Chapter 59. Workshop Begins
Minnelil still wasn’t back when I woke up. I wasn’t sure if her bed had been slept in or not. She could have come to doze off for a while and left already. We pulled Grit up and dragged her to breakfast. I didn’t see Minnelil there either.
Fek slammed down his fork on the table, plate empty. “Let’s reanimate!” he shouted, punching his fist into the air.
“I guess,” I said.
“I have the rest of the day off,” Grit said. “I’m going right back to bed.”
“Huh?” Fek said. “Aren’t you going to continue in Falar’s workshop?”
“He said he wanted to get back to his research as soon as possible, so we did our whole skeleton quota yesterday. He even gave me the credit for it already.”
“That can’t be a healthy way to learn something,” I said.
She shrugged. “I knew the basics already. There’s an exam to do it again for another credit, so I’m going to keep practicing. Getting the legs to stick was hard.” Her words were slurred and there were dark circles under her eyes that looked black and purple against her white skin.
“How do you look this wrecked? What should we expect?”
“Nothing like this,” she said. “We did it outside to take advantage of the ambient Null. It makes the skeletons stronger, but staying out that long while working is rough. You’re going to be doing it in a class. No one but Falar is mad enough to do it outside.”
“Don’t look so pleased when you’re saying things like that.”
Grit grinned at me, eyes half-closed.
“Come on, Lina! Let’s go,” Fek said. “Grit can crawl back to the dorm herself.”
“You’re sure she’s going to make it?” I said.
“The skeletons will carry her if she falls asleep here,” Fek said. “It happens quite a lot, so there’s a system.”
“Oh, that’s true,” Grit said, and laid her head on her hands resting on the table. “If I’m still here when it’s lunch time, wake me up,” she mumbled.
I saw the stairs that the Chancellor had broken. Skeletons were hammering nails into fresh boards that were brighter than the worn planks elsewhere. All the wood looked petrified, like the silvered deadwood standing in the middle of the forest. Maybe the Null got to the planks as well? Did it make them stronger or weaker?
There were more people waiting outside the workshop door than I’d expected. I guess this was a popular class even before the Bursar went all-in on the skeletons. Lombarte and Smerz stood at the other end of the platform. Lorn was nowhere to be seen. He had seemed like he already knew what he was doing, so maybe he was off doing a group project with other more advanced students.
I cursed silently. Him not being there probably made Lombarte and Smerz even more of a nuisance. I avoided looking at Lombarte, even when I couldn’t ignore the tinkling of the copper bells sown on to his robe.
“Great,” Fek muttered under his breath.
“Yeah,” I said.
Ferne arrived, dragging her feet across the floor. “Good to see you all here in time. Line up.” She walked next to the door to wait for people to organize themselves into a queue.
Lombarte and Smerz pushed their way to the front of the queue, looking smug and pompous while doing it. I scoffed and stayed at the back.
“The materials have been prepared according to the number of participants. We’ve scrounged together everything we could, so take care not to break anything. We don’t have a lot of spares,” Ferne said in a loud voice, leaning on the door. “I will explain to you the necessary steps and the way to prepare the bones. Please, listen to the whole explanation before you try to do anything by yourself. Once I have…”
Lombarte pushed a slip of paper toward her. Ferne glanced at it as she kept speaking. Lombarte kept holding it at her, and she finally snatched it from his hand.
Ferne frowned as she read it. “Two extra people?” She scratched her forehead with the paper and sighed. “Well, if the council requires it…”
“My father sends his thanks as well,” Lombarte said.
“Fine. Get in and start gathering the materials.” She kicked the door with her heel and it opened. “Remember, don’t do anything before I’ve explained everything.”
People started filing in past her as she stood with arms crossed over her chest. The line moved slowly.
“Why did we have to end up at the end of the queue?” Fek said, shifting from one foot to the other.
Lombarte vanished from sight and I started to breathe easier.
Ferne answered questions from the students and marked down names into a small notebook. “You,” she said, looking at Fek and then at me. “Oh, and you. Phew. Did you hear what I said about not doing anything before I explained things?”
“This is the third time you’ve repeated it,” I said.
“What?” Fek said, turning his gaze to Ferne.
She groaned. “I’m tasking you both to stop each other from doing anything stupid, you hear?”
I shrugged at her. “I’ll try.”
“Me too!” Fek said.
“That makes me feel so much more confident. Get in and go pick up your bones.”
The room was larger than any of the lecture halls, with tall tables spread around it. The students who had got in first already had bones a collection of bones before them on the tables. In the front of the room were big piles of bone, separated by type. People picked up bones from each of the piles, a skull from one, two femurs from another, and so on.
“Those piles are getting pretty small,” Fek said.
Ferne walked to the front of the hall and climbed onto the stage. The wall was lined with blackboards with skeletons already drawn on them. She started drawing arrows pointing at some bits, swirls and runes all around them. I was lost watching her work as the line slowly approached the piles. More and more people gathered their collection of bones and took them to the tables.
From what I had managed to read of the book earlier and gleaned from Fek’s notes, I sort of understood what she was doing on the blackboard. Lorn had pushed mana into the bones, working with the Null suffusing them, almost like I did with myself.
Raised voices made me shift my attention from Ferne and her scribblings. Two people were tugging on a bit of spine.
“I got to it first!”
“Nu-uh, you already have enough to make a decent sized one!”
“Students,” Ferne said.
The two guys awkwardly holding onto the small bit of bone stopped tugging and grimaced at each other.
“There’s no need to fight. There’s enough for everyone,” Ferne said, stepping down from the stage.
“Um, except there’s not,” Fek said. He was standing nearer to the piles than me. “There’s just one skull. And all of those bones are broken.”
“What?” I asked, stepping up behind him.
It was true. And what was worse, the skull and the broken bones felt familiar. “Don’t tell me this is the one that goon threw off the platform?”
“The really angry one?” Fek said. “Oof, but how can you tell?”
“It’s still angry. But why is it here? It was a skeleton already,” I asked.
Ferne nudged a bone with her foot. “Not anymore. It was too badly mangled and the magic gave out. As I said, we don’t have a lot of spares. There should have been enough for everyone, but…” Her eyes landed on Lombarte and Smerz. They had two piles of bones before them. I was sure I counted at least three spines. “Hmm, the workshop requires everyone to reanimate their own skeleton.”
“You can have that one,” I said quickly.
“Damn, beat me to it,” Fek said. He reached down gingerly, poking the skull with a finger. When it didn’t move, he picked it up. “Phew, maybe it’ll be fine?”
Ferne looked around the room, scanning the piles of bones. Her hair was dark and straight, cut to reach around her shoulders, and she pushed a hand into it to scratch at her head.
I looked around the room as well. I toyed with the idea of going around the room and demanding people give me one bone each to make something weird, but all the attention was making me sweat and grind my teeth as it was. I didn’t need one bit more. My eyes landed on something on top of a large bookcase on the left side of the stage. “How about that?”
“That?” Ferne said, her hand stopping its scratching.
“It’s a skeleton, isn’t it?”
“Well, yes, but…”
“Great. I’ll do that.”