فصل 8

Chapter 8

CALL STARED. After two weeks of sand sorting, he’d given up on the idea that Rufus was ever going to be forward or direct with him. In fact, he realized, he’d given up on the idea that he’d ever really find out why he was at the Magisterium at all.

“Sit,” Rufus said again, and this time Call sat, wincing as his leg twinged. The couch was comfortable after hours of sitting on a cold stone floor, and he let himself sink into it. “What do you think of our school so far?” Before Call could answer, there was the sound of rushing wind. He blinked, and realized it was coming from the jar on Master Rufus’s desk. The small tornado inside it was darkening and condensing into a shape. A moment later, it had taken the form of a miniature olive-green-uniformed Assembly member. It was a man with very dark hair. He blinked around.

“Rufus?” he said. “Rufus, are you there?”

Rufus made an impatient noise and flipped the jar over. “Not now,” he said to it, and the image inside became a tornado again.

“Is that like a telephone?” Call asked, awed.

“Something like a telephone,” said Rufus. “As I said before, the concentration of elemental magic in the Magisterium interferes with most technology. Besides, we prefer to do things our own way.” “My dad is probaby really worried, not having heard from me in so —” Call started.

Master Rufus leaned against his desk, crossing his arms over his broad chest. “First,” he said, “I want to know what you think of the Magisterium and your training.” “It’s easy,” Call said. “Boring and pointless, but easy.”

Rufus gave a thin smile. “What you did in there was very clever,” he said. “You want to make me angry because you think that if you do, I’ll send you home. And you believe you want to be sent home.” Call had actually given up on that plan. Saying obnoxious things just came naturally to him. He shrugged.

“You must wonder why I chose you,” Rufus said. “You, the last of all those ranked. The least competent of all the potential mages. I suppose you imagine that it is because I saw something in you. Some potential the other Masters had missed. Some untapped well of skill. Maybe even something that reminded me of myself.” His tone was lightly mocking. Call was silent.

“I took you on,” Rufus continued, “because you do have skill and power, but you also have a great deal of anger. And you have almost no control at all. I did not want you to be a burden on one of the other mages. Nor did I want one of them to choose you for the wrong reasons.” His eyes flicked toward the tornado, spinning in its upside-down jar. “Many years ago, I made a mistake with a student. A mistake that had grave consequences. Taking you on is my penance.” Call’s stomach felt as if it wanted to curl up inside him like a kicked puppy. It hurt, being told that he was so unpleasant he was someone’s punishment.

“So send me home,” he burst out. “If you just took me because you don’t feel like one of the other mages should have to teach me, send me home.” Rufus shook his head. “You still don’t understand,” he said. “Uncontrolled magic like yours is a danger. Sending you home to your small town would be the equivalent of dropping a bomb on them. But make no mistake, Callum. If you persist in disobedience, if you refuse to learn to control your magic, then I will send you home. But I will bind your magic first.” “Bind my magic?”

“Yes. Until a mage passes through the First Gate at the end of his Iron Year, his or her magic can be bound by one of the Masters. You would be unable to access the elements, unable to use your power. And we would take your memories of magic, too, so that all you would know was that you were missing something, some essential part of yourself, but you would no longer know what it was. You would spend your life tormented by the loss of something you didn’t remember losing. Is that what you want?” “No,” Call whispered.

“If I believe that you’re holding back the others or that you’re untrainable, you’re done here. But if you make it through this whole year and pass through the First Gate, then no one can ever take your magic away. Make it through this year and you can drop out of the Magisterium if you want. You’ll have learned enough to no longer be a danger to the world. Think on that, Callum Hunt, as you sort your sand the way I instructed you to. Grain by grain.” Master Rufus paused, and then made a dismissive gesture, indicating that Call could go. “Think on that and make your choice.” image

Concentrating on moving the sand was as grueling as ever, more so because of how pleased Call had been with their cleverness in coming up with a better solution. For once, he’d felt that maybe they could really be a team, maybe even friends.

Now Aaron and Tamara concentrated quietly, and when he looked over at them, they wouldn’t meet his gaze. They were probably mad at him, Call thought. He’d been the one who’d insisted that someone come up with a better way of doing the exercise. And even though he was the one who’d been dragged into Rufus’s office, they were all going to be in trouble. Maybe Tamara even thought he’d finked on her. Plus, it was his magic that had scattered their piles that first day. He was a burden on the group, and they all knew it.

Fine, Call thought. All Master Rufus said I had to do was get through this year, so I’m going to do it. And I’m going to be the best mage here, just because no one thinks I can be. I never really tried before, but I’m going to try now. I’m going to be better than you both and then, when I’ve impressed you and you really want me to be your friend, I’m going to turn around and tell you how much I don’t need you or the Magisterium. As soon as I pass through the First Gate and they can’t bind my magic anymore, I’m going home and no one can stop me.

That’s what I’m going to tell Dad, too, as soon as I get to that tornado phone.

He spent the rest of the day moving sand with his mind, but instead of doing it the way he had the first day, straining to capture each grain, pushing it with all the desperate effort of his brain, today he let himself experiment. He tried a lighter and lighter touch, tried rolling the sand instead of lifting it into the air. Then he tried to move more than one bit of sand at once. He’d done it before, after all. The trick was that he’d thought of it as one thing — a sand cloud — instead of as three hundred individual grains.

Maybe he could do the same thing now, thinking of all the dark grains as one thing.

He tried, pulling with his mind, but there were too many and he lost focus. He gave up on that idea and concentrated on five grains of dark sand. These he was able to move, rolling them together toward the pile.

He slumped back, amazed, feeling he’d done something incredible. He wanted to say something to Aaron, but instead, he kept his mouth shut and practiced his new technique, getting better and better at it, until he was moving twenty grains at a time. He couldn’t do better than that, though, no matter how hard he struggled. Aaron and Tamara saw what he was doing, but neither one of them said anything, nor did they try to imitate him.

That night, Call dreamed of sand. He was sitting on a beach, trying to build a castle for a naked mole rat caught in a storm, but the wind kept blowing the sand away as the water grew closer and closer. Finally, frustrated, he stood up and kicked at the castle until it came apart and became a huge monster with enormous sand arms and legs. It chased him down the beach, always about to grab him but never quite close enough, as it shouted at him in Master Rufus’s voice, Remember what your father said about magic, boy. It’ll cost you everything.

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The next day, Master Rufus didn’t drop them off and leave as usual. Instead, he sat down in a far corner of the Room of Sand and Boredom, took out a book and a waxed paper packet, and started to read. After about two hours, he unwrapped the packet. It was a ham-and-cheese sandwich on rye bread.

He appeared to be indifferent to Callum’s method of moving more than one grain at a time, so Aaron and Tamara started doing it, too. Things moved faster then.

That day, they actually managed to sort all the sand before dinnertime. Master Rufus looked over what they’d done, nodded in satisfaction, and kicked it all back into one big pile again. “Tomorrow, you’re going to sort by five gradations of color,” he said.

The three of them groaned in unison.

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Things went on like that for another week and a half. Outside of class, Tamara and Aaron ignored Call, and Call ignored them right back. But they got better at moving sand — better, more precise, and more able to concentrate on multiple grains at once.

Meanwhile, at meals, they heard about the lessons the other apprentices were receiving, which all sounded more interesting than sand — especially when those lessons backfired. Like when Drew set himself on fire and managed to burn up one of the boats and singe Rafe’s hair before he was able to put himself out. Or when Milagros’s and Tanaka’s students were practicing together and Kai Hale dropped a lizard elemental down the back of Jasper’s shirt. (Call thought Kai might deserve a medal.) Or when Gwenda decided she liked one of the mushroom cap pizza things so much that she wanted more of it and inflated the mushroom so large that it pushed everyone — even the Masters — out of the Refectory for several days until its growth could be tamed and they could hack their way back in.

Dinner the night they were able to use the Refectory again was lichen and more pudding — no mushrooms at all, anywhere. The interesting thing about the lichen was that it never tasted the same — sometimes it tasted like steak and sometimes like fish tacos or vegetables with spicy hot sauce, even if it was the same color. The gray pudding that night tasted like butterscotch. When Celia caught Call going back for fourths, she tapped his wrist playfully with her spoon.

“Come on, you should come to the Gallery,” she said. “There’s great snacks there.” Call glanced up the table at Aaron and Tamara, who shrugged agreement. The three of them were still being stiff and silent with one another, only talking when they had to. Call wondered if they planned to forgive him ever, or if this was it, and it was going to be awkward for the rest of the time he was here.

Call dropped his bowl back on the table, and a few minutes later found himself part of a laughing group of Iron Year students making their way toward the Gallery. Call noticed that as they went, the glittering crystals on the walls made it seem like the corridor was covered in a fine layer of snow.

