Infinite Regress (24 page)

“I’m sorry,” she said. “But this could lead someone towards creating a Mimic.”

She ran through the whole story as quickly as she could, starting with her close encounter with the Mimic impersonating Sergeant Bane and ending with the handful of charred runes that had been left behind, after the Mimic had finally been destroyed. Caleb listened in silence, his eyes going wide as she outlined some of the implications. A Mimic was almost completely unstoppable, save for a spell so simple that hardly anyone would think to cast it when it was useless in a duel. And it had been sheer luck that she’d realized the Mimic’s true nature in time to deduce how to stop it.

“That’s... weird,” Caleb said. He didn’t sound annoyed or hurt any longer, which relieved her more than she cared to admit. Instead, he sounded fascinated. “It was a
spell
?”

“Yeah,” Emily said. She put the piece of paper down on the workbench and started to sketch what little she recalled of its spellware. “Each spell was perfectly balanced amidst the others, keeping the structure in place. It was an order of magnitude—perhaps several orders of magnitude—more complex than our spell tiles.”

“Clever,” Caleb breathed. “Who came up with this?”

Emily shrugged. Very little was
known
about Mimics. There was no way to find one unless it resumed its natural form—and no way to force one to resume its natural form, as long as it had
mana
to spare. She could vaguely grasp the complex entanglement of the necromantic and soul magics that allowed Mimics to function, but it wasn’t something she dared write down. If Lady Barb had thrown a fit at the prospect of magical batteries, Emily hated to think what she’d say if Emily built her own Mimics.

And yet, there are possibilities
, she thought, looking at the notation.
I wonder
...

She cleared her throat. “Our main problem here is channeling magic through the tiles, right?”

Caleb nodded, impatiently. They’d gotten better at channeling the magic so it formed a makeshift spell, but every so often a tile would burn out or explode anyway, no matter what they did. Emily suspected that there were limits to how much
mana
could be pushed through the tissue-thin layer of
Manaskol
. If only she could put it together with a battery... but without a conscious mind governing the flow of magic, the result would probably be an immediate explosion.

“The spellwork here is
solid
,” she said, picking up one of the tiles for him to inspect. “What if the Mimic’s spells were
virtual
spells, built out of magic? If the spells have no real substance, and they don’t, can they overload?”

She frowned as Caleb looked doubtful. There was no way she could explain the concept of holographic computing to him, all the more so as she wasn’t sure she understood it herself. A computer could generate a virtual operating system, rather than something built out of firmware. She wished, again, that she’d spent longer studying computer programs while she’d been on Earth, but if she’d known she would be kidnapped by Shadye she would have memorized hundreds of thousands of other pieces of information.

And made sure I was carrying a couple of textbooks
, she thought, ruefully.
Even a copy of
The Way Things Work
would be very helpful
.

“I suppose it could work,” Caleb mused. “But there would still be a great deal of leakage, wouldn’t there?”

Emily studied the spell diagram for a long moment. “Not if you tune the spells to reabsorb the
mana
,” she mused, finally. Mimics
didn’t
leak. If they did, they would be detected easily by magicians. She’d stood next to Sergeant Bane after
he’d
been replaced and sensed nothing wrong. “It should be possible.”

“You’d have a major leak,” Caleb protested.

Emily grinned at him. “Not if you told them you couldn’t,” she said. “It’s like pushing water down a straw.”

“When the water is part of the straw,” Caleb countered. He shook his head doubtfully. “The Mimic would be burning power just to keep its assumed form. Even keeping a trap spell suspended in time would be costly.”

“You’d need a constant loop,” Emily reasoned. She doodled on the paper for a long moment, trying to see how the spell might work. “As long as the cycle remained unbroken, the spell should remain in existence without much input.”

“There would still be some decay,” Caleb said. He gave Emily a long look. “This is dangerous.”

Emily sighed. “That’s what the Grandmaster thought.”

She met his eyes. “We could make something like this,” she said. “But it would have to remain our secret.”

Caleb looked at her for a long moment. “Until we actually made it work?”

