Schooled in Magic

by Christopher G. Nuttall

  “But there are other possibilities,” Mistress Irene added. “If you happened to come up with something that was very useful, you might be paid a fee by the monarch–or the military.”

  Emily had thought about that, but she couldn’t think of anything that she could produce that the military might want. The Sergeants would love gunpowder, she was sure, yet she didn’t know how to produce it. She’d given some thought to producing magical guns–using spells to blast the cannonball towards the enemy with great force–before realizing that they already had that concept. Maybe if she used a spell to duplicate gunpowder’s effects directly ...

  She scowled, remembering what she’d read in her book. Warfare didn’t involve tanks and aircraft, not here; it involved iron swords, sorcery and animals that had been modified by magic to be more intelligent and capable. There were horses in this world that could almost speak; cats and dogs that could think almost like a human. Everything she knew about warfare from studying history was either already present or beyond her ability to produce, unless ... a thought struck her and she made a mental note to check to see if they had invented stirrups. Or bicycles.

  Bicycles would be interesting, if they could be produced with local metals. She might not understand precisely how and why gears worked, but she knew how they went together. It would be easy to sketch out the concept and see if Imaiqah’s father–or someone else–could produce them cheaply enough for commoners to buy. Or maybe rent them, if metal was too expensive for bicycles to be produced in vast numbers.

  “I look forward to seeing what you introduce,” Mistress Irene said.

  After a pause, Mistress Irene picked up a sheet of parchment from her table and passed it to Emily. “Your new class schedule for the coming week. I’m afraid you’re going to be busy.”

  Emily scanned it quickly, feeling a sinking sensation in her chest. Now that she had been introduced to all of her classes, she would be starting the main ones with the other new pupils while being expected to join already-running classes in minor subjects and catch up as quickly as possible. She wondered if she was actually meant to do well in all of them, or if the tutors merely wanted her to have a taste of each discipline. Sorcerers, it seemed, were expected to know something about everything.

  There were two periods for Martial Magic, she noted numbly, both consisting of two hours of hard physical exercise and tactical theory. Thankfully, the planners had placed them both at the end of the day, so at least she would be able to rest after pushing herself to the limit.

  She also had a free period every day, but she already knew that it wasn’t really ‘free.’ Instead, she needed to use it to study. Each of her classes had a long reading list of books that students were expected to read in their own time and she had a feeling that if she didn’t do her own research, she would run into trouble sooner or later. Besides, there were points that everyone who grew up here knew–that she didn’t know - and no one had thought to tell her because they believed that they were obvious. She would just have to keep studying and pray that it was enough to keep her going without any major mishaps.

  And there was a black mark on two separate periods.

  “What’s this?” Emily asked.

  “For the moment, you can consider them free periods,” Mistress Irene said. “Unlike most of the basic classes, Ancient Writing won’t be running a new primer class for several weeks. I’ll tell you when the next class has been organized. Just read about the subject if you have time.”

  Emily groaned, rubbing her forehead. There were the reading lists for the other classes, and then the books she needed to study to learn how to defend herself, and then there were the history books covering the Allied Lands ...

  “Students,” Mistress Irene commented sardonically. “Just remember that what you don’t know can hurt you.”

  “Of course,” Emily said. Hadn’t there been a joke about what you didn’t know being able to hurt you because the original saying had been something about backstabbing you to death? “I’ll learn as quickly as I can.”

  “And go to the playing fields this afternoon,” Mistress Irene added. “You should at least see one game of Ken.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  ACCORDING TO A BOOK ABOUT THE history of Whitehall, a sorcerer of somewhat questionable sanity had set out to create the most complicated game he could for budding sorcerers. In the resulting game, there were twelve players to each team, four different sides and–just to confuse anyone who wasn’t already, the rules changed depending on what the players were actually doing. Two players in each team, selected randomly, were actually traitors working for a different team, who could win the game by making their own side lose.

  Emily detested all team sports with a passion, but Ken was particularly absurd, especially considering where it was played. The Arena was as dimensionally flexible as the rest of Whitehall–and massive, which meant that the players had more room to roam. And roam they did; at times, the players would throw balls from hand to hand as they ran through the marked passageways; at other times, they would jump into tubes and pop up at the other side of the Arena. Being hit by a ball sent a player into the penalty box, where spectators pointed and laughed for ten minutes, unless he happened to be carrying one of the other balls when they were hit. If he had a red ball, he was out of the game completely and was booed as they slouched out of the Arena; a yellow ball meant that he had to surrender the ball they were carrying by throwing it to a player from a different team; a green ball meant that he got a free pass. Naturally, the balls changed color at random. A player might jump for a green ball and discover–too late–that he had caught a red ball.

  It seemed to Emily that the designer had meshed soccer, basketball, paintball and dodge ball into a single game, played inside a climbing frame for children.