He wondered if any of these corridors led in the direction of Master Rufus’s office. Not a day went by that he didn’t think about sneaking in there and using the tornado phone. But until Master Rufus taught them how to control the boats, Call needed another route.

They walked through an unfamiliar part of the tunnels, one that seemed to slope gently upward, with a shortcut over an underground lake. For once, Call didn’t mind the extra distance, because this part of the caves had a bunch of cool things to look at — a flowstone formation of white calcite that looked like a frozen waterfall, concretions in the shape of fried eggs, and stalagmites that had turned blue and green from the copper in the rock.

Call, moving slower than the others, was in the back, and Celia dropped back to chat with him. She pointed out things he hadn’t seen before, like the holes high up in the rocks where bats and salamanders lived. They passed through a big circular room with two passages leading from it. One had the word Gallery picked out above it in sparkling rock crystal. The other read The Mission Gate.

“What’s that?” Call asked.

“It’s another way out of the caves,” Drew, overhearing, told him. Then he looked weirdly guilty, as if he wasn’t supposed to tell.

Maybe Call wasn’t the only one who didn’t understand the rules of magic school. When he looked closer, he saw Drew looked about as exhausted as Call felt.

“But you can’t just leave,” Celia added, giving Call a wry look, as if she thought that every time he heard about a new exit, he was going to consider whether or not he could escape that way. “It’s only for apprentices on missions.” “Missions?” Call asked, as they followed the others toward the Gallery. He remembered her saying something about them before, when she’d explained why all the apprentices weren’t at the Magisterium.

“Errands for Masters. Fighting elementals. Fighting the Chaos-ridden,” Celia said. “You know, mage stuff.” Right, Call thought. Pick up some deadly nightshade and kill a wyvern on your way back. No problem. But he didn’t want to make Celia mad, since she was pretty much the only person still talking to him, so he kept those thoughts to himself.

The Gallery was huge, with a ceiling at least a hundred feet above them and a lake at one end, stretching off into the distance, with several small islands dotting the surface. A few kids were splashing in the water, which steamed gently. A movie was playing on one crystal wall — Call had seen the movie before, but he was sure what was happening on the screen hadn’t actually happened in the version he’d seen.

“I love this part,” Tamara said, rushing over to where kids had arranged themselves on rows of oversize, velvety-looking toadstools. Jasper appeared and plunked himself down directly next to her. Aaron looked slightly puzzled but followed anyway.

“You have to try the fizzy drinks,” Celia said, pulling Call over to a rocky ledge where an enormous glass beverage dispenser, full of what looked like water, rested beside three stalactites. She picked up a glass, filled it from the twist spout, and stuck it beneath one of the stalactites. A spurt of blue liquid splashed down into the water, and a mini whirlpool appeared inside the glass, spinning the blue liquid and the clear liquid together. Bubbles rose to the top.

“Go on, try it,” Celia urged.

Call gave the drink a suspicious look, then took the glass from her and swigged down the liquid.

It felt like crystals of sweet blueberry and caramel and strawberry were bursting inside his mouth.

“This is fantastic,” he said when he was done swallowing.

“The green is my favorite,” Celia said, grinning around a glass she’d poured for herself. “It tastes like a melted lollipop.” There were piles of other interesting-looking snacks on the ledge — bowls of shiny rocks that were clearly spun out of sugar, pretzels wound into the shapes of alchemical symbols and sparkling with salt, and a bowl of what looked like crispy potato chips at first glance but were darker gold when you looked at them closely. Call tried one. It tasted almost exactly like buttered popcorn.

“Come on,” Celia said, grabbing his wrist. “We’re missing the movie.” She drew him toward the velvety toadstools. Call went a little reluctantly. Things were still fraught with Tamara and Aaron. He thought it might be better to avoid them and explore the Gallery on his own. But no one was paying attention to him anyway; they were all watching the movie being projected on the far wall. Jasper kept leaning over to say things in Tamara’s ear that made her giggle, and Aaron was chatting with Kai on his other side. Fortunately, there were enough older kids around to make it easy for Call not to sit too close to the other apprentices in his group without it seeming intentional.

As Call relaxed into his seat, he realized that the movie wasn’t being projected exactly. A solid block of colored air hovered against the rock wall, colors swirling in and out of it impossibly fast, creating the illusion of a screen. “Air magic,” he said, half to himself.

