The provost gave them what amounted to a perfunctory tour of the main building and the grounds. Alfie could have lingered for days, exploring the myriad rooms, hidden garden paths, and other areas of the estate, but it was evident that Cornelius Sharpe was chafing to get the tour concluded.
As they walked hurriedly around the place, Sharpe reiterated to them that the building was old and complex and had many secrets, many of which he did not know himself.
The provost led the group through a series of winding paths and hidden alcoves as he talked, the students struggling to keep up as he moved with purpose, chatting all the while about how the university could be capricious as the sea if they didn’t mind themselves. Abruptly, they stepped out into a small clearing, ringed by ancient trees that towered impossibly high above them.
Sharpe stopped in his monologue and looked around. His silver eyebrows rose, and a knowing smile crinkled his features.
“Well, well, if you look closely you will see that what I have been talking about has gone and manifested itself,” the provost said, his voice barely able to contain his impatient humor. “That’s what happens if you let your guard down, get distracted, or, as is the case here, forget that today is Monday.”
Alfie and Will, along with all the other students in the small group peered around. They were standing in a grove of trees, which was a little strange, as it had appeared they had been heading straight up to the manor house itself.
Alfie frowned, but before he could ask Will whether he had noticed the sudden change in the environment, he saw something strange happening. The trees around them were moving, their limbs bending and twisting in impossible ways, as if alive with some otherworldly force.
“Uh, what is happening?” asked one anxious student, a guy with impressive dreadlocks.
The provost simply smiled and adjusted the cuffs of his tweed morning coat.
“This is one of those unknown secrets of the Aetherbright Academy I was just telling you about,” he said, ducking as a bee the size of a pigeon whirred happily past his ear. “A place where magic and nature converge, where even the most ancient of trees hold secrets and power beyond our wildest imaginations.”
“You’ve never been here?” Alfie asked.
“Putting aside the assumption that you might think I know where here is,” Sharpe said, “I must answer in the negative.”
“You don’t seem very worried,” said the girl with black curly hair and the little tortoise creature. She shuffled to get a little closer to the provost of the Aetherbright Academy.
Sharpe chuckled. “No, I have never been here. Not in this place and at this time. But I’m not worried either. One of my colleagues was actually telling me about it last week over a game of backgammon, though it slipped my mind until now. Apparently, according to her, this glade is accessible only on Mondays after the summer solstice. Her mind was on other things as well, if I recall her anecdote correctly. So, perhaps, that has something to do with it too.”
As they all stood in awe, watching the strange dance of the trees, the provost turned to the students, his eyes alight with excitement.
“You are here to learn not just magic, but to explore the mysteries of this place. To uncover the secrets that lie hidden all around us, waiting to be discovered. That’s the fundamental aspect of magic that non-magic users are unaware of: the potential for magic is everywhere, if only you have the eyes to see it.”
Alfie gasped softly as the bark of a tree near him undulated like it was water that had just had a pebble dropped in it.
“I hope that you are ready to begin. Readiness for such an ask is something that cannot be taught unfortunately.”
They followed the provost out of the glade, stepped around a mound of crumbled masonry, and continued across the lawn as if nothing had happened.
“Now, I won’t go into too much detail now,” Sharpe said. “I am a firm believer in using the time that is given to us wisely. With that in mind, repeating myself is a habit I try to avoid. I will tell you all more about the specifics of our training here—how it works, how long it takes, what it typically entails, and why it is we train our selected brand of mages at all—when we’re enjoying dinner later and are more at ease.”
“Select brand of mages?” Alfie said to Will. “What do you think that means?”
Will smiled wryly from out of the side of his mouth. He obviously knew what the provost was talking about, but Alfie hadn’t a clue.
“Right, as I am sure it is obvious to all of you, the Aetherbright Academy exists to train mages,” Sharpe continued as they walked along a gravel path that skirted some outbuildings. “Saying that, although magic is the key competency taught here, our spell-casting students will also be expected to learn other skills. Things such as woodcraft, hand-to-hand combat, firearms training, and other more mundane skills like evasive driving.” He waved his hand around in a languid fashion. “Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.”
