Arcane Tangle

Chapter I

The Wall

In the dark of the cellar of the women's dorm, floating in the air soundless and unseen, the Being waited.

Presently the door above the stairs opened, and in the darkness a dozen copper washtubs came alive with the reflected glow of a paraffin lamp.

The Being observed.

Down the stairs, the lamp in one hand and a laundry bag in the other, came Karoline. Only the dorm's domestic servants usually went down here, but her black velvet uniform announced that Karoline was a student. So much was on her mind lately that she'd forgotten all about the laundry day - so now here she was at this late hour, obliged to do it all by herself.

Perhaps if she'd had less on her mind, she would have noticed out of the corner of her eye a hint of something silvery, something spectral, lurking by the stone wall. She did not. She plodded on, right to the end of the room, to one of the smaller basins.

The tap she turned on spluttered, gurgled, and an inelegant, irregular stream began to fill the tub. Karoline sighed, placed the lamp on the counter, and reached for the buttons of her jacket.

Very, very slowly, thirty feet behind her, something stirred, and inched towards the light.

She shook off the jacket and the skirt; she stood only in her underwear and a thin, sleeveless undershirt, against whose white fabric her long black hair cascaded. She pawed at the water, and found it too cool. She scowled, and worked up a thermal spell. Hesitantly, thin wisps of steam arose from the water's surface. She pinched the bridge of her nose. Damn, she was tired.

She turned the tap off. She reached for soap, but found none. She turned around—

Alicia was coming back from the library. She was in the ground floor corridor and just about to climb the stairs leading up to her bedroom when suddenly her attention was hijacked by: a high-pitched scream; a bright flash of orange light coming from the half-open doorway to the laundry room; a loud crash like a sonic boom; a faint stench of burning.

In the ensuing silence Alicia stood still, looking at that door just a few feet away.

"Huh," she said.

She lay her books down on the floor, advanced, and swung the door fully open.

Down below in the far end of the room, clearly visible in a pool of lamp light, her classmate Karoline was standing, in her underwear, with her left hand stretched out, breathing heavily, staring wildly.

"Karoline? What are you doing?"

Shaken, the other girl looked up. "A leech-wraith!"

"What?"

"A leech-wraith! Right here! I'm looking for soap and I turn around, and there's this... writhing mass..."

Alicia reached for her pocket and produced a pouch, from which she took a pinch of pale blue powder. She blew it up in the air. There was a quiet crackle, and the particles lit up, filling the room with stark white light.

Clearly visible now was a scorched path on the wooden floor that led from Karoline all the way to a large scorch mark on the wall right by the stairs.

"Karoline. Did you fireball it?"

"Well, yeah!"

"You fireballed an incorporeal being?"

"Look, I panicked, okay? Kind of worked too, it buggered off somewhere—"

"This is extremely unprofessional, Karoline. You're lucky they haven't installed gas lighting down here yet."

"Well— how would you react if you suddenly saw a heap of phantom tendrils standing right next to you—"

"They aren't even that dangerous. Them stealing your life force hits no worse than a flu."

"Wow, fantastic!"

There were now footsteps closing in behind Alicia, wardens or servants coming to check what all the noise was.

"Well, justified or not, you're definitely getting fined for this."

Karoline's gaze miserably followed the charred trail. Next to Alicia, the old bald caretaker, the cranky one, popped up in the doorway, and surveyed the damage with wordless dismay. Karoline closed her eyes, and rubbed her forehead.

"Fuck my life," she muttered.

*

Crossing Vallnord Academy's inner park on an early morning in spring, when the mellow sun lights up the trees' fresh leaves in that lavish shade of green, is certainly pleasant and dawdle-worthy. It was one reason why Diane was a little late to the Thaumaturgy class.

She closed the door behind her as quietly as the ancient iron hinges would let her. Fortunately, Professor Fink was not a stern type. A small, elderly man in a sagging shirt, he was already chatting up the thirty or so seated students, a droopy smile on his face. Behind him was a vast and many-tiered blackboard, which was in imminent danger of getting entirely filled with graphs and diagrams. Next to him stood a wooden tripod, on top of which was placed what appeared to be a large, clear quartz crystal.

Niko must have come a little late too, because he was seated alone, a little in the back, and still fishing for his notebook in his leather bag.

What a coincidence. Yes.

