by Alex Kosh
“Okay, that’s not important right now,” the vampiress interrupted. “You can tell me later, if you want to. What’s important right now is that tomorrow Shins is planning to pull some kind of dirty trick. You have to go and see your uncle straightaway.”
I agreed and tried to get off the bed, but I was still too weak and I could only stay on my feet for a couple of seconds.
“What were you doing in here?” Alice asked, going back to her first question. “Just don’t tell me you’ve been practising the craft again. It’s bad enough that you’re the worst pupil in the group, but now you’re the one with the worst disciplinary record too. At this rate Shins won’t even have to give you any exam – they’ll throw you out anyway.”
I supposed she was pretty much right. But why did she have to remind me I was the worst pupil in the group?
I had to tell Alice about my theories and experiments.
“And you think no one’s ever thought of that before?” the vampiress asked, giving me a sceptical look.
“Yes,” I replied honestly
“I’m not so sure,” she said, shaking her head. “Don’t forget, when you created the shield, there was a burst of energy, and it could have been transmitted to the operator before you cut off the connection, but anyway, that’s just a small detail.” Her red eyes glinted cunningly. “So you think that now we can practise the Craft in your room?”
And do other things too, I wanted to say, but wisely decided to keep quiet. I hoped all those rumours about vampires being able to read peoples’ minds weren’t true.
“There’s only one way to check,” said Alice, and she lit a fireball in the middle of my room.
“That’s right,” I whined. “And now if something goes wrong, I get the blame again?”
“Oh stop that,” she said with a conspiratorial wink. “Things couldn’t get any worse than they already are.”
“You optimist,” I sighed and tried to get up off the bed again.
I almost made it, I took two steps toward the door, but my legs gave way again and I collapsed ... straight on top of Alice.
And at that very moment Chas came bursting into the room.
“Just as I thought!” he exclaimed. “While we’re working hard in Tyrel’s class, they’re cuddling in here. By fireball light – how romantic!”
Chas laughed theatrically: “You could at least have locked the door.”
With a strength that was amazing for a frail young woman, but not at all that surprising for a vampire, Alice tossed me over to the furthest corner of the bed. She rose to her feet almost too fast for the eye to follow and looked Chas up and down as if she was deciding where it would be best to bite. Being no fool, Chas backed as far away from her as possible.
“Don’t forget what I told you,” Alice snapped at me, and made a haughty exit.
“Just don’t tell me I interrupted something,” Chas went on in his usual style. “I didn’t do it on purpose.”
Well, of course not. I knew he didn’t do it on purpose, but that was no comfort to me. I was about to tell Alice about my talk with the tutor, but Chas had ruined everything.
“What did she tell you?” Chas asked, trying to sound casual. “Don’t think ...”
“Ah, but I will think,” I said irritably, making a third attempt to get up off the bed. “Or have you forgotten that I think too much?”
“Hey,” Chas exclaimed, grabbing me by the arm one second before I collapsed on the floor. “Have you been donating blood? You’re as weak as a kitten. Where does she bite you? I can’t see any marks on the neck ...”
“Drop it will you?” I yelled furiously. “Just lay off me.”
“Okay, not another word,” said Chas, suddenly serious. “Then why are you too weak even to stand?”
So for the second time that day I told someone about my theory and how I’d tried to disarm the sensor spell.
“Well, well,” Chas laughed. “And there I was thinking you really were donating blood to Alice. You must admit, it’s strange that she hasn’t drunk any blood in two months.”
So it wasn’t just Caiten and me who were thinking about that!
“Next time use your head, for a change, and don’t go jumping to conclusions,” I advised him,” trying to get back for his facetious remarks.
“Interesting experiments you dabble in,” Chas remarked, as if it was nothing special. “If the two of you don’t get punished tomorrow, it means you did everything right. But what if you do get punished?”
“Why should both of us get punished?” I asked, puzzled. “They’ll only punish me. It’s my room.”
Chas looked at me hard.
“And he advises me to use my head. Yesterday we were in your room too, as it happens. But both of us got punished! And that means that not only can they detect magic being worked, they can identify whoever’s working it.”
Dragon’s teeth! He was right. So now Alice could suffer because of me. And any breach of the rules was even more dangerous for her than it was for me. They’d throw her out at the slightest opportunity, and unlike me, she didn’t have anyone in the Academy to protect her. And speaking of protectors ...
“Listen, Chas, will you help me get to the Craftsmen’s floor?
“Want to visit your uncle, do you?” he asked.
“So you know as well?” I gasped.
It looked like the entire Academy knew. But how long had they known?
“Of course,” Chas said with a yawn. “Everybody knows.”
