Study in Slaughter (Schooled in Magic) (30 page)

“Public opinion is fickle, my father says,” Alassa added. “What
really
happened last night?”

“The body was odd,” Emily said. She explained as best as she could, then went on. “I don’t even know if we’re dealing with a
real
necromancer.”

“No one else knows either,” Alassa confirmed. “My father sent me a short message this morning. Apparently, there’s going to be an emergency debate in the White Council about the situation.”

She leaned forward, confidently. “I think someone is trying to get you in
real
trouble,” she said. “I bet it’s Master Tor.”

“I don’t think he would murder a student and destroy the Warden just to get rid of me,” Emily said, although she had her doubts. “Wouldn’t he be risking everything?”

“He’s a respected professor,” Alassa pointed out. “It’s possible he doesn’t realize that his position can actually be undermined.”

She shook her head. “If you’re meant to be helping the investigation, perhaps you should spy on him,” she added. “Maybe you could search his office...”

“And get kicked out for good when I get caught,” Emily said. The tutors had taken to patrolling the corridors, watching for students trying to use more serious hexes on each other now that the Warden was gone. “Maybe I should just transform myself into the spitting image of his favorite student and see what he might tell me.”

Alassa lifted an eyebrow. “That never works,” she said. “
Acting
like his favorite student would be much harder than looking like him.”

Emily shrugged. Was it possible that Master Tor was bent on discrediting her? He certainly had a motive; Emily had, however inadvertently, strengthened his faction’s enemies on the White Council. But if he was prepared to murder to achieve his aims, why not simply kill Emily herself? Or kidnap her from Whitehall, if he intended to force her to work for his faction instead. It just seemed too complicated...he would have to have known in advance that she was about to break the rules spectacularly
and
that the Grandmaster wouldn’t agree to expel her. And he would have had to kill the Warden too.

“It doesn’t seem to make sense,” she admitted. She smiled as Imaiqah appeared and sat down on the other side. “I think...”

Professor Eleas strode into the room and closed the door with a loud bang. He looked tired; rumor claimed that most of the tutors had spent the entire night searching the school, rather than call in investigators from the Allied Lands. Emily cancelled the privacy ward and did her best to look attentive. The handful of students staring at her didn’t help.

“We have looked at several kinds of influential runes over the last two weeks,” the professor said, as he took his place in front of the class. “And we have studied how easily they can be manipulated to affect an unknowing victim. Today, we look at ways to deflect the effects of such runes.”

Emily leaned forward with interest. The runes he’d used to influence their behavior on the first day had been blatant; after that, the class had developed the habit of checking their chairs and desks before they sat down. Some of the others they’d seen, though, had been far less noticeable. It was alarmingly easy to imagine how they might be misused.

“If noticed, their effects can be shrugged off, even by non-magicians,” Professor Eleas continued. “However, noticing their effects can be incredibly difficult. Indeed, a victim may invent reasons and self-justifications for doing what the runes tell him to do. The longer this continues, the harder it is to realize that the runes exist at all. There are quite a few case studies of people
discovering
the runes, after they have thoroughly embedded themselves, and deciding that the runes didn’t work, even though an outside observer would disagree.”

He smiled, rather tightly. “Please look inside your desks.”

Emily opened her desk and blinked in surprise as she saw a small sewing kit; needles, thread and a tiny silver cup. It took her a moment to realize that the cup was a thimble, something designed to go over her fingertip and provide some protection from the needle. She knew better than to splash her blood where someone else might pick it up. Under the sewing kit, there was a simple sash made of silk. She brought them both out and put them on top of the desk.

“There are those who will argue that sewing is woman’s work,” Professor Eleas said, glancing at several of the boys. “The effects, however, are much stronger if the work is done by the intended user directly. I suggest that you save your complaints.”

He clicked his fingers and a small outline of a rune appeared on the blackboard. “This is a very simple protective rune,” he explained. “It counteracts the effects of most runes, simply because the runes are rarely very powerful. However, it
can
be countered itself. Most magicians prefer to use sewing to produce the protective runes because the threads start to unravel if they come under attack. It can serve to alert the wearer to a danger they may not have sensed.”

Emily looked up at the rune, then back at the sash. She’d never really sewn anything in her life, not even when her clothes had started to become threadbare because there was no money for anything new. Her mother might have been able to do it, but she’d never tried to pass the skill onto Emily. Even putting the thread in the needle, she suspected, would be harder than it looked.

“You may begin,” Professor Eleas said. “Be careful not to prick yourself. You will have to destroy the sash and start all over again if that happens.”

They went to work. Emily rapidly discovered that it
was
harder than it looked; the thread seemed determined not to get through the eye of the needle, no matter how carefully she aimed it at the hole. Alassa didn’t seem to be having any more luck; Imaiqah, on the other hand, confessed her mother had insisted that she learn to sew as well as helping her father with his business. With her directions, Emily finally started to sew the thread into the sash. She couldn’t help thinking that it looked thoroughly unkempt.

“I never realized how hard the tailors have to work,” Alassa muttered. Her delicate fingers seemed more capable of manipulating the needle and thread, but she was still having problems. “All the designs they marked into my dresses...”

Emily scowled. How many of those designs had actually been protective runes?

“Try to put in as many stitches as possible,” Professor Eleas advised two of the boys, both of whom had been muttering rebelliously for several minutes. “The tighter the thread is bound to the sash, the stronger the protection.”

Emily looked enviously at Imaiqah, who had managed to sew the rune into the sash perfectly, then went back to work. Alassa was right, she decided; the servants who produced and mended clothes for the aristocrats had a very difficult life. She knew that it was a skill she might master, if she pushed ahead with it, even though it seemed impossible. But that very feeling was a deadly trap.

“There,” Alassa said, finally. “Done!”

“You need to tighten it up,” Professor Eleas said, glancing down at her work. “Right now, it’s too loose to last long if it was challenged.”

Emily looked up at him. “What would happen if someone accidentally pulled out the thread?”

“It would stop working,” the professor said, simply. “Most magicians are careful not to expose too many of their protections to outside eyes.”

That made sense, Emily decided, as she finally finished the rune. It still looked oddly uneven to her, far less precise than the one Imaiqah had produced, but she doubted she could produce anything better without more practice. Sewing was definitely
not
one of her skills.

“My mother used to say that it calmed her down,” Imaiqah said. “I don’t think it worked.”

Emily snorted. Both Alassa and she were short-tempered. The other girls seemed to take it in their stride, but the boys had real problems; Professor Eleas ended up handing out detention to two of them after they got into an argument that rapidly turned into a fistfight, while a third had pricked his finger and then tried to proceed with the rune anyway. The professor gave him an angry lecture on the dangers, concluding with the sarcastic observation that a student from a great magical family should be aware of the risks of letting someone else obtain a sample of his blood.

“Most of you have workable runes,” the professor said, turning back to the class. “You will have to practice, I’m afraid...”

There was a loud snort from one of the boys. “Why are we not carving runes into metal instead of...
sewing
?”

Emily hid her amusement. Few boys would
want
to sew, regarding it as embarrassingly feminine and effeminate...unless they went into tailoring, where it was somehow acceptable to sew. In Whitehall, there would be much stronger objections to ‘woman’s work’ than she’d ever heard on Earth, which was darkly amusing if the runes really didn’t work properly unless they were created by the person who intended to use them. For all she knew, there were wives who used runes to influence their husbands.

“Because, as I explained right back in the first class, the harder the material you use to craft the rune, the stronger it is,” the professor said, angrily. “In this case, if you happen to make a mistake with the rune, removing it from your skin and destroying it is easy. Something metallic, on the other hand, might be harder to remove.

“Furthermore”—his gaze swept the classroom—“a sewn rune starts to come apart when challenged. A metallic rune would not, thus leaving you unaware of the attack.”

He reached into his desk and produced a sash, with the same rune sewn into the silk. “In order to use the rune,” he explained, “all you have to do is wear it. The closer to your skin, the better.”

Emily took the sash and wrapped it around her throat, as if it were a scarf. Other students wrapped it around their wrists or legs. It didn’t seem long enough to be worn like a belt.

“There is yet another good reason to always produce your own protective runes,” Professor Eleas said. “How do you know what the rune I gave you actually does?”

Alassa stuck up her hand. “It’s in the textbook you wrote,” she said, quickly. “It’s listed as a general-protection ward.”

The professor smiled. “True,” he agreed. “But bear in mind that someone with bad intentions can trick you into wearing a rune that might
not
be intended to protect you, but do some quite significant harm. You cannot afford to lower your guard when dealing with subtle magic. A single mistake can open a chink in your armor large enough to bring you down completely.”

His smile grew wider. “Open your textbooks,” he ordered. “By the end of the lesson, I want you to have identified at least three
additional
runes you can sew into the next sash. I also want you to write a three-parchment essay on how best to ensure that you are protected from outside influences. Give examples of historical problems handled by magicians, if possible.”

Emily groaned—
another
essay—but wrote down the details anyway.

“Those of you who didn’t manage to sew the rune, come over here,” Professor Eleas said. “Everyone else, silent study. I shall be testing you before you go.”

“Another essay,” Alassa muttered, as she cast the privacy ward into the air. “I thought this was meant to be an
easy
class.”

“You just need to practice,” Imaiqah assured her. “We can work on your sewing this evening.” She looked at Emily. “Yours too.”

“We’re supposed to be playing
Ken
,” Alassa reminded her, shortly. “We’re facing Cat’s team this weekend and he’s far too good. And all of our surprises will be public knowledge by now.”

She looked up at Emily. “Why
did
you leave the arena?”

Emily heard the hurt in her voice and felt a pang of guilt. In hindsight, she should have stayed and watched, no matter how long it took. Her friends had
expected
her to be there to support them, no matter how foolish and pointless the game seemed to her. But she hadn’t really understood just how important it was to
them
. If the Warden hadn’t been murdered, Alassa would have been
really
furious with her.

“I...I’m sorry,” she said, miserably. She wanted to say something, but what could she say? “I...”

“Stay the next time,” Alassa said, seriously. She leaned forward so she could whisper in Emily’s ear. “I’m going to stick you to the chair. You won’t be able to move without my permission.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, again. She would almost have preferred a shouting match—or an exchange of spells. Anything would be preferable to the guilt, guilt she hadn’t even realized that she should be feeling. “I won’t leave the game again.”

She flicked through the book, locating a series of protective runes that seemed designed to protect the wearer from insects, disease and minor accidents. The notations beside the latter clarified that the rune didn’t always work, unsurprisingly. There were accidents so inevitable that runes provided no protection, normally ones caused by carelessness or stupidity. The magic, it seemed, got confused if the user did it to himself. She made a note of them and went onwards, locating a set of cleaning runes. They didn’t seem powerful enough to sweep up the dust from the barracks, but they could at least prevent it from settling elsewhere.

“Good work,” the professor said, when he inspected their runes. “You’ll be practicing with them tomorrow.”

Emily nodded mutely as he dismissed the class, keeping a handful of students back to discuss their detentions. Picking up her bag, she led the way out of the classroom and back up to the bedrooms. She didn’t know if the room would let her in if her roommates were out—nothing had been said about
that
restriction—but she had to try. The door opened and she let out a sigh of relief.

“Don’t let them know you’re off restriction,” Alassa said, as they stepped inside. “You could give someone a
real
surprise if they thought you were defenseless.”