The Alchemists Academy: Stones to Ashes Book 1 (8 page)

“We’re looking for a chalice,” Alana put in. “The chalice of life.”

“Now what would you want with that?”

“You’ve heard of it then?” Wirt asked.

“Heard of it? Boyo, I was there when they used it to patch up Arthur. Lovely bloke. Always handy for a fight when I was bored.” Llew turned his attention to Robert. “I don’t suppose that’s the kind of thing you do is it? I haven’t fought a prince in years.”

Robert blanched, and didn’t say anything. Priscilla put a hand on his arm. “Leave my brother alone. He’s a lover, not a fighter. He just wants to make people laugh, not fight dragons.”

Llew looked a bit disappointed. “Oh well, I suppose that’s fine too. I don’t suppose you feel like swapping things around a bit, maybe? Chain him to some rock, and you fight me?”

Priscilla looked like she might say something unpleasant, so Wirt decided to intervene. “Can you help us find the chalice or not?”

Llew shook his head. “How would I do that? I haven’t been out of this cave in… well, a long time. I could tell you a bit about it though.”

Wirt nodded eagerly.

“Well,” Llew said, “originally, there were lots of chalices. This one belonged to the sorceress Ervana. Not a nice lady. Made the mistake of trying to kill off a bunch of little wizards.”

“So what happened?” Wirt asked. “Did people kill her?”

“Oh no,” Llew said, “they couldn’t. Someone as powerful as her, the best you can hope for is to imprison her. So they turned her to stone instead, out on one of the lost islands.”

“So you could tell us how to find her?” Wirt prompted. Llew shrugged.

“I suppose so.” He pointed to the tunnel he’d come from. “Just head down there, then follow the tunnel marked “fforde allan”. That’s way out, to those of you who don’t know.”

Wirt looked to the others who nodded. As they turned to set off down the tunnel. Llew waved them off.

Chapter 11

T
he entrance to the tunnel turned out to be on a small beach, where a large rowing boat sat dragged up onto the sand above the tide line. Out over a short stretch of water, several small islands were clearly visible. Wirt looked at the boat with a certain amount of distrust.

“Is it just me, or is this a bit convenient? I mean, presumably the dragon can fly, right? So why have a boat?”

“Maybe other people go out to the islands?” Spencer suggested. Wirt saw Alana nod.

“Someone has been out here recently.” She pointed to a set of footprints leading up to the boat from further along the beach. Another set pointed back the way they had come. “Maybe it was whoever took the chalice.”

“Or just some fisherman,” Spencer pointed out. “We can’t be sure.”

“We won’t be sure of anything,” Wirt said, “until we get over to that island and take a look for ourselves.”

Worryingly convenient or not, that meant taking the boat. It was not as easy as it sounded. For one thing, Priscilla flatly refused to get her dress wet, so only four of them were involved in pushing the thing into the water. After that, there was the problem of rowing, which turned out to be a lot harder than it looked, and was not made any easier by the fact that Spencer, on the other oar, didn’t seem to be able to coordinate his efforts with Wirt’s very well. They did at least one complete circle before Robert took the oars from both of them, propelling the boat across the water in easy strokes.

“What?” he asked in response to their stares. “I have lots of practice rowing.”

Wirt had to admit that it made a kind of sense, as rowing was meant to be a sport for the wealthy. You probably didn’t get much better off than a prince, even one who wanted to be a jester. Back in Wirt’s world, the thought of wanting to be a jester was not all too far-fetched of an ideal job. It was the equivalent of being a comedian, which was actually quite glamorous. However, if you were the Prince and had wanted to become a comedian, then it was not the kind of job a king would encourage.

Which vanished when they were only halfway to it, along with all the others.

In the horizon, the dark outline of land came into view. Then as quickly as it appeared, it disappeared. “No wonder they call them the lost islands,” Spencer said. “How do we find them now that they’re gone?”