Alfie’s eyebrows had risen higher and higher as the provost had listed off these skills.
Hand-to-hand combat? Firearms? Evasive driving? This sounds more like a military school than a university, he thought.
They came to a halt outside of a long, low stone building. If Alfie was any judge, the walls of this structure were even thicker and more formidable than the block walls of the main building. The roof was an arching tracery of graceful metal struts holding in panes of thick glass. Emanating from within, flashing sporadic lights could be seen reflecting from curving glass panels, though no sounds could be heard.
“Welcome to the Thaumaturgical Firing Range,” the provost said, standing in front of a stone door that resembled the kind of portal Alfie might have expected to find fronting Fort Knox. “Are there any amongst you who have visited a mundane shooting range? Ah, Mr. Grant?”
“My father and I used to clay pigeon shoot fairly regularly, sir,” the haughty young man with the auburn hair replied in a Scottish accent.
“Ah yes, well this is our version of it,” Sharpe said. “You will see that clay target shooting takes on a slightly different meaning here.”
The mammoth door retracted into the wall at a gesture from Provost Sharpe, and he led the way inside.
As soon as Alfie set foot inside the dark passageway, his ears were assaulted by muffled explosions, as well as the kinds of sounds that he had last heard while playing video games at home—sparkling, crashing, and sizzling noises.
The group followed Sharpe down a straight passage. They emerged back out into the bright light of day to find themselves standing under the glass roof that Alfie had seen outside.
“This,” Sharpe said, holding out his arms, “is the Aetherbright Academy’s take on clay target shooting.”
“Whoa,” Alfie breathed.
He was standing behind a waist-high stone barrier in what was basically an observation box. In front of him, about ten paces away, with their backs to the group, were a bunch of other young men and women. They were focused on the pitted and scarred stretch of sandy floor in front of them, which must have been roughly the size of the average football field.
And they were using magic.
Alfie’s eyes went wide as he watched a female student, with her sleeves rolled up and her hair in a pragmatic ponytail, reduce an animated stone man to smithereens in a gout of blue fire.
“I see what you mean by clay target shooting, guv—sir,” Will quipped from beside Alfie.
“Yes, Mr. Savage, you have spotted my cunning pun, have you not?”
“You—we—use golems as target practice?” the girl that Sharpe had called Miss Hookway said. “Isn’t that a bit…?”
“Cruel? No,” said Sharpe shortly, observing as another lumbering nine-foot-tall humanoid came stomping toward the older students from the other end of the firing range. “The golems are made from clay, conjured with a simple spell that is stored inside a cavity in their heads. They are animated but not alive, and they are quite tough, which is why we use them for training purposes.”
“I thought we’d be learning to, you know, make things float and stuff,” Alfie said as a portly young man with a wispy goatee raised a hand and sent a crackling bolt of purple lightning lancing out from a small dagger he was clutching. It hit the golem and shattered one of its arms into terracotta-colored gravel.
“Yes… Floating… It has its place, of course,” Sharpe said thoughtfully.
The portly young guy with the wispy beard made an adjustment on his dagger and pointed it at the oncoming golem once more. A larger, brighter, more concentrated tendril of mauve electricity shot out from the tip of the weapon and hit the clay man in the chest. It froze and then disintegrated with a tooth-rattling explosion.
“But really, what good is magic if you can’t occasionally blow shit up?” Sharpe added in an undertone for Alfie’s ears only.
After the thaumaturgical shooting range, they strolled around the lake, Will and Alfie chattering excitedly to one another about what they had seen back at the range and how they’d go about blowing up their first golem.
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Behind a small copse of beech trees, they stopped in at a menagerie. A hard-looking woman with raven-black hair hacked into a practical bob was mucking out a pair of creatures that looked like Shetland ponies, which were standing idly by a large pond. Unlike any Shetland ponies that Alfie had ever come across though, this pair of small, docile-looking horses smelled absolutely rancid.
