by Alex Kosh
“Okay, let’s go, genius,” said Chas, giving me a nudge.
We were a pretty good team. A Fiery Boy, a Child Wonder and a Genius. Now we just had to define the distinctive (or deviant) qualities of Neville and Chas. I’d already thought up a name for Chas – Lash. In honour of his restless tongue, which always seemed to cause problems for me and no one else.
But then, Chas had changed a lot over the last two months. He used to rave about the Academy and collect every little crumb of information he could find – but now? Now he’d completely lost all interest in theoretical knowledge. He just lazed around in lectures and in the exams he cribbed – from me! From someone who had no idea about the working principles of a lamp, let alone “the theory of energy balances”, until he got into the Academy! I used to think of him as a kind of older brother, but during the last two months he had turned into a kind of boneheaded younger brother for me. Sure, he’d always been a joker, but he could always be serious when he wanted to, and find an answer for any problem, but now more and more often, I was the one who had to do that.
We met the others at the door of the Small Meditation Hall, as usual. And as usual, in the morning, our universal sociability rating was zero.
We nodded to each other and walked into the hall. Craftsman Tyrel greeted us with a crooked smile and aromatic green tea. As usual. He wasn’t in the mood for talking either.
After the tea, it was time for relaxing meditation. We were supposed to maximise the amount of energy passing through us, but not alter it. This was the safest kind of meditation for us, because it didn’t give Naive a chance to envelop us in the flames of hell. Not only because we didn’t have to weave any energy patterns (quite often we indulged ourselves and did that), but for the simple reason that Naive slept through almost all the morning meditation sessions.
I won’t tell you about the four hours spent in the Meditation Hall. Not now, or later. Because it’s pointless trying to explain your experiences, you have to feel them. How can you explain the beauty of a rainbow to a blind man? And if you’re blind ... what point is there in explaining it?
At the end of the four hours, we left the hall wide awake, feeling fresh and keen to socialize.
“Can you tell me where they’ll send us if we don’t pass these dragon’s exams?” Chas enquired. “And what title we would take with us on departing these hallowed halls?”
“The title of loser,” Alice prompted.
Chas thought about that for a second.
“That’s not a title, that’s a destiny,” he said eventually. “But seriously, have you ever seen anyone in the Academy apart from Craftsmen and pupils?”
“Higher Craftsmen,” Neville quipped.
“And who else?” Chas persisted.
“I saw a janitor once,” Naive piped up.
“What janitor? Are you crazy?” I asked. “All the cleaning here is done automatically by spells.”
“It’s just a dream he had during the morning meditation session, when he was sleeping like a log, as usual,” said Neville, slapping his younger brother on the back.
Naive sniffed angrily, but before he could reply, Chas continued: “But apart from pupils, Craftsmen of all ranks and a phantom janitor, have you ever seen anyone?”
Of course, I could have said that I’d seen a vampire from the Kheor Clan, but I was afraid my friends might not believe me, to put it mildly.
The others thought about it for a while.
“No, we haven’t seen anyone,” I answered for all of us.
“Exactly!” Chas exclaimed. “And now tell me, just how far away do you have to exile someone so that that no one ever hears anything about him again, eh? It’s hard even to imagine it. There aren’t any of these people inside the Academy, there aren’t any of them outside the Academy ... so where are all the rejects?”
“In our first class, Craftsman Tyrel said they were sent to the distant garrisons,” Alice recalled.
“Ah, tell me another!” Chas laughed. “Can you tell me what ‘distant garrisons’ our Empire has? You can cross the glorious Empire of the Elirs in two or three days on a horse! Maybe they send the failures to the Borderland? To the border with the Tabernacle Caliphate? Great! But that’s only a week’s journey away at the most.”
“What are you getting at?” I asked, delighted that Chas was more like his old self again.
“What I’m getting at is that you can always get a message home, even from the most distant garrisons, even from Tabernacle itself. Right?”
“Right,” I agreed.
“Then explain to me why there has never been a single message? Rumours spread like wildfire in the city, we’d have been sure to hear about it!”
“Sure, but ...” I had found the fault in my friend’s reasoning “... but then, if one of these failures disappeared without trace, his family would create a ruckus! And we’d be certain to hear about that too!”
“That’s right,” Chas admitted. “This needs thinking about ... although, I must admit, the only thoughts that come to mind are pretty frightening. So maybe it’s best not to think about it?”
I must admit I was afraid to think about it too. Especially when I remembered I wasn’t exactly making brilliant progress, and I must be somewhere near the top of the list of candidates for expulsion. I’d have to have a word about it with Romius. I didn’t think he would lie to my face ... well, probably not ...
