Original Work Wolf In The Fold (Schooled in Magic 28)

Chapter Sixteen

Emily’s skin crawled.

The world shifted around her, the Blighted Lands suddenly more real to her as they rode further south. An impression of imminent disaster, an impression of unseen eyes watching them … a wave of heat that left her sweating inside her riding clothes followed by a gust of cold air that made her horse flinch and threatened to turn the sweat to ice. The landscape was hidden in a haze, visibility falling so sharply that she feared they would ride over a cliff before they realised the danger and yanked hard on the reins. There were things shimmering at the corner of her eyes, impressions of something out there that vanished when she turned to look at them. It was hard, almost impossible, to be sure they were riding south. It was all too easy to imagine they’d turned themselves around in the haze.

It was the silence that really got to her, an oppressive silence that was worse than almost any noise. She could barely hear anything, not even the horse’s hooves, as they rode onwards. The ground seemed covered with a thin layer of ash, a reminder of countless books set in post-nuclear war nightmares. The sun was barely visible in the sky, the light scattered so completely by the haze it was hard to tell where the sun actually was. She kept a wary eye on the surrounding landscape as they kept riding south, not trusting herself to speak. Cat hadn’t known much about the terrain a few miles from Kuching, let alone anything a hundred miles or more south of his castle. There was just no way to be sure they weren’t riding into a trap.

The tiredness tore at her soul, a strange desire to close her eyes and never open them again. She could feel aches and pains in her joints, a suggestion she had walked for miles even though she’d been on horseback … and she wasn’t sure just how long they’d been travelling. Minutes? Hours? Days? She wasn’t sure. She knew it couldn’t have been that long, a few hours at most, but she didn’t really believe it. The world had shrunk to the horse and herself and not much else. She glanced back at Caleb and Serigala, their forms half-hidden within the mist. It might be smarter, she reflected grimly, to slow their march until the mist faded away, before they managed to seriously hurt themselves – or worse.

“The mist won’t lift in a hurry,” Cat said, when she asked. He spoke quietly and yet it sounded as though he was shouting, the sound battering her ears. “We need to keep moving.”

Emily nodded, sweat crawling down her back. They didn’t know how long they had … her mind ran in circles, reciting everything they knew and thought they knew and reminding her of just how much they didn’t know. Everything mocked her, time and time again, as the light grew brighter, just for a second, before fading away again. The mist crawled closer … she thought she saw shapes within the haze, shapes that were very far from human. But there was no way to be sure. Elsewhere, she might have wondered if she was seeing things. Here …

A shape rose up in front of them, the mist drawing back as through it were a living thing. Ice ran down her spine as she saw the Inverse Shadow, or something very much akin to it. She’d been brought here, the very first day she’d arrived in the Nameless World … Shadye had intended to kill her and Void had saved her, changing her life beyond all hope of repair. Her mother’s face flashed in front of her eyes for a long moment, a pang of regret echoing through her soul before being driven away by the grim awareness her mother had never really cared for her. She had fallen into a bottle and stayed there, leaving her second husband to rule the roost … Emily gritted her teeth. She had no intention of ever going home, not now and not ever. It was …

Caleb pulled his horse alongside hers. “Are you alright?”

“It started here, perhaps,” Emily said. She mentally reviewed the map, even though she knew it was pointless. The landscape was just too different now. “I came here …”

Her heart twisted again as they rode around the alien structure. The Inverse Shadow looked wrong, as if whoever had designed it wasn’t remotely human. The proportions were all skewed … she swallowed, hard, as she recalled the structure existed in multiple separate dimensions at once. It was a tower … no, it was a dome … no, it was a castle … every time she blinked, she saw something different, something alien. It was hard, almost impossible, to keep her eyes focused enough to see through the shimmer, to see aspects of the tower curving in ways her eyes couldn’t follow. She had the feeling that if she walked into the building she would never come out again, or if she did she would be changed beyond all recognition. If it was the same place …

Caleb glanced at her. “What was the point of this place?”

Emily shrugged. She had no idea. Most structures made a certain kind of sense, even if their practical function was covered in human aesthetical designs, but Faerie structures were just … alien. It could be anything from a simple home for a creature that existed in multiple dimensions to a military base, a factory, or something so strange it was utterly beyond her imagination. What would a human from a medieval world make of an aircraft, let alone a spacecraft? She might lack the context to understand what she was seeing, let alone realise how it changed the world. And yet something was nagging at the back of her mind, something bad.

“I wish I knew,” she said, although it wasn’t true. She had the feeling she was better off not knowing. But what you didn’t know could kill you. “Better just to leave it cordoned off.”