  Points could be scored by either putting a ball into a hoop or knocking other players into the penalty box–or off the field completely. The referee was apparently allowed to award additional points for initiative, which could be as simple as picking up a ball on the ground or jinxing another player, just to force them to compete savagely against one another. No one knew what the purpose of that was, according to the history book, because the original rulebook had been lost centuries ago. Emily, who remembered the football jocks from back home, suspected that it was really nothing more than legalizing something that would have happened anyway. It was as good a theory as any.

  Having created his rules, the sorcerer had run out of imagination and settled for naming it after himself. Ken–in the sense of knowing something, rather than Barbie’s boyfriend–had been played in roughly the same way ever since ... and, judging by the number of watching students screaming their approval as the four teams fought for victory, it had remained popular up to now.

  “Tedious,” Imaiqah announced, from where she was seated on the hillock. “You should read a book instead.”

  Emily couldn’t disagree. “Maybe they should play a game on broomsticks instead,” she said. “With balls that knock players off their brooms, a hard place to land and a golden hummingbird thingy that unbalances the game so much that whoever catches it is almost certain to win.”

  Imaiqah gave her an odd look. “Only an untrained magician would risk flying on a broomstick. A trained magician should know just how many spells could bring a broomstick and its rider crashing out of the sky.”

  “Oh,” Emily said. Maybe she should try to introduce that particular sport and see how it worked in real life. “How do they actually tell when a given team has won?”

  “In a championship game, they keep playing until only one team remains in the Arena,” Imaiqah said. “Here, there’s a time limit.” She pointed towards a large hourglass on the edge of the playing field. “Whichever team has the most points–after adjustment for losing players and fouls–wins the match. If you manage to pull off a Black Horse Ken, you get feted for life.”

  Emily blinked. “A Black Horse Ken?”

  “Tha
t’s when you lose all of your players, but still win on points,” Imaiqah said. “It doesn’t happen very often.”

  “I ... see,” Emily said. Of course it wouldn’t happen very often; a team that had been completely removed from the field would not only lose points for each player they lost, but wouldn’t be making up any more points afterwards. “They’d have to amass thousands of points before they were wiped out.”

  “Yeah,” Imaiqah said. “Broomsticks. Did you hear about Broomstick?”

  Emily gave her a sharp look. Was that a phallic joke? “No,” she said, slowly. “Why...?”

  “Third-year student,” Imaiqah explained. “She never cleaned her room, even when her roommate reminded her time and time again. They weren’t earning any credits for cleanliness because she was sloppy and left clothes and half-eaten food lying everywhere, so the roommate was suffering too. Eventually she snapped and turned Broomstick into a broom.”

  She giggled. “But the roommate didn’t get the spell quite right,” she continued. “Broomstick took on some of the characteristics of a broom. She thought she belonged to her roommate, that she should be used to clean the room ... she became completely obsessed with cleaning everything when she was finally turned back into human form. There are people who say they’ve seen her leaning against a wall, waiting to be used.”

  Emily shivered. “That doesn’t sound very funny,” she said, finally. It was a thoroughly gruesome story, with implications that chilled her. “What did the roommate do wrong?”

  “We all got a lecture on it when we entered Advanced Charms,” Imaiqah said. Unlike Alassa, she had actually worked her way through Basic Charms before Emily had been enrolled at Whitehall. “The roommate didn’t specify that her mind should remain unaffected because she didn’t think that there would be any bad effects, not like being a frog for an hour and then catching yourself trying to snap flies out of the air with your tongue for the next week. So the unexplored variable affected her mind ...”

  “Good God,” Emily said. “And that is considered a harmless prank?”

  “No,” Imaiqah said, more seriously. “I think that the roommate was punished severely, but Broomstick had to be left to recover on her own. The druids couldn’t actually do much for her without making the problem worse.”

  A cheer rose up from the direction of the stands as one of the players scored a goal, winning ten points for his team. Two other players converged on him and threw balls at the same moment, forcing him to duck and cast a charm to shield himself. The rules stated that shielding charms could not be maintained for longer than ten seconds, every five minutes, or the unfortunate player would spend time in the penalty box. Emily rolled her eyes as the spectators counted upwards gleefully, just before the charm was dispelled with two seconds to spare.

  Imaiqah coughed, possibly sensing that Emily found the topic of mental changes caused by transfiguration uncomfortable. “I practiced with your numbers,” she said, holding up a sheet of paper. “And with your accounting system. My father is going to love them.”

  Emily took the sheet of paper and scanned it quickly. She had come up with the idea of double-entry bookkeeping when she’d realized that Imaiqah, a merchant’s daughter, had never heard of it, but she hadn’t realized that her world didn’t have Arabic-style numerals until she’d seen Imaiqah’s first page of accounts. Her father had given Imaiqah a small allowance and, she’d reluctantly admitted, he expected her to justify everything she bought. Emily had written out the numbers she recalled from her home world and taught Imaiqah how to use them. “23” was a great deal simpler than something comparable to “XXIII”–and that was a relatively simple example. Who would have thought that medieval accounting required an entire accounting guild because even the educated classes had trouble with numbers?

