by Alex Kosh
“Not slapping, but patting gently,” I corrected her.
“Patting me gently,” Alice agreed. “And I ... gave him a gentle shove.”
“Not a gentle shove, but a whop to the solar plexus.”
“Ah yes,” the vampiress agreed again without arguing. “And anyway, what are you doing sitting around here? We’ve got a competition!”
“You shouldn’t have hit me,” I growled as I got up off the floor. “Let’s go, quick.”
We reach the competition just in time for the final solo duel, between our best pupil, Steel (who had already won his fight with the representative of the faculty of air) and the lad that Chas had been arguing with (who had just got back from the treatment station).
Chas’s loud exclamations made it easy to locate our friends in the crowd,
“Come on! Burn him!”
“Chas, they can’t hear you,” I told him, walking up and slapping him on the shoulder.
“They can’t hear me,” Chas agreed, “but that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy shouting my heart out. Give him a fireball! Burn him!”
Chas’s phrase “Burn him!” was soon picked up by our entire faculty. So thanks to Chas, we now had our own battle cry.
Chas only noticed Alice when his voice gave out from all the yelling.
“Where were you?”
“I overslept,” she said, giving me a warning glance.
Okay, if the girl wanted me to keep my mouth shut, then I’d keep my mouth shut. And I decided to keep quiet about having been attacked by someone with a knife too. I hadn’t even told Alice about that ... yet.
Meanwhile the duel had started.
Don’t be surprised if I don’t describe any of the duels except ours. I can’t tell you how tired of them I was by this time. The worst thing of all was that there was nothing new to see. I knew all these spells off by heart, the sight of all those shields and fireballs and fists was enough to make me feel sick ... If only, just once, I could have seen a duel between real Craftsmen, or at least senior pupils. In the whole two and a half months, there had only been one duel between senior pupils, and we hadn’t seen it, because we were in Shins’s class at the time.
Anyway Steel lost his duel. I didn’t know what Shins would do to him now (in the last two weeks I had realised that for some reason this competition was very important to our teacher), but the lad did everything he could. The duel was very close, with both opponents down on the floor more than once. Steel had a shining black eye, and his opponent was singed by a fireball that had broken through his water shields. But despite his burns, the lad managed to hit Steel from behind with a column of water. After a blow that hard, our best pupil was carried straight from the field to the treatment station on a stretcher. The victor followed him there, but on his own two feet.
And that left our faculty in second place in the overall standings. If we won our team duel, we could easily find ourselves in first place. If we won ...
“We’re on soon,” Chas said, getting agitated. “Does everyone remember what we have to do?”
“Win,” Naive said.
Chas looked at Vickers junior as if he was his bitterest enemy, but he controlled himself and said nothing.
“Let’s move closer to the field,” Neville suggested. “That way we’ll see who we’re drawn against too.”
Scene 7
“Earth would be the best,” Alice mused as we made our way through the crowd to the field.
In principle, I agreed with her. The main advantage we had over earth magic was that fire was better than anything else at dealing with all kinds of vegetation. And the second was that vegetation had to grow. Magical plants grew fast – they took anything from a tenth of a second to several minutes – but even in that short time there was a lot that you could do. But then, of course, there was more to earth magic than just plants, those lads could make the earth shake and create stone walls. Only there was no earth on the floor where the duels took place, and there were no stones either (apart from the floor and the walls, which, according rumour, it was impossible to damage). Fortunately. I was always amazed at how happily their green vegetation flourished on a bare stone floor ...
“I think water would be best,” Neville disagreed.
He was wrong there, of course. Water is fire’s worst enemy, and a duel with pupils from that faculty would be very tricky. Our only advantage, which was what Neville was relying on, was his aptitude for water magic. Very rarely – almost never, in fact – it happened that someone had an equal aptitude for working with opposed elements. That was what Neville was counting on. And apart from that, I suspected that he simply wanted to test his skill.
We walked through the crowd and came out right beside a group of four Craftsmen who were the first-year teachers. They were arguing about something as we appeared beside them, but when Shins spotted us, the argument immediately broke off.
“Allow me to introduce my best team of five,” our teacher said with a smile. “Zachary, Chasis, Alice, Neville and Naive.”
The other three Craftsmen nodded to us, but they stopped when they saw Alice’s grin – I have no idea what she had to smile at – and didn’t go any further.
“Hmm- hmm ...” said one of them, clearing his throat. “We’ve heard, we’ve heard ...”
“Mind you, only good things,” Shins said.
Who would ever have believed it? Only good things – and from Shins, of all people!
“And here are my five,” the bearded Craftsman standing beside Shins said cheerfully.