“We need more time to inspect the ruin,” Serigala said, joining them. The academic didn’t seem too bothered by the endless ride. Emily fought down a surge of sudden resentment, even anger. He was an adventurer as well as an archaeologist … he was used to being on horseback. Of course he was. “I’ve never seen a ruin quite so well preserved.”

“I guess the necromancers gave it a wide berth,” Emily said, crossly. Shadye had tried to sacrifice her in the alien structure … or one just like it. She had no idea what such a massive burst of power would do, if it were loosed in such a place, but she doubted it would have been good news. There was so much alien power in the structure that it might trigger a much bigger explosion, like striking a match in a gunpowder store. “You never came out here?”

“No one did,” Serigala confirmed. “The guild never allowed it.”

I came out here, with Void and Grandmaster Hasdrubal, Emily thought. She shivered. The Grandmaster hadn’t deserved to die, not the way he had. She wasn’t sure if his soul had found peace or if it was still trapped, a plaything of a demon with the power of a minor god. I guess the guild never heard about our visits.

She looked into the haze and saw nothing, then steered the horse after Cat and Penny. The alien structure fell behind, already lost when she glanced back. She was almost relieved, even though they were heading further and further into the unknown. The idea of going into the building again scared her to the bone. Caleb rode beside her, his face grim. She could see sweat on his brow as the wind shifted again, gusts of hot and cold air blowing against their faces. The tainted magic mocked her, brushing against her mind and making it hard to concentrate. It was difficult, almost impossible, to focus.

Frieda glanced back. “Are we there yet?”

Emily couldn’t help herself. She giggled.

“We’ve barely just begun,” she pointed out. “There’s a long way to go.”

She eyed Cat’s back, hoping to hell they hadn’t been turned around. They thought they were travelling in a straight line, but it was impossible to be sure. The mist pulsed around them like a living thing, visibility seeming to clear just long enough for her to hope they were coming to the edge of the haze before closing in again. She had the impression it was taunting them even though she was sure it wasn’t a thinking being … not that that meant anything, she cautioned herself. There was no reason the mist couldn’t be an intelligent enemy.

Serigala joined her. “I’ve been meaning to visit Heart’s Eye, to determine how you managed to found a whole new university,” he said, without preamble. “The whole concept is something new.”

No, it isn’t, Emily thought. There have been universities on Earth for centuries.

She sighed, inwardly. The concept of higher education had been unknown on the Nameless World. Most students either went to work or found apprenticeships, becoming masters in their own right before they could do any research … the handful of genuine researchers were funding and supported by magical families or magic schools. Both wanted something in return for their support … the idea of creating a place for academics to live and work without needing to fend for themselves, where disciplines magical and mundane could be blended together into a single whole, was just alien to them. Her lips twisted, all too aware of the dangers as well as the advantages of funding a university. It was all too easy for the university professors to lose their grip on reality, to convince themselves that their intelligence gave them the right to dictate to people who lacked their smarts. She wondered, sometimes, how it had all played out back home.

Serigala was still talking. “How did you come up with it?”

“It’s something that needed to be done,” Emily said, unwilling to discuss Earth with anyone she didn’t trust fully. “I could never force myself to focus on one discipline. There was too much to be gained by letting three or four different fields blur into one.”

Serigala shot her a half-smile. “And yet, you could have done that without opening a university.”

“I could, yes,” Emily agreed. “But how many others could do the same?”

She met his eyes. “There are people who could have been great researchers, only to be trapped in their hometowns. They don’t always have the magic, and even if they do they don’t have the resources to make something of their talent nor the knowledge of previous developments they can use as a launch pad for their own developments. They would starve if they weren’t working for a living, which means they can’t focus on developing newer and better ways to do things. And …”

“You funded it,” Serigala pointed out. “Don’t you think some people will take advantage of your generosity?”

Emily shrugged. It was difficult to calculate just how rich she was, in earthly terms. Merely owning a barony put her in the top one percent, and even with the carefully limited taxes she’d crafted to encourage economic development she still raked in enough money to fund the university and a hundred other projects without noticing the loss. It was funny how few aristocrats realised a small slice of a very large pie was still bigger than a much smaller pie, she had often reflected. It never seemed to occur to them that the economy needed to breathe. Or that people produced more if they were allowed to keep a sizable percentage of their produce.

“I’m sure some will,” she said, finally. Heart’s Eye had protocols for evicting someone who broke the rules, particularly if they damaged trust too, yet … she didn’t really care if someone wanted to attend classes without actually doing anything, as long as they behaved themselves. “But overall, the advantages outweigh the disadvantages.”

