Infinite Regress Read online

  Adana smiled. “And what if we don’t get caught?”

  “You get away with it,” Emily said. “But I would be very impressed if any of you managed to break into a tutor’s office, let alone a bedroom.”

  She held up a hand. “There are two other points that need to be brought to your attention,” she warned. “First, the interior of the school is monitored closely. If you break one of the rules—like ensuring your roommate cannot attend classes—the tutors will know who to blame. If you manage to do something stupid, and you probably will, there is no point in running away from the scene of the crime. You will be caught and you will be punished.

  “Second, as some of you probably already know, there are long-standing feuds and disagreements within the magical community. Your families may have rivalries with other families. You are not allowed to pick fights with members of those families inside Whitehall or engage in proxy battles with students from other countries or whatever. Whitehall is neutral in all political disputes. If you can’t find it in you to be friendly to people from different sides, then ignore them.”

  She looked from face to face. Dulcet and Julia probably wouldn’t have any friends or enemies within the magical community—yet—but the other four, even Jasmine, might well see old feuds reasserting themselves at Whitehall. Hell, Adana might well be trouble. There were no Ashfalls at Whitehall, if she recalled correctly, yet it was quite possible that one or more of their client families were represented at the school. And Melissa was at Whitehall too, after being disowned by her family. Adana might have orders to try to make Melissa’s life difficult...

  Which would be stupid, Emily thought, coldly. Picking a fight with a Fifth Year student would be insane. She’s no match for Melissa on her worst day.

  “If you need help or advice, I will be around on Saturday,” she said. “I will be in the common room by your bedrooms from ten bells to twelve bells, at least for the first couple of months. Should you need help outside that time, ask a tutor to find me through the wards and you can talk to me if I am not in class. That said—” she held up a hand “—if you waste my time, I will not be pleased.”

  Aloha had suggested she issue such a warning, pointing out that she might be besieged by younger girls demanding advice at all hours of the day. It wasn’t anything like as convenient as they might have hoped—a look at her schedule had told her she was going to be in class at least five hours a day—but she would be around. All Emily could really do was hope that nothing happened that demanded her urgent attention.

  But they might think that it isn’t urgent when it is, she thought. And they will be too scared to approach me.

  She leaned back in her chair. “Do you have any questions?”

  Tiega thrust her hand into the air. “Did you really kill Shadye?”

  “Yes,” Emily said, flatly.

  “Unreal,” Lillian breathed.

  “She killed a combat sorcerer last year,” Adana told them. She looked at Emily, her bright eyes flickering over Emily’s face. “How did you do it?”

  “Skill,” Emily said. She had no intention of discussing Shadye, Mother Holly or Master Grey with them. “It was not easy.”

  “You could teach me how to duel,” Adana said. “Could you? Please?”

  “Take defensive magic next year,” Emily said. She didn’t like dueling. Maybe there were students who viewed it as an honorable sport, but she just saw it as dangerous. Master Grey had set out to kill her, after all. There was no honor in cold-blooded murder, even if the victim turned the tables and won the duel. “After that, if you wish, you may take dueling as an elective.”

  She rose, ending the session. “I believe you’ve already seen your rooms,” she said. “Did Madame Razz give you guidance medallions?”

  “Yes, My Lady,” Dulcet said, shyly. “She showed us how to use them too.”

  “That’s good,” Emily said. “You will learn how to navigate the school, in time, but until then keep those guidance medallions with you. If you lose them, ask a tutor to send you back to your dorms and get a new one from Madame Razz. She will not be pleased, but she will understand.”

  She studied them all for a long moment, then nodded to the door. “Dinner time,” she said, firmly. The food wouldn’t be anything special for Tiega or Adana, but the other four would think they’d died and gone to heaven. “Make sure you eat as much as you can. You’ll need the food for energy.”

  Jasmine stepped up beside her as she led the way out of the room. “Why didn’t you tell me who you were?”

  “I didn’t want to be recognized,” Emily said, seriously. It didn’t sound as though Jasmine knew Emily had helped to pay her fees. “Are you going to sing for the school?”

  “If they’ll let me,” Jasmine said. “Will they?”

  “Probably,” Emily said. There was no such thing as a talent night at Whitehall, but perhaps that too would change. Some of Gordian’s ideas weren’t bad. “I just hope you’ll have time to practice.”

  “I’ve had too much practice,” Jasmine said. She gave Emily a brilliant smile. “Right now, I’m practically singing in my sleep.”

  “I’d better teach your roommates how to block out the sound,” Emily said. “Or they’ll be turning you into things just to make sure they get a good night’s sleep.”

  “Ouch,” Jasmine said. “That isn’t funny.”

  “No,” Emily agreed. “It isn’t.”

  Chapter Ten

  EMILY HAD MADE SURE TO GO to bed early—after casting charms to make sure Cabiria wouldn’t keep her awake half the night—but she still felt tired and unready as she followed Caleb into the wardcrafting classroom and took a seat near the front. The classroom would have interested her normally—there were diagrams painted on the walls and dozens of workbenches, covered in various pieces of metal and stone—but she felt too tired to care. Gritting her teeth, she forced herself to cast a spell for energy, knowing she would pay for it later. Such spells always came with a price.

