Faculty of Fire (33 page)

There was more than an hour still to go before lectures started, but we all pretended to hurry off to our passionately beloved tactics and energetics.

“How do you like that?” Chas asked as soon as we were round the corner.

“Great! Terrible!” Naive and I said simultaneously. You can guess which of us said what.

“The important thing is that he couldn’t throw you out,” Alice remarked.

“But if you’d lost the duel, he probably would have done,” said Chas.

“But why should he want to throw Zach out,” asked Neville, who wasn’t up to speed on the latest events. “Shins even praised him, which is more than I expected from the old fogey.”

“It was more than anyone was expecting,” said Chas. “So what made him turn nice all of a sudden?”

Alice gave me an eloquent glance, apparently expecting some kind of explanation. But, unfortunately, I didn’t have any worthwhile explanations to offer.

“What were those papers you handed Shins just before the duel?” she asked suspiciously.

“A bribe!” Chas replied instantly.

“No, not a bribe, it was the calculations for my fiery snake,” I explained. “He was sure I cribbed the spell from one of the senior students.”

“You should have called me as a witness,” Chas said seriously. “I could have confirmed that I was there when you thought it up.”

“No,” I disagreed. “That would have been an unnecessary reminder of our little crime ...”

“By the way, Zach, he didn’t say anything about any further punishment, did you notice?” Alice asked.

She was right. Not a single word had been breathed about my latest villainous offence against the rules of the Academy. So I must have calculated right. And now I could practise magic in my room!

“What’s she talking about?” Neville asked in surprise. “It seems to me you have too many secrets from your own team.”

“Let me tell you all about it,” Chas volunteered.

Scene 5

That evening we decided to get together and celebrate our victories. Although by the time we actually did get together it couldn’t really be called evening. First there was lunch, then there was meditation, and then there was supper and it was only afterwards that we all gathered in my room.

Chas and I could hardly stay on our feet after working in the dining hall. I could never have imagined how tiring it was to carry plates about and wash dishes for hours at a time! At the end of the second shift we were ready to collapse. The only advantage to our slave labour in the kitchen was the chance to cadge extra portions of food. For instance, we brought so much fruit to our gathering that Naive’s sudden joy at the sight of it gave him an instant fit ... of gluttony. But even in that state he couldn’t eat everything we’d brought. For the first time since we started studying at the academy, Naive actually needed our help.

“You know, there’s a definite upside to this punishment of yours,” he remarked, contemplating the remains of his second supper with a sated and yet somehow still gluttonous gaze.

Chas and I both heaved deep sighs.

“Definitely,” said Alice, surprisingly backing up Vickers junior. “If you hadn’t been punished, Zach, you wouldn’t have found out about the sensor spell, and you wouldn’t have known how to disable it.”

This time I was the only one who sighed. But it came from the heart. If only they knew what it had all cost me!

“And now we can practise any time of the day or night,” Neville added gleefully.

After he said that, four fireballs suddenly lit up in centre of the room.

“Okay, guys, just don’t burn my room to cinders,” I begged them, hastily gathering up my textbooks off the floor.

“Oh, come on, will you!” Chas exclaimed. “Here we are celebrating, and you’re still grabbing at your textbooks.”

“If I don’t grab my textbooks right now, there might not be anything left to grab in a little while,” I growled, but Chas took no notice of what I said.

He picked an apple up off the tray and raised it like a glass.

“I wish to raise this fruit in honour of today’s success!” he declared in a loud voice.

Aware of the solemnity of the moment, we all grabbed apples.

“I congratulate you and, naturally, my own beloved self, on today’s success,” Chas went on. “And may you all savour these divine fruits in honour of our future victory in the team competition.”

We knocked our fruits against each other and each took a small bite. None of us – except Naive, of course – could force down a second supper.

“Yes, I really hope that now we can practise the Craft more,” Neville said with a sigh.

“Some say practise magic, and some say practise the Craft,” Alice remarked, “but do any of us know if there’s any difference between these two concepts?”

“Magic is the control of mags, and the Craft is a method of controlling them,” I replied straight away.

“There they go again, back in their textbooks!” Chas howled. “Can’t we give it a break just this once, eh?”

“We’re almost done,” Alice reassured him, but then she turned to me and asked another question. “So basically, then, we’re just perfectly ordinary Magicians? The same as the ones who were persecuted from the twelfth to the nineteenth centuries?”

“Oh, no!” I disagreed. “There’s a huge difference between those Magicians and us! What we practise is the Craft, not magic!”

“Then what is the difference between practising the Craft and practising magic?” the vampiress asked again.

“To be quite honest, I don’t know,” I was forced to admit. “I know there is one, but what it is ... there was nothing in the libraries about that.”

“You went to the wrong libraries,” the vampiress laughed.

“Hey!” said Chas, leaping to my defence. “As it happens, Chas had access to the Central Library of Lita, and he got a better education than all the rest of us put together.”

“Oh, really?” Alice said, amazed. “And he still doesn’t know a simple thing like the difference between the Craft and magic.”

“It wasn’t mentioned in any of the history books,” I insisted. “Maybe there are some books about it in the Academy library, only we don’t have access to anything except the textbooks.”

“Haven’t you ever tried reading the legend of how the Craft first appeared?” Alice enquired.

“What sense can you make of legends? I prefer to deal with facts, not fairytales,” I answered scornfully.