The atmosphere at breakfast was friendly, if you disregarded the petty spats between Neville and Alice, but they were basically a matter of habit – during the last two months their mutual hostility had practically evaporated and given way to mutual respect.
Next on our schedule was our class with Shins, who took us for the practical sessions. This was the worst part of the day for me – after almost every practical class I walked (or was carried) to the druids’ emergency treatment station to have my burns treated. Apart from the damage I suffered during the training duels, our teacher often demonstrated new spells on me, and that did nothing to improve the state of my health. I had no idea why he’d taken such a dislike to me. In fact, I remembered that our first class had actually gone rather well ... from my point of view.
Pupils who achieved the so-called break-through, that is, who had lit the candle in the Meditation Hall, were transferred to Shins’s classes. Shins taught us how to weave patterns of energy, or spells. When I first arrived in the Hall of Low Power, there were eight people studying with him, including Alice.
The vampiress had told us about these classes, so I arrived with at least some idea of what was expected of me. But it was a very superficial idea. How does that saying go? I hear the chime, but where’s the bell?
“All right, young man, today you are going to study the very simplest pattern, popularly known as a fireball.”
I nodded eagerly.
“For this you need to create two lines of energy. Each of them must form a closed circle, so that the energy will not escape from your fireball.”
I nodded again.
“Then you have to bring the two lines together to form a kind of sphere. Is that clear?”
I nodded automatically.
“Begin,” Shins said with a wave of his hand. Then he noticed the confused expression on my face and asked: “Is there something you don’t understand?”
I nodded again.
“What exactly?” he asked, slightly annoyed.
“What do I need to do?”
Anyway, the fat Craftsman took a dislike to something about me, and after that he was always making me out to be a goofy idiot. And the most annoying thing was that he partly right ... at least, he had been until today. Today I was going to show them all.
The Hall of Low Power which Shins occupied was larger than a standard lecture hall, but much smaller than the Meditation Hall. It had been built to leave enough free space for training duels to take place in front of the pupils sitting on the benches. This was also the hall where pupils from the junior classes sett
led their disputes with duels.
We sat in our places and started waiting for Shins. The old man liked to arrive about ten minutes late, but we always came on time. Just in case.
“You know, guys,” said Chas, thinking out loud, “what I’m wondering is ...”
Almost all of Chas’s “clever” idea started with the words “what I’m wondering is”. The surprising thing was that some of his crazy theories turned out to be pretty near the truth.
“What I’m wondering is, why does our entire course consists of fighting duels? Well, of course I understand that we’re in a destructive faculty here, you can’t actually do anything very useful with fire. But I made enquiries about the way things are in the other faculties, and it turns out the only thing they’re being taught is how to fight duels too.”
The answer was silence. And not because nobody had anything to say, but because Shins appeared. This was unheard of – he’d arrived almost on time.
“Having a jolly time, ladies and gentlemen?” Shins enquired from the doorway. “Well. don’t get carried away. Last night someone broke the rules of the Academy. And that is a punishable offence, ladies and gentlemen, and the punishment is serious.”
Chas and I exchanged knowing glances.
We’d been detected in our crime. But how? Nobody had seen us, had they? But then they were Craftsmen, they could find out almost anything, if they wanted.
“Zak and Chas, report to the office of the junior tutor after classes.”
A funny thing, that. No one had introduced us to the senior tutor yet, but the Craftsmen always stubbornly referred to Caiten as the junior tutor.
The pupils from the other groups gave us surprised looks, but no one dared to speak to us in class.
“All right, let’s review the material we covered in the last class. Zach and Triz, out in the field.”
The field was what we called the area in front of the benches, the space where the duels took place.
I walked out into the field with Triz, one of the numerous rotten snobs from the Great Houses (actually, my own pedigree was far superior, but who was comparing?). We pulled up our hoods and the DED appeared around us, transparent to those who were on the outside, but completely opaque to us. That was deliberate, so that we wouldn’t be distracted by anything during the duel.
The distance between us was about a hundred feet – the classical arrangement. In the senior classes, the distance was reduced to sixty-five feet, and for the Craftsmen to thirty-five feet.
“Ready to lose again?” Triz chuckled
He was so sure of himself! We’d see who won this time.
I checked once again to make sure the pattern for my fire snake was still there in my memory. Everything seemed to be all right, it ought to work.
“Begin,” Shins ordered.
I should tell you that only the pupils from the senior classes fought duels that lasted for any amount of time. We simply didn’t have the strength for long duels, and our arsenal of weapons was less varied: shields, firebirds, butterflies and the celebrated fireballs.