  “Tell him about them,” Emily suggested. It was an idea she couldn’t copyright, but it would help convince Imaiqah’s father that she was a source of other, more profitable ideas. “And why don’t you mention the other idea to him at the same time?”

  Imaiqah flushed. “I’ll have to see what he says,” she said, finally. “He may have to start hiring tailors if he wants to produce clothes for the shop ... ”

  Emily smiled. The concept of mass production didn’t exist in this world either, allowing her a chance to outline it for someone who might listen. Instead of a number of highly-skilled craftsmen, have a larger number of workers producing goods piece by piece, she’d suggested, wishing that she’d listened more carefully when it had been mentioned back home. She was sure that there was more to it than that; no doubt someone with money involved, once he had the basic idea, would expand upon it. Tailors might no longer have to sell their wares directly if they went into partnership with merchants.

  There was another roar from the spectators and Emily rolled her eyes. One of the other tricks woven into the Arena was a spell that allowed the watchers to follow the action perfectly, no matter how far they were from the wards that marked the edge of the playing field. (Apparently, leaving the playing field without permission counted as being sent off, leaving players trying to trick their opponents into crossing the wards.) But she had to admit that she wasn’t really interested in Ken–it wasn’t something she’d be good at doing.

  All the school stories she’d read had always made the main character into a sporting prodigy. But it didn’t work that way in real life.

  Or maybe there was a point to Ken that hadn’t been mentioned in the book. Players of the game tended to think very quickly, and to react and cast spells without needing to pause and concentrate. The Allied Lands were at war–as hard as it was to imagine, with the sun shining down from high overhead, casting long rays of light over the nearby mountain peaks–and they needed fighting magicians more than they needed sports stars.

  “Come on,” Emily said. She stood. “Let’s go visit the animals.”

  Whitehall’s grounds changed without warning; every time she looked out of the windows she saw something different. There was so much magic soaked into the castle that it had a remarkable effect on its surroundings. If it hadn’t been for the amulet Madame Razz had given her, Emily knew that she wouldn’t have been able to find her way around at all.

  “What would happen,” she asked as they walked, “if the spells keeping the school stable were to collapse?”

  Imaiqah considered it. “A pocket dimension would either snap out of existence or explode everything inside it back into the normal world,” she said. “I wanted a chance to study dimensional engineering; Professor Theta said that a trained dimensional wizard could earn a living almost anywhere, but I would have to undertake three years of study first. He also said that if you knew the coordinates of the dimension, you could open and close the gateway at will without anchoring it to something in our world.”

  Emily sorted it out in her mind. Whitehall was so vast–bigger than the TARDIS, she suspected–that if the spells did collapse, the entire surrounding countryside would be completely wrecked. She’d wondered why Whitehall was so isolated from the rest of the Allied Lands–and would still have been isolated even if the necromancers didn’t exist–but perhaps that was the reason. If the school were to be destroyed, the danger to innocent bystanders would be minimized.

  They walked through a miniature village–without any discernible purpose, as far as Emily could tell–and into the Garden of the Stoned Philosophers. Emily had been told that students who kept talking in the library, despite spending an hour as a statue for each offense, were eventually transfigured permanently and placed in the garden as a warning to their successors. She really hoped that it was a joke. Looking at the statues, they all seemed to be of older men rather than the students she knew. It was probably a joke.

  “That statue always gives me the creeps,” Imaiqah admitted, pointing to one that stood on its own in the centre of the garden. It was a statue of an angel, with hands covering its face. Emily looked at it and recalled the entities she’d seen as Shadye�
�s prisoner and helpless sacrifice. There was something about the statue that made her reluctant to look away from it.

  She found her voice. “What is it?”

  “No one knows,” Imaiqah said. She looked down at the grass below their feet. “They say that there are magical creatures out there that we have never catalogued, because no one ever returns to report their existence.”

  “You,” a voice snapped. Emily glanced up sharply. Alassa was walking out of the trees that had concealed her presence, accompanied by two of her cronies. All three of them were holding wands. “Do you know what you did to me?”

  Emily glared at her, feeling rage burning through her mind. “Do you know what you did to me?”

  Alassa brandished her wand, threateningly. Emily hesitated. Using a wand was a sign that the carrier was not a skilled magician, but it didn’t mean that the carrier wasn’t a strong magician. And she had never been allowed to use a wand. She hadn’t seen Aloha use one either–and her roommate was aiming to become a combat sorceress. Sparks snapped out of the tip of Alassa’s wand, but Emily held her ground. There was no way that she was going to back down in front of the royal bully.

  “I gave you what you deserved, you insufferable commoner,” Alassa snapped. “You...”

  Words failed her as Emily stared at her in disbelief, followed by slow-burning horror. Alassa would have been raised to know, with every inch of her being, that she was born to rule–and that those who happened to be common-born were her servants. She wasn’t allowed to doubt that, not even slightly–and it would provide a justification for anything she wanted to do. No, she wouldn’t even bother with a justification. The sense of her own superiority was too strong to need to convince herself of the rightness of her own actions.