The Alchemists Academy: Stones to Ashes Book 1 (9 page)

To Wirt’s eternal gratitude, Ms. Genovia chose that moment to interrupt again.

“For today, though, all you will be learning is the simplest of transformations. Let’s get on with it, shall we? Boots to start, I think.”

The incantation proved to be fairly straightforward, as the turning people into things one had been. The main difference seemed to be in the details of the gestures. A slightly different twitch of the knuckles might produce a sword or a shoe, a butter knife or a dinner table. Wirt found this out the way most of the rest of the class did, by getting things slightly wrong as he struggled to transform his piece of wood into the boots required.

Still, it was as good an effort as most other people managed. Alana’s first attempt resulted in an ugly looking blob of greenish stuff that turned out to be ectoplasm, when the two teachers tested it. Mr. Fowler did so with a test tube and something similar to litmus paper, while Ms. Genovia achieved the same results by the simple expedient of sticking her finger in the stuff and tasting it.

“Not so much thumb action next time, I think. Try again.”

After a couple of false starts, Spencer was the first to manage actual footwear, though Ms. Genovia was actually harder on his effort than Alana’s. Presumably, she felt that ballet slippers were in some sense even further from the boots she wanted than ectoplasm was. Spencer had turned a shade of red, seemly embarrassed to have produced them.

Nobody succeeded in producing exactly what was required by the end of the class, and Ms. Genovia dismissed them with an exhortation to practice hard when they got a chance.

Lunch inevitably brought things back to discussions of where the missing chalice might be. The three of them sat in a corner of the canteen, eating what the dryads’ crystal ball had decided they really wanted, or at least swapping it around until they each had something that they actually liked.

“I think,” Wirt said, “that now we know more about Ervana, we need to find out if anybody here has some connection to her.”

“And how do we do that?” Alana asked him. “Look through all the student records until we find something?”

“Sounds like fun,” Spencer said. Wirt saw Alana wince good-naturedly.

“The really depressing thing, Spencer, is that you actually mean that, don’t you? I can just imagine you sitting among stacks of files with a big grin on your face.”

“It’s not my fault if I’m just naturally organized.”

“Naturally geeky, more like,” Alana said, though she smiled as she said it. Wirt found himself smiling too. There was something comfortable about the banter between the two of them, and it was strangely nice to be a part of something like that for once. To fit in. “Seriously though, do you think that people here would even let you look through the school records?”

“Who said that we had to ask?” Wirt said. The others gave him a worried look. “What? How hard can it be to sneak a look at a couple of files?”

“What if we got caught?” Spencer asked. “My father would kill me.”

“We’d be expelled,” Alana said. “I can’t afford to risk that.”

Wirt saw that they were serious. He shook his head. “All right then, we won’t do anything like that. I’ll bet that there are plenty of records that are publicly available though. There’s nothing to stop us looking through some of them to see if we can come up with a connection. If we can, then someone else will probably want to look deeper.”

That, the others agreed, was a good idea.

“So we’ll head to the library after lunch?” Spencer suggested.

Wirt shook his head. “I’ve got another Transportation lesson.”

Spencer frowned. “But I don’t remember that from your class schedule.”

“This is an extra one. Special tuition.”

If that didn’t completely satisfy Spencer, at least he didn’t argue. Alana gave Wirt a long look before declaring that she would try asking Priscilla’s mirror for information, as silly as it sounded. They were in a magical school, after all, which happened to be a giant tree.

Wirt left too, though he did not head for the Transportation classroom. Instead, he rode the transport tubes, looking for the office of the harassed-looking board member with the briefcase, Urlando Roth.

Wirt arrived in a hallway so dingy that it seemed to Wirt that no one would possibly have had their office there if they had any kind of choice in the matter. A single office door stood at the end of it, opposite what appeared to be a laundry room. There was a glass section in the door, with the words “U. Roth” painted on in peeling black paint.  Wirt peered inside. No one. The room was spartanly furnished, with a desk, a chair, a large bouquet of flowers sitting in a rather battered vase, and several rows of rusting filing cabinets.

