The Academy [BOOK ONE COMPLETE]

“You really don’t need to come with me,” Marcus said.

“Shut up. Don’t tempt me,” I said. “Go left from here.”

“But that’s a much longer…”

He cut himself off as a gust of wind blew a group of skeletons off the walkway to our right. The bones joined the ones still circling in the vortex in the middle of the building. Their hollow clattering came faintly through the howl of the wind.

“Left it is,” he said.

On the other side of the building, the janitor rushed around the place with his cart. He was wrangling a whole group of students coming out from the Beach. He was threatening them with the broom, poking it at them as they scrambled back. The janitor turned to flick another glowing stub into the wind, waving a hand at us before running off.

“How can the wards be breaking again?” Marcus said, breathing heavily as we ran.

How should I know? I didn’t say anything, instead focusing what was ahead, sheltering my eyes with my arm. “Keep moving,” I said.

---

Marcus crashed on the platform, basically crawling the final steps up. “Finally,” he gasped.

Falar stood with both arms raised to the side, holding a tangle of runes with both hands. Jextor towered behind him, hands on his shoulders. They both had their eyes closed, but Falar opened one eye to look at us as Marcus wheezed. The eye was pitch black, a pit of tar. “Marcus. And you. How am I not surprised.”

“Focus, lecturer,” Jextor said.

“The affront of you telling me to focus,” Falar muttered, closing his eye again.

The runes on his hands burned white. The light inside the runes was bright enough to hurt, but the darkness swirling around him still threatened to smother it out. The dark bled from his bare arms, pushing out through his skin.

“Sir! Lecturer!” Marcus shouted. He pressed a hand on his mouth, face pale.

“What’s going on?” I asked. I crouched low, creeping toward the wall where the wind was less likely to blow me away.

“He’s tapped in way too deep!” Marcus yelled to push his voice over the booming wind.

“Silence,” Falar whispered. The sound cut like a razor, making Marcus and me wince.

Marcus grimaced, veins on his neck popping out. He leaned toward me to whisper. “It’s really dangerous. The—“

“Trust me, I know. Why is he doing it?”

“The wards must have frayed beyond repair. He’s rebuilding them from ground up. This is hilariously bad,” he said, letting out a sound somewhere between a chuckle and a whimper. “Wish me luck. I’ll go and try to keep him alive.”

He started to crawl toward Falar, staying sensibly low. Mid-way across the platform he glanced back. “You should get somewhere safe.”

Far too late for that. If I hadn’t woken up stupid today, I’d have stayed in the cheerfully-colored merchant’s tent. I pressed my back into the wall, as far away from the edges as possible. The ward around my neck rattled almost as much as the platform. I didn’t even want to guess at the amount of power circling this place. Magic and death, death and magic. I rubbed at my throat, twitching as jolts of electricity sparked under my skin.

Marcus had reached Falar. He rose and started drawing runes of his own. He gasped, every gasp puffing out as white cloud. Frost built around his cowl and face, mustache freezing from the moisture on his breath.

“Lina?” Ferne shouted. She stomped toward me, standing straight. Her face was tinted grey, lips grey. Cold wafted off her, sandwiching me between the warmth of the wall and her. “Why are you here?”

“Because I’m an idiot,” I groaned, twitching again. “Oh damn.”

“What?” she asked.

“Something’s happening,” I breathed out.

Ferne looked behind her. Darkness flared, spilling out from Falar, waves and waves of black, engulfing the world. Ferne spun around, wrapping her arms around me. She smelled of ice and dust. The darkness rolled over us as she squeezed my face against her chest.

---

I shivered myself awake, shaking all over. The black ceiling sat above me, not blown away by the wind, it seemed. “Didn’t end up in the infirmary this time,” I muttered.

“I’d have taken you there, but I needed to do some final detailing on the wards,” Ferne said, back toward me. “Marcus took Falar and Jextor down already. Don’t worry, they’re going to make it.”

“He took them? Both? How?”

Ferne chuckled, drawing dizzyingly complicated runes into the air. They sizzled in a controlled manner, no longer rattling and tearing like the band Fek had drawn in the tent. “Levitation is a simple spell. You need to learn just a couple more runes and you could in principle be able to do it.”

“For… for real?”

“The lecture starts tomorrow. Be there. Maybe it’ll be more interesting for me, if you do.”

I shook my head, her words making me dizzy. Cast a spell? I knew I was in a school that taught necromancers, but I hadn’t realized…

“There we go,” Ferne said, letting her hands fall. She yawned, stretching her arm above her head and pulling on her wrist with her other hand. “I’ll have to mobilize a bunch of students to come collect all the bones. Luckily, most got piled into a big heap in the middle of the grounds. You’re exempt.”

“I better be, with all the running around I did.”

“You can go and pass word to Falar and Jextor that the wards have been finished, instead. And if you somehow see Coratorus, punch him in the skull for me. Never around when we’d actually need him.”

“He’s probably tucking in Jextor,” I said, scoffing. “Fine. I’ll go.”

