Past Tense (Schooled in Magic Book 10) (51 page)

Caleb was still asleep, one hand reaching out to where she’d been, two hours and three months ago. She watched him for a long moment, then turned and hurried into the shower, tearing her dusty clothes off and dropping them on the floor. They’d practically turned into dust themselves; she summoned a dressing gown from her closet as she closed the door and turned on the running water. Stepping under the warm water felt like heaven; she closed her eyes and luxuriated, feeling the dust falling off her body and vanishing into the drain. She reached for the bottle of soap, without opening her eyes, and scrubbed herself thoroughly. It felt as if she was removing layers upon layers of dirt, grime and dust.

And how often
, she asked herself,
did I think I would never be clean again?

It felt like hours before she turned off the water, rubbed herself down with a towel and looked in the mirror. She’d expected to see bruises all over her body, but they were long gone; instead, she looked fit and healthy and reassuringly normal. She no longer looked out of place. Even the scar on her cheek had faded after she’d returned to the future.

She touched the scar lightly, then pulled the dressing gown on as she heard someone stirring outside. Cabiria wouldn’t be coming back to the room, not until morning; she checked the wards and discovered that Cabiria was using another bedroom, granting Caleb and Emily some privacy. She felt a rush of affection as she stepped out of the shower and smiled as she saw Caleb sitting upright, looking at her.

“Caleb,” she said. She darted across the room and hugged him tightly, pressing her lips against his. He seemed taken by surprise, but kissed her back. “I ... I love you.”

The admission surprised her. She’d missed him, more than she cared to admit; she sat on the bed and kissed him again and again, as if she didn’t want to let go. She could tell he was surprised, but she didn’t blame him.
He
thought it had only been a few hours since they’d gone to bed.

“Emily,” he breathed. His hand touched her cheek, his eyes going wide. “What happened?”

“It’s a long story,” Emily said. She’d have to discuss it with him, then work some of what she’d learned into their joint project. “I can tell you ...”

She stopped as she came to a decision. It scared her—perhaps it would always scare her—but perhaps it was also time to take the bull by the horns. She loved him and she liked him and she cared for him ...

... And perhaps it was time to face some of her demons.

“Caleb,” she said. She found herself suddenly grasping for words, feeling his body pressing against hers. Her heart was beating so loudly she thought he could hear it. “Caleb ... take me to bed.”

“B
ITCH,”
T
AMA MUTTERED.
“F
ILTHY BITCH
.”

His body
hurt
. It felt as though he was nothing more than a walking bruise. His face hurt, his chest hurt and there was a dull throbbing pain between his legs that suggested that having children was now impossible. It was hard, so hard, to comprehend that he’d been beaten by a girl, a girl who had literally had her hands tied behind her back. She’d bested him with magic and she’d bested him without magic ... cold savage hatred flared through him as he staggered to his feet. He was going to find her and he was going to do unspeakable things to her ...

He stopped, dead, as he realized the implications. The bitch had escaped; he was
sure
she’d escaped. She’d escaped the punishment she should have faced for murdering Master Gila, she’d escaped Master Chambers’ revenge after brutally slaughtering his apprentice ... she just kept twisting until she got out of trouble. He didn’t understand how she did it ... no, he did; he understood all too well. She was spreading for Whitehall, offering him her body in exchange for illicit lessons and protection from other men. There could be no other explanation. A woman could manipulate a man in ways that no other man could match, convincing him that he was the master when, in truth, he was being ruled by his gonads, his mind blinded by lust and desire.

“Bitch,” he snarled, again. “Unnatural bitch!”

Master Wolfe’s body lay on the ground, very definitely dead. Tama searched it anyway, hoping to find something useful; there was nothing, save for a silver wand and a tiny stone knife, barely larger than his index finger. The latter felt odd in his hand, as if it had once touched great power, but no amount of poking unlocked its secrets. He turned to look at the control column and sighed. The magic surrounding it was far beyond his comprehension. He didn’t have a hope of taking control for himself.

“Bastard,” he swore. He checked Master Keldor’s remains, but anything useful he might have carried had been burned to a crisp. Her spells, no doubt.
She
had been involved in creating the spells, hadn’t she? Perhaps she was spreading for Master Wolfe too. How like a woman to urge a man to keep something precious for himself, when it should be shared with all. “Bastard.”

He turned and kicked Master Wolfe’s body, hard. It twitched.

Tama stared. Just for a moment, he recalled all the stories about corpses that rose from the grave and returned to extract a horrific revenge on the living. Master Keldor had studied death magics extensively. Perhaps he’d done something to his former friend. But the twitch didn’t reoccur. Tama told himself, firmly, that he’d imagined it. He drew back his foot to administer another kick, striking Master Wolfe in the arm ...

... And the corpse dissolved into eerie multicolored light, rising into the air.

Tama stared, unable to move. What
was
it? The pulsing cloud of magic felt almost like a living creature, but he’d never seen or heard of anything like it. A cold malevolent hunger assailed his mind, keeping him rooted to the spot even as he started to panic; he was convinced, all of a sudden, that he was being studied even though he couldn’t see any
eyes
.

And then the cloud started to move forward.

His trance snapped. Tama turned to run ...

But it was already far too late.

End of Book Ten

Emily Will Return In

The Sergeant’s Apprentice

Something that has always amused me, when I read certain fantasy (and even sci-fi) books is the endless quest to dig up and rediscover the knowledge of the past.

In some cases, this is justified. Magic largely slipped out of the world years before the events of
Jonathon Strange and Mr. Norrell
, so both of the titular characters have good reason to dig up old books and study them to see how old spells can be used in the modern world. In the world of
Mistborn
, the Lord Ruler buried so many secrets that digging them up forms a major part of the series. (This is averted in the
Wax and Wayne
sequel books, although it also is quite important in
Elantris
.) But in many other books—
The Black Magician
series, the
Foundation
series (yes, really)—this makes little sense.

