Spiral Path (Night Calls Series Book 3) (25 page)

As we started up the flight leading to the third floor, we
could hear doors opening above us, and male voices, most of them low. Professor
Brown moved tightly to the railing, continuing to climb as a group of young men
flowed past us, nodding respectfully to us, several murmuring, “Professor
Brown,” as they passed. One of them, a tall, blond youth with a moustache,
winked at me, and another with skin the color of ground nutmeg smiled.

Professor Brown nodded once, both acknowledging and
dismissing them, I thought.

I had the impression that they were afraid of her.

I turned slightly, glancing over my shoulder. Several of the
young men were looking warily over
their
shoulders, but they looked away when they saw my interest.

So far, she didn’t frighten me. Tonneman and several of the
others worried me, though. Just because they had manners didn’t mean that they
were truly kind.

I’d have to figure out the students here eventually. For
now, I had to find my place with the teachers.

By the time we reached the landing, we were alone. The door
to the practice area was ajar; Professor Brown pushed it open. “Tonneman!” she
cried, speaking like one man addressing another. “I have brought you your heart’s
desire!”

Professor Tonneman was erasing a huge piece of slate that
covered a section of the wall. The last of the chalk writing disappeared under
his rag. Then he turned to us. He wore a different jacket and vest today, but
he was still wearing natural deerskin trousers and high boots. Having seen
several gentlemen wearing what must be newer fashions, I now placed the
professor as a fancy sort of fellow. Not as fussy as that one shocking man in
town, but more than anyone else in the school.

Now why had Professor Brown said those words?

The transformation instructor reached behind herself, took
hold of my wrist and pulled me forward. “I bring you Alfreda Eldonsdottir
Sorensson, a daughter of the Schell line,” she announced. Professor Brown broke
off momentarily, and then in a softer voice said: “Be careful what you ask for,
Tonneman.” Releasing me, she gave me a quick smile (though what she meant by it
I hadn’t a clue) and hurried out, closing the door behind her.

Now, finally, I had reached the ritual professor. In this
room was the entire reason for my trip to Windward.

Professor Tonneman liked to frighten students.

Lord and Lady, help me
now
.
I hated like poison to
be embarrassed, and I could smell humiliation on the horizon.

Above me, the rounded dome rose into shadow. Somehow I’d
expected the inside of the room to reflect the Italian design of the house, but
there were shadowy rafters above us. The huge room of pieced granite sloped
into a large, shallow bowl containing a floor of fine, packed white sand and a disk
of smooth river gravel in the center. The gravel had the ladder of a good-sized
fire laid upon it. Professor Tonneman stood at the lip of the shallow bowl, his
hands behind his back.

“Miss Sorensson,” he said gravely. “I was not aware that you
were meeting with Professor Brown today.”

“We met in the hallway, sir,” I told him. “She brought me
here before I could tell her I was waiting for a guide.” I did not bother with
a curtsy.

“Professor Brown is nothing if not enthusiastic,” was his
answer. “Has your book arrived yet?”

“I received a book called
Ars Magica,”
I replied. “Someone
told me it was the ritual book.”

“Do you have questions about the book?”

“I’d like to know the trick for reading it,” I admitted.

“Was it blank?” he asked, starting toward me.

“Most of it. Some of it was very light print, but I could
not read the words.”

“Indeed? Curious. This suggests that you have some
experience with ritual.”

“A little bit,” I decided to say. “Not enough to . . .
rely upon.” I couldn’t call my efforts useless. My ability to call upon Death
had surely saved my life. And I had helped Marta with wards several times. But
you usually don’t learn any ritual until you have your wand and athame, and
mine had just arrived. “That’s why I came to Windward: for ritual training.”

“And Latin,” he added, giving me a firm look.

So they’d already found time to discuss me. “Now that I know
I need it, I will study it,” I said.

“Your early scholarship has been formidable,” Professor
Tonneman said, and I could hear the strength of his accent on the word “formidable.”
He sounded a touch British, where before he’d merely sounded educated. “I am
surprised that your Latin has been so sparse.”

