His broom was broken. The broomstick had snapped in two and it looked like someone had gnawed on it also.
“Have to fix the salt perimeter again,” the janitor muttered.
He tossed the pieces of the broken broom into a small bag that was hanging on his cart. He grunted as he raised up a limbless torso and tossed it into the bag as well. Three arms, some legs and a head followed. The head still had a piece of the broomstick clenched between its teeth. The janitor also cleared up some smaller bodyparts from the walkway. No-one wanted to slip on a finger and fall from this height. None of the academy walkways had railings.
He considered cleaning properly, but it would take too long now that he didn’t have his broom.
His proper broom. He had other brooms of course, but they were ordinary ones.
The inside of the closet was a disaster. Janitor avoided stepping into anything too disgusting and reached in to grab a large bag of salt. He carefully drew a thick white circle around the door, pouring a thin stream of salt directly from the bag. He was careful to leave a path on the narrow walkway so that undead could still pass by the closet. The higher-ups would get annoyed if undead got stuck and errands were handled late or not at all because of it.
The air was chilly, as always. The academy was up in the mountains and nothing was keeping the wind from blowing straight through it. The janitor slapped his hands together a couple of times to get the blood moving. He looked over the side of the walkway and saw another large pile of body parts far, far down on the ground.
“You didn’t have to spread them out that much,” he said towards the closet.
There was a sound like a bunch of embarrassed rocks grinding together as the sentry roused itself. It was a simple thing, but it had enough intelligence to be ashamed.
“Sooorryyyy,” the sentry said.
“They were just ordinary zombies. You could have just held the door closed until I arrived.”
“Froooozen zombies. Not bad mess,” the sentry said, and waved a large stony hand towards the absolutely horrible mess.
The janitor sighed.
“You’re going to clean up here,” he said to the sentry and gripped the beam of his janitor cart.
Before the sentry had time to reply, the janitor pushed the cart straight off the side of the walkway. He quickly stepped after it before the falling cart had time to yank his hand too hard. The enchantment of the cart took hold after the first few metres and the fall turned into a soft glide. He knew that the sentry would do an awful job with the cleaning but it was the principle of the thing that mattered. Holding the beam of the cart with one hand, the janitor took a packet of cigarettes from the pocket of his overalls. He managed to shake one loose and grabbed at the cigarette with his lips, but fumbled and dropped it.
The janitor watched solemnly as the cigarette dropped down much faster than him. It landed directly into the open mouth of one of the zombie heads.
“Can I have that?” Fek shouted up to the janitor.
The janitor had still at least thirty seconds to fall before he would reach the ground. He glanced down at Fek who had been poking the collection of remains with a stick and was now approaching the head with the cigarette in its mouth.
“Just don’t get your fingers bitten off,” the janitor said.
He sighed and put the packet back into his pocket. He watched as the boy tried to snatch the cigarette but was grabbed by an arm sticking out of the pile and somehow kicked in the groin by a disembodied leg.
This is going to be one of those days, isn’t it? the janitor thought.
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He had managed to stuff most of the zombies in to the bag before lunchtime. Being the janitor of an academy like this had its perks. The tools were one of the major ones. Cleaning especially was real easy when he had a bottomless bag and an enchanted broom. The life insurance was pretty sweet also. The contract had been signed for ten years and it was mentioned explicitly that death would not end it prematurely. He had negotiated an extra clause that he would not be turned into a zombie. He secretly hoped they would turn him into a vampire. Vampires seemed cool.
There wasn’t much risk of dying though. He just handled his business and kept his nose out of any politics and power struggles, and things went pretty smoothly. The perk of being a non-magical member of a society like this was that he was both irrelevant and indispensable. No one paid any attention to him, but they also always needed someone who could unclog a laboratory sink or carry heavy alchemical equipment to the other side of the room.
Nearly all young wizards first tried to enhance their strength and impress someone by moving some huge alembic by themselves. They always ended up dropping something heavy and expensive and usually breaking some toes in the process. The janitor had noted that wizards usually wore suede slippers. He wore steel-reinforced boots. He also had rubber gloves that were enchanted to be resistant to acid, poison, fire, ice and negative energy. He really didn’t want to put his unprotected hand into any of the laboratory sinks in the premier necromancy academy of Velonea. They were gross.
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The janitor sighed.
“What’s up?” Fek asked.
The janitor had untangled the boy from the pile of zombie corpses and bodyparts. He had tried to throw away the cigarette, but Fek had managed to grab it and was smoking it happily.
“Those will kill you, you know,” the janitor said.
“The zombies? Nah, I just got unlucky,” Fek said and massaged his lower abdomen gingerly. “Anyways, what were you sighing about?”
“The zombies broke my broom.”
“The one that zaps stuff?”
“Yeah.”
“Dang.”
“Yeah.”
Fek smoked in silence for a while. The janitor found some more fingers and threw them into the bag. No one had any use for corpses that were in this kind of shape. The necromancers always complained if they tried to raise something and instead got an assortment of wiggling body parts.