Emily shrugged. If the
virtual
spellware could handle a surge of magic, all she’d need to do was hook it up to a battery and let the power flow. Indeed, there was no reason why the spellware
couldn’t
handle such a surge. The only real danger would be accidentally destroying the spell components and she was sure she could handle it.

“I’m not sure if we would ever want to release this,” she said. “But we could always cite the Sorcerer’s Rule.”

“Not if we wanted to prove what we’d done,” Caleb said. “We’d need to say
how
we’d done it too.”

“We can cross that bridge when we come to it,” Emily said, tiredly. She gave him a sidelong look. They’d need to reread the rules, very carefully, just to see how much detail they were required to provide. “We
could
keep working on the tiles instead and tackle the virtual network later.”

“But the virtual network would be much more flexible,” Caleb pointed out. “We should concentrate on that.”

Emily frowned. Changing their joint project now wouldn’t get them in trouble. It wouldn’t be hard for her to write out a project outline that would conceal the nature of the Mimic, not least because the Mimic had been fantastically complex. But there would also be a great many hard questions to answer. Professor Locke would probably accuse her of trying to duplicate the ancient magics...

“I suppose,” she said. She could always ask if Caleb could join them. “I...”

She glanced up as someone banged on the door, then hastily hid the paper she’d scribbled on as Caleb waved a hand, opening the door. Dulcet stepped inside, her face pale.

“My Lady,” she said. “Can you come now? Tiega is very upset.”

Emily frowned. “Upset about what?”

“I don’t know,” Dulcet said. “But she was crying.”

“Maybe she went to see the Warden,” Caleb said.

“She didn’t,” Dulcet insisted. “I was in class with her all day.”

“I’m coming,” Emily said, rising. She glanced at Caleb. “See you at dinner?”

Caleb smiled. “Why not?”

E
MILY HADN’T BEEN SURE WHAT TO
expect when she entered the First Year dorms, but they seemed reasonably normal. Unsurprisingly, there was hardly anyone in sight. Most of the students would be trying to catch a nap before dinnertime or studying books in the library, assuming they’d already learnt the value of hard work. Or perhaps they’d be down on the playing fields, watching the games and hoping to be spotted by one of the captains. It was unusual for a First Year to play, but it had been known to happen. She glanced into the common room and frowned as she spotted Adana and Julia, sitting on chairs, then headed down to their room. At least they’d left their roommate alone.

She stopped outside Tiega’s door and hesitated, then knocked gently and pushed the door open. The wards would allow her into their bedrooms, although she’d been warned—along with the other mentors—that she wasn’t supposed to use the permission without extremely good cause. A crying student might not be considered good enough, she suspected. Tiega might be upset because she’d been insulted or upset because one of the tutors had told her off in front of the entire class.

The room was brightly lit—and deserted, save for Tiega. Emily closed the door, glanced at the other two beds to make sure there was nothing wrong with them, then walked slowly over to Tiega’s bed. Tiega lay on the mattress, curled into a ball. There was something about the sight that grabbed at Emily’s heartstrings, even though Tiega seemed to veer constantly between being a despicable bully and a pitifully abused child.

“Tiega,” she said, quietly. “What’s wrong?”

Tiega rolled over to stare at Emily through watery eyes. Emily studied her back, looking for signs of unpleasant hexes or jinxes. Melissa had been fond of a particularly nasty hex that made a victim’s face turn blotchy and horrific, but Tiega looked normal. It certainly didn’t look as though she was having trouble moving. She was clutching a piece of paper in one chubby hand, holding it so tightly that the paper was threatening to crumple...

“Tiega,” Emily repeated. “What’s wrong?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Tiega said. “You can’t help.”

Emily frowned. A fight with one of her roommates? Neither Adana nor Julia had seemed to be in pain, let alone turned into a frog or hexed into silence. Or a disagreement with one of the tutors? Surely
that
wouldn’t have bothered Tiega
this
much. She certainly hadn’t been given detention or she would have been kept behind after class. Or a note from home...

She allowed her voice to harden. “What happened?”