“My mother did not want me to study the mysteries.” I used
the word practitioners chose when speaking to those with other gifts . . . those
without magic. “I suspect that is why she let the Latin and Greek instruction
slip by. My older brother was not interested in college, so it was easy to
stress other things. It’s not like anyone speaks Latin to each other,” I
offered after thought.

“
Actually,
you can speak Latin with another person, but it is rarely done. Generally you
will find another language that you share first. I became acquainted with a
scholar while in Greece, and the only language we had in common was Latin,” the
man replied. “All knowledge has value. It is knowing when to use your knowledge
that can be the trick.” Professor Tonneman stopped next to the smooth circle of
gravel. “What kind of wards have you set up?”

“
Mrs.
Donaltsson set up wards throughout a town, using small boxes filled with
faceted crystal balls,” I told him. “We made a traveling ward and a ward for
our house and surrounding land. My cousin did the spell, though. I was inside
the circle to place the stones in a velvet-lined box.”

“
Is
that your extent of warding?”

I considered his choice of words. “I helped with a small
circle to transport a letter. We were outside that circle.”

I decided not to mention that the Goddess had protected us
from a nasty demon by burning the circle down to bedrock.

“
Anything
else?”

Not any other wardings.
Just . . . .
 
“I have called Death a few times.”

He tilted his head, as if studying a small problem. “Have
you, now? Already?”

I fixed him with a firm look. “I was taught that the first
of the major arcana was introducing yourself to the Last Great Healer.”

“That is correct.” He studied me for a moment. “I need to
see you work, to have an appreciation of where you are in your studies. Go
ahead and summon Death.”

“Odd” was not a strong enough word for how I suddenly felt.

Slowly, I said: “I was taught to only call upon Death when I
had a question I could not answer any other way.”

“I am the one with the question,” he replied. “It is whether
or not you have successfully summoned Death.”

“People sometimes do not succeed?” I said, letting my gaze
wander around the room at the high, round windows up near the dome, and the slate
wall against one of the wings of the house.

“It can take numerous attempts to summon Death,” he told me,
starting back up the bowl toward the lip of the high circle.

Touching the leather pouch tied to my waist, I said: “I will
need water for this.” Then I remembered I wasn’t wearing my hunting knife. It
was in my wardrobe. Bother. That meant using the athame.

I had to trust it was an acceptable way to break in the
knife. Since a practitioner sometimes uses the athame to draw her own blood, it
shouldn’t matter if it was the first use.

He gestured toward the wall opposite the slate panel. “There
is a barrel of well water there.”

I saw the barrel pushed into shadow across the sandy basin.
Water was a place to begin. I thought about the ceremony while I went up to the
keg. You didn’t summon Death for someone else—you summoned him for your own
questions. So I needed a question.

I pulled out my carved little egg-shaped cup my brother had
made for me, and used my elbow to push the lid of the wooden barrel to one
side.

“Not that thing, we will be here until tomorrow. Use this
goblet.” A large glass suddenly appeared before me, floating above the open
keg. It was a beautiful, deep blue, standing upon a pedestal, and lovely as a
newly opened flower.

I tucked the oak cup back into my pouch and took the goblet
in my hand. It was heavy but not uncomfortably so. The dipper hanging by the
barrel was a lovingly carved wooden one, and I used it to fill the goblet.

In truth I was grateful for the larger container. I did
not
want to have to cut myself twice for
a glass full of bloody water. Last time I’d been melting snow, though, and snow
took up a lot more room. I marched back down to the fire circle, pleased that the
center of the sand bowl was flat enough to set the goblet safely.

As I’d noticed, firewood already lay in the center. I didn’t
care for the arrangement: too many large logs. I set them aside to start a
small fire with flint, steel, and tinder from my pouch. I squatted comfortably.
It only took two strikes for a spark to catch, and using some twigs and the
smallest of the sticks from the firewood, I got my fire burning. Oak and cedar
formed this fire, and my nose thought it a good mix. Then I made a tripod of
wood to give the fire a place to grow. The rest, fat logs and long ones, I left
to one side, in case I needed them later.