Wirt tried the handle, and unsurprisingly found it locked. He tried the transportation spell. It was only in the second that the spell took hold that Wirt saw the faint sheen of a spell around the door, presumably a magical barrier of some kind. All he could do by that point was hope that his luck with that kind of barrier would hold. It did. One moment Wirt was standing in the corridor outside, and the next, he was in Urlando Roth’s office.

Wirt doubted that he would have long before the teacher showed up. Breaking through that barrier must have set off some kind of alarm, at least. The best he could do was search as quickly as possible. Wirt decided to start with the filing cabinets. At least they were not locked like the door. He opened drawers, flicking through the files in the hopes that something would catch his eye. Nothing did. Wirt wished Spencer was here. This was where he would have come in useful. Spencer  would probably have known just what they needed to look for, and might even have been able to make some sense of a filing system that appeared to be more of a store everything unit than an actual filing cabinet.

Wirt pulled out a couple of files and looked them over, but he didn’t learn much about the missing chalice. On every other events going around at school, he learned too much. He learned all about the school’s budget deficit patterns over fiscal years in a dozen dimensions. He learned all about the school’s list of magical objects. They all seemed to be well-guarded and intact, except for the magic chalice.

In desperation, he turned to Urlando Roth’s desk. There was not much on it. The bouquet of flowers sat in quite the most hideous vase Wirt had ever seen, a grey, stubby vase with knots and crevices that seemed to drag down the beauty of the blooms within it by its very presence. The card on them read “to my darling A, a present”, which only said to Wirt that the teacher had a middle name. Urlando Adam Roth? Urlando Adrian Roth? It didn’t really improve matters, though it did make Wirt wonder who would send the accountant flowers.

The other pieces of paper on the desk turned out to be essays which had not been graded. One was on “the probabilities of magical chaos”, while the other was about “predictive magic”. Wirt had more sense than to try and read them, in case his head exploded.

It was time, he suspected, to get out of there. Wirt took a last look around, trying to see if he had missed anything, and then started to concentrate on the hallway outside. He saw the door start to open, and mumbled the words to the Transportation spell as quickly as he could. Wirt’s last sight, before he transported past him and ran for the transport tube, was of a red-faced and out-of-breath Urlando Roth (Aidan? Albemarle?) rushing in with all the anger of someone who had just had their personal space broken into. Wirt was very, very glad that he had gotten away in time.

Chapter 13

I
t took some effort to locate the others, because it turned out that the school had more than one library where they had arranged to meet. As a result, before he found his friends, Wirt found himself passing through a large open space filled with shelves littered with ladders propped against them, through a room with a multicolored stone floor where scrolls peeked out of pigeonholes nestled in the walls, and even through a library that looked like a garden nursery filled with small trees growing in tubs.

He finally found Spencer and Alana in a circular reading room overstuffed with oversized armchairs, where a sticky blob of greenish goo sat in the middle of a stone pit, spectacles perched incongruously on a vaguely nose-like protrusion.

“Where are the books?” Wirt asked, and Alana held up a thin folder.

“If you ask the librarian, it will fetch what you want. Actually…” she turned her attention to the green blob, “could you give me the next stack of essays, please?”

The green blob quivered for a moment, then turned until the spectacles faced a patch of space somewhere beside Wirt’s head. Wirt flinched instinctively as a rope-like green tentacle lashed out from it, disappearing through a shimmering patch of air just inches from his right ear. For a brief instant, Wirt thought that maybe he was under attack, but the others seemed unconcerned by it. A second later, and the tentacle pulled back like an angler pulling in their line, another folder stuck to the end of it. The green thing passed it to Alana.

“Thank you.”

“What is that thing?” Wirt asked. Alana shrugged.

“It’s a Thing. Come on Wirt, you can help.” She indicated another of the armchairs.

“I thought you were going to ask Priscilla’s mirror for help?” Wirt said.

Alana shrugged. “It was being irritating, and told me that looking it up myself would be good for me. Still, it suggested that maybe I should look at the old essays of those teachers who were students here once. Apparently, they never throw anything away here.”