  Professor Armstrong strode into the room at precisely five minutes past the hour, the door slamming closed with a loud thump and locking behind him. “I will be entering the classroom at this time, every class,” he said, as he walked up to the front of the classroom and turned to face then. “Anyone who arrives after me will be denied entry to the room and marked absent. Repeated absences will result in your removal from my class and there will be no chance to take it again, should you repeat the year.”

  Emily nodded, studying Professor Armstrong thoughtfully. He was a towering man, with long red hair and a long red beard that hung down to his chest. His face was scarred and pockmarked, his hands were large enough to make her feel uncomfortable, yet there was an odd gentleness about the way he moved that reassured her. She didn’t blame him for closing the door or issuing such a stern warning to his students. She’d heard the same from several other tutors over the years.

  “For most of you, this is your first class with me,” Professor Armstrong continued, after a long moment. “You will have had experience with very basic wards before, of course, but for these two years we will be looking at practical Wardcrafting. Those of you who wish to find an apprenticeship with an enchanter will require top marks in this class, so I advise you to pay attention. Your progress will be monitored closely and if I don’t feel you have a reasonable chance at passing your exams, your names will not be included in the rolls.”

  He paused, his eyes flashing as he dared them to say anything. “This class is almost completely practical work,” he said. “You will be required to prove to me that you can complete each step, reliably, before we move on to the next step. There will be a considerable amount of background reading, naturally, but you’re expected to cope with that in your own time.”

  Emily winced. What time?

  Professor Armstrong went on, regardless. “We will start with putting together basic wards, anchoring them within hearthstones and runic sequences, then I will allow you to take the risk of cons
tructing your own wards,” he said. “You will not pass your exams unless you put together a ward network that stands up to a wardcrafter for longer than ten minutes. And in doing so, what is the greatest danger?”

  Cirroc stuck up a hand. “Sir, I...”

  “You’ve already taken this class,” Professor Armstrong said, cutting him off. “And if you don’t know the answer, you’re doomed.”

  His gaze swept the room, again. “Anyone care to recollect what they should have read in the books? Am I required to pick someone at random?”

  He jabbed a finger at the Gorgon. “You. What is the greatest danger in putting together one’s own wards?”

  The Gorgon hesitated, then leaned forward. “Using a piece of well-understood spellware,” she said. “That’s...”

  “Correct,” Professor Armstrong boomed. “And why is it a danger?”

  His finger stabbed at Emily. “Emily? Care to answer the question?”

  “Because the spellware is already understood,” Emily said, “a skilled wardcrafter can easily counter it and break through the layers of protection.”

  “Exactly,” Professor Armstrong said. “You would not believe the number of students who give me a piece of work they have carelessly thrown together from known spellware, completely failing to fix the glitches in the original junk! And I rarely need more than a minute to crack it. Let that be a lesson to you. If you can’t be bothered closing all the holes before you steal someone else’s early work, you deserve everything you get!”

  His flashing eyes swept the room. “Open your desks.”

  Emily obeyed. Inside, there was a lump of stone—it took her a moment to recognize that it was an inactive hearthstone—a handful of tools, a collection of pieces of metal and a notebook. Beside her, Caleb did the same. His desk held the same collection, although she thought his hearthstone was bigger. She doubted it made much of a difference.

  “That hearthstone is raw,” Professor Armstrong stated, as she traced her fingers over the stone. “You will see, if you touch it, that it has never been primed, let alone turned into a lodestone for magic. Such unprepared hearthstones are relatively cheap, but rest assured you will be expected to pay for any replacements if you lose them through carelessness or stupidity. You will be using it as the base for your work. Close your desks.”

  He went on as the desks banged closed. “The principle difference between basic ward construction and outright Wardcrafting is that the latter involves anchoring one’s wards to a structure or object independent of yourself,” he informed them. “For the former, you anchor your wards and protections within your own magical fields; for the latter, you anchor the wards to a hearthstone and then charge them with magic. Later, you will be using runes to power the wards directly from ambient local mana. It is those wards that cause the greatest headaches after their creators die.”

  There was a long chilling pause. “Why is that the case?”

  His finger stabbed at Pandora. “They don’t collapse after the death of their creator,” she said, softly. “The wards either need to be dismantled or left in place, permanently keeping intruders out of whatever they defend.”

  “Correct,” Professor Armstrong said. “Indeed, there was a tradition—for a while—of having emperors buried in warded tombs, tombs which were effectively impossible for looters to rob. Later, as Wardcrafting developed, it became harder to seal the tombs permanently and a number were looted. Of course, some of the looters discovered too late that many artifacts were cursed.”

  He smirked. “In your later years, should you be called upon to craft wards for your family house, you will have to ensure that your family are keyed into the wards too,” he added. “But what sort of problems does this produce?”

  Emily winced inwardly as his finger moved towards her, but stopped, pointing at Caleb instead. She breathed a sigh of relief. The answer was fairly simple, she thought, but she’d learned it from Void, rather than Professor Lombardi or Mistress Irene. She didn’t want to talk about that with anyone. Professor Armstrong might object to her learning skills from a sorcerer who wasn’t an experienced tutor.