Softly she took the seat next to him. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught the contrast of the blond hair and the black uniform. He gave her a small, indifferent nod, and she returned in kind. Exactly as you'd expect from two distantly acquainted classmates.

"Okay, we keep digging into thermothaumaturgy today," Professor Fink's goatlike voice continued. "But before we get into that, first I need to make a little detour, and talk to you on how to handle a focus."

Diane opened her notebook and ran her fingers down its middle fold. Niko shoved hair away from his eyes and leaned to her, and was apparently about to say something when he noticed that one other student across the room was looking vaguely in their direction; and so he cleared his throat, and set his eyes on the professor.

"Now, focuses have of course been a big deal historically. If you try to imagine a medieval mage, say, you always picture someone with a staff, right? Because they always used to channel through a focus embedded in the staff head. Even when I was a student, well... fifty years ago..." He gave the class a resigned little shrug. "It was still common then to wear rings and stuff, and channel through those. But then came the Bargard School of Metaphysics, and one of its foundations of course is using natural magical currents rather than redirecting them, and so focus use lessened a lot."

Professor Fink had this gift of being easy to listen to. All the students' attention was now fixed on him. All, except possibly for two.

"Did you do your homework?" Diane whispered, without turning her head.

"Yep," Niko answered.

"Report, please." Whenever he blushed, his skin tone complemented his brown hair in an especially cute way, she thought, catching a sideways glance.

"So, focuses got pulled out of syllabuses. Which is fine and good, except this particular class will require it, so now it is up to me to cover this material which you'd normally have learned from the intro courses." Another helpless shrug, a smile, a wink. "Poor us." A round of chuckles.

"I made sure I was alone in the changing room after the practice..." Niko's whisper lowered to barely audible. "I got completely naked, and started stroking myself..."

"Very good. Go on." As usual, her face betrayed nothing but a hint of a smile.

"And I got really close, I could feel the orgasm coming right up..."

"Were you making cute noises?"

He shot her a stern glare. "I do not make cute noises."

"Any object with a clear enough magical potency can be a focus. Artificial, natural, doesn't really matter. But the most tried and true are crystalline structures." Professor Fink tapped the quartz on the tripod.

"What happened then, Niko?"

"Just like you told me to, I had to keep going for fifteen minutes. If I ever felt I was close, I let go and waited..."

"Were you afraid of getting caught?"

"Couple of times I shoved the clothes over my lap because I thought someone was coming."

"But you did finish?"

"Oh yes. Made a huge mess on the floor."

"Did you say my name then?"

"Loud and clear."

"Crystals are neat because their geometry not only focuses well, but also makes for an easy get-away. Remember, the number one danger when using a focus is that your magical capacity actually gets channelled through it, and if you're not careful, it might get stuck there! If that happens, and, say, you get separated from the focus, well - then you're in a pickle." Professor Fink raised his finger and looked up to the ceiling. "You're in a hell of a pickle. It's almost impossible for you to do magic. That's why you need to be careful never to get too involved in your focus!" He looked back at his students with a smile of gentle admonition.

Diane reached over to Niko's notebook, and made a little check mark.

"Very good. High marks."

"Alright, Diane. Let's hear your report."

She inhaled and stalled for a moment, before starting in an even, calm whisper.

"Last night after we turned off the lights, I waited. My roommate tossed in her bed for a few minutes, but she's a fast sleeper. I slithered out of my nightclothes and was naked under the sheets. I thought of your naked body, of the fun times we've been having... And that was all I needed to get nice and wet. When I pushed these inside myself..." she extended the middle fingers of her left hand, "they just glided right in." The two fingers reached and gently stroked Niko's wrist. He swallowed.

"So, it's not like focuses are obsolete or anything. There's just a very specific set of circumstances where using them will actually benefit you. And there's an entire course on that, you can take it, I think, in your third or fourth year, we won't be getting into that. They will, objectively, allow you to shift more energy to a more specific aim. But there are trade-offs. It all depends on the conceptual links that you can work into your spellmaking."

"And then, with Yolanda just a few feet away from me, maybe asleep or maybe not, I pictured you on top of me, and I touched myself, and touched, and touched... and I wanted to moan and mewl, but I had to be very, very quiet."

"And you came quietly?"

"Almost. When it hit me, I kind of made this little whine. It was rather obvious. I really do hope that Yolanda was asleep."

