Demon Accords 8: College Arcane (23 page)

When all were paired up and working, my aunt
came back to the bleachers.

“The rest of you could be so kind as to move
the wood and bricks and use them along the chalk outline of the
entire space. Space the bricks and the wood out, no need to stack
or have them touch.”

Aunt Ash put them all to work, moving the
material out of the game space. The weres just picked up whole
pallets of bricks, two weres to a pallet, and hauled them away with
casual ease. The rest of the students started creating a physical
outline of the course, one brick and one board at a time. The
course was huge, at least in outline, easily thirty feet wide and
seventy feet long.

When everyone was employed but me, Aunt Ash
finally turned and looked me in the eyes.

“Warlock,” she said loudly. Everybody stopped
what they were doing to watch. “Go out and bring me Earth,” she
said pointing to the big overhead door at the other end of the
basement. “Enough to fill this course,” she said, holding my gaze
until I nodded.

Things were different between us. Strained
and new, and she was really mad and hurt. But you get maddest at
the people you love, right?

There was a person-sized door right next to
the big overhead, and it unlocked easily from inside. I wandered up
the concrete ramp that led to the parking lot at the rear of the
building, thinking about how bad I had screwed up with my aunt.
Blacktop stretched for fifty yards, mostly bare but with scattered
patches of ice and snow that squeaked in the frigid air where my
boot treads pressed down. At the end of the asphalt were large
mounds of plowed snow. After looking around a bit and not seeing
much visible in the bright sodium lights, I closed my eyes and
reached
through the ground, feeling for anything I could
use.

The pull I got came from the snowbanks, so I
moved closer. Snow’s not my thing, water, in any form, being the
antithesis of all my powers. Yet when I looked closer, I noticed an
oddity—a crown of bare branches poking up from the other side of
the mound’s crest. A tree sapling, maple perhaps, growing out of
the snowbank. Caeco is the bio major, not me, but still I was
pretty certain that trees didn’t randomly seed in snowbanks. I
reached
through the ground at my feet and found a
significant mass of dirt, stone, broken concrete and old asphalt
debris buried deep under the snow. The mound next to it was the
same, as was the one next to that. They were probably bulldozed
there when the parking lots were redone. Perfect. After a quick
glance around for witnesses (the subzero air made that unlikely,
but not impossible), I made a request of Earth. The snow shook as I
received my answer. Reaching further away, I felt the vibrations of
cars and trucks on Main Street, busy even on a weekday evening.
Perfect.

Back down the ramp, I cracked open the person
door to get to the controls for the overhead door, which were
mounted on the wall between doorways inside the building.

“-do you say warlock like it’s a negative?” a
voice carried across the floor. Ariel’s, I thought. I froze, the
door only open a couple of inches, and listened like a creeper. Old
habits die hard.

“Because me dear, the history of warlocks is
a bleak one, it is. Ye see, we were a fearsome people and when we
found the isles, we fought to keep them. Males with a bit o’the
Craft, we found, could power these glyphs if they were applied jest
right. A bit tricky that, getting the layers of runes down correct
and all. I’m more than a bit impressed that the boy was able to
mark his own self… but don’t ye go telling him. I don’t want him
thinking I approve of what he done.

“Anyway, a male so marked became known as a
warlock. Some think the word comes from the Middle English word
warloghe,
one who breaks faith. Fitting in this case, aye?
But there’s some what think it comes from another Middle English
word
werre
, which means strife. One who breaks strife… one
who wins conflict? So strong and fast, so inured to pain and fear
they were that they were much like the berserkers of the Vikings.
Kept us mostly free. But here’s the thing… once a warlock used the
glyphs in battle, they became permanent. And the warlock would
inevitably grow to crave the thrill of battle, as it were. A nasty,
vicious spiral it was, leading the poor man from battle to battle
until eventually his luck would run out and he would be killed,” my
aunt’s voice answered.

“And you think Declan will do the same?”
Ashley asked.