Just as Shins required, Triz didn’t bother to engage his brains, he just launched a firebird at me straight away. I knew that he was waiting for me to waste my meagre reserves of power on a shield, and then he would hit me with a fireball. That was how Neville had won yesterday, and anyone could have beaten beat me like that before. But not today.
I happily expended practically all my power on an energy shield.
I was working on a snake for use against a firebird, that would really improve my chances of winning.
Triz waited for a moment or two until he recovered his strength, then blasted three fireballs at me, calculating that I wouldn’t be able to dodge them all.
But today I didn’t have to dodge them.
I shot out three slim snakes of fire, and halfway towards me the three sparking, fiery spheres disappeared, with that familiar popping sound.
Triz gaped in amazement at the empty space where his three fireballs had just been, then out of the kindness of his heart he launched another five.
Well, he shouldn’t have done that. Five fireballs was definitely his limit. Now he was mine for the taking.
I quickly shot out five snakes of fire and followed them up with the biggest fireball I could manage. All of eight inches in diameter.
Triz was absolutely flabbergasted by the disappearance of his five fireballs and my little fireball flung him back two yards. Shins protected the pupil’s face, as the rules required. Apparently it was only in my case that the fat Craftsman sometimes forgot to put up a shield, so that I regularly had to waste an hour or two lying in the emergency treatment station. A fine Monitoring Party he was ... although everything was apparently done by the rules, there hadn’t been any fatalities so far. But there was a first time for everything – as my victory proved!
Yes, this was definitely a happy day.
The DED disappeared, and for the first time in all these weeks I heard no laughter and there were no smirks on the faces of the pupils. But Chas’s face was lit up with a smile as bright as if he was the one who’d just won his first duel.
“So it’s like that, is it?” Shins muttered. “All right then, Zach, try doing that with this fireball.” I obediently launched a slim snake at it, and ...
“Can you hear me? Wake up, will you?” I heard Chas’s voice say somewhere of in the distance. “I’m not going to the junior to get punished all on my own.”
I slowly opened my eyes.
That white ceiling again. The emergency treatment station.
“How did I get here?” I asked, and shuddered – my entire face was a mass of pain .
Obviously, I’d got burned again. I was used to it, on average I spent two or three hours in the treatment station every day. Usually after Shins’s class, sometimes after another of our fiery boy’s mistakes. I didn’t know what it was like in the other faculties, but in the faculty of fire it was an ordinary, everyday occurrence, and I got burned every day. What in a dragon’s name made me join the faculty of fire? Take the faculty of water, for instance, what injuries could they suffer? Well, they could get a bit of a soaking – highly traumatic. In the faculty of earth, the most serious injury you could pick up was a few bruises. And the worst injury in the faculty of air was a broken bone after a fall from a height – they all liked to fly at the slightest excuse. But we had to suffer burns, and that’s really painful, let me tell you. If it wasn’t for the spells of the druids (those guys had obviously come across alumni of our faculty before) ... I was afraid even to think what graduates of the Academy would have looked like ... if there ever were any.
Well, the good news was that after a couple of hours in the treatment station there wouldn’t be a trace of any burns. Your body was protected by the livery, the hood covered your hair, so there wouldn’t be any problems with mass baldness among the students, but the face ... for some reason the High Craftsmen hadn’t come up with any protection for the face. A pity. The Monitoring Party wasn’t always quick enough to create a shield in front of a duellist’s face when he was hit by an attacking spell ... or they didn’t always bother to create one, as in Shins’s case.
“The fireball that Shins kindly created right in front of your nose exploded when your snake touched it. You miscalculated something,” Chas explained.
No, all the calculations were spot on. That vicious worm of a teacher had decided to bully me again, and that was no ordinary fireball.
“How long have I been lying here?”
“Almost three hours now. Alice sat with you at first, then she went to class but I begged off – we still have to go and see the tutor for our punishment.”
In principle, if I’d been there for three hours, everything ought to have healed already. And if I’d been lying there for three hours, it was my face that had been damaged again ... oh, that Shins really had it in for me. I’d have to say thank you to the druids when I left the treatment station. Maybe I could thank them
somehow later, after (if) I left the Academy ... I could plant a tree in the Ancient Forest or do something useful like that. If not for their miraculous ointments and healing spells, I’d have been scarred for life.
“All right, let’s go, may a dragon take you,” I grunted as I got up off the bed. “Only don’t rush, my head’s still spinning like a top.”
Chas nodded in agreement, but the moment we were out of the treatment station, he took off so fast that I could hardly keep up with him.
“Shins gone completely berserk,” he said, thinking out loud on the way. “He deliberately stuck that fireball right under your nose. If he was expecting it to explode, he could have made it further away from you, or at least protected your face. Why would he want to maim you?”