The Alchemists Academy Book 2: Elemental Explosions (5 page)

The honest answer to that was no. Not after Roland had already turned Wirt down once, not to mention scaring him with that quantum ball of his. Wirt, however, could guess what it would be like sharing a room with someone for the next year if they didn’t at least try to find some common ground. Besides, Ms. Lake had asked him to.

“Sure, just follow me and try to stay close. The school is big enough that it’s easy to get lost.”

“I know,” Roland said. “The tree’s transportation system has hundreds of thousands of pathways.”

“That’s right.” Obviously the new boy had been doing his homework. Wirt set off, starting by showing Roland the dormitories and the cafeteria. Wirt couldn’t help noticing that everywhere they went, Roland attracted stares. Approving ones from the girls, mostly. Wirt couldn’t help thinking that they had never looked at
him
like that. Well, except for Alana, and that had only been once.

Wirt did his best to explain how the kitchens in the school worked, and that you only ever got what you were given, though it seemed that Roland knew that too. That was hardly unexpected, given that he had presumably already had at least one meal there, but he could at least have attempted to look interested.

Wirt decided to get a few of the more functional areas of the school out of the way. He showed Roland where some of the teachers kept their offices, noting as he did so that Urlando Roth’s no longer had his name on it, and then headed to the reception area outside Ender Paine’s office, where there were benches for those students awaiting the headmaster’s displeasure, and the statues of the governors seemed to glower down at them in their weird, inhuman guises.

Roland didn’t seem bothered. “You should see some of my more distant relatives,” he said with a yawn. “Besides, they’re only statues.”

Wirt wasn’t so sure about that. He’d heard them whispering about him as he’d left Ender Paine’s office once, after all. That wasn’t something he felt like sharing with Roland though. It wasn’t something he even wanted to remember if he could avoid it.

 “Does this place have a gym?” Roland asked, and Wirt resisted the urge to sigh. All the places that could be reached through the tree, from Llew the dragon’s cave to who knew where else, and his roommate was just interested in somewhere to play sport? Still, Wirt went along with it. He more than went along with it. After so much time travelling around the school during the summer, he was more than equipped to show Roland all the gyms he could ever want and more.

There was one place with a floor of sand over stone, where curiously old-fashioned weights lay in the corner and a teacher in a robe that was closer to a toga sat permanently engrossed in thought. There was what appeared to be a woodland glade indoors, where rubber bands hung from the branches to give students resistance as they worked. There were fencing
salles
and tournament lists, weight rooms and something called the ‘Golden Gym’ where leprechauns kept people running along rainbow treadmills in the hopes of reaching the pot of gold at their end. There was a full-sized arena, and there was even a dungeon complex, where more heroic students worked out by dodging traps and fighting whatever creatures they ran into along the way.

And there was a simple, ordinary gym, with a sprung wooden floor and enough space for a basketball court with some bleachers. Roland had seemed to like almost all the spaces Wirt had taken him to, but this was obviously his favorite. He took a ball out of a rack at the side and started to shoot hoops from increasingly difficult locations, making most of the shots with ease.

“You want to play?” Roland asked. “One on one?”

Wirt knew that he ought to shake his head and move on. After all, growing up in England, basketball wasn’t exactly the sport everyone played, so it wasn’t like he had had much chance to practice. On the other hand, playing a quick game with his new roommate would probably do a lot more to help them get along than refusing.

“Okay then.”

It took ten seconds for Roland to block him hard enough to send Wirt skidding to the floor, and things didn’t improve from there. Roland scored basket after basket, and he clearly didn’t believe that basketball was meant to be a non-contact game either. By the end of it, Wirt was battered, bruised, and only too eager to call a halt to the whole business of giving Roland the guided tour.

If anything though, the game seemed to have made Roland all the more eager. He was certainly grinning by the end of it, slapping Wirt on his bruised back and telling him it was a good game. Great, Wirt thought, all he had to do to make friends was let himself get bounced across most of a gymnasium floor.

“So,” Roland said, “where to now?”

Wirt shook his head. “Actually, I was thinking that we should get back. I mean, I’ll have a class to get to soon, and I’m pretty sure you will too.”

Roland looked down at his watch. It was an expensive one, of course, with about half a dozen different dials crammed into one face. “So that it can tell the time in six different dimensions,” Roland explained without being asked. “And we’ve got plenty of time for one more stop if we hurry.”

“Where did you have in mind?” Wirt could think of plenty of places around the school that were best avoided, from the rooms Ender Paine kept hidden within his hat to the island that housed the stone garden.

“Well, Ms. Lake did say that you should show me these ropes of hers.”

“You want to go to see the school’s collection of artifacts?”

Roland shrugged. “Why not? From what I hear, there’s some really impressive stuff in there.”

“I’m not sure that they’d let us in without a teacher,” Wirt suggested. He didn’t want to go rooting around through that collection. Not after the trouble the cup of life had caused last year.