“Oh, no dear. I
fear
much worse than
that,”my aunt said.

“But he’s good. I mean, he’s a nice guy, a
really nice guy. He protects little kids and stuff. He wouldn’t go
bad, would he?” Matthew asked, his voice not one I expected to
speak up.

“Yes he is, dear. That’s me grand hope. He’s
very much the lad you described. It’s jest that we all have the
seed of darkness inside us and I wonder if using the glyphs is akin
to planting it,” she said. “But enough on that topic.”

It was wickedly cold outside, seeping through
my sweatshirt and jeans, and the conversation about warlocks and
crazy nephews was over so I loudly opened the door. Quickly closing
it behind me, I paused to shiver and rub my hands together without
looking at the others. I hit the UP button on the overhead door
control, the steel panels immediately rolling up.

The parking lot lights were blotted out by
the massive shape waiting on the other side, and once the
twelve-foot-high opening was fully clear, I brought my Earth
in.

Stepping through on four ponderous legs, the
mass of dirt and concrete was over twenty feet long, ten feet high,
and a roughly lizard-shaped eleven feet wide. The floor shook as it
waddled through, its gait rough as I struggled mentally to make it
walk. A trail of dirt dribbled behind it and its back was layered
with a thick coat of dirty ice and snow, the little sapling
sprouting like a horn from its head. Once it was through the door,
I hit the DOWN button and then walked ahead of my monstrous
delivery. Driving a little two-legged dirt dude was nothing; making
a forty-ton, four-legged behemoth walk took all my concentration
and a huge amount of power, so I kept my head down as I walked it
to the site marked by a brick and timber outline.

There I paused to read the spells written and
carved into the concrete. Here, a mini mountain range would rise;
over there would be a flat plain, continually windswept by the Air
spells woven underneath. Here, a mini-river would spring up from
the ground and flow downhill to a basin where the water would pool
before seeping magically back uphill to start again, commanded by
chalked symbols and a woven grass doll lying on the floor beneath
it. The fire witches had created a space that would be hot, maybe
hot enough to burn wood and would certainly dry out clay and mud.
Tami’s part of it was a beautiful picture of blue, orange, yellow,
black, and white ash—a desert landscape under a hot sun.

My aunt had outlined a model landscape, one
that would set itself up for the most part when I delivered the raw
material. It would be about a foot thick across much of its space
but much higher in the middle.

I looked up at my aunt to see how things
stood. She was looking at my dirt beast, studying it with a careful
eye. I decided that she was maybe, just maybe, a little impressed.
She looked at me and raised one eyebrow.

“A léiríonn as?” she asked, wondering if I
was showing off.

I glanced at my audience. Most eyes were wide
and more than a few jaws were dropped. Delwood looked impressed and
even Jenks appeared uncertain.

I looked back at my aunt and shrugged while
holding my thumb and forefinger an inch apart.

“Well, go on wit ye. Put the dirt where it
goes, We’re wasting class time,” she said.

I waved the earth lizard over the course, its
massive feet lifting over the brick border, shaking the building
when they came down, the head coming closest to the class side of
the room. The students backed up a couple of feet, even though the
earth lizard never left the outline. Another wave of my hand and it
settled into place, like a monstrous crocodile lying down, features
crumbling as the dirt flowed outward. A second later, the preset
spells activated and the center of the model lifted up into a
ridgeline while dirt flowed outward to fill in the rest of the
space.

I helped the mountains along by moving much
of the broken concrete up to the top, a cliff of manmade stone. The
area set up for water collapsed down into a basin that had an
asphalt bottom, and a miniature riverbed climbed halfway up the
escarpment. I can’t do shit with water, but the ice and snow were
easily moved by an earth wave I used to convey it to the basin. It
shifted and slid into the basin, where I melted it with heat
borrowed from the building around me. Almost as soon as liquid
water was available, the spells that Britta and Ryanne had scribed
set the water to circulating, pouring down the riverbed.

