Faculty of Fire

by Alex Kosh

  “Something could happen to one,” the troll said with a shrug. “This way we have a spare ...”

  They dragged us into a hall where several trolls in scruffy loin cloths had set up base. These lads were obviously the ones with all the brains, in charge of the whole operation. Otherwise why would they need the maps of the Academy that were laid out the table?

  “All right,” the other troll agreed. “What was it Dkharm said? The Craftsman must check the teleports before every transit. Well then, two Craftsmen can check the teleports twice as fast.”

  Shins and I glanced at each other.

  “Sorry to ask, but do you know how to check teleports?” I enquired in a low voice.

  “What do you think?” the Craftsman said, giving me a haughty look.

  “I see,” I sighed.

  One of the trolls took hold of Shins by the scruff of the neck.

  “This one stays here for now, we need to question him.”

  Another troll lifted me into the air in the same fashion.

  “And this one’s coming with me.”

  Very funny. What choice did I have, with my feet dangling two feet above the ground?

  “Do you have any idea at all about teleports?” asked Shins, squinting sideways at me.

  My troll turned and walked towards the door, still clutching me by the scruff of my neck.

  “What do you think?” I replied dismally and left the room, still dangling in mid-air.

  The stone troll lugged me to the teleports and set me down tidily on the floor.

  “Right, now, you tell me if ...” – the troll pondered for a moment – “... that teleport’s in working order.”

  As far as I could tell, he pointed to one of the teleports at random.

  “It’s working,” I replied immediately.

  “That’s swift,” the troll said approvingly. “Now go through it. And don’t forget, if you try to run away, we’ll wring your friend’s neck.”

  Well, the trolls were certainly great logicians. How was he going to tell whether I’d made a run for it or been torn to shreds by the teleport? But then, what did I know, maybe the process was accompanied by visual effects of some sort. And then again, if they wrung Shins’s neck, who was going to check the teleports for them? But on the other hand, they had a whole crowd of Craftsmen stashed away on the twentieth floor.

  I obediently walked over to the teleport.

  Right then, here we go.

  One step up onto the platform, and I was transported to a different floor.

  A nasty little thought immediately popped up somewhere in the back of my mind. Why didn’t I just take off and let them wring Shins’s neck? What did I care? Let the old coot get what he deserved ...

  I stepped back into the teleport.

  “Well done, you got that right,” the troll praised me, and immediately cuffed me on the back of the head. With his stone hand ...

  “What was that for?” I asked resentfully as I got up off the floor.

  “For taking so long to come back,” the troll explained cheerfully. “Now check that one.”

  “It’s not working,” I answered immediately.

  I just had to hope the troll didn’t have the brains to push me into the teleport headfirst, to see if I’d told him the truth.

  “And that one there?”

  “It’s working,” I replied, guessing at random again.

  “Check it,” the troll ordered.

  I suddenly felt like a dog following orders from its master. Yuck ...

  But nonetheless, I stepped into the teleport. I tried not to think about the danger of being spread across all eighty floors ... and I actually almost managed it.

  I came out on a different floor and immediately stepped back in again.

  “Swift,” the troll rumbled again. “Let’s go and check the teleports on another floor.”

  I nodded and plodded towards the round platform he had indicated.

  We stepped from teleport to teleport until we reached the familiar space of the History Museum – and we emerged from the same teleport through which Kelnmiir and I had fled only a couple of hours earlier.

  It took a while before I started recovering from the strange state of detachment in which I had passed through the teleports. Every step could have been my last ...

  I started trembling

  “All right, take a rest for a while,” the troll said, and he tethered me to a pillar, like a horse, with my hands tied behind my back.

  I was afraid I might not be so lucky next time. What if one of the teleports turned out to be faulty? But no, it was better not to think about that ...

  Especially bearing in mind that I had something even more interesting to think about. What could that be? Well, for instance, why had the teleports let me through with no problem just now, when they refused to work before? What was the reason for that? Shins could probably have answered that question, but he was still on the other floor. A pity.

  As if in response to my plea, Shins suddenly emerged from the teleport, urged on by a stone troll.

  “Sit here,” the troll growled and pushed Shins towards the opposite wall.

  When the troll went away, the Craftsman glanced around furtively and scurried across to me. I wondered why they’d tied me up, but not him.

  “You’ve been very lucky,” Shins told me first of all. “About one in every five teleports is faulty. I’d don’t know how you managed to avoid them ...”

  So I could quite easily have stepped into a teleport ... and never stepped out of it again? Oh, jeepers ...

  “Fools have all the luck,” I muttered in reply. “What’s it to you? I’m a spy ... you’d be better off if I got splatted.”

  “Even if you are a spy, it’s probably not of your own free will. Any man could be hypnotised, and he can’t be blamed for that,” Shins said unexpectedly. “And apart from that, only a Craftsman could have reprogrammed the teleports. Now that I’ve examined all the teleports, I can say that for certain. You couldn’t have done that.”

  First he almost spat in my face, and then he started making excuses for me.

  “If it’s not my fault that I’m a spy – even though that still hasn’t been proved yet – then why did you take such a dislike to me?” I asked, coming back to the question that was giving me no peace.

  Shins shrugged: “There was a general directive – to give some pupils a harder time than the others.”

  “A directive?” I asked incredulously.

  “Well, there was a list of those they wanted us to concentrate on.”

  “But what for?”

  “You haven’t studied the theory of hypnosis yet,” Shins continued. “It’s generally believed that practically any kind of hypnosis can be broken down if a person is subjected to intense nervous stress or discomfort. We were given the names of those who were under the greatest suspicion, so that we could make things as hard as possible for them...”

  “And I was one of the suspects,” I concluded.

  Well, it was logical enough. When I arrived in the Academy, I was carrying clear signs of hypnosis, I was surprised the Craftsmen hadn’t detained me straight away.

  “Yes,” Shins agreed. “But what we didn’t anticipate was that a human being can get used to anything. The more intensive training and increased rate of injuries only led to the pupils concerned becoming psychologically tougher and stronger. All our attempts to throw the suspects off balance only had the opposite effect of setting them more firmly on their feet.”

  If I thought about it for a while, that was exactly the way it had happened. Whenever they gave us a hard time, we survived... and calmly kept studying. But what were they expecting? That we would break down and be so terrified that we couldn’t sleep at night? Oh, sure. We had far too little time for sleep anyway.

  “And do you trust me now or not?” I asked in a quiet voice.

  “I’m obliged to trust you now, because I have no other choice. I need your help if I’m going
to do anything at all ...”

  I could hardly hold back a smile of delight.

  “And what do we need to do?”

  First we’d got into the History Museum, then the Main Hall ... But no matter how hard I tried, I hadn’t been able to come up with what we needed to do in order to ... in order to free the Craftsmen, I supposed ...

  “We need to remove the external force field from around the Academy,” Shins explained. “It may be night now, but there’s always energy dispersed through the air, even at night. Although, of course, there’s not as much of it at night as there is during the day. Anyway, if we remove the isolation field, we allow energy into the Academy from the outside world, and once there’s energy, the Craftsmen will throw the trolls out of here in a couple of minutes.”

  We both looked at the trolls swarming around the huge wooden crates.

  “That would be great,” I declared. “But how do we do it?”

  Shins thought for a moment. It seemed to me that he still wasn’t sure if he could really trust me.

  “We need to get out of the Academy building somehow.”

  “Well, supposing we do get out of the tower, which is highly unlikely, then what?”

  “Then I’ll go into action,” Shins sighed and showed me a ring. “Recognise it?”

  I nodded.

  Of course I recognised the charge ring. Romius had given it to Shins, so he could use it to remove the isolation field ...

  “Apart from me, no one – neither you nor your vampire friend – can destroy the isolation field,” Shins continued. “Bear in mind that I’ve put my trust in you, and if the trolls or whoever’s behind them hear about it, I’ll know for certain who to blame.”

  I looked around hastily. You could never tell, someone might be eavesdropping, and then they’d dump the blame on me.

  “So Kelnmiir and I were supposed to make sure you got out of the Academy?” I asked.

  How about that! First they call you a spy, then they lay the responsibility for solving everything on you. What kind of behaviour was that? How could I make sure that Shins got out of the tower, if my only weapon – the all-purpose battle broom – had been left behind in the Main Hall? It was the end ... the Academy was doomed ...

  “And you can’t destroy the isolation field from a window?” I asked half-heartedly. There weren’t any windows in the Museum in any case, but what if Shins suddenly got the chance to do something during one of his tours of the teleports with the trolls? Only he was no fool, he would have done it already if he’d had a chance.

  “The field can only be destroyed from the ground floor level,” said Shins, confirming my misgivings. “That’s the way it was designed. It was created about seven centuries ago, so we can’t ask its creator why things were done precisely like that. A pity. He probably had plans of his own ... Thanks be to the gods, he never carried them out.”

