The Academy [BOOK ONE COMPLETE]

I stroked Clickens’ spine, running my hand down it gently. “I’m sorry I called you naughty. You were only protecting the place while we were gone, weren’t you?”

Clickens mewed, perched on my shoulder. Its teeth looked even sharper than before. What was left of the skeleton lay at my feet, spread across the walkway. I pushed the bones away from the book with my boot. I picked up the book and blew the bone dust off from it cover. The title of the book was How Not to Be Seen. This had to be the book Falar had promised to send me. What a dumb name.

“You can’t attack people coming in like that, though,” I said. “What if it had been a person? How would I ever get the blood off you? I bet bone stains.”

Clickens bumped me in the shoulder with its skull. It was hard to say, but the cat seemed more excited than worried about the idea.

“No! You can scare them, okay?” I said. Maybe a compromise was a safer option. It would probably like that.

It looked at me with its eye sockets and opened its jaws a bit. I decided it was squinting and licking its lips at me. Cats.

I picked up the book and kicked the remains of the skeleton down. The bones would get buried in the snow soon enough.

No one else was in. Minnelil was getting tossed around by Jextor and Grit hopefully wasn’t by Falar. I placed Clickens on one side of the table and the book on the other.

Clickens tried to push to book off the table with one bony paw, so I picked them both up again, grabbing the cat under one arm and the book under the other. “I’ll put one of you into the chest. Behave and it won’t be you.”

Clickens screeched a long low note. I figured it had learned its lesson, so I put Falar’s book in the chest and took out my book about creating and caring for undead. I had an exam to pass, and the book had started making more sense now that I had reanimated Clickens.

I turned the pages, making notes as I went. “Oh, it says I can put more Null into you later once the world has scabbed over the initial impossibility of the reanimation,” I said, scratching Clickens as it lay on my lap. “Weird.”

It seemed older undead could be more powerful than ones created more recently. The world didn’t take kindly to too much Null at a single place or time, but like a muscle tiring of holding a pose, its resistance grew weaker over time. This book might be interesting after all. Clickens had already gone through the normal skeleton like it had been made of paper. If I could make it even more powerful, what could it do later?

That wasn’t the real question.

For what might I need a cat that could smash its paw through Null-infused bone? I shook my head and smacked my lips. Well. It would be interesting to try. The book said that infusing more Null tinted with the necromancer’s personality would keep the undead more resistant to anyone else trying to control it. That would be good, anyway.

I stood to stretch. There still hadn’t been any word from Shalameth or Firgl. That was probably for the best.

It was lunch time soon. Maybe I’d meet the others there, but I had to test something first. I didn’t want to, but I did. Back in the library, Firgl had spoken about graves. The thought felt like a wound on my mind, like a rotten tooth that I wanted to poke to see how bad it was.

I sat back down. My grandparents had been dead for a long time. I could start with them. The white flowers mom picked to put on their graves. I had helped her, too small to really understand why we were doing it. I had taken no flowers on anyone else’s grave after that.

When the orphanage had gone to visit the graveyard, I had stayed in my room and clenched my fists until they came back. One of the matrons had tried to scold me for it and force me to go, but when she had looked at my face, she had given up and left without a word.

Had grandpa been called Ran? Mom had always called him dad. He hadn’t looked as old as Shalameth, but he had been old. I remembered the wrinkled eyes and how I had wondered why they looked like there was a grey film over them. He had always smiled, and been so strong, stronger than dad. “Old men are like roots of a tree,” he had said, flexing his arm, “gnarled and supposesd to be under the ground”. I had laughed, but Mom had scolded him for it every time.

I blinked and kept blinking. The Kertharians had almost taken him away from me with everything else. I sighed. Clickens headbutted my ankle, mewing quietly.

“It’s okay,” I said. “Let’s go eat.”

---

Even Fek wasn’t in the Lunch Hall when I got in. I sat down and settled to wait for the food. Clickens perched on my shoulder, weighing almost nothing, but radiating pressure that made my arm ache. The more I had practiced channeling, the more I had learned to distinguish the different types of magic from each other. The regular magic tingled and vibrated, as varied as life. Saying the Null was always the same would have been easy, but it wasn’t true.