“Good grief,” one of the group said, “what’s that stink? I thought it was only dogs that rolled in dead stuff?”
“Those ponies need one hell of a bath,” someone else commented.
“Those are no ponies,” Sharpe told them, seemingly unperturbed by the foul stink.
“What are they, then?” Alfie asked.
“They’re kelpies,” Sharpe replied.
The young woman, Miss Hookway, let out a low sound of understanding.
“Yes, kelpies, Fritha,” Sharpe said, beaming at the girl. “Shape-shifting water horses that are said to lure people to drown in the water they inhabited. Absolute rot, of course, as so much folklore is. Why in the dickens would a kelpie want a human for company? They do have a rather strong, pungent odor when in their horse form, don’t they?”
Alfie observed the little creatures for a while. Now, he looked more closely, their coats, which he had taken at a glance to be black, appeared more of a deep midnight blue.
“Although she is currently indisposed, the woman over there tending to the beasts is one of your schoolmen, Kate Cutty,” Sharpe continued, nodding toward the toiling woman. “She is in charge of the Beast House—what we affectionately call our little menagerie here.”
The woman—Schoolman Cutty—looked up briefly and nodded. She was wearing a bandana pulled up across her face, no doubt to combat the eye-watering stench of the kelpies, and a broad-brimmed cowboy hat. Alfie just caught a glimpse of keen blue eyes between the bandana and the hat before she returned to her work. There was a long leather duster draped over a fence nearby, but Schoolman Cutty had her shirt sleeves rolled up, revealing tanned arms covered in tattoos. She had an athame—a black-handled, double-edged ritual knife—strapped into a thigh sheath on one leg and a big, old revolver in a thigh holster on her other.
Alfie looked around and saw that more than a few of the male students were giving the woman admiring looks.
“Come,” Sharpe said, “let’s continue.”
They went from the Beast House to the more mundane shooting range, which was located outdoors in a stand of trees. After that, they visited the glasshouses. Alfie wasn’t much of a botanist, one plant looking more or less like another to his non-expert eye, so the impact of the glasshouses was somewhat lost on him. He could appreciate that some of the plants and flowers definitely moved with a lot more speed than the common sunflower or rose did.
“There is one other important part of the grounds you will need to see, but I am going to save that for tomorrow,” Sharpe said enigmatically when they had fetched up outside the main door of the academy manor once more. The dwarf that had guided them from the station was waiting patiently for them, as still as a statue. “As for now, Jollux, one of our most meticulous porters, will guide you to the dormitory you will be staying in for the interim.”
Jollux nodded magisterially at the group of new students—a rather difficult feat given his enormous beard and massive stomach.
“I will see you in a few hours for dinner,” Sharpe said blithely.
“Where’s the dining room?” Grant asked.
“Hm?” Sharpe asked, already half turning away. “Oh, yes. Well, that’s your first test, Mr. Grant. Good luck.”
With that, Sharpe opened the grand entrance doors with a wave of his hand and disappeared inside.
Alfie, Will, and the rest of the group were led inside by Jollux. Overall, the interior of the magical academy was a blend of grandeur, tradition, and function. To Alfie, it looked like it had been designed to inspire awe and provide a fitting backdrop for the education and training of mages.
They passed through a grand and impressive library—a place of high ceilings and tall shelves—which Alfie imagined contained a vast collection of books and scrolls on magic, history, potions, and all the other things he guessed that upcoming magic users had to learn about.
The classrooms and training areas they passed were outfitted with magical and alchemical equipment, as well as books and artifacts relating to magic and fighting. The training areas had been designed for both physical and magical combat, with obstacle courses, target ranges, and standard gym equipment.
The common spaces, the hallways, halls, and sporadically placed study areas had been decorated in the same martial style as the classrooms. Alfie spotted obviously magical and probably historical elements and decorations, such as medieval armor, ancient weapons, and enchanted tapestries. It was all dazzlingly unbelievable, but, then again, not so unbelievable as it might have been only a day or so ago.
Magic is real, Alfie thought, the words thrilling through his core. It’s real, and I’m part of it now.
The more Alfie saw of the place, as they marched down passages and up sets of stairs, the more he was inclined to think that fighting and battle played far more of a role in this academy’s curriculum than he ever might have supposed.
After ten minutes of walking through the echoing corridors, standing aside every now and again so a group of older students could hurry past on their way to some lesson or other, the dwarf eventually stopped outside an oak door, studded with iron rivets.
“This is the temporary dormitory reserved for our newest initiates,” he proclaimed solemnly. “Three bedrooms for the young men and three for the young ladies. You will find everything you need inside. Dinner will be served in two hours. You will hear the gong.”
With that, he left them, sweeping smoothly away like a small plum-colored barge heading up a river of stone.
Alfie and Will spent a little time chatting and checking out their temporary digs. The dormitories were comfortable enough but simple.
“I guess that’s because this is temporary, as Jollux explained,” Alfie said when Will pointed this out. “I’m thinking that it’s pretty spartan—compared to the rest of this gaff—because newcomers don’t spend too much time in here.”
The bedchamber that Will, Alfie, and a couple of the other lads picked as their room attested to the transitory nature of the dormitories, to the fact that they were merely the place where all students stay, and had stayed, before they…
Before we what? Alfie wondered, sitting on the edge a single bed and staring around the room.
The dorm rooms had posters of various ages and eras stuck around the place. From a glance at the text on each corner, they had been pulled out of a publication called Thaumaturgist’s Digest. These posters showed mostly people that Alfie had never seen before, but there were some that depicted men and women that he was quite familiar with. They were the kinds of odd, eccentric, left-field people who’d had profound effects on everyday society.
There was a tech billionaire who had made the news not too long ago for losing the most money ever in a game of strip poker, the author that had cashed in on her Aetherbright Academy experience in a big way by fictionalizing it, an American painter who had died at the age of twenty-eight after taking the art world by storm and creating work that ‘shouldn’t have been possible’, and a five-foot-nine basketball player who had, according to his poster caption, found a way to circumnavigate the law that prohibited self-enchantment in professional mundane sports back in the eighties.
“Not surprising, I guess,” Alfie muttered to himself, “that all these guys did so well, seeing as they were bloody magic users.”
“Hey, Alfie, would you ever have guessed that Freddie Mercury was a friggin’ wizard, man?” Will asked from the other side of the room.
“It’s making more and more sense now. That guy was out of this world. Don’t tell me he used magic to make his voice better?”
“Nah,” Will said, leaning forward and tilting his head to the side so that he could read the tiny text under the skewed poster. “Says here he was a hydro fortifier. His talent was all natural, but he used his magic to cool down his vocal cords during gigs so that he could play for longer.”
Alfie looked out the small window. He could see some lawn, what looked like a large, well-tended vegetable patch, and not much else.
“So, what happens next?” he asked Will, who came to lean against the wall and look out of the window, too.
Will shrugged. “The Aetherbright Academy is pretty cagey when it comes to outsiders knowing how it all works. But, you know, I’ve run in some pretty dubious legal circles in my time.”
“Really?” Alfie said, sarcasm dripping off his words. “I would never have guessed.”
Will snorted. “From what I heard, it sounds like we get separated into little groups, right? And then we’re given, like, a little base or something of our own. I think.”
“Why little groups?”
“Something to do with the different types of mages, I reckon.”
“Oh yeah, I’ve been meaning to ask about that. The system called me a Fortifier, and you mentioned you were a Caster.”
“Bloody hell, I keep forgetting how you don’t really have a Scooby-Doo as to what’s going on,” Will said. “Yeah, there are four different types of mages—thaumaturgists, if you fancy being posh. There are Enchanters, Conjurers, Casters, and Fortifiers—like yourself.”