  Now he had revealed another secret to me. With every word he was digging me in deeper and deeper. Even if I really wasn’t a spy (and I didn’t entirely believe that myself any more) and if we somehow managed to win, they could easily decide to get rid of me as someone who knew too much. Earlier I would never have thought the Craftsmen were capable of something like that, but now I was quite certain that if it was necessary, I would simply disappear. And after the kind of kick in the backside the Academy had received from the Tabernaclian invaders, they would make mincemeat of anyone who was under the slightest suspicion or posed the slightest threat to them. Ah, but then I still had to survive that long ...

  “Do you have any ideas about how we could get out of here?”

  “Well you see,” said Shins, looking embarrassed (oh wonder of wonders!), “I’m not used to taking any kind of action without magic. For more than a hundred years I’ve done absolutely everything and solved all my problems with the help of the Craft, so it’s hard for me to ... think sensibly in the present situation.”

  Well, now the Craftsmen had got their comeuppance, hadn’t they? “Okay, that means I’ll have to come up with something,” I sighed.

  A solitary, but very bold idea flashed through my mind: It would have been better if I was a spy. There wouldn’t have been so many problems ...

  “By the way, you wouldn’t like to untie my hands, would you?” I asked, suddenly remembering my situation. “They’re getting a bit numb ...”

  A bit – that was putting it very mildly ...

  “No,” said Shins, taking me by surprise. “If the trolls wanted to tie you up, why upset them unnecessarily? What if they get annoyed with you or me and break our arms or legs ... or do something else ...”

  Hmmm ... but the Craftsman was right after all. Why irritate the stoneheads unnecessarily? They were heavy-handed. I could hang about there for a bit longer, what did it matter if my hands went numb? As long as no one broke them for me ...

  “By the way,” I said, remembering, “if our stone friends come back and drag me off to check the teleports again ... What should I do?”

  “I can’t teach you to see coded energy flows, no matter how much I might like to. They spend quite a long time on that in the third year, using special teaching methods.”

  “Then while we’re on the subject ...” I continued. “Tell me why, when we were wandering round the Academy after it was captured, the teleports wouldn’t let us through, but just now I walked through a teleport ahead of a troll in both directions with no problem.”

  “Oh, that’s very simple,” Shins said blithely. “There’s an element in the teleport’s autonomous power supply that blocks it from working if there isn’t a troll nearby.”

  “That’s clear, then,” I said with a nod. “Although no, it isn’t clear at all. If that was it, then I could have gone through the teleport in one direction, but I couldn’t have got back.

  “Who knows how the element works?” Shins said with a shrug. “That’s the basic form, but there’s probably more to it than the basics ... maybe it’s enough for the troll to be near the receiving teleport. Without serious research I doubt if it’s possible to say anything more specific than that. By the way, this new element has taken the place of another element that used to block the teleport from functioning if there was insufficient energy to transport the body involved. That’s why the teleports have become dangerous – the safely block has been replaced.”

  Aha! So the invaders had made life difficult for themselves. That much was clear ...

  “And can’t you remove the block from the teleports?” I enquired.

  “I can remove the blocks from all the teleports in five minutes. But only if I have enough energy ... and I don’t.”

  “Clear enough,” I drawled, and went back to the question that was bothering me most of all. “So there’s no way I can know if a teleport is dangerous or not?”

  “Well, if a teleport has broken down completely, you can. Throw something very small into the teleport, and if it disappears in a red flash, instead of a white one as usual, then the teleport has no energy left at all.”

  “That’s something, at least,” I sighed.

  A troll walked out quietly from behind the crates. Such a huge carcass, but he moved so quietly ... a troll like that could creep on you without you even noticing.

  He walked over to us unhurriedly, untied my hands and tied Shins’s.

  “Right, swifty, you’re coming with me,” the stonehead announced and dragged me off, not towards the teleport, but into the storeroom of the Museum.

  As we walked along the corridor, the troll thought out loud: “You people think we’re stupid, but that’s not true at all. Do you think we didn’t recognise you? Not long ago you and that vampire made a dash for this teleport. And where did it get you? Nowhere. A couple of hours later, and here you are, right back where you started.”

  I had to admit that the troll’s reasoning was very sound.

  “You’re a swift one,” the troll accused me. “And we don’t like swift ones. You think we’re stupid, but that’s n
ot right.”

  I thought he’d told me that already ...

  “Oh no,” I said, trying to explain. “I don’t think you’re stupid ... maybe just a little bit slow ...”

  “We’ve got something for you,” the troll said ominously.

  We have?

  Two stone hands were placed on my shoulders.

  “You’re such a swift one, you need to cool your enthusiasm a bit. And we’re going to help you with that.”

  I felt something close round my neck ... something made of iron!