Wirt stared out over the water. Something about it was wrong. There was a faint shimmer to the air where the islands had been, not to mention a sense of simple wrongness to the whole thing. Why would you put a boat there if it couldn’t get you to where you wanted to go? As some kind of trap? Wirt didn’t think that Llew, the dragon, would have let them walk into something like that without at least a warning. At least, Wirt hoped he wouldn’t.

“I think it might be a glamour,” Wirt said. “You know, to disguise the islands. If we keep going, we will probably hit the one we want.”

“But then we’ll sink,” Priscilla complained. “We’ll run onto rocks, and we’ll sink, and we’ll probably end up stranded on the island forever, with nothing to eat and no servants.”

“Only if we don’t remember where there was a beach properly,” Wirt said. “Um… someone
does
remember where there was a beach, right?”

Thankfully, it turned out that Alana did. Or  so she thought she did, anyway. She sat at the front of the rowing boat, shouting directions to Robert, who rowed without complaint. She did a good job of it too. While there were a couple of worrying moments as the boat’s bottom scraped on rocks, it was not long before the five of them found themselves on dry land again.

As soon as their feet touched the beach, the island shimmered back into existence again. The others around it didn’t though, and Wirt found himself wondering whether they were ever real, or simply a distraction. This one felt real enough though. A shale beach sloped up to a stony path, winding through rocks beyond. Wirt and the others dragged the boat high up the beach before setting out along that track.

The space it led to was not what Wirt had been expecting. A flat expanse of lawn stretched out in a square, broken in places by beds of what looked like flowers, along with the occasional tree. Finding a pleasant little garden in the middle of a hidden island was not the surprising thing though. That had more to do with the fact that everything in the garden was made from stone. Everything.

The “lawn” consisted of petrified blades of grass, grey and hard; while the flowers’ petals shone with topaz, quartz and bluejohn, and their stems looked like polished marble. The trees were like huge columns that still somehow swayed in the breeze, occasionally shedding leaves that fell and shattered like roof tiles.

“I suppose this counts as easy maintenance gardening,” Wirt said.

“I don’t know,” Alana replied. “You’d still have to go around and polish everything occasionally.”

The path continued through the garden, and the five of them followed it. Statues started to appear by the side of it, ranging from the classical and elegant to the simply odd. A marble statue of some man so heroic that he didn’t feel the need for any clothes other than a fig leaf sat right next to an amorphous blob of a thing carved from smooth basalt. Wirt decided that it probably was not the moment for art appreciation, though he noted that Priscilla was certainly appreciating one of the two, at least until Alana reminded her that they were supposed to be looking for something.

The path came to an end in a circle of the stony grass perhaps thirty yards across. More statues circled it, on plinths of polished marble, but it was the one in the middle that caught Wirt’s interest. It was of a woman, who looked to be no more than thirty or so, wearing a long, hooded robe. She was crouching, her hands up as if to defend herself, and the expression on her stone features was caught somewhere between hate and fear. A bronze plaque sat next to the statue, reading simply “Ervana”.

“That’s it?” Wirt asked. “Just one word?”

“Maybe they didn’t want people knowing what she had done,” Spencer suggested.

“Or maybe they thought that everyone would already know,” Robert added. “Maybe they thought she was just that famous.”

“Infamous,” Alana corrected him.

Priscilla stepped past her, reaching for the plaque. “Oh, I’ve seen these before. They’re really very clever.”

As her fingers brushed the metal of it, a figure appeared beside the statue. It was that of Ender Paine, though without the beard.

“If you are here seeking knowledge, know that this “statue” is the petrified form of the witch, Ervana, whose actions threatened my school. Her punishment was decided by myself, in conjunction with the school governors, and we fought hard to stop her. You can see the effect of that battle on the rest of the island for yourself. If you are here trying to undo the spell, tough. Nothing short of a fully fledged Chalice of Life will change her back, the school has the only known example, and I will add you to the statuary soon enough. If you are just here to gawk, don’t you have anything better to do than wander round a magically protected island, staring at those statues with few clothes on?” Wirt saw Priscilla blush. “Now go away, and leave the witch to her punishment, before the spell turns your toes into limestone.”

