Faculty of Fire (31 page)

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 thirteen! 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.”

“No way,” Chas growled. “All because of some halfwits? We’ll serve them ourselves. We’ll serve them real good. We’ll see who has the last laugh here!”

I’d never seen Chas so angry before, they must have really hit a sore spot.

We had short break while the hungry students were stuffing their bellies, and I decided to have a nap. A night’s sleep obviously hadn’t been enough to restore my strength, and I still felt like a squeezed lemon.

But the moment I closed my eyes, someone bumped me with their shoulder, then whacked me with a tray, and stepped on my foot ... anyway, I soon realised it was almost impossible to snooze in the kitchen. For want of anything better to do, I joined a group of pupils who were excitedly debating life in the Academy. And of course, the most energetic debater of all was Chas.

“Don’t be idiots,” he said. “There’s a good reason why they’re only training us to fight duels. It means some kind of scrap’s due to blow up some time soon, and they’re going to need every craftsman they can get to fight.”

“That’s right,” one of the guys from the faculty of water agreed. “Our Emperor’s not as strong as he used to be – he doesn’t have an heir, and no one knows who’ll come to power after him. Tabernacle or one of our other neighbours might have decided to take the chance to grab the golden city.”

One of our other neighbours? Hah! We didn’t have any other neighbours ... on this continent. And I didn’t see how we could call anyone on the other continents our neighbours.

“That’s ridiculous,” said a guy from the faculty of air. “No one would risk attacking Lita, because the Academy’s here. One High Craftsman’s worth a thousand Tabernacle troops.”

It was exactly like a council of High Craftsmen. All that was missing were students from the faculty of earth. First-year student offenders discuss the fate of the world – a picture worthy of the brush of a great artist.

“They’re not stupid enough to invade us without some magical back-up. But then they have an Academy of the Craft in Tabernacle too. It’s not as strong as ours ...” Chas laughed, as if he didn’t really believe what he was saying “... but it’s pretty good.”

“That’s right,” said the one of guys from the faculty of water, nodding his head. “And that educational institution of theirs has a strange name, too. It’ll come to me in a moment ... Aha! The Order. The Magical Order.”

“And do they teach the same things there as they teach us?” I asked.

They all turned and gaped at me.

“How would we know that?”

“I don’t know,” I said with a shrug. “I just thought ...”

“Take no notice of him,” said Chas, half-joking. He’s always thinking too much, and always off the subject ...”

They all laughed.

I turned away, offended, and decided to quit the stupid discussion. As if I was interested, anyway ...

But then I got talking to one of the pupils from the faculty of air, and we even swapped a few designs for weaving spells. They hadn’t been taught any fire spells, so he was absolutely delighted by the design for a simple fireball. And I must say the spell that I received in exchange, for an “aerial shield” set me trembling in excitement. In the time we had left I told Lot – that was the young guy’s name – why I was there, and he told me what his “crime” was. It was nothing as serious as what Chas and I had done. All he’d done was to create an “air cooler” in his room – he was feeling hot, you see. And for that he’d been given a whole week of corrective labour. So Chas and I had been lucky – Caiten must have gone easy on us the first time around.

After half an hour, Chas and I went out into the hall to collect the empty plates form all the tables. Just to spite me (why else?), the familiar trio were still sitting in their places at the table with that cursed number thirteen.

“Let’s go together,” Chas whispered to me. “If anything happens, you back me up.”

Meaning what? Just what was he thinking of starting?

I made a grab to stop him. But it was too late. Chas went marching proudly across to the table and started gathering up the plates. I did the same at the next table

“You eat all the leftovers, I suppose?” puny Angel enquired. “Can’t let good food go to waste.”

“Of course,” Chas replied, without interrupting what he was doing. “That’s the same principle we follow when we brew this wonderful soup out of yesterday’s leavings.”

All three of them looked down at their empty soup plates, and their faces instantly acquired a greenish tinge.

“And I hardly need mention the simple fact that everyone in the kitchen considers it his bounden duty to spit in the plates of half-wits like you,” Chas went on.

From the expression on his face as he said this you could almost read how many times he’d spat into each plate. Although, to be quite honest, he couldn’t have spat in their plates, because I’d brought them out, and I hadn’t known until the last moment exactly who I was taking them to. But how could the three of them know that?

Their faces turned completely green.

“I’d advise you ...” Lens said threateningly. That is, he tried to make it sound like a threat, but his voice was actually shaking.

“No, I would have advised
you
,” Chas interrupted. “But it’s too late now, you’ve eaten it all ... By the way, did anyone come across a rat’s tail? I boiled up a rat out of the goodness of my heart, to put some meat in the soup. Especially for our favourite customers ...”

That was the last straw. All three of them jumped up off their seats and made a dash for the door.

“What stupid fools they are,” Chas giggled. “How did you like my performance?”