“So here we are,” Spencer walked up, “reading through things like “seven variations on toad spells”. Ms. Genovia only got a B for that, incidentally.”

“She has obviously practiced since,” Wirt said. Alana nodded her agreement.

“How did your ‘Transportation class’ go?” she asked. “Please tell me you weren’t caught breaking into the records.”

Wirt saw Spencer’s eyes widen.

“You really-”

“Yes,” Wirt said. He was not surprised that Alana had guessed. “I didn’t find anything very useful. Not unless you count the fact that someone has sent Mr. Roth flowers or that he seems to have a middle name beginning with A.”

“What?” Alana asked, so Wirt started to explain about the note, but Spencer interrupted.

“Eureka!”

Wirt hadn’t known that it was possible for a Thing with no real face to give disapproving glares, but this one managed it. Spencer muttered a hasty apology before holding up an essay. The title was slightly more catchy than Ms. Genovia’s frog one, and slightly more relevant too. “Ervana: Enemy or Friend?” was written across the top, along with the name of the student who had written it: Ms. Preville. Alana took it from Spencer, and started to read through it.

“This is for her history of the hundred worlds class,” Alana said, “so Ms. Preville would have been what? About our age? She argues here that Ervana was not as evil as people have made out, and that it was actually Merlin who was the evil one, manipulating Arthur into taking over and maintaining his position through violence, then setting up this school to increase his own power. She tries to suggest that Ervana’s attack on the school was actually her trying to save it.”

“I bet she didn’t get a very good mark,” Wirt guessed. Alana shook her head.

“Actually, she got an A. I can only think that she was good at messing with people’s heads even then, because no teacher would have given her an A otherwise.”

“So Ms. Preville
is
behind all this,” Wirt said. “We should tell someone.”

“Maybe,” Spencer replied. “I’m not sure I would want to be thrown to the Headmaster on the strength of one student essay.”

Spencer had a point. Besides, Wirt suspected that things wouldn’t be quite that easy. They could accuse Ms. Preville, certainly, but all she had to do was say that it was silly, and that there was no evidence of her actually having taken the chalice, and then it would be the three of them in trouble, rather than her. Besides, unless she was stupid enough to have it hidden in her sock drawer, accusing Ms. Preville didn’t do anything to help them recover the chalice.

“I think,” Alana said, “that the best thing we can do now is-”

“Keep a constant watch on Ms. Preville, search her room, and wait for her to try to use the chalice?” Spencer said. He sounded like he was not looking forward to the prospect. Alana frowned.

“I was
going
to say that we should tell Ms. Lake. Someone in charge should know, and at least she’ll listen to us.”

“That was probably true,” Wirt said, believing a teacher would probably be more convincing than a student about bringing up the matter. He just couldn’t escape the thought that there was something they had missed. “Okay,” he said, deciding that it would probably come to him eventually, though almost certainly shortly after he actually
needed
it. “We’ll go and see Ms. Lake.”

They found her in her office. At least, it looked like an office from the outside. Inside the door, the three of them found themselves on the shores of a small lake, with the sun overhead and an exit from the tree just behind them. Ms. Lake sat on a rock, in a pose that an artist looking to paint beautiful women in natural settings would probably have loved.

Ms. Lake looked up as they approached.

“Oh good. I was just about to come looking for the three of you when I got a bit sidetracked by all of this.” She indicated the workbooks around her. “Now, I have some news.”

Wirt saw Alana take a breath. “So do we, Ms. Lake. We think we have…”

“I’m afraid the Quest has been cancelled by the Headmaster.”

Wirt couldn’t believe that. Neither could the others, because the room fell completely silent.

“But…” he began. Ms. Lake shook her head.

“I know you’ll all be disappointed, after the work you have put in, but the Headmaster feels that,” she paused, and then continued in a fair imitation of Ender Paine’s voice. ‘“Having the little brats running around looking for something is beginning to affect the running of the school, Vivaine. I’d forgotten how much trouble these Quests can be. This stops now.” Of course,” her voice went back to normal, “I must abide by the Headmaster’s decision.”