  “The more people who are keyed into the wards,” Caleb said, “the more weak points within the structure for someone else to use to break in.”

  “Correct,” Professor Armstrong said. “And the other problem?”

  Caleb hesitated. “I don’t know, sir,” he admitted. “I...”

  “At least you’re smart enough not to guess,” Professor Armstrong said. It sounded like a compliment, although Emily couldn’t help bristling on her boyfriend’s behalf. “Would anyone else like to answer the question?”

  Prunella stuck up a hand. “Sir,” she said, when Professor Armstrong nodded to her. “It allows your family to remove you from the wards.”

  “It can,” Professor Armstrong confirmed. “Like Caleb said, allowing someone else access to the wards can make it easier for them to break into the command spellwork, giving them a chance to rewrite your work to erase your access rights. Should you be a Family Head, you must always be on guard for your children trying to steal your power and home from under you. The more you have keyed into the wards, the greater the chance that someone will try something.”

  Emily glanced at Caleb, thinking hard. Was that what had happened to Fulvia? She’d left her family’s home, from what Void had said, although no one knew where she’d gone. But if her family had chosen to expel her, she wouldn’t have had much choice. Whoever had crafted the original wards had probably keyed special rights to those who shared the bloodline, which Fulvia didn’t. She shrugged, dismissing the thought. There would be time to worry about Fulvia later.

  “It seems a little harsh,” Pandora said. “I don’t think my future husband would expel me from my home.”

  “You can never trust anyone these days,” Professor Armstrong said, cheerfully. “The better your defenses, the less chance someone will try to take advantage of you.”

  He rubbed his hands together. “If there is anyone here who cannot cast a simple early-warning ward, please leave the classroom now,” he said. “Everyone else, open your desks, remove your hearthstones and place them in front of you.”

  Emily smiled. She would have been astonished if someone had left the classroom, given that almost everyone mastered such wards in their first year. All they really did was sound the alert if they brushed up against another magic field, such as a cursed object lying in wait, but they were very useful. She’d used them herself in Martial Magic, priming them to warn her if someone was trying to sneak up behind her. The wards were simply too tricky to detect before they were already triggered.

  She rubbed the hearthstone gently as Professor Armstrong strode around the classroom, checking each hearthstone before grunting in curt acknowledgement and moving to the next stone. Emily had no idea why he hadn’t done it before the class began, but she rather assumed he knew what he was doing. Maybe he’d thought one or more of the students had already started to prime the hearthstone. But when she touched it, she sensed nothing but cold stone. It could have passed for a piece of sandstone, if she hadn’t already known what it was.

  “You have all, I believe, experimented with wands and staffs,” Professor Armstrong added, when he returned to the front of the classroom. “Infusing a spell into a hearthstone operates on the same lines, but this time you charge the spell before pushing it into the hearthstone. I strongly advise you not to try this with anything dangerous, not yet. Accidentally setting off a blasting curse on your fingertips will probably kill you—and if it doesn’t kill you, you’ll wish you were dead.”

  “Ouch,” Caleb muttered.

  “Cast the spell,” Professor Armstrong ordered. “And then infuse it into the hearthstone.”

  Emily nodded, then shaped the spell in her mind. It felt hard to put it together piece by piece, now that her abilities had expanded sharply, but the textbooks she’d read had warned her that it would make it easier to move to the next step. Normally, a
spell would be infused into a wand without being charged; this time, she had to charge it first... she felt it waggling backwards and forwards over her fingertips, then humming as she pushed her hand against the hearthstone and tried to let go of the spell. It shimmered with power, then flickered out of existence. Emily swallowed a curse as she stared down at the grey stone. It almost seemed to be mocking her.

  “It isn’t primed yet,” Professor Armstrong said. Emily looked up, sharply. She hadn’t heard him approaching, even though he strode around the room like a charging elephant. She’d been too intent on the spell to notice. “You need to use a far more gentle touch.”

  “Yes, sir,” Emily said.

  “Try again,” he ordered. “And this time, be gentle.”

  Emily nodded and went back to work. It took her four tries to get the spell infused into the hearthstone without losing it, although she had a feeling it would get easier as the stone became more used to the presence of magic. Hearthstones channeled magic, projecting wards out... she shuddered, inwardly, as she recalled Shadye looming over her with a stone knife. He’d intended to use it to suck out her magic and use it for himself.

  “You’re pushing too hard,” Professor Armstrong said to Pandora. “You need to be gentle.”

  “I was gentle,” Caleb muttered. He’d succeeded on his second try. “But the spellwork doesn’t last very long.”

  “It needs to be charged,” Emily muttered back. “But how do we charge it without overbalancing it?”

  She sighed in frustration. It was definitely a balancing act; too little power and the spell would snap out of existence, too much power and the spell would come apart at the seams. She silently thanked Void for making her start again from the beginning, no matter how much she’d resented it at the time. If he had let her have her way, when her magical reserves had expanded so radically, she doubted she would have been allowed to remain in Professor Armstrong’s class. She would probably have accidentally destroyed the hearthstone within the first hour.