Serigala cocked his head. “Why do you feel that way?”

“You never know who’ll be the one to make the next breakthrough,” Emily said. Ten years ago, if someone had told her she’d be yanked into a fantasy land, she would have laughed in their face. Now … “It’s worth some investment to ensure the prospective inventor gets a chance to invent something.”

“The aristocracy would disagree,” Serigala pointed out.

Emily shrugged. “Adam would have lived and died a shopboy in Beneficence if the University hadn’t existed,” she countered. “No one would have let him do any magical research – and even if they had, he wouldn’t have had access to the books and supplies he’d need to do it. He might have a genus intellect, but without the education to know what has been done before he’d be starting from scratch, if he started at all. I think he’s repaid everything I invested in him.”

She ground her teeth in sudden frustration. Adam wasn’t the only one who’d been denied opportunities through an accident of birth. Frieda and Imaiqah could easily have gone the same way … Markus and Melissa could have been at dagger’s drawn instead of falling in love and getting married and telling their respective families to go to hell … Emily herself had been trapped, before Shadye had kidnapped her, unable to get out of the poverty trap before it was too late. She understood the beancounter’s argument, the solemn reminder there was no such thing as a free lunch, but she didn’t intend to let it change her plans. She would keep funding the university until she died.

Or if I run out of money, she thought. It was rare for an aristocrat to go bankrupt, but it did happen. The university needs a solid financial base before anything goes wrong.

Serigala leaned forward. “Have you ever studied the history of education?”

Emily felt something prickle down her spine. She wasn’t sure why.

“I was given to understand that much history had been lost,” she said, carefully. It was technically true, if incomplete. “Why …?”

“It’s true,” Serigala agreed. “We know very little about the early days of Whitehall, or Mountaintop, or Stronghold. Much of what we do know is wrapped up in myths and legends. Apparently, the founder of Mountaintop was a professor at Whitehall who had a row with his colleagues and fled, screaming I’m leaving, to found another school … naturally, that story is denied by Mountaintop.”

“Naturally,” Emily echoed. She had never cared for the rivalry between the two schools, certainly never bothered to give it any real attention. “I don’t think anyone believes it.”

Serigala smiled, then leaned forward. “What puzzles us is this. There’s no traceable path of development. One moment, we have the Whitehall Commune; the next, we have the school … and while there are changes and improvements, as the school grows and interacts with the surrounding kingdoms and empires, the basic outline of Whitehall is set in stone right from the start. Lesson circles are replaced by classrooms, apprenticeships from puberty are replaced by generalised lessons … the whole shift happened so rapidly it practically came out of nowhere.”

Or from the future, Emily thought.

“Why?” Serigala studied his hands. “Why such an instant change? It makes no sense.”

“It is a logical way to do things,” Caleb pointed out, from where he’d been quietly listening. “Having a new magician become an apprentice from the get-go means they lack the background knowledge to know which field they want to specialise in.”

“And having so many masters in one place does allow for a lot of cross-pollination,” Emily added. “The new students could get a taster session for each master before deciding who they wanted to follow, perhaps even learn the basics before taking the oaths.”

“Perhaps, but it still appeared out of nowhere.” Serigala looked up. “A newborn babe isn’t a ground adult. He is a toddler, then a child, then a teenager, and then finally an adult – he makes his way through the stages one by one, and even if he does try to grow up quickly it can’t be done without causing all sorts of problems and long-term damage. There are spells to speed up growth, true, but they have very nasty side effects. The same can be said for an organisation or a government. The Allied Lands evolved and are now evolving again, for better or worse. But modern magical education seemed to spring into the world full-grown.”

Emily kept her face blank. Did he know something? It was hard to believe it possible, not when most academics dismissed the idea of time travel, but all it would take was one person thinking outside the box to crack the secret. Or was it just a wild coincidence? The puzzle would have excited her, if she hadn’t already known the answer. It wasn’t a bad idea for him to research the mystery. It was just that she didn’t want him to draw the right conclusions.

“Some inventions appear when the world is ready for them, and the conditions for their arrival are met,” she said, finally. “If half the stories are true, the Whitehall Commune had everything it needed to found a school.”

“So does a husband and wife,” Serigala pointed out. “But that doesn’t mean their child is born fully grown.”

“History is telescoped,” Emily said. Even a cursory look at recorded history raised red flags, from kings who had ruled for hundreds of years to national lifespans compressed into a decade or two. “For all we know, the historians skipped over the boring parts and rushed ahead to the interesting bits.”

“Not here,” Serigala said. “There’s too much we don’t know about what really happened back then.”

Emily nodded. She couldn’t disagree.