“How long have they known?”
“Not all that long, really. I only found out about it today.”
“Who from?” I asked, even getting up off the bed.
“I don’t remember,” he said with a shrug. “Everyone’s talking about it.”
Absolutely wonderful. My uncle wasn’t going to be too pleased with me, but I hadn’t done anything, had I? I hadn’t told anyone. But then who had? I wondered.
“Shall I take you there?” Chas asked. “I’m starting to feel sleepy.”
“Yes, take me,” I sighed.
The weakness was just beginning to pass, but it would still be good to have Chas there as support.
We walked out of the room and headed slowly towards the teleports. On the way I told Chas about what Alice had heard. Chas might be the world’s greatest bonehead, but I trusted him two hundred per cent. And apart from that, I was hoping he could tell me about the exam Shins was planning to give me.
“I haven’t got a clue,” Chas told me. “Before I started at the Academy, I used to think I knew quite a lot about it, but now I’m beginning to realise that even you know more about it than I do. I thought the Academy was a house of magic, with spells always being worked everywhere, and duels going on all the time.”
“And what is it?”
“The Academy is one big bundle of rules with a crowd of senile old fools making sure everyone follows them. I don’t know what happens to the young Craftsmen, there ought to be far more of them than teachers! But where are they? Have you seen them? No. Where do they go after they graduate from the Academy? And why do the ones who get thrown out for one reason or another just disappear? By the way, they’ve already thrown someone out of the faculty of earth because he couldn’t cut it. I wouldn’t be surprised if they throw one of us out too ...”
And I knew who it be – me.
“Sorry,” said Chas when the sad expression on my face made him realise what he’d said. “And as if that’s not enough, there’s all this weird intrigue going on. Between the faculties, between the Craftsmen, between the pupils. It’s only from the outside that the Academy looks like an impregnable stronghold of honesty and truth. Remember what we’ve had drummed into our heads ever since we were kids – Craftsmen never lie. Sure they don’t.”
“So what do you suggest?” I asked with a sad smile. “Do we just drop everything and go home?”
“As if we could,” Chas said angrily, smashing his fist against the wall. “You must rea
lise the only way you can get home is by graduating from the Academy. Nobody’s got home any other way in two hundred years. If they had, I’d know about it. And even after you graduate, you won’t be in the city for long – they’ll send you off somewhere or other ... to guard the distant borders, for instance ...
“But you said we don’t have any distant borders,” I reminded him.
“Precisely!” Chas exclaimed. “Maybe Tyrel wasn’t talking about our borders at all. They’ll send us off to some other state ... to the next continent ... as mercenaries.
“What are you getting so wound up about? You’ll be here studying for ages – you’re one of the best pupils. No one’s going to throw you out. You’ll graduate from the Academy, and then maybe they won’t send you off to the distant borders as a mercenary,” I said with a bitter laugh.
“If they throw you out, I’m going with you,” Chas said seriously. “We started the Academy together, and we’ll finish it together. And if we can’t, then we’ll leave together.”
I didn’t know what to say. All the sarcastic remarks had flown clean out of my head.
We reached the Craftsmens’ level and Chas asked, “Well, will you make it on your own from here?”
I got the idea. He thought he wasn’t welcome while I talked with my uncle.
“No,” I answered.
After what he’d said, it would have been a rotten trick to send him away.
“By the way, do you believe the rumours about my uncle helping me get into the Academy?” I asked as we shuffled on towards my uncle’s study.
“What rumours?” Chas asked with a sham smile. “They haven’t seen the way you can weave spells. Power isn’t everything by any means. Remember our fiery boy.”
We both laughed, we couldn’t help it.
I knocked on the door of Romius’s study and tried the handle. Useless – the door was locked.
“You’re uncle’s on the prowl somewhere as night draws in,” Chas declared.
“Let’s go and ask Caiten, maybe he knows where he is,” I suggested uncertainly.
“Why him in particular?”
“Because I don’t know anyone else here,” I replied wearily.
Our tutor’s study was locked too.
“I have a strange premonition that something very nasty is going to happen tomorrow,” I groaned. “Let’s go back.”
“We could wait,” Chas suggested uncertainly.
“Oh no,” I said. “It’s going to be a hard day tomorrow, I need a good night’s sleep to get some of my strength back.”
Chas and I were a bit late for supper, and we missed our friends. So unfortunately my serious talk with Alice was postponed yet again.
I was in such a lousy mood, I didn’t feel like eating at all. But I forced everything on the tray down, because I thought I was really going to need my strength the next day.