“And jest what’s the point of that?” Aunt Ash
asked. I looked at her finger, pointing at the little bare-limbed
sapling up near the end of the course.

Another shrug; what I was supposed to do, let
it die?

“It doesn’t fit the rest of it, now does it?”
she pressed.

I frowned, then waved my right hand. The tree
and a portion of its surrounding dirt left the model and slid
fifteen feet away, leaving a trail of mud.

“Too soft to let it jest die then, are ye,
Warlock?” she challenged. I met her gaze with a steady calm. Her
eyes narrowed. “Tami? Would ye be so kind as to burn that decrepit
tree for me?” she asked, never taking her eyes off mine.

Tami tilted her head to one side in
consideration, then simply formed a fireball in one hand and threw
it at my tree. Without taking my eyes off my aunt’s, I shunted the
fireball into the snow still clinging to parts of the model. A
cloud of steam puffed upward as dirty crystals exploded outward for
a few feet in every direction.

Tami frowned at me and formed another
fireball, but Ashling spoke before she threw it. “Don’t bother,
dear. He’s decided it’s under his protection and he can be stubborn
as a stone. We’ll let it be if that’ll soothe ye, Mr. Warlock?”

Her tone was mock serious and I realized the
thing with the tree had been a test.

“So, my cheeky lad here has taken care of our
dirt needs in short order and your fine spells have started to
work. Now we have the makings of a grand game pitch. So next, we
need players. We’ll also need people to keep an eye on things and
catch any that feel the need to cheat. Are any of you, by chance,
telepathic?”

Three people, including Ashley, raised their
hands.

“Oh, that’s fine then. You’ll be our
officials. Okay, now for some avatars, what me nephew used to call
double D’s,” she continued.

Paige raised her hand and when my aunt nodded
in her direction she asked, “ Why can’t we just use the Barbies,
Miss O’Carroll?”

“The dollies?” Aunt Ash frowned. “Did ye no
show them a proper avatar, lad?” she asked me. I nodded, thrilled
that she hadn’t used the term warlock. All my life, I had felt she
should call us male witches warlocks and now that she was calling
me that, I couldn’t wait for her to stop.

“He did, Miss O’Carroll, but only Michelle is
an Earth witch. We don’t really see how we would play the game with
fire, water, and air,” Erika said.

“The whole point of the game is to learn to
improvise and use your given abilities with control and style. Do
you not see any other ways to use your affinities?”

“Declan showed me I could use a water ball or
ice ball, but the Barbies are so much more… people like,” Britta
said.

“Oh, is that it,” Aunt Ash said. “ Ye’d
rather be using a comfortable shape than be winning, is it?”

“No, ma’am. We want to win, but how does a
ball of ice or water become the winner?” Ryanne asked.

“I see. Let’s do it this way. Tonight, we’ll
have those of you with the ability to move a dolly do just that.
You’ll all work together and your job will be to hunt down young
Mr. Warlock here and whatever avatar he can put together in the
next ten minutes. Then after, we’ll see how ye feel,” she said.
“Declan, go around the backside and do yer thing. In ten minutes,
we’re coming for ye. And only use what’s lying around or in your
pockets. Oh, an would ye clean up that mess ye made coming in?”

I looked back at where she was pointing,
seeing the trail of dirt and rock that had dribbled off the dirt
lizard. A wave of my hand swept it toward me, starting at the
overhead door and piling up at the back end of the course. I headed
to it, thinking about what I could construct. I was finally warmed
up, so I reached up and brushed back the hood of my sweatshirt, one
of the bronze witch bracelets banging my forehead. I had left them
on, kind of a visual reminder to Delwood and Jenks.

Now I looked at them as I squatted down next
to the dirt and rock debris pile that was my supply source. Each
bracelet consisted of two arcs of bronze, hinged together at one
point, with a simple catch at the other point. When they were
working, the catch was impossible for the wearer to open, the
result of the spells embedded in the bronze. Now they simply popped
open and I had two hinged pieces of bronze about an inch and a half
wide.