“Well that’s just where you’re wrong,” Neville put in. “Legends don’t appear out of nowhere, and every fairytale is only part-fairytale.”

“I don’t read fairytales,” I said irritably.

Why were they all picking on me?

“You mean you haven’t read the
Legend of the Old Dragon’s Gift
?” Neville asked, amazed.

“No, I haven’t, and I don’t regret it in the slightest,” I replied angrily. “Fairytales are for children. Grown-ups read the historical chronicles.”

“What’s wrong with you?” Alice said to Chas. “How could you neglect your friend’s cultural education so badly?”

What? Did she think that I was backward because I didn’t read fairytales? I thought she was a lot smarter than that.

“I do repent of my omission,” Chas said and asked brightly. “Should I tell him the legend now, or wait until he goes beddy-bye?”

“I think I’ll tell it to him myself as a bedtime story,” Alice laughed.

Had I heard right?

“Maybe we ought to leave you to get on with it?” Chas shot back. “The Vickers brothers can easily move across to my room ...”

“You won’t be in my way,” Alice laughed. “Zach, do you agree to listen to the story?”

She gave me a crafty look – straight in the eyes.

I wanted to say I would gladly listen to anything at all, simply in order to hear her voice ... but for some reason all I did was nod.

“All right,” said Alice, settling herself more comfortably on the bed. “Please turn off the light and leave just the smallest fireball.”

The guys quickly performed all the necessary operations and sat down round the vampiress. I was already sitting beside her anyway. As a point of information, I must say that when it comes to telling stories, vampires are the tops. With their perfect memories ...

“Many have heard of the times of the Magicians’ persecution. But few really know what caused it. The stories about ‘Evil Magicians’ are full of details that make the blood run cold in the veins of even the most hardened vampires. But that’s not really the way things were at all.”

“So those magicians were nothing but little darlings after all?” Chas suggested.

“Don’t interrupt,” Neville hissed at him.

“At first the Magicians were not evil, at least, they were no more evil than other people,” Alice continued. “But in those days the laws that governed magic were different, or rather, it was not governed by any laws at all. That is to say, a Magician could not always predict the effect of the spell that he had invented, and when he could, it was only approximately. For instance, a magician wanted to grow a tree, and he uttered a spell ... and a tree really did grow, but what qualities did it possess? The tree might prove to be poisonous, or it might prove useful and bear good fruit. In casting a spell it was very difficult to foresee all the possible things that might happen, and so in those days practising magic was like playing a game with the theory of probability. You might be lucky, to you might not. And, of course, it goes without saying that innocent bystanders suffered just as much from the spells as the Magicians themselves (in fact, sometimes even more). As time passed, of course, if a magician survived, then he built up a certain set of spells that worked, and stopped making dangerous experiments. But the problem was that they refused to share the knowledge they had gained through their perilous efforts with other members of their dangerous profession. And they were also very reluctant to take apprentices ... so novice magicians had to travel the entire road of trial and error all the way from the beginning to the end (which was quite often lamentable).

“Ordinary people quickly caught on to the fact that living alongside practising musicians was rather dangerous, and they tried to drive them out of their communities any way they could. Not all the magicians were so accommodating that they simply packed up and left their homes, and confrontations became ever more frequent, with the Magicians often prepared to resort destructive magic...

“Over the course of hundreds of years, people came to detest Magicians so much that they became genuine outcasts. Wherever they were discovered, people drove them out, or simply killed them. They say that this was the period when the Order of Inquisitors arose in the Tabernacle Caliphate, and it was the Inquisitors who perfected the art of catching and killing Magicians.

“Magic was forbidden. All those who tried to practise it were obliged to leave their homes and live in the forests – but the druids quickly drove them out of there – or in the mountains, where they usually simply disappeared (quite possibly ending their magical careers in a dragon’s stomach).

“These powerful social upheavals made it easy for the Kingdom of Miir to seize the land of its neighbours. In some cases, settlements even joined the Kingdom of their own free will, since the strength of the vampires and their imperviousness to magic were well known to all. No one ever called the vampires’ abilities magical, probably because all of the vampires’ supernatural abilities were expressed in the control of their own body and spirit, unlike the Magicians, whose influence continued to grow stronger ... and so it happened that the vampires were obliged to carry out regular hunts for magicians on their lands. Although the vampires had always regarded the people living on their territory as mere cattle, even cattle sometimes require protection.

“And during one of these hunts a group of vampires (in fact there were only two of them) travelled far, very far into the Distant Mountains. And all because the Magician they were hunting was very stubborn and refused to surrender. And he didn’t just run, he used magic, so that the vampires couldn’t catch him. He must have been a very experienced magician who had managed to learn a lot of powerful spells without killing himself in the process.

“The two vampires and the Magician spent several weeks galloping though the mountains, until the pursuers drove him into the cave of an old dragon. By the way, even in those days, most of the dragons who were still alive were quite incredibly old, probably because the young, inexperienced ones were quickly killed by thrill seekers and men seeking their precious scales. Also the guards of the shafts who mined the mountain stone were quite fond of dragon’s meat and enjoyed hunting the winged beasts. However, dragons were really only beasts until a certain age, because they matured very slowly, but if they survived into adulthood then, according to the legends, they became almost the cleverest creatures in the world. But that was only according to legend, because, despite their wisdom and cleverness, dragons themselves were quite fond of human flesh and gladly devoured the rare witnesses of their wisdom.