“Well, we could go and get Ms. Lake,” Roland suggested. “She’s the custodian of the artifacts, isn’t she? Or we could just go. We have her permission, after all.”

Roland seemed eager, but Wirt wasn’t. Instead, he couldn’t help thinking about how much Roland knew about the school. Had anyone told him that Ms. Lake looked after the artifacts? Wirt shook his head. It was probably nothing. Even so…

“Roland, we really don’t have time. Come on, I’ve still got to collect some notes from our room before class.”

Chapter 5

W
irt’s next class was a transmutation one with Ms. Genovia. The big, bluff woman spent much of the class showing them how to transform pumpkins into more useful things, from a telephone directory to a small carriage.

            “If you have your pumpkin with you, you’ll never be short of options. Plus you can make such wonderful soup from it, of course.”

            Wirt worked hard on his, since he’d always been quite good at transmutation. Roland was in the same class, and appeared, if anything, to be even better than he was. That definitely impressed Alana, who sat off to one side having very little success in countering the pumpkin’s natural tendency to spring back to its original shape. Roland actually ended up giving her some tips, and Wirt couldn’t help noticing the jealousy with which Spencer looked at the other boy from across the class as he did it.

            Wirt was just happy when Alana finally succeeded in transforming hers into a small antique telephone for a whole ten seconds. As good as Alana was at other subjects, she had always been far better at constructing glamours than at actually transmuting things. It had to be hard on her that the school’s main glamour teacher, Ms. Preville, was gone now.

After the class, Wirt made his way down to the cafeteria for lunch. He still ached from his basketball game with Roland. Apparently, his new roommate didn’t mess around when it came to sports. His
old
roommate, meanwhile, had made it down before him, and was sitting alone at a table off to one side. Wirt collected his lunch, which turned out to be goulash, and went over to join Spencer.

            “What did they give you?” Spencer asked as he sat down, then looked and winced. “Bad luck. I hear that someone went and gave the nymphs a crystal ball subscription to some kind of world cooking channel, so it’s not going to get better, either.” He nodded down at his plate, which held some kind of rice and curry dish.

            As they both picked through their lunch Wirt and Spencer were quiet. Wirt guessed that the other boy was waiting for him to say something about their change of rooms, while Wirt was trying to come up with something that didn’t sound too much like an accusation. After all, when your closest friend suddenly wanted to change rooms, what did that say about what he thought about you?

            “Spencer…”

            “It was my father’s idea,” Spencer explained without being asked. Wirt nodded. That was what Ms. Lake had said too, and Wirt certainly knew what Spencer’s father was like. So busy that he could hardly spare his son a minute to talk to him, and yet utterly determined that Spencer would either follow in his footsteps in corporate magic or rise to the top of some other aspect of the field.

            “So he just decided that you didn’t need a roommate?” Wirt asked. He couldn’t help the slight note of accusation there. Spencer had to have said something, or why would his father have done anything.

            “Well, you know he found out that we were roommates when we were in the middle of looking for the chalice, right?”

            “But I thought your father was okay with that.” Wirt pointed out. “After all, you told him that even Priscilla has to share.”

            “Apparently, he changed his mind,” Spencer said. “I think that the whole chalice thing had something to do with it, to be honest.”

            Wirt wasn’t sure that he understood. “How could that make him want to get you a single room?”

             Spencer looked uncomfortable for a moment. “He said that he doesn’t want me going around having adventures. That it isn’t what he’s paying my school fees for, according to him.”

            “But the search for the cup was an official Quest,” Wirt said. “It went towards your marks for the year. You couldn’t exactly ignore it.”

            Spencer shook his head. “It wasn’t that part that was the problem. It was the part where we kept going even after we had been told to stop. Father thinks that showed a lack of respect for authority.”

            “So he would have preferred us all to be killed by some crazy old witch?” Wirt demanded.

            Spencer shrugged. “I know he doesn’t like adventure generally. He says that magic should be used for better things than just running around fighting dragons or exploring dungeons.”

            “Well, it wasn’t like we actually fought Llew. We just talked to him.”

            “You know what he means, Wirt.”

            Unfortunately, Wirt knew. Mr. Bentley was a serious man, interested almost exclusively in his many businesses. Anything that didn’t lead to success, defined in Mr. Bentley’s personal world purely as profit, was wasteful. Magic, to him, was what you used to predict which way the markets were going to go in the next quarter, or to ensure that your business rivals’ products never did quite as well as yours. For Spencer’s father, a proper magician wore a business suit, not a robe. In that view, adventures belonged to a way of life that was old-fashioned and unprofitable.

            “And now it’s our second year,” Spencer said, “so the pressure’s really on.”

            “More than when he had you taking extra classes last year?” Wirt asked.

           to Spencer nodded. “Far more. There’s the tests for the elite class, for one thing.”

            “Elite class?”

            Spencer looked at Wirt like Wirt had just admitted that no, he didn’t know that the world was round. “The
elite
class.”

            Wirt shook his head. “I still have no idea what you’re talking about, Spencer.”