She looked about as surprised as I felt. I wanted to see what was left of Falar, and the infirmary was on my way back down, anyway. I could peek in before going to find Fek. I hope Angmgri… the merchant had managed to keep him from running off anywhere. At least the tents and the wagons were still approximately where they had been before all this. One wagon was half-buried in bones. I recognized the janitor from his blue overalls, pushing the bones away with his broom, a miniscule wisp of smoke rising from a pinprick of orange near his face.

I should visit the Bursar and check whether this had impacted her affairs. Maybe she would give the merchants a discount. Or bill them extra for being saved before the winds blew their wagons right into some mountain, oxen and all.

I knocked on the infirmary door.

“Enter!” Marcus called from inside. He was sitting near a desk, writing something as I stepped in. “What ails… oh, it’s you. Are you okay?”

“Sure,” I said, glancing around the room. “How about the couple?”

He snorted, but schooled his face back to neutral. “Be careful, that might just catch on. If Falar heard, he’d kill you on the spot. Anyway, they’re doing fine, but quarantined for now. You’ll see them when they don’t radiate death anymore.”

“You quarantined them together? You should be the one worrying about Falar.”

Marcus grimaced. “Well, we only have one suitable room in the infirmary for it. Once things settle down, I’ll move them to their offices.”

I chuckled and turned to leave, but a thought made me stop. “Why do they radiate death, anyway?”

“The explanation is pretty technical. Are you sure you want to hear?”

Coratorus had written about the after-effects of using too much Null. The explanation had been utterly incomprehensible. “Actually, I am. But try to make it make sense.”

Marcus put down his quill and smiled up at me. “No promises, but take a seat.”

He had to stop his explanation a couple of times as more people came in to complain about getting bruised or falling off a walkway. He mostly sent them away with a pat on the back and told them to drink a lot of water and get to bed early.

“You actually have no idea what you’re doing, do you?” I said, watching the student with a massive black eye leave the infirmary. He had got hit in the face with a skull.

“Well, I’ll know if something is actually serious,” Marcus said, waving a hand dismissively. “But do you get it now? Expelling the Null needs to be done so it never actually touches your body, but bleeds out pure.”

“Yeah, it’s coming back to me.” I shivered as I remembered what had happened the previous time I had been on that platform. My throat had been sore for days after screaming so much. “The room is sound-proofed, I guess?”

“Actually, yes. And for a good reason. The chancellor says the process tickles,” Marcus said, glancing toward a closed door at the end of the room. “I really hope Falar doesn’t kill him in there.”

---

A bunch of students came in and started complaining about frostbite and being whacked on the head with a broom. I left Marcus to wrangle them and to tell Falar and Jextor about the wards being finished. I was excited to speak to Minnelil about the things Marcus had explained to me. It helped explain what Falar had done to me. If someone had walked up to the platform back then, would they have frozen stiff, poisoned by the Null bleeding out of me? Did Falar do that to himself every time after he had made himself strong?

The snow flowed through the building in an orderly way, funneled along a tunnel of wind hanging in the middle of the air. Not a single snowflake floated anywhere else. This all couldn’t be normal. Did people really live like this in here? Read a book in the morning, survive a gale threatening to blow off everything and everyone in the afternoon, spend the night sweating off death through their skin?

I shook my head at all the questions. It was interesting, exhilarating even. I didn’t remember the last time things had been exhilarating. Before the Kertharians, perhaps.

I put my palm on the black wall.

I held it there, holding back from driving my fist into the stone. This excitement was fake. The gloom and pain was held back by the ward wrapped around my neck. The rage and frustration lurked just outside, simmering behind a door slammed shut by Falar.

I brushed the wall, running my fingertips on the skin-warm stone. It might be fake, but there was nothing I could do about it.

Unless… could I handle my ward similarly to how the wards of this place worked? Funnel the darkness through me, controlling it instead of shutting it off? I was proud of the idea. Falar would call it stupid, but he also had said multiple times that when I knew enough to remove the ward myself, I could do it. It had always felt like another insult, the implication that I would never be able to do it. But Ferne had said I could do my first spell soon.

I rubbed at my face. Too many ideas, too many thoughts. I never had this many back home. My fingers were warm from touching the wall.

A student walked down the stairs in front of me, white hands peeking out from under the black sleeves.

“Grit!” I shouted.

She wheeled around, red eyes wide. “Lina!” She ran up to me, grabbing me into a hug. Her hair was white and in my nose, her coarse palms rubbing my shoulder. “We didn’t know where you were! Fek said you ran into the storm.”

I… I lifted my hand slowly, patting the back of her head. I let my shoulders drop, eased into the hug.

I needed it.

Grit let me go from the hug after a moment, but still held on to my shoulders. “Let’s go, we can get in early for the dinner.”

“Seriously, do we really do anything else in here than eat?”

She grinned at me. She had massive eyes, like all Jonungaard. It was like half her face was eyes, stark red irises with a sliver of white visible around the edges. “I hear they put extra effort into the meals after something weird happens. Come on!”