Humans are incredibly inventive creatures. When we know something is possible, we can and we do duplicate it; when we have so much to build on, we can and do develop something more. Our modern society rests on the shoulders of giants—Galileo, Newton, Einstein—and future society will rest on the work of Stephen Hawking and his peers. In a world of magic, particularly one with a strong tradition of pushing the limits, I simply do not see why a past society should be radically more advanced than present-day society.

Certainly, there are things we don’t understand about the past. The secrets of Roman bridge-building, for example, were lost somewhere in the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. But there is no way the Romans could match our society, when it comes to building bridges. The limits of their technology were just too far behind ours. One might get a very efficient steam engine, if one tried. But could it really outdo a modern car?

One of the core ideas of the
Schooled in Magic
series, as I see it, is that there are no secrets that will remain forever unknown and unknowable. Magical knowledge marches on—and while the Sorcerer’s Rule may play a role akin to patent protection in our world, the knowledge that something is possible will spur other wizards to attempt to duplicate it. I didn’t want—and I still don’t—artifacts from a bygone age that are not only far superior to anything from the present day, but beyond understanding and duplication. (Mind you, I did have an idea for such artifacts being duplicated—eventually—but that will have to go in a whole different book.) This is a universe based on magic, rather than science, yet it is still functionally
rational
.

So why should Lord Whitehall and his comrades be vastly more capable than Grandmaster Hasdrubal and his?

They shouldn’t.

It’s actually interesting to study just how little we truly
know
about ancient history. Quite a bit of our understanding of the Roman Civil War and the rise (and assassination) of Julius Caesar comes from Cicero. But this has its limits—Cicero was hardly the mover and shaker he liked to think of himself as being. He had
some
influence, but—as Pompey noted—no actual power base. Or, if you want an example closer to our time, there was the strange affair of Edward IV and Eleanor Butler. It was strongly suggested that Edward secretly married Eleanor Butler prior to his actual (and also secret, at first) marriage to Elizabeth Woodville, rendering his children with Elizabeth illegitimate.

Naturally, this was
very
convenient for Richard III. If Edward V (the older of the famed Princes in the Tower) was illegitimate,
Richard
was the legitimate king. But was this actually true? On one hand, it
does
fit Edward IV’s known patterns—he married Elizabeth in secrecy, even to the point of seriously damaging England’s international standing—but on the other hand, it only came out when Edward was dead and there was a strong party in the wings ready to take advantage of it.

Richard III—usurper or rightful king? We don’t know.

The Nameless World doesn’t know anything like as much about its past as it likes to think, something I have endeavoured to make clear. Nor did our own ancestors. The "truth" in many situations was often buried, forgotten or lost between a morass of claims and counter-claims. Trying to establish what really happened can be a nightmare, academic reputations resting on handfuls of documents that may have been mistranslated, forged or simply lacking in data. (Most early accounts of WW II made no mention of the Ultra Secret, for obvious reasons.) And that’s not including headaches like politically-driven revisionist history or feminist retellings of the past where women were far more important (and equal) than they ever were in real life.

Our ancestors were
human
. Not one of them was wholly good or wholly bad. They were creatures of their era, born and raised in societies that were often quite different from ours in all sorts of ways. By our standards, Richard III was a figurative bastard who stole his nephew’s birthright; by theirs, Richard was recovering the throne from a
literal
bastard who had no right to it. And far too much of what we "know" about the past simply isn’t so.

I trust you enjoyed Emily’s voyage to the past. If you did, please leave a review—every little bit helps.

Christopher Nuttall

Edinburgh, 2016

The original human settlers of the Nameless World, although rather mystified by their arrival, did not realize at first that they were on a
mana
-rich world. Indeed, some of them never realized that they’d moved from world to world at all. However, it was not long before the
mana
started to take its toll on the human population. A small number of human children were warped by the
mana
, becoming the first magicians. Their powers materialized shortly afterwards, usually during puberty.

This was often disastrous. The magicians had very little understanding of how their powers worked or how to handle them. Random surges of magic tended to produce disastrous results, ranging from accidentally harming or killing their families to emotional storms and outright madness. Local communities rapidly started to kill the magicians out of hand, fearing that it was the only way to keep them from becoming a major threat. Only a handful of the early magicians remained sane long enough to escape their communities before it was too late.

Unknown to the magicians, their fits of madness were caused by attempts to channel more power through their minds than they could handle. (Later, similar problems would account for the madness brought on by necromancy.) Unaware of the dangers of pushing their powers too far, too quickly, they would often obtain great power at the cost of their rationality. Even if a magician was lucky enough to escape madness after one power surge, like Emily in
Trial by Fire/Wedding Hells
, repeated attempts to boost their power eventually tipped them over the edge. Magicians who survived so long rapidly acquired a reputation for being mad, bad, and dangerous to know.

That was not the only problem. Surges of power caused damage to their bodies: in men, it reduced sperm count; in women, it damaged or destroyed their eggs. Female magicians, assuming they survived long enough to have children, rarely managed to carry a child to term; male magicians rarely had more than one or two children. The "curse," as it came to be known, would later serve as justification for denying women magical training.

Matters were complicated by demons. A handful of magicians discovered that it was possible to summon demons and bargain with them, trading blood (life) for knowledge and services. These services often came with a sting in the tail; the demons might teach the magicians how to cast newer and better spells, but the spells would be impossible to edit and tended to have nasty side-effects. Quite a few spells were far more
mana
-intensive than they should be, ensuring further damage to the caster’s mind and body. A number of magicians
did
realize the danger, but very few were willing to abandon demons entirely.