The Academy [BOOK ONE COMPLETE]

I leaned my shoulder on the door, hand on the handle. The dorm door didn’t have a lock. I’d need to do something about that, but if someone bothered to knock, they probably weren’t looking for trouble.

“Lina?” Frederik’s voice came from the other side of the door.

“You alone?” I asked.

“Huh?”

I opened the door to peer out, ready to let go of the handle and jump out of the way if someone grabbed the door. He had sounded too relaxed and confused to have been forced to knock or to have brought people himself, but I didn’t want to take the chance. “Get in.”

I grabbed his robe and pulled him inside, pushing the door closed behind him. He looked around the dorm, eyes wide.

His hair was pushed up on one side, sticky with whatever glue he had put on it, so I reached over and pushed it down. “Grit’s sleeping, so keep your voice down.”

“Right, yeah, thanks,” he said, patting the hair carefully. “I slept against the wall.”

“I figured. Want to sit? I owe you.”

“You really do, you know,” he said, sighing. He sat down, still shaping his hair into something less resembling an oily haystack. “Fahn was livid. He’s a Girnham. They are not one of the big families, but important people nonetheless. And his family has ties to the Lombartes.”

I winced. “What can I do?”

“Sorry?”

“I said, what can I do? It’s my fault. Minnelil needs the money. I owe all of you. I can go grovel, but it might not go well. You know these people, tell me the angles.”

Frederik licked his lips, rubbing his brow. “It’s more complicated than that. I’m not letting you loose on them.”

“You’re not letting—?”

“Yes, exactly. Listen, Lina,” he said, waving a hand before my face. “I made a deal. It’ll work out for everyone, but you can’t barge in anymore, do you hear me?”

“Do you think I would?”

He tapped the table with his fingers. “You might. Minnelil needs to help them finish the skeleton. I got them an extension because someone disrupted their workshop. I thought I would need to pull in some favors, but Ferne guessed it was you and she only sighed and said fine.”

I wasn’t sure if that should have felt like a compliment or an insult, but I’d take it. “What’s the catch?”

“There’s no catch. Except the skeleton needs to be ready, and no one gets told anything about this. Fahn’s pride stays intact and he gets his commendation. Let’s hope that’s enough for him. Lorn you don’t need to worry about.”

“No pride left to hurt, eh?”

“He’s a nobody. He can’t afford pride, Lina.”

I stared at Frederik for a second. “A nobody?”

“It is what it is,” he said, rubbing at his face with both hands. “This place is almost as far from the real world as is possible, but it’s not cut off entirely. It’s a delicate balance. Don’t think for a moment Coratorus wouldn’t step in if something jeopardized the school, wreck the reputation he has been building for centuries. It’s important that the families don’t hesitate to send their most gifted children here.”

“Or second most gifted,” I said.

Frederik smacked his lips, coughed lightly. He paled, but the skin at his hairline started to redden. “The point still stands,” he said after a moment.

I sniffed. If he called people nobodies, he deserved to be taken down a bit every once in a while himself. Even if the nobody was a waste of space like Lorn. “Alright,” I said. “I won’t mess it up. You’ve gone to the trouble of arranging this and I owe you for it. If you need me, I’ll handle it.”

“After a month of getting to know you, I’m seriously hoping I won’t,” Frederik muttered. He leaned back in the chair and let his arm dangle over the backrest. “Oh, we’re actually going to the Beach tonight with some friends. Do you want to—?“

“Skip,” I said. “Don’t push it, mister.”

He grinned, standing up. “Joking, joking. Take care, Lina. I’ll let Minnelil know. Please just… take it easy, will you?”

“I already said I wouldn’t mess it up. Don’t worry about it. I’ll keep my head down.”

He nodded at me and turned away. He peered at Grit as he walked past her bed. “She’s really out cold, isn’t she?”

“Seems like it. If she doesn’t wake up before dinner, I’m eating her lunch.”

“Don’t you dare,” Grit muttered, rolling over and pulling the duvet over her head.

---

The student stood on the stage, both fists brandished high in the air. “Are you ready to reanimaaaate?!” he yelled.

“Why is it always like this in the first workshop?” Ferne muttered. “Get down from there, Humbert!”

The students tittered around the room. Humbert climbed down the stage and dodged as Ferne poked a finger at him. He had a massive grin on his face, and the corners of Ferne’s mouth twitched like she was holding back a smile as well.

I sighed and focused on the cat’s skeleton. I had managed to lace the bones together with magic, even though the metal wire already held them up in the approximate shape of a cat. Adapting everything Ferne had drawn on the blackboards about reanimating a normal skeleton should be possible. I had a hunch.