“Are you going to get a new one?” Fek asked.
“Yeah. It’s going to be a pain in the ass though,” the janitor replied.
Fek nodded and threw the smoking butt of the cigarette into the janitor’s bag. The janitor frowned, even though he knew that the cigarette butt would just vanish, as all things thrown into the bag did. Still, it was his bag. You should at least ask first.
“Anyways, see you around. I got to get moving,” he said.
“Yeah, I’ve got places to be too,” Fek replied.
He did not.
The janitor knew Fek was just killing time until he was old enough to get enrolled in the beginning of the next term. The boy had magical potential coming out of his ears, but he was a dumbass. The janitor appreciated that. He was happy that Fek was here instead of Tenorsbridge. That place would make mincemeat out of a good kid like that.
The janitor did actually have places to be. He would need to get the paperwork together to requisition a new broom. It was always a hassle to requisition a replacement artefact. The broom was one of the more powerful and dangerous ones, so it was going to be extra frustrating. Who knows what kind of paperwork and signatures he would need to wrangle from the higher-ups and… He sighed again. Just thinking about it made his head hurt. Still, before he could concentrate on that, he had to go break chancellor Jextor out from his quarters. The man had managed to get himself frozen in again. He was a dumbass too.
---
“There you go, chancellor,” the janitor said.
Chiselling and melting the ice off the door had taken the janitor a full thirty minutes this time. The chancellor kept his quarters very warm and very humid and it caused an unlimited amount of problems for the janitor. Everything grew mold, undead went all runny and the amount of ice that formed on the door was spectacular. The janitor had tried everything, but facade doors were real hard to insulate and the insulation material tended to grow mold, too.
The chancellor was a big man. At least a head taller than the janitor and twice as wide. He needed to bend his head slightly to get out from the door.
“I can’t understand how this always happens,” he said. “Anyways, I have to rush. I seem to be late.”
“Sorry, the zombies caused a mess so I had to handle that first,” the janitor said. “They also broke my broom.”
The chancellor winced and raised his eyebrows dramatically.
“They broke the Decreator Noir?”
“Yeah, my broom,” the janitor said wearily.
Then a thought struck him.
“Could I requisition a new one directly from you, chancellor?”
“Unfortunately, I’m busy, late, and don’t have the necessary papers. You have to get those from the bursar.”
The janitor groaned.
The chancellor slapped him on the shoulder reassuringly. The janitor groaned again. The chancellor’s reassuring slaps were legendary. An elderly researcher had once died because of one. It was rumoured that the chancellor had not liked that particular researcher, though. The janitor tried to make sure the chancellor did not have a reason to dislike him.
“Just get the papers and get them to me and I’ll handle it,” the chancellor said. “Though naturally you’ll have to get the principal to sign off on it too, but that’s just a formality.”
“Thank you, chancellor. I will.”
“Now if you’ll excuse me, I really do have to run. There are some important guests from the negative plane arriving and I have to be there to herd them.”
The chancellor turned forcefully so that his billowing robes swung around and the rim nearly hit the janitor. He leaned back to dodge out of the way and grabbed the beam of his cart to keep his balance.
“I’ll get you the papers soon, good luck with the visitors, chancellor!” he shouted after the man.
He didn’t enjoy the idea of having to go to the bursar. Out of all the faculty members he liked her the least. The janitor didn’t like financial people in general. All he had ever met had felt cold and calculating. Like they had no souls.
In this case, all of the prejudices were literally true.
The janitor sighed aloud and glanced up towards the ceiling. He grabbed his cart and pushed it moving. He had to rekindle the furnace and make sure there was no one in the boiler room. Students always ended down there before passing out.
At the furnace, he pulled the lever just like he did every week. The portal opened and heat from the Fire Plane came pouring out into the kiln. He grabbed his bag and poured the contents into the furnace. This was always the most boring part of the process. It took minutes for the bag to empty. It was always a bit of a surprise what came out in addition to what he had thrown in, as all the wastebaskets and trash cans in the academy were connected to the bag too. He had had to fish out the chancellor once. A normal person wouldn’t have survived being in the bag for days, but a normal person wouldn’t have got stuffed into a trash can by an angry mob of students either.
This time nothing surprising popped out. The janitor used the wait to plan how he would approach the bursar. She was easily irritable, miserly and mistrustful, in addition of being an emotionless automaton. It was sort of an impressive combination really, but the janitor still found it hard to marvel the complexity of her inner workings. She made everything such a pain in the ass.
The janitor was still thinking about how he would present his case when he got the boiler room and peeked inside. This time there was no one inside. The janitor had a theory that the water spirit bound to the boiler was of the type that lured people to their watery graves. Maybe the effect still radiated through the machinery somehow and caused the sleep deprived students to wander into the boiler room and stay there until they collapsed. It was no use trying to lock the door against wizards, so he just made sure to peek in every other day or so.
He would eat lunch after he had managed to get the papers. Time to face the music box.