Chapter 60. Can I Start Already?
“You sure about that?” Fek asked, putting down an armful of bones on his table. Even the shin bones looked angry. What the hell was the problem with that skeleton? At least half of the bones were broken, so it probably wouldn’t be that dangerous even if Fek got it moving again.
“Positive,” I said, looking at what I had instead. The bones were much smaller. The stand had a plaque on it. “Mr Mittens, companion to Fergor the Void,” I read. “Never heard of him.”
“Do you mean the Mr or Fergor? He was the single most feared necromancer of his age. Lived about two hundred years ago. Or not really lived, but close enough,” Ferne said, looking over my shoulder. “Taught here after retiring. The skeleton is probably from that time.”
“I never got a cat,” I said. Mom had never allowed me to bring one into the house. Dad thought they were scary. He was brave, but for some reason cats made him nervous. I sniffled.
“It’s not really going to be a cat, you know?” Fek said. “It’ll be a skeleton.”
“Well, your skeleton was filled with rage, so why can’t mine be full of… whatever it is cats have?”
“Poise?” Ferne said.
“Being annoying?” Fek said. “Not soft and cute, anyway.”
“Shut up, it’s going to be great,” I said.
“When are we going to start!” Lombarte shouted.
Ferne sighed and walked back to the stage.
I guess the rest had been waiting for a while. Climbing the bookcase hadn’t been quick. The top had been dusty and made me cough so much I feared I’d fall. Still managed to bring the thing down with me. The bones were posed with small metal wires to stand like a cat mid-stride.
I had to admit it wasn’t very cute. The legs looked weirdly long and thin without the fur and the skull was small. I could have closed my hand around it.
A boy tapped my shoulder from behind. “You’re going for another challenge?” he whispered to me. “I heard about the last one. Nice!”
“What? No!” I said.
“Shh!” Ferne said from the front of the room. The shush sounded like a whistle that reached all the way to my bones. The rest of the class winced too. Her face was pale like Falar’s, the veins dark under her skin. “Sorry for the delay. I’ll start the explanation next, so pay attention. Don’t mind the cold. I’m easing into being able to assist in the reanimation if someone manages to put their skeleton together.”
The people in the front row shivered. She kept speaking and a blanket of cold air rolled over my feet, getting between my boots and the hem of my robe.
“Brr,” Fek said. “Anyway, guess I can start already? The first step is—“
“No!” Ferne and I shouted at the same time.
“It doesn’t even have arms! What am I supposed to do next?” Fek said.
“Maybe the bones shattered too much to use when the idiot flung it down?” I said. “Just leave them out?”
“But where am I going to anchor the stabilizing matrix? It should form an inverted pyramid when it has its arms spread to the sides.”
“Look, it’s not easy for me either. This thing is shaped like a tube.”
“Serves you right for picking a cat.”
“Quieeeeet,” Ferne said. She had dragged her chair near the speaker’s pulpit and was resting her head on the pulpit, slumping in the chair. “Let the others focus.”
“They’re not focusing, though,” I said.
Smerz was using a small bone to dig at his ear. Some students at the back corner had pooled their bones and built a huge skeleton. They had spiked two skulls on a femur, and stuck it so it jutted forward from the skeleton’s pelvis. Ferne had taken one look at the construction and sighed so hard the Null fell off her face, leaving her looking like a living, if a rather fed-up, human again.
“I’m going to tell them to stop in a moment,” she said.
The boy who had tapped my shoulder earlier slipped. The ribs he had been trying to put into place clattered all around his table. He sighed, but then his face went pale and his gaze snapped to Ferne. “Ah! Is the Bursar going to be angry if we don’t get anything done?”
Ferne waved her hand around lazily. “She’s depending on the…” She trailed off and her head snapped up. “Listen!” she shouted. “The Bursar will be extremely disappointed in everyone who doesn’t provide a working skeleton by the end of the workshop. Suboptimal work will have to be presented to her personally.”
A moment of silence followed.
The boy behind me screamed. One student yanked the femur and pulled the skulls off it. The skeleton construction clattered apart, as the enchantments they had used to keep it together came undone.
“Save yourselves!” someone shouted, waving a skull in one hand and a pelvis in the other.
Ferne pinched the bridge of her nose and closed her eyes as students kept clamoring. “Wait, I didn’t…” she muttered faintly.
I wrapped my arms around the cat’s skeleton. I had managed to draw the first four runes and I’d be damned if I let someone fumble and disrupt them. “Great work, Ferne,” I said as the noise kept getting louder.
“Now that I have your attention, and as you have calmed back down,” Ferne said, letting her gaze circle the room, “let’s recap what I explained about the steps of assembling the skeleton.”
She went through the simple runes that we were supposed to use to hold the skeletons together enough that they could be reanimated in the next steps. The Null was laced onto the bones as the last step, balanced with the normal runes to create the discord that lent the skeleton its real power. The Null made the skeleton stronger and more durable, but using nothing but it would create only a pile of very cold bones.
On the other hand, normal runes would burn off and require someone to keep yanking on the enchantment to make the skeleton do anything. Using the Null made the runes permanent by isolating them from the world, and lent the skeleton a sort of personality, even if that personality was mostly hating everything alive. The reanimating necromancer tempered the naked hate with a runic construction of their own mind or will.