“D’you reckon you can tell me what each of them does, in layman’s terms? It’d be good to have a little background knowledge about how all this works.”
“Mate, the way of the layman is the only way I know.”
“Perfect result.”
Will flopped down on the bed next to Alfie, raised his hand, and stuck up his thumb.
“Fortifiers are basically all about body augmentation, yeah? Like how you worked that magic on yourself and got that armor? As you get the hang of it more, you’ll be able to work your magic—literally—on other people as well as yourself. But that takes a fair chunk of time.”
Alfie nodded.
Will stuck up another finger. “Conjurers are easy to explain and understand. They build what they call ‘constructs’. These are magical objects crafted out of the ether. Constructs are quicker to whip up than what an Enchanter can produce, but they’re usually not as potent as they don’t have a physical object anchoring the magic to this world, you follow me?”
“Uuuuuh,” Alfie said.
Will laughed. “So both a Thermal Conjurer and a Thermal Enchanter could come up with a fire sword, yeah? Only, a Thermal Conjurer could knock one up in a matter of minutes, or seconds if they know what they’re doing, by making a construct out of nothing and shaping it into a sword.”
“Okay, I get you, I think,” Alfie said. “Whereas a Thermal Enchanter would need an actual sword to work their magic on. It takes longer, but the end result would be more robust?”
Will gave a nod of satisfaction. “Spot on. So, a Conjurer, depending on their elemental connection, could whip up, like, a shield crafted from condensed air or a fire sword or—”
“A bat made of ice?” Alfie said.
Will gave him a meaningful look. “Yeah, or that.”
Will raised a third finger. “Enchanters are—and I’m generalizing a bit here, so slap the cuffs on me—usually the brain boxes, okay? They do pretty much what we’ve talked about. They need a canvas to work on. They could take a regular old medieval cannon and make it into a storm cannon or what have you.”
“So, I suppose you could think of them as magical engineers who take things and jazz them up and enhance them with spells?”
“Right, but like I said, this takes a lot of time, so mostly they take on a more tactical background role.”
Alfie nodded. “And Casters?”
“Casters, they’re the real powerhouses, if you ask me. Damage dealers. They use their elemental skills more directly. One of them might be able to freeze something solid with a blast of icy air, make a wall out of earth, or hit you with a bolt of lightning channeled through their palm—if they’re a Voltaic Caster.”
“Are you just making up words to confuse me?” Alfie asked, narrowing his eyes.
Will laughed again and slapped him on the back.
“Sorry, mate,” he said. “Nah, that’s just what we call mages who have an inclination to electrical magic. There’s metal, earth, and air, which are all pretty self-explanatory. Then there’s thermal; magic that draws and uses heat or fire, and hydro, which is—”
“Water?”
“—water and ice,” Will said, nodding.
“So, six elemental variations,” Alfie said, making sure.
“Those are the ones that are most common, but I’ve heard about others popping up. Those rarer elements don’t tend to be seen much, and they don’t last very long in the real world if there’s no one to teach how to use it.”
Alfie sat for a moment and assimilated this information.
“Four classes of mage,” he muttered. “Caster, Fortifier, Enchanter, and Conjurer.”
“Yep,” Will said, fiddling with the ring that was now sitting snugly on his pinky finger. “Like the elements, there are some ultra-rare specialties that don’t fit into those four boxes, but those four are pretty much all you’ll see unless you’re really lucky.”
“And six primary elemental types: thermal, hydro, metal, air, earth, and voliti…”
“Voltaic,” Will said.
“Voltaic,” Alfie repeated.
“Okay, I think I can remember all that.”
They lapsed into a thoughtful silence.
After a moment, Alfie took a breath and said, “Will?”
“Yeah?”
Alfie sat back and slumped against the headboard of the bed. He stared pensively out of the window. “If we do get divided up into groups or whatever, you reckon we’ll be in the same group?”
“I hope so, mate.”