distinguishing feature. The different colour! I hadn’t been wasting my time in Caiten’s classes on artificial intelligence in spells after all.
I started putting together a new spell by the light of Chas’s fireball, which was hanging in the air, lighting up the room like a lamp. What is a spell? It’s a model for weaving together filaments of energy, assembled according to definite rules and laws. So what did a Craftsman who was creating a new spell need? What he needed was a pencil and paper.
Chas woke up about three hours later. He rubbed his red eyes and stared at me in surprise.
“Haven’t you extinguished that thing yet?” he asked.
“I’m still doing the theoretical calculations,” I said casually, carefully studying the table of the fireball’s colour range that I had drawn up for myself.
“Is it really so hard to keep jabbing at big fireball with a small one until the big one disappears? Would you like me to show you how it’s done?”
Chas flexed his fingers theatrically.
“And are you going to keep jabbing at someone else’s fireball for minutes at a time during a duel too?” I asked him.
“Why should I bother?” Chas said breezily. “I don’t need to, I’ll put up a shield, and the job’s done.”
“Then don’t interrupt.”
He’d woken up at just the wrong moment, when I’d almost finished the sampling routine that ought to locate a fireball’s weak spot by its colour. Now it was time to try it out.
I visualised the interwoven pattern of energy that was required, and it went streaming out of my fingers in a thin ribbon of fire.
“What’s that you’re doing?”
Chas watched my invention curiously as it flew round his fireball.
Pop.
The room suddenly went dark. I’d been using Chas’s fireball as a lamp all this time. Economising. You can’t help learning to economise when you have to weave spells using such tiny crumbs of energy.
“Well, well,” said Chas, and he sounded pleased. “Didn’t I say practising would get you a result? Will you teach me?”
I tried my best to explain my design to him, and he actually understood, but he couldn’t reproduce it.
“You know, this is all too small and fiddly for me,” he admitted eventually. “You’re the only one who can control tiny energy flows like that.”
“That’s right, I agreed. “Because larger flows are beyond my power.”
To be quite honest, I was triumphant. For the first since I started my studies, I felt like a real Academy pupil. I had invented something that no one else had thought of before.
“Put up another couple of fireballs,” I told Chas.
For an occasion like this, Chas made a really special effort and created three of them.
I easily visualised the design of my new creation, and three slim, fiery snakes came flying out of my fingers.
Pop, pop, pop.
“Bravo,” said Chas, applauding. “But now we really ought to get some sleep. I feel quite worn after all this.”
He felt worn out? After his sleep in the corner, while I was slaving over my brilliant invention?
“I entirely agree,” I said with a yawn. “Especially since we have morning meditation in only ... four hours’ time.”
Before he left, Chas slapped me on the shoulder.
“You’ll really show them tomorrow.”
Scene 2
A strange fat little man in glasses and a grey suit was holding forth ecstatically: “This bird likes to make its home near people and feed at their expense. The size of the bird varies from very small to absolutely huge. It has negative colouring and a wide wingspan ... Anyway, I’m sure you must have come across the flopingo bird numerous times in your own home ...
It was a terrible morning. Getting just a few hours sleep after such an exhausting day is no fun, I can tell you. Even Chas failed to spring out of his den in his usual lively fashion, and he looked even worse than I did. I was pepped up by my little victory – my ace in the hole for today’s practical classes.
“Next time you can practise without me,” Chas muttered instead of saying good morning. “Ask that vampire gi
rl. She’ll probably like the idea, and you won’t get bored.”
I frowned at the mention of Alice. It was two months now since that memorable conversation in her quarters, and she still hadn’t let me walk her back to her room. Now I was fixated on the goal of getting her to say yes, and doing everything I possibly could to achieve it. If the vampiress allowed me to see her back to her room, that meant she was ready to open up to me ... and that meant I had a chance. And I thought Alice had accepted the rules of this game.