You can’t be ready for everything, but having tools at hand
doesn’t hurt.

Now came the painful part, mixing the elements and drawing
the circle. This wasn’t warding, not as I’d come to Windward to learn. Calling
Death was the only time you could perform a ritual with the other planes of
existence and not protect yourself with a true ward. That’s because once you
drew and closed the circle and summoned Death, everything bad shunned the circle.

Apparently the only thing of value Evil has is brains. Even
evil things fear Death.

Blood is salty, so I didn’t need to add salt to my water.
And I could heat the blade of the athame first, energizing it and giving me
fire. While I heated the athame, I blew gently across the water, rippling it,
giving it the air of my body. I decided to aim for a modest circle, large
enough for Death and me, but not huge. Ten feet across should do it, what with
the fire between us.

“What kind of ward is this, exactly?” Professor Tonneman
asked abruptly.

“Death’s ward,” I answered.

“I have not heard of ‘Death’s Ward.’”

His words caused me to look up. Once again he stood at the
top of the sandy depression, but now he held a small, elegant wand.

“I don’t know any other wards,” I reminded him. “But if you
draw the circle for Death and call, nothing evil will stay in the area.”
Standing, I took my beautiful new silver knife and nicked the flesh of my right
palm. Enough blood dripped out to cause a stain to spread over the surface of
the water in the goblet. Since the cut closed quickly, I didn’t worry about
applying pressure. I picked up the goblet and started stirring with my athame.

“You learned this ritual from Mrs. Donaltsson?” Professor
Tonneman’s voice came from somewhere behind me.

Was it my imagination, or had the room darkened? I glanced
at the curved wall of windows, mullioned and gracious, overlooking the
labyrinths and maze. More snow moving in, perhaps.

Three strides away from the fire felt like a good distance.
I took the wet athame and started dribbling my circle. Heavy drops of water
spattered the sand, forming dimples like those on the face of the moon.

“She took me out in the woods and told me what to do to
summon Death,” I finally said. I wondered if he was really interested, or if he
was just trying to distract me while I was working. That’s what Cousin Esme had
been doing while I was working with the herbs, I realized. She’d been trying to
distract me, to see if I could work through confusion.

Huh. I’d learned to make a meal while keeping a weather eye
on my little brothers. Nobody got burned or beat up when I was in charge.

“Of course you must be fast enough getting the circle up
that nothing evil joins you in the circle,” came the professor’s voice.

True enough. I wasn’t dawdling, that was certain, but I was
trying to be precise, so I didn’t leave anything out or look sloppy. Professor
Tonneman’s words suggested that I was a bit slow for him, so I dribbled faster,
to get the first circle down quickly.

Then the room disappeared.

That sounds silly, but trust me—the room was no longer
there. I was someplace dark, and outside the sand bowl was . . .
water? Only the growing fire gave me light to see by.

I could hear the slaps and pops of a fish breaking the
surface of a pond. A ripple hit the rim of the great sand bowl I stood in,
allowing water to slop over the edge and trickle a foot into the white grains.

I walked a little faster. A quick glance showed a dark line
completely around the fire, so I started the second, inner circle, looking up
occasionally to see if anything else was changing. I remembered Professor Brown
warning me that anything that happened in the ritual room was real.

How could there be water in the room? It was like I was on
an island.

My next glance showed that I was not the only living thing present.
I could see tiny, glittery orbs reflected beyond the circle. There were pale
green dots and red ones of varying sizes. It felt as if a pond full of frogs
watched me.

Water. I stood on an island, surrounded by water.

I knew that shine. When I walked out after dark with a
torch, the eyes of animals reflected that way.

Dribble, dribble . . . I resisted pouring the
goblet out. I had to make this water last, because I did not trust magic water
to finish the circle. And I definitely didn’t want to make up the difference in
blood.
I must learn that spell to turn
dew into water as soon as possible
.