When we turned to look, we were absolutely stupefied. Or rather, all five of us turned to look, and only Chas and I were stupefied. But quite enough for everyone.
“Allow me to introduce Lens, Angel, Nivel and Story ... Alik isn’t here yet, he’s at the treatment station. Recovering from the duel in which he overcame the representative of the faculty of fire only a few minutes ago,” the bearded Craftsman informed us with a superior smile. “He’ll be back in about an hour.”
Wonderful. So the best pupil from their faculty was taking part in the team battle as well. Absolutely marvellous.
“Very pleased to meet you,” Chas and I said as acidly as we could manage, trying to conceal the anxiety in our voices.
“Is the dining hall closed today?” Lens asked caustically.
“Why, did you fancy some soup?” Chas replied.
Alice shook her head: “Somehow I get the impression that you already know each other.”
Fortunately, the Craftsmen took no notice of our little spat.
“Since you can only start in an hour’s time, only three teams will participate in the draw for the first bout,” said Shins. “Right then ...”
I wondered just how the draw was carried out.
The three Craftsmen held out their fists and started shaking them up and down.
“Stone, scissors, paper ...”
We looked at each other incredulously. And the expressions on the faces of the pupils from the faculty of water were as dazed as ours. Was this a joke? The Craftsmen drew lots using a common children’s game?
After several rounds the participants had been determined. It was us and the faculty of air. I’d been expecting some lousy turn of events like that. Air was the most awkward opponent for us, and for the other elements too, to be quite honest. Not dangerous, mind you, but awkward. Why so? Because the pupils from the faculty of air were the most elusive, and the tactics they used in a fight were the trickiest and ... the sneakiest. Just imagine an aerial fist flying straight at you: it’s not really that easy to spot (all you can see are the vibrations of the air), and just at the most awkward moment you trip over something or run into something. An obstacle made of air. Suddenly, for a second, the air in front of your leg, your arm or your face becomes a lot denser, and you run into this thing at full speed. Annoying? That’s not the word for it. And if you got caught in the middle of an acrobatic manoeuvre ... then you just had to hope the Monitoring Party would take
pity on you and make sure you didn’t break your neck. No treatment station would be able to help you then. And although there hadn’t been any cases like that so far – or rather, we hadn’t been told about any– speaking for myself, I’d rather not put my faith in statistics, not even statistics as positive as that. So acrobatics were out – and all the others understood that perfectly well too. But anyway, we’d made preparations for this turn of events, although they were pretty superficial.
“Does it look like we have a few little problems here?” Naive asked, just to get things clear, after we’d moved away from the Craftsmen for a brief conference.
“Just a few!” Chas growled. “All our advantages are down the tubes!”
He was almost right, of course, but things weren’t really all that bad. We had to remember that in order to create a so-called “aerial trip”, a pupil from the faculty of air had to come within fifteen or twenty feet. Why so close? Well, why didn’t we create fireballs right under our opponent’s nose? We had to create the structure of the spell only a few yards away from us, and then give it the impulse to move in the right direction. And that was because we could only weave the energy flows right in front of ourselves, no more than a couple of yards away. That was the way it was done.
“Don’t we have advantages?” Naive asked naively.
Chas slowly turned bright red.
“You ... just keep quiet,” he hissed. “Go and have a chat with your phantom janitor.”
Naive took offence at that.
“I really did see him,” he muttered. “Once on our floor and once on the floor where the meditation halls are.”
“Sure, sure,” Chas mocked. “And yesterday I saw dragons performing their mating ritual outside my window.”
“Pervert,” Alice muttered. “Voyeurist ...”
How about that for fancy swearing! I’d have to ask her what that strange word meant when we had some free time. Really and truly, the vampiress was always amazing me.
“Let’s not waste our strength on wrangling with each other,” I put in. “We have to concentrate on the duel and focus our minds on winning.”
“Good thinking!” said Shins’s voice behind my back.
He walked up, looked round at all of us and pronounced a speech that was brief and – surprisingly – pretty good-humoured.
“Now, you guys, a lot depends on how you do today. You have to win, and conclusively. Beat them hollow. Do you understand me?”
“Yes,” we said, nodding wisely.
“Don’t forget now, if you let me down ...” From the expression on the Craftsman’s face, we got a pretty precise and detailed idea of what he would do to us in that case.
“We understand,” I rapped out.
“No problem,” Chas added optimistically.
For some reason the others decided not to say anything.
“Now, quick march to the field and do everything you have to do to win!” our teacher barked.
We obediently trudged off.