“I bet Falar’s skeletons would be less angry if he didn’t do that,” Fek said.
Ferne threw a piece of chalk at him.
The explanation was similar to what Coratorus had written about physical enhancement and making myself stronger by using the Null, but everything sounded both simpler and more difficult this time when there was no need to care about keeping anything alive. The balancing was less complicated, but nothing helped in attaining the balance. Coratorus had written about trusting the body to react to death. It tried to keep itself alive, so half of the work was letting it do it and the other half fighting what it wanted to do.
I shook my head, letting my lips flap. Thinking about the skull’s writings was giving me a headache. Working on the cat’s skeleton was in some ways easier than what it seemed to be for the others. It was still eerie how similar all the other skeletons looked as people managed to get them standing somewhat. Each the exact same size and shape, except Fek’s hand-me-down. Maybe it would have been too, if it hadn’t had half of its bones missing.
I focused again on the cat’s skeleton. The metal wires were an interesting addition. I supposed metal should turn brittle when cold, but the Null wasn’t cold, exactly. I could reinforce the steel, maybe infuse it with even more Null than the bones could take.
“Metal wire can’t turn undead, right?” I asked.
“What?” Ferne said.
“Forget it,” I said.
The runes had to fit on the bones, which was a pain in the ass to handle. I pried off a fingerbone from Fek’s collection and used it like a pen. The bone conducted mana, even if not very well. I could still use it to scratch the shapes on the tiny bones. The thin lines couldn’t hold much mana, but maybe I wouldn’t need that much, since the skeleton was smaller as well.
“Right, that’s it!” Ferne called. “Lunchtime.”
“Whoa, already?” I asked. My neck ached from all the craning over the table.
“I’m famished!” Fek said. “Reanimating is hard work.”
I pressed my palms into my lower back and stretched. “Did Grit really do all this in a single day? No wonder she was so spent.”
Fek rattled a bony foot at me. “Yeah, I only managed to do this one for now.”
“And now a toe fell off,” I said.
“Damn. I even put it together from three different pieces,” Fek said. He crouched and started crawling around under the table.
The first night I was here, he had been crawling under my bed. And now here I was, reanimating a skeleton with him.
What a life.
“I’ll lock the door when everyone has left,” Ferne called out. “I don’t want anyone in here messing up what you’ve put together so far, and I’ll make the wards walk anyone who tries straight to the Bursar’s office. So better call off that particular challenge this time, hmm?”
The boy behind me swallowed audibly.
“Right, I’ll be off,” I said.
“Aren’t you coming to lunch?” Fek said.
“I’ll check up on some things first.”
“Going to look for Minnelil?”
“No. Shut up. Maybe,” I said, looking to the side. “Actually, you know, maybe I am.”
“Took you a moment, but you got there in the end! Nice.”
“What’s nice is that you two didn’t cause more trouble this time,” Ferne said, walking past me.
I scanned the platforms, but didn’t see anyone who looked like Minnelil. It was pretty hard to tell as everyone wore black robes, but no one was as lightly built as she was or had the same lustrous brown hair.
It was dumb to think that I could recognize her from afar, but I kept trying anyway. The wind smelled of mold. I stopped in the middle of the stairs, my stomach dropping. So soon? I sniffed at the air, but the smell was gone. The air was clear and crisp. Maybe I had imagined it.
I knew I hadn’t, but I had other things to worry about. The dorm was quiet when I peered in. Grit snored in her bed. She was only half under the covers. I went to shake her, but she only drooled and turned onto her other side, slapping my hand away. I sucked on my bruised knuckles. Damn, those palms were hard.
She had brought me food when I had just started out here. I guess I would just have to do the same to her if she was going to sleep through lunch. If I dragged her out, would she wake instantly because of the Academy artifact? With my luck, her soul would get unsevered and float off into nothingness. I could ask someone about it, but I wouldn’t try it out with her.
I shut the dorm door and rubbed at my forehead. Grit could sleep it off, but where could Minnelil be? My stomach growled and I started toward the Lunch Hall. That would make the most sense.
“Hey!” Frederik shouted at me.
“Hey,” I said, taking the steps two at a time, hands pushed into my pockets.
He ran after me. “Wait up!”
I continued walking, but he caught up anyway. “What is it?” I asked. “Actually, wait. You know everything that’s going on here, right?”
“Not everything, but… actually, what is this about?” he said, the usual smile turning into a quizzical look.
“Do you know which group Minnelil ended up with? I haven’t seen her since the skeleton announcement.”
Frederik grimaced. “Really? That doesn’t sound great.”
I turned and grabbed hold of his robe. “Why—what do you mean?”
“Ah, wait, Lina!”
I unclenched my jaw and let go, uncurling my fingers slowly. “Sorry, it’s been a long day,” I muttered.
“Yeah, I mean, I suspected that she might end up in—“
He hopped back as I grabbed at his robe again. I took a breath and lifted my hands into the air, to show I would listen.
“She got into a team with some people I wouldn’t have wanted to group with, is all I mean. If you haven’t seen her then maybe she’s still working?”
“Why would she still be working? It’s been a day.”
“It’s just a guess! I mean, I didn’t exactly—“
“Whatever! Where would they be?”
“Uhm, in one of the workshops, I guess?”
“Right,” I said, and turned around.