Tiega uncurled her fingers and passed Emily the note. It was nothing more than three sentences, written using English letters. UGLY FAT GIRL. USELESS FAT SMELLY GIRL. EAT SHIT AND DIE. Emily recoiled in shock, shaking her head in stunned disbelief. Bullying at Whitehall was normally physical, not emotional.
She’d
certainly never been sent any unsigned notes.

“I found it on my bed,” Tiega said. She sounded shocked. “Whoever left it here could get into my room!”

Her roommates
, Emily thought. The housemother or a tutor could enter, of course, but she rather doubted a staff member would be leaving poisonous messages on Tiega’s bed.
It had to be Adana or Julia
.

She frowned. Maybe she was required to turn a blind eye to students hexing other students, but there were limits. If she was told off for intervening... well, she’d cope with it. She’d coped with worse in the last four years.

“You need to protect your bed,” she said. “Didn’t you ward it against intruders?”

“Just the bedside cabinet and the trunk,” Tiega said. She stood and reached for the trunk, positioned neatly at the foot of her bed. “Only a member of my family should be able to open it.”

Emily tested the clasp, gingerly. The trunk looked old enough to belong to Tiega’s grandmother, but there was nothing wrong with the spells protecting it from harm. Whoever had crafted the trunk had done a very good job, although she didn’t recognize the spellwork. She suspected that anyone less capable than Professor Lombardi—or a blood relative—would have real problems trying to break into the trunk.

“You probably need to protect the bed as well,” Emily said, as she tested the bedside cabinet thoughtfully. Tiega had used a set of very basic spells, but she doubted that anyone below Third Year could have unlocked the cabinet without being caught in the spell. “Someone could hex your bed if they wished.”

She sighed. It wasn’t something she’d had to endure, but Alassa had had problems with her first set of roommates and they’d hexed her bed a few times. Never enough to keep her from class, yet always badly enough to make her life uncomfortable. If Tiega was having problems with her roommates...

“I’ll get to the bottom of this,” she said. “I promise.”

Gritting her teeth, she tested the paper for hints of someone’s magical signature, but found nothing. That was odd. A skilled magician would be able to keep their power in check long enough to write the message without tainting the paper, yet she would have been surprised if any student below Fourth Year had that sort of precision. Adana, Lillian and Tiega herself had all been raised in magical communities, but none of them were
that
good. She frowned in bemusement, then tested for fingerprints. The only ones that appeared were Tiega’s and her own.

“Odd,” she said, puzzled.

She scowled. It was hard to imagine an older student writing poisonous notes to Tiega. If nothing else, they’d be lucky not to be expelled when they were caught. But she found it hard to believe that any of the younger students could write the note without leaving either traces of their magic or fingerprints. Hell, hardly anyone knew to watch for fingerprints. It had only been two years since the fingerprint spell had been invented.

“Someone hates me,” Tiega said. She sounded as though she was going to start crying again, her voice torn between anger and dismay. “They can’t even face me!”

Emily nodded. Hexing Tiega wouldn’t have been pleasant, but at least it would have been out in the open. Sending notes was far more cowardly. Tiega would feel worse because she had no idea who was sending them. But Emily would have bet good money that either Adana or Julia had sent the notes. No one else had access to the bedroom.

“I’ll deal with it,” she said, quietly. “You have a rest until dinnertime.”

She took the note and placed it neatly into her pocket, then rose to her feet and walked out of the door, back to the common room. Adana and Julia weren’t the only students there; five boys and six girls sat around a table, playing what looked to be an immensely complicated game of cards. Their eyes went wide as they saw Emily.

“You two,” Emily snapped, glancing at her charges. “With me. Now.”

Adana looked puzzled, but rose at once. Julia followed a little more slowly, her face so perfectly controlled that she betrayed no hint of reaction. Emily led them both down the corridor to one of the interview rooms, then stepped aside and motioned for them to enter the small room. There was really nothing inside, save for a table and a set of chairs. They were used, she’d been told, for private discussions between the housemother and her charges.