The duel started according to regulations. We walked out onto the field and stood in two lines facing each other, and then I realised I knew one of our opponents – he was an old acquaintance from the dining hall. The two of us had washed hundreds of plates together. He recognised me too. We nodded to each other and wished good luck – to ourselves (what point is there in wishing your opponent good luck?).
Everyone pulled their hoods up and secured them with special fastenings. We and our opponents were both wearing yellow pupils’ livery, and only the colour of the hoods was different, to show which faculty we belonged to (ours were red, and the “aerials” had blue).
A few seconds later the DED spread out over us, and our entire world was reduced to the limits of the duelling field.
It was hard to follow what all our opponents were up to, and practically impossible at the same time to watch what my team-mates were doing. But in any case, I soon gave up trying to watch my friends when our opponents moved into action. Their first decision was pretty much the best they could have taken – they tried to knock Naive out of the game – which was only logical, since the rumours about his power had spread to the other faculties. And we had foreseen that this was one of the most likely possibilities.
So, when five aerial fists went hurtling towards Vickers junior, my general-purpose wall was already standing in front of him. Then we struck back in the same style, and tried to take out one of our adversaries. The one in the middle. Naive’s huge fireball sailed over the wall and the other four of us launched firebirds. The trick didn’t work.
“Now we’ll give you a roasting,” Chas yelled, and immediately took shelter behind the almost invisible wall.
The response was three aerial fists. The wall gave way under the third one, and Chas was thrown back about six feet by the recoil.
“You and who else!” one of our opponents shouted.
Chas slowly picked himself up off the floor.
“Burn them!” he yelled, and our recently acquired call to battle announced that the time for friendly formalities was over.
And then the real carnage started.
The “aerials” suddenly moved a lot closer. They darted forward, covering twenty-five yards in only a few seconds, dodging our fireballs with ease. The “aerials” were genuine acrobats – they ran through the air, creating invisible steps under their own feet, and sometimes using levitation to help them along. They were everywhere at once. But we had to move at the speed of a tortoise and fend off the attack.
On my left Alice tried to jump out of the way of an aerial fist, and just at that second her legs seemed to run into an invisible barrier. She went down, and immediately moved into a roll, but then ran smack into an invisible wall, this time with her back. Just at the right moment I managed to dodge another attack and avoid tripping over an invisible obstacle, and I spotted the joker who was causing Alice such serious problems.
I couldn’t let him get away with that – and I had something ready for this very situation. Five modest-sized (actually, really small) fiery butterflies went dashing at the lad from all sides, and all five of them hit the target, after nimbly dodging round two shields. All of my spells were small ... but very clever.
Meanwhile Neville spoiled our opponents’ acrobatic display a bit by transforming the entire field into a skating rink. One of the “aerials” was just turning a backward somersault at that moment ... and he took a really bad tumble. Naive immediately stepped in and zapped off his very best fireball. The Monitoring Party condescended to soften the blow, and the lad got off with a pretty bad scare, but he passed out.
Five of us against four of them!
But my delight was premature. I was distracted for a split second – and I took a blow to the jaw from an aerial fist.
I found myself on the floor, and the floor was covered by the ice that Neville had created. It wasn’t easy to get back up ...
Another aerial fist from the side hit me on the shoulder, and set me spinning on the spot. And then my head struck something hard ...
A man in strange green clothes was speaking, rapping out every word:
“The attack will be unexpected! We shall take the enemy by surprise ...”
Events had moved on without my involvement – and they were moving in the direction of our defeat. When I got to my knees and looked around, the sides were level at three against three. On our side, Naive and Chas had been knocked out of the game. They were both lying unconscious a few yards away from me
The three “aerials” were pressing Alice and Neville very hard, and they had very conveniently turned their backs on me. I couldn’t let an opportunity like that slip. Gathering all my strength, I launched three small fireballs. Purely by chance, one of our adversaries jerked to one side, out of the way, but the other two were hit. Not very hard, but enough to distract them for a moment. And that moment was long enough for Alice to create her “heater”, as Chas called it, under her opponent. The lad was tossed up into the air, and co
llided with the dome. When the “aerial” landed on the floor he was already unconscious.
Neville’s move was less successful, and his opponent managed to put up a shield. But the fortunate lad who had dodged my fireball suddenly took offence at all this attention and struck out at Alice and Neville with an “air wave”. The aerials didn’t use this spell very often, apparently it was quite difficult to weave. I could see why. An immense wave of trembling air, looking as if it had been heated, simply swept Alice and Neville away. I just hoped the Monitoring Party had softened their collision with the dome ...
So now I was left alone to face two pupils from the faculty of air. We stopped for little while to get our breath back and take a good look at each other.