“Alex Strike does the movies.” Celia was hugging her knees, intent on the screen. “You probably know him.” “Why would I know him?”

“He’s a Bronze Year. One of the best students. He assists Master Rufus sometimes.” There was admiration in her voice.

Call glanced back over his shoulders. In the shadows behind the rows of toadstool cushions was a taller chair. The lanky brown-haired boy who’d brought them sandwiches for the past few days was sitting in it, his eyes intent on the screen in front of him. His fingers were moving back and forth, a little like a puppeteer’s. As he moved them, the shapes on the screen shifted.

That’s really cool, the little, treacherous voice inside Call said. I want to do that. He pushed the voice down. He was leaving as soon as he passed through the First Gate of Magic. He was never going to be a Copper Year or Bronze Year or any other year than this one.

When the movie ended — Call was pretty sure he didn’t remember a scene in Star Wars where Darth Vader made a conga line with Ewoks, but he’d only seen it once — everyone jumped up and clapped. Alex Strike shook his hair back and grinned. When he saw Call looking at him, he nodded.

Everyone soon spread out through the room to play with other fun stuff. It was like an arcade, Call thought, but with no supervision. There was a hot pool of water that bubbled with many colors. Some of the older students, including Tamara’s sister and Alex, were swimming in it, amusing themselves by making little whirlpools dance along the surface of the water. Call stuck his legs in it for a while — it felt good after all the walking he’d been doing — and then joined Drew and Rafe in feeding the tame bats, which would sit on their shoulders while they fed them pieces of fruit. Drew kept giggling as the bats’ soft wings tickled his cheek. Later, Call joined up with Kai and Gwenda to play a weird game involving batting around a ball of blue fire that turned out to be cold when it struck him in the chest. Ice crystals clung to his gray uniform, but he didn’t mind. The Gallery was so much fun that he forgot to worry about Master Rufus, about his father, about bound magic, or even about Aaron and Tamara hating him.

Will it be hard to give this up? he wondered. He imagined being a mage and playing in bubbling springs and conjuring movies out of thin air. He imagined being good at this stuff, one of the Masters, even. But then he thought of his dad sitting at the kitchen table all by himself, worrying over Call, and felt awful.

When Drew, Celia, and Aaron started back toward the rooms, he decided to go with them. If he stayed up any later, he’d be cranky in the morning and, besides, he wasn’t sure he knew the way without them. They retraced their steps through the caves. It was the first time in days Call felt relaxed.

“Where’s Tamara?” Celia asked as they walked.

Call had seen her standing with her sister when they left and was about to answer when Aaron spoke. “Arguing with her sister.” Call was surprised. “What about?”

Aaron shrugged. “Kimiya was saying that Tamara shouldn’t be wasting her time in the Gallery in her Iron Year, playing games. Said she ought to be studying.” Call frowned. He’d always kind of wanted a sibling, but he was suddenly reconsidering.

Beside him, Aaron stiffened. “What’s that noise?”

“It’s coming from the Mission Gate,” Celia replied, looking worried. A moment later, Call heard it, too: the tread of booted feet on stone, the echo of voices bouncing off rock walls. Someone calling for help.

Aaron took off, running up the passage toward the Mission Gate. The rest of them hesitated before following him, Drew hanging back so much that he kept pace with Call’s hurrying. The passage started to fill up with people pushing past them, almost knocking Call over. Something clamped on to his arm and he found himself pulled back against a wall.

Aaron. Aaron had flattened himself against the stone and was watching, his mouth a thin line, as a group of older kids — some of them wearing silver wrist cuffs, some gold — came limping through the passage. Some were being carried on makeshift stretchers strapped together from branches. One boy was being supported by two other apprentices — the whole front of his uniform looked like it had been burned away, the skin underneath red and bubbly. All of them had scorch marks on their uniforms and black soot streaking their faces. Most were bleeding.

Drew looked like he was going to cry.

Call heard Celia, who had pressed herself to the wall next to Aaron, whisper something about fire elementals. Call stared as a boy went by on a stretcher, writhing in agony. His uniform sleeve was burned away and his arm seemed to be glowing from the inside, like a piece of kindling in a fire.

Fire wants to burn, Call thought.

“You! You, Iron Years! You shouldn’t be here!” It was Master North, scowling as he detached himself from the group of the wounded. Call wasn’t sure how he’d spotted them or why he was there.

They didn’t wait to be told twice. They scattered.