He smirked. "Your description is a little vague. Can you reproduce the sound, for closer appreciation?"

He was joking, of course; and it was to his enormous horror that she twisted her eyebrows, closed her eyes, and let out a quiet moan, warm and very unmistakable. He straightened up and looked around; but she'd timed her display with Professor Fink dragging the tripod noisily across the floor, and it remained unnoticed. He breathed out and looked at her; she was following the lecturer with perfectly undisturbed interest, and just a slight twinkle in her eye.

"Alright." He reached out and checked her notebook in return. "Very good. Have you thought of a new assignment yet?"

Eyes still on the professor, she leaned back. "I've got something better."

"Oh?"

"Did you hear they found a leech-wraith haunting our cellar? Tomorrow at twelve a team will come in to banish it."

Niko inclined his head. A leech-wraith? These things tend to be attracted to misery, regrets, unfulfilled potentials. Kind of weird to find one in a place bustling with activity, such as one of the country's most prestigious magic universities. But to be honest, Vallnord did have some amazingly hauntable cellars.

"Okay, so what about it?"

"A banishing ritual is kind of a nuisance, so the entire building will be evacuated for two hours or so. Also, the team is external, so they'll have to disable the intruder alarm. Which brings me to my point." Her fingers played with her steel fountain pen. "How would you like to get into my actual bed?"

It was so like her, casually drop a question like this and pretend she didn't know that it was the hottest thing he'd ever heard in his life.

Professor Fink placed a large bar of lead on a robust ceramic plate on the desk by the wall.

Vallnord took excellent care of its students' moral well-being. While co-education was pretty much a necessary evil, mandated by centuries of magical tradition, many watchful eyes always strived to ensure that the contacts between male and female students remain purely intellectual. Powerful wards were placed on both the men's and women's dorms to immediately alarm of anyone entering them that shouldn't. Though many students would sometimes look wistfully to the windows of the opposite gender's dorms, Niko'd never heard of any actually getting there.

But Vallnord was clearly no match for Diane's practicality.

"So," she looked at Niko, and finally cracked a little smile. "Would you like that?"

"Take a guess, Diane. Take a guess if I'd like that."

Professor Fink cleared his throat, and squinted at the quartz. The air between the crystal and the lead bar blurred, and there was a low hum; and the bar bent down, half-melted. Professor Fink broke the magic off and licked his lips, barely even winded. There was a lot of impressed muttering.

"Oh, wow." Niko whispered. That was really a lot of energy shifted with very little effort. Any other day, it would have really awed him.

*

Diane slung her bag over her shoulder.

"Alright, I'm off. See you in the afternoon."

Yolanda nodded from her desk. "What time is it? Do I have to flee yet?"

"It's only eleven. You still got an hour."

Chances are, at some point in your life you had to banish a spectre from some dark nook in your house. In that case you know the basics of this ritual, which are really the same for every kind of apparition - you light some incense, you chant a bit, you disengage the presence from the space it's occupying. This is roughly what was going to happen today - except a leech-wraith is no house imp, and the cellars under the Vallnord women's dorm are no ordinary cellars. This was going to be an industrial-scale job, with whole sackfuls of a vile concoction based on sal ammoniac burnt in gigantic iron censers, and a whole squad of enchanters drawling ominously in a chorus.

The fumes are awful and make your eyes sting. You could probably protect your room with a ritual of air purification - a handful of wild sage, some sea salt, and a very simple atmospheric catalyst. But for just a few hours, why would anyone bother?

Diane reached the triangular stairway that climbed through the middle of the building. She glanced over her shoulder, and headed upwards.

There was an attic above the third floor. It was a large, sunlit space, divided by partition walls into several large rooms. It was currently being used as a common storage area, and not much more besides. Unused furniture, crates, chests and worn leather valises, aged textbooks with margins scribbled on by students long graduated, various useless trinkets of students present which got relegated from the rooms, rugs, dusty red muslin window drapes which were last in use a decade and a half ago, all these things and more were stacked haphazardly all around the place. There was nobody around when Diane entered, blew dust off a desk by a window, and took out of her bag her portable burner, a small tin pot, a water bottle, a handful of wild sage, and a pouch full of sea salt.

*

Niko stepped outside. The women's dorm was directly across the inner park, its reddish walls surreal behind the yews and the plane trees. