Study in Slaughter (Schooled in Magic) (17 page)

She looked back down the corridor...to discover that it was gone. The walls had
moved
when she wasn’t looking. There was no way out, apart from walking into the darkness. She summoned another light globe and directed it ahead of her as she walked through the door, one hand ready to cast a protective spell. For a moment, she saw blank walls and another door at the far end...and then her light globe simply blinked out of existence, leaving her trapped in the darkness. It should have been silent, but she could
hear
something moving in the room. Desperately, she cast the spell again, but nothing happened. The wards were interfering with her magic.

All right
, she thought, as the first flickers of panic began to run through her mind.
I keep walking forward and then I reach the door
...

She moved forward, but her fingers touched nothing. The room couldn’t be
that
large, could it? But it was easy enough to create a magical trap that acted just like a hamster wheel; the victim could run as fast as they liked, but the ground would keep shifting beneath their feet and they would never actually get anywhere. Or perhaps it was a pocket dimension...she pushed the panic aside and knelt down, feeling cold stone beneath her fingers. The sound, whatever it was, seemed to be coming closer.

“Emily,” a voice snapped. “You’re retarded, girl!”

Emily stood and spun around to see her stepfather, drunk and staring at her with wild eyes. Everything she’d learned at Whitehall simply faded from her mind as the memories bubbled up inside her. His rages, his tantrums, the moments she’d caught him staring at her...he had never
hit
her, but there were times when she would have thought that would have been preferable. She had never quite dared shower or even wash when he was in the house. He advanced forward, his breath stinking of beer, forcing her back.

“You’ll never amount to anything,” he bellowed, waving his meaty fists in the air. “You won’t ever...”

It was an illusion, Emily told herself, but it was so hard to actually
believe
it. The scene felt so
real
, a composite of a hundred different memories. Somehow, Blackhall had pulled them out of her mind, then flung them back at her. The confidence she had built up over a year in Whitehall faded away, leaving her the scared little girl who had hidden in her room, praying desperately that her stepfather would leave her alone for one more day. It would be so easy to collapse...

She was thirteen again, her body slowly starting to flower into womanhood. It hadn’t been a pleasant time. Her mother had never told her anything about her own body. It had been a dreadful shock when she’d started to bleed for the first time, let alone grow breasts. And then her stepfather had started to
look
...She’d hidden, cowering in her room, knowing that the thin door would provide no protection if he came for her. Her life had been a nightmare...

And yet she hadn’t really
known
it was real. She saw, now, that she had been subjected to mental abuse, but she hadn’t known
then
that it was real. Who could she go to and ask for help? What if they didn’t believe her? Fear had kept her prisoner far more effectively than ropes and chains. She’d long since lost the urge to trust any adult.

Emily gritted her teeth so hard they hurt, fighting to control her emotions as they threatened to overwhelm her. She wasn’t that person any longer.

She forced herself to think and cast the cancellation spell, yet it took four tries before her stepfather’s image snapped out of existence. Her panic forced her to push so much power into the spell that the magic trapping her in the room also vanished. The next light globe worked perfectly, revealing an empty room with a single door, right ahead of her.

Emily sank to the floor, staring at where her stepfather’s image had been. No one knew him in Whitehall; the image had to have been pulled right out of her mind. There
were
spells that did just that, she knew from her reading, even though she had never used them herself. What did it say about her, she wondered absently, that her greatest fear wasn’t the power-mad necromancer Shadye, but her powerless stepfather? Tears prickled at the corner of her eyes; it was all she could do not to break down and sob her eyes out. The reminder of where she had come from had torn away all of her carefully prepared mental defenses.

Somehow, she pulled herself back to her feet and staggered through the door. There was nothing outside but a long corridor; she cast the seeker spell and saw that the orb was directly ahead of her. The cold stone against her bare feet felt reassuringly solid as she kept moving, a droll reminder that her whole encounter with her stepfather had been an illusion, a particularly nasty one.