When I got back to my room, it was still lit up by the fireball, which had only shrunk a little bit. In a couple of hours it would disappear completely, now that Alice had gone and she wasn’t feeding it any more mags.
Ah, to the dragon’s den with it. I wasn’t bothered about anything anymore, I wasn’t going to put it out. Right now I didn’t have enough strength for a snake anyway. So it could just burn on, it wouldn’t stop me from sleeping. In fact it would make a pleasant change, I was feeling pretty dragonized with the constant darkness outside. The fireball could take the place of the sunshine.
What was that Chas had said? We had to report to the dining hall after morning meditation?
Scene 4
A strange woman in a dark suit, with short-cropped hair and a very thin face, stared fiercely straight into my eyes, rapping out every word as she spoke: “Today we shall find out WHO is hindering our studies, WHO is wasting the teachers’ precious time, WHO is absolutely incompetent, WHO is a disgrace to the entire Academy, WHO is willing to betray his friends...
There were a lot more of these “WHOs”, but they soon merged into a single, long monotonous drone.
Eventually the droning stopped and the woman summed up: “Right then, WHO IS THE WEAKEST LINK?
I can’t tell you the details of what happened that morning – I don’t remember them. Somehow or other Chas and I made it to the Meditation Hall, supporting each other on the way, and spent the requisite number of hours there. We were both totally zonked, but no one noticed because it was morning, and basically no one was in really great shape or a good mood. We had to leave the meditation session an hour early to get to the dining hall on time. We reached the dining room at a slow crawl, said good morning, got our instructions and started working like zombies. First they told us to wash the vegetables, then chop them, then carry them ... I only woke up completely after an hour and a half.
“This is sheer victimization,” I said with a yawn. “Will they let us stop for breakfast, at least?”
“In your dreams,” chuckled a fat cook in white apron who was walking by. “During breakfast you have to set out the plates, then collect them, wash them before the next shift arrives, then set them out again ...”
Chas and I exchanged glances and howled.
“I don’t like this,” Chas muttered as he sliced up yet another horticultural wonder.
“Just you wait,” one of the pupils working with us said with a crooked smile. “I’ll see how you look when the evening comes.”
By the way, there were eight offenders working in the kitchen. The others explained to us that pupils were only sent to the kitchen for one offence – using magic outside the Meditation Halls and the Halls of Power. We found it pretty easy to get on with the other six, even though three of them were from the faculty of water and three were from the faculty of air.
As we talked, it turned out that we all had pretty much the same problems. The practical lessons were all about fighting duels, and there was almost no time left for working on spells. So they’d tried practising in their rooms, just like us. There was just one who had been punished for dousing someone with water in the corridor as a joke.
I immediately remembered the lad who played that joke on me on the first day of studies, and wondered if he’d been punished too. I certainly hoped so. Although he’d already been punished before that incident – after all, we met him in the dining hall ...
The worst time was when breakfast started. According to a secret rule, which we were informed about very publicly, offenders didn’t serve their own classmates. So our friends were served by lads from the faculty of water, and we were instructed to serve their faculty.
We washed dishes for an hour, and then it was our turn to lay out the plates. After the monotonous work we’d been doing, we were delighted. But we shouldn’t have been.
I’d completely forgotten about Liz’s new boyfriend, so I didn’t spot him and his cronies at first. Not until I started putting breakfast on their table.
“I’ve seen this little waiter somewhere before,” said blond-haired Lens.
“Ah, so that’s why they let him into the Academy, so he could serve the food,” Angel snickered.
I could have wrung that little louse’s neck.
“Well, someone has to do it, “Nigel remarked. “Apparently, this is his true vocation.”
I set the plates out on the table without saying a word and tried to leave quickly.
“And where are you going?” said Lens, grabbing hold of my sleeve. “Maybe we want to order something else. Just wait for a moment.”
Keep calm, don’t get agitated. If I didn’t control myself, I was bound to get thrown out of the Academy. I could bet my life on it. And I wasn’t even sure that would be such bad thing after all.
Still without saying a word, I freed my sleeve and withdrew from the battle zone.
I met Chas back in the kitchen. “My nerves are shattered,” I muttered, sitting down on a chair. “Your turn to bring back the plates. Table thirteen.”
Yes, that’s right, our old acquaintances were sitting at table number thirt
een! Now just let anyone try to tell me there’s no such thing as an unlucky number.
Chas came back with the empty plates five minutes later.
“Why are you so red in the face,” I asked spitefully.
“Oh, I’ll show them,” Chas muttered, flinging the tray down on the table. “No Academy rules are going to save them.”
“Calm down,” I advised. “Let the lads from air serve them, and then we’ll help the earth group out.”