That was Ender Paine, all right, and it seemed that time hadn’t really changed him much. As the image faded, Wirt wondered how serious he was about the last part, and decided that he didn’t really want to find out. They should probably do everything that they had come to the island to do and get off it before there was even a remote chance of the spell taking effect.

“Does this actually tell us anything?” he wondered aloud.

“I suppose,” Alana said, “that it gives us another reason why someone might want the chalice. You heard the image. It’s really the only way to bring her back.”

“Would anyone want to?” Wirt asked. The others gave a kind of collective shrug, though Spencer looked thoughtful.

“Father says sometimes that, in business, you can’t expect people to behave exactly the way you would. Just because it makes no sense to us to bring back a witch who attacked the school doesn’t mean it might not make sense to someone else.”

“We should search nearby,” Spencer suggested at last. “There is always a chance that someone has hidden the chalice here until they can use it.”

Wirt was not entirely convinced, but they still searched. In truth, there was not much to search. They looked behind a few plinths, and into knotholes on a few trees, but there didn’t seem to be anywhere that someone could reasonably have hidden a chalice, let alone its cauldron shape. In any case, it just didn’t feel right to Wirt. If you had this powerful item, then whatever you were planning on using it for, you would want to keep it close by, wouldn’t you? And if whoever had taken the chalice had come here with it, wouldn’t they have simply used it, rather than hide it away where anyone could find it?

“I think,” Wirt said, “that we should get back. There’s nothing here.”

“Plus,” Robert said, “We need to get out of here before whoever stole the chalice comes back.”

That was a good point too. Out here, presumably no one would be able to help them if the thief should happen to show up, and since they would be someone with enough magical power to take the chalice in the first place, that probably wouldn’t be a good thing for the five of them.

They hurried back to the boat, and this time Wirt helped with the rowing, so that they made it back to the beach outside Llew’s cave in half the time that it had taken to row out. They dragged it up onto the beach, and headed back into the dragon’s cave. Llew was not in his cave as they had expected.

Having found nothing, thinking this was a dead end, they were eager to get back. They stepped into the base of the transport tube, thought about their respective rooms, and zoomed upwards.

Chapter 12

A
lump of wood sat at the front of Mr. Fowler’s ever mobile and slightly scorched classroom, on a stand that let everybody there see it. Near it, Mr. Fowler and Ms. Genovia both stared out over the class. Wirt had his own block of wood, as did everyone else in the class. He peered out at them over it.

“Now, class,” Ms. Genovia said. “Mr. Fowler has been kind enough to let us use his classroom for this lesson on combining magical disciplines. The lesson today is on the transformation of objects, and will combine elements of what you have already learned in your transmutation and alchemy classes.”

“Which means that we get to change something’s shape before we accidentally blow it up,” Alana muttered under her breath. Wirt stifled a short laugh, while beside him, Spencer looked on intently.

“Changing a living creature is difficult,” Ms. Genovia said, “but generally you are not making real changes to the types of tissue involved. The body does half the work for you, if you let it. To transform something inanimate, on the other hand, is somewhat trickier. You must know enough about the substances involved to be able to shape them to your will.”

That, it seemed, was where Mr. Fowler came in. The white-ish robed wizard launched into a long discourse on the properties of wood, and on the alchemical processes that would normally be involved in transforming it into other substances.

“Some… um, things are more difficult to achieve than others,” he said, “lead into gold, for example, seems to be beyond us as yet.”

“With other substances, however,” Ms. Genovia put in, having apparently decided that letting Mr. Fowler keep going would mean that nothing got done, “it is possible to achieve things more directly. Observe.”

The bulky teacher waved a hand, said a few words, and in place of the block of wood there sat a small trombone, which Ms. Genovia picked up and played. Badly. She put it back down on the stand, where it transformed back into a block of wood.

“Unfortunately,” Mr. Fowler said, discretely cleaning out one ear, “transformations for more than a minute or two are much more complex, meaning that you have to use a much more involved process, possess an extremely great amount of power, or work that process on something with enough magic of its own to sustain the transformation. The mathematics of the decaying form are really very fascinating. I’m sure I have some chalk around here-”