Good thing no one saw that
, she thought, before remembering that they were probably being monitored by the sergeants. At least they probably wouldn’t share what they saw with the other students. She was fairly sure that she wasn’t the only person to come from an unpleasant family—Alassa’s aunt had planned to either kill or enslave her—but it wasn’t something she wanted to talk about, even with her closest friends.

She reached the door at the end of the corridor and checked it, thoroughly. There were no spells that she could detect, but when she tried to open it the door refused to budge. Someone had not only locked it, they’d jammed up the lock to make it impossible to pick. She glanced down, wondering if she dared shrink herself again, then realized that she couldn’t make herself small enough to fit through the cracks. Shrinking spells had their limits; too small would prove immediately fatal, they’d been warned. Bracing herself, she triggered a blasting spell and watched the door explode into the room.

Emily peered inside—and frowned. It looked exactly like her room in Whitehall, at least in basic outline; there were no hints that someone was actually
living
there, apart from the chest on the floor. It looked like a pirate’s treasure chest, right down to the golden padlock on the front. A golden key lay right next to it. She cast the seeker spell and nodded in approval when the spell firmly indicated that the orb was inside the chest. All she had to do was open the chest. She picked up the key...

...And felt a powerful transfiguration spell taking hold of her body. She tried to dispel it, but it was already too late. Her body shivered and melted into its new form...and she was stuck, utterly unable to move. Some such spells could be broken, but this one was too tough to break easily. And she couldn’t even move her hands to help focus the spell.

“Well,” Sergeant Miles said, from behind her. “That could have gone better, couldn’t it?”

He moved into Emily’s field of view and held up a mirror. She saw a small golden statue of herself, perfect in every detail, without a trace that it had once been human. The sergeant let her take a good long look, then cast the counter-spell. Emily staggered; she would have fallen over backwards if he hadn’t caught her. Between seeing her stepfather and making a simple mistake, she felt as if she were at the end of her endurance.

“Yes,” she muttered, reluctantly.

“You didn’t do too badly, for a first time,” Sergeant Miles said. “Some of your fellow students might try to get through the walls rather than risk walking into a mysterious room, but you didn’t really have much choice. And you did manage to dispel the phobia spell, even though it had caught on to your mind. Losing your boots...you’d get marked down for that, but if you’d been trapped it would have been the end. Overall, not a bad first attempt.”

His voice hardened. “Picking up the key, on the other hand, was careless,” he added. “You should have known better than to assume it was safe—if you thought that much at all.”

Emily felt herself flushing. She
hadn’t
thought at all. In hindsight, she could have just cast the revealing spell and discovered that the key was booby-trapped. But she’d just been so relieved at the thought of completing her task and getting out of Blackhall she hadn’t realized that the ordeal wasn’t entirely over.

Sergeant Miles patted her on the shoulder. “You go back to Whitehall and get some sleep,” he ordered, holding out a hand to help her to her feet. “Tomorrow, someone else gets run through the maze. The next time you get in, it will be a little harder.”

Emily nodded.

“I’d suggest taking a sleeping potion too,” Sergeant Miles added, as he put the key back where she’d found it. “The phobia spell often brings back old memories—and they are often stronger at night. Tell Madame Razz I ordered it, if she protests.”

“I won’t argue,” Emily promised. “And thank you.”

Chapter Fourteen

P
ROFESSOR LOMBARDI IS MAD AT YOU,”
Alassa said, the following morning. “You missed his class.”

Emily nodded, blearily. The sleeping potion had worked, but not well enough. She’d slept, she thought, yet she had also had vague nightmares that had kept snapping her in and out of sleep. By the time the first bell of the day rang, she still hadn’t been able to get out of bed, let alone go down for breakfast. Professor Lombardi was definitely not going to be pleased.

“I know,” she said, resisting the urge to rest her head on the desk. There was no point in irritating Lady Barb as well as Professor Lombardi. As it was, Emily knew she could look forward to another punishment essay—or worse. “I’ll go speak to him before lunch.”

Imaiqah reached across and put a hand on Emily’s arm. “What happened to you?”

“Long story,” Emily muttered. The sergeants hadn’t told her to say nothing about her experience in Blackhall, but she didn’t
want
to talk about it. Even Alassa, who had seen images from Emily’s memories, didn’t know the full story of her upbringing. “I overslept.”

“That’s bad,” Alassa said, although she didn’t sound convinced. “He
really
won’t be pleased with you.”

Imaiqah smiled. “How did you stop the bed from tossing you out in the morning?”

“I don’t know,” Emily said. Maybe Madame Razz had ordered it to let her stay under the covers until the sleeping potion had worn off completely. “I...”

Lady Barb swept into the room, closing and locking the door behind her. The class straightened up as she marched to the front of the room and turned to face them. Emily couldn’t help noticing that a third of the students who had attended the taster class hadn’t shown up; clearly, they’d decided that a career in Healing wasn’t for them. They didn’t even want to learn the basics.

“Welcome back,” Lady Barb said, sardonically. She’d probably noticed the missing students too. “Stand up and gather round Paddy.”

Emily stood and followed the other students to the front of the class. “We will start today with a very simple exercise,” Lady Barb said, as she produced a silver knife from her robes and held it over Paddy’s chest. “Watch carefully.”

She plunged the knife into Paddy’s body. Several students let out cries or stumbled backwards as blood—a shade too bright to be real—appeared around the wound, trickling down Paddy’s chest and pooling on the table. Emily felt sick, even though she knew that Paddy wasn’t human—or sentient. Lady Barb had done it so casually.

“This blade is cursed,” Lady Barb said, conversationally. “I would like one of you to try a simple healing spell as I pull the knife out of the wound. Any volunteers?”

Song raised her hand.

“Very good,” Lady Barb said. “On three...one, two,
three
.”

She pulled the knife out of the wound. Song cast the healing spell...and the wound, instead of closing, opened wider. Blood spewed upwards, as if it were projected out of a fountain, forcing the students to jump backwards to avoid getting any on their robes. Seconds later, Paddy let out a disturbingly human-like cry and fell limp.

“The curse drew on the power of the healing spell and perverted it,” Lady Barb said, into the appalled silence. She clicked her fingers and the wound started to heal. “Do you see what would have happened if Paddy had been a real human?”

Emily nodded. It was amazing what one could live through, the sergeants had pointed out more than once, but even a necromancer would have had trouble surviving having his chest ripped open. Healing spells had their limits, even without curses intent on making healing impossible. A human would have died before the magician had time to realize that something had gone badly wrong.

“You’ll find cursed blades everywhere,” Lady Barb added, dryly. “Even the ones that are not charmed to be instantly fatal can be disastrous, if not checked properly. And, as they are wired into the person’s body, they are often far harder to remove than a standard curse.”

She looked directly at Song. “How might you have handled it better?”

Song flushed. “Remove the curse first?”

“A very good idea,” Lady Barb agreed. “You start by casting the most precise revealing spell you know”—she demonstrated; the knife lit up with an unholy red light—“and then you dismantle the curse as quickly as possible.
However
, it is vitally important that you don’t allow yourself to panic. Curse-breaking, as you should have learned in first year, can be very complex.”

Emily scowled, remembering the advanced exam they’d given her when she’d tested out of Basic Charms. Some curses could simply be dispelled, but others had to be dismantled very carefully or they might lash out at their victim before they fell apart completely. The nastier ones had to be taken apart in a specific order. Anyone looking at the curse might not have long to work it out before it was too late.

Lady Barb stabbed the knife into Paddy again. “This time, try to remove the curse first,” she said. “Go.”

Song cast the revealing spell, then a series of counter-curses. Emily watched as the curse faded away into nothingness, although she could tell that it wasn’t a particularly
complex
curse. Paddy made sounds of distress as Song worked, causing her to bite her lip as her work proceeded. Finally, she cast the healing spell and pulled out the knife. The wound closed, but Paddy seemed to be no better. Moments later, he shuddered and expired.