The entity on the mountain had smelled like rot. Like the Null had been spoiled somehow. The Academy itself was an impersonal weight on everything, like being hugged from every angle at the same time by something that didn’t even know I was there, ageless and uncaring in a way that was too vast to consider. The undead were sharp, discrete angles of power, tinted with tatters of personality.

“Hey, girl!” Frederik shouted, waving at me. “Mind if I sit?”

“Ugh, hey,” I said, kicking the chair opposite me out from under the table. Its legs scraped against the floor before Frederik caught it.

“Cool,” he said, sitting down. “So, I heard you and Minnelil are an item now? You know there’s a secret challenge about—”

“Stop, no, I don’t want to hear,” I said. “Can’t you guys be normal for once? Why don’t you make a challenge about Bursar and get all of yourselves killed while you’re at it?”

“Oh, there are a couple. No one tries those,” he said, then leaned in like he was about to tell me a secret. “There’s a rumor someone did, though. Pretty exciting, eh?”

I groaned. “What is it, Frederik?”

He grinned, swiping his hand over his hair. It had to be annoying he couldn’t do it properly and could only carefully pat the glistening sculpture of blond hair. “Just wanted to say it’s cool and I’m happy for you. Want to come and have dinner some time, the two of you?”

“Is that a weird invitation or a serious one? This isn’t for some challenge I don’t want to hear about?”

“If you want, there actually would be a… you don’t, I got it. Nah, it’s about the other stuff.”

“Other… oh,” I said, looking at my hands. I drummed the table with my fingers. “I guess. I’ll talk to her.”

“Great,” Frederik said, smiling and blinking at me. “I’ll get out of your face.”

“Learn to wink with just one eye,” I muttered as he rose up.

Immediately when he stood up, Fek slid onto the chair. “Hey, Lina!”

“Aah! What is up with you people today?”

Frederik flashed me a grin and patted Fek on the shoulder. “Nice switch.”

“Thanks,” he said. “Did you get to read your book? Any sign of the others?”

“No,” I said. “No sign of the food either, what’s taking so long?”

“Maybe the skeletons rushed too much and got tangled together?” Fek said, glancing behind him. The hall was filled with students, but no skeletons were anywhere in sight.

“That’s dumb,” I said. “You were reading the same book earlier. Did you finish it? It’s actually sort of interesting.”

“Yeah, I did. Don’t remember anything about it.”

I rolled my eyes. “You can make them stronger. I saw Clickens take apart a skeleton. What do you think it could do if I could make it even stronger?”

“Don’t do that. It almost bit off my finger already. But yeah, you can. Man, I can’t wait until I can channel Null. Jextor said it’s going to be really difficult for me, but if I can tap into the trauma, it should make it easier. Said he can arrange for Falar to give me some new ones, if I don’t have enough. I said no thanks.”

“Good for you,” I said. He tried to start talking immediately but I slapped the table, cutting him off. “Oh! I wanted to mention something. Do you know who wrote the book that Falar sent me? The one about hiding yourself using Null?”

“Where’s the food? How come it’s this late? Anyway, hopefully the book is not by Coratorus again? Are you going to be in a fugue for another two weeks with Minnelil?”

“No!” I said, lifting up a finger and leaning closer. “It’s Fendribalis! I didn’t have time to check it out yet, but I thought maybe you would like to check it out too?”

“Oh, for sure! Fendribalis rules!”

I smiled, placing both hands behind my neck. “We’ll see, but it’s nice if… hey, where are all the skeletons?”

“Did you know Fendribalis has written more about the effect of Null on the mind than anyone else? I bet that’s why they know about using it for hiding. And I don’t know. They’ll be here, don’t worry.”

“What if something has happened?” I asked. My spine tingled. I trusted my hunches. Anticipating the worst at any moment had kept me alive for a long time, and now I felt my skin getting cold. “They’ve been sending the skeletons away a lot.”

“Nah, Falar redid the wards around the school.”

“Are we in the school?” I said.

The back door leading to the kitchens creaked open. Students sitting between me and the door started to shiver one at a time. My skin rose to goosebumps, waiting.

The smell of mold rolled over me.