Having a hunch about reanimating skeletons. Phew.

“What are you sighing about?” Fek asked. “At least your thing has all of its limbs.”

“It’s a cat!” I shouted. “Yours is just missing an arm and a half.”

“That’s almost third of the limbs!” Fek said. “Other skeletons are going to make fun of it.”

“You can pinch an arm somewhere later,” I said. “Let me focus, you doofus.”

“You let me focus! You’re the one who keeps sighing.”

“Shh,” Ferne said, waving a hand at her blackboards. They spanned all of the stage, full with diagrams, runes and grinning drawings of skeletons. “The instructions are finished. Follow them to the letter, and raise a hand if you need help.”

Humbert lifted a skeleton’s arm up, the bones rattling as the hand flopped from one side to the other.

“You think you’re being clever, but that works too,” Ferne said and sighed. Her skin went pale as she breathed in, bracing. “Get to work!”

The shout rippled through the room. Fek grabbed hold of his skeleton to keep it from rattling apart.

“Oh come on,” someone said, bones raining down around them.

---

The matrix was in place. I had no idea what any of the runes meant, but I had replicated them as carefully as I could. Ferne had said it was better for us to only copy them for now. According to her, knowing unnecessary runes was dangerous before having the context to understand when and how to use them.

I wasn’t so sure. I had copied the runes in my notebook. I had an inkling how I could adapt them to something else than a cat or a human skeleton, but would that be even remotely right?

I’d keep the runes saved, but try to forget I had them. I put down the magnifying glass and rubbed at my eyes. The last bones were too damn small. I couldn’t even see the runes no matter how much I squinted, so I had borrowed the glass from Ferne.

Drawing the runes with the sharpened fingerbone wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t so much harder than picking a lock. The mechanical locks were often simple, but the ones enhanced with magic had taken finesse.

“Huh,” I said. Now that I knew channeling, I could probably get through a magical lock as easily as turning a door handle. Running mana through the lock pick might make turning the sliders easy, disrupt the enchantments by feeding mana into the locking spell from the inside.

On the other hand, by using the Null I could kick my foot through a stone wall and walk in through the hole, without worrying about the door in the first placed.

I shrugged, focusing back on the cat’s skeleton. Fek mumbled something and wiggled here and there, trying to get one of the top ribs to hold together. It had been broken in three places, but he had laced it with runes and gauze. I ignored him and went through the runes one more time. I had reused the arm runes from Ferne’s diagrams to handle the tail. I was pretty proud of the idea. Maybe the cat could grab stuff with it?

I raised my hand and Ferne wandered over.

“Already done?” she asked, running a hand carefully over the small skeleton. She scratched at the skull, like giving the dead cat a scritch. “It has been years since anyone did anything else than a human skeleton. Back in my day we reanimated anything. Fish, dogs, birds. One particularly dumb person tried to reanimate a teratome, heh.” She chuckled, eyes unfocusing. The smile on her face worried me.

“Why didn’t you do humans back then? How come you do now?” I asked.

She kept her gaze on the cat, finger stopping mid-scritch. She leaned closer to look at the skull, squinting at the faint runes. “No particular reason. Is the controlling matrix ready? What’s your plan with the wires?”

“No particular…?” I said, but Ferne pointed so insistently at the wires that I shrugged. “I’m thinking of keeping them in. The metal could take the Null as well as bone, right? The bones will radiate the controlling magic as the wires have been pushed through them. So… it should keep the metal flexible and the Null will keep it from breaking?”

“I’ve never tried it like this myself. It’s a tradition to keep the undead as pure as possible. Interesting idea. I don’t know if it’ll work, but I’m excited to see what happens. Can you handle channeling the Null on it yourself? That’s somewhat straightforward, as long as you can do it in the first place.”

“I think so. I’ll try.”

Ferne clapped me on the shoulder. “That’s the spirit. Then I’ll go hide behind my desk in case the wires explode after all. Good luck.”

She really did walk up to the stage. The speaker’s pulpit was a sturdy wooden box, and she crouched behind it. “Go ahead!” she called.

The students around me took a step away.

“Great,” I said. I wasn’t sure I could actually channel the Null. I’d only done it when I was angry or swimming in the stuff already. Besides, I had only used it on myself so far. Channeling it out couldn’t be that much more difficult than channeling mana, and I could do that on most tries already.

“Here goes nothing,” I said, lowering my hand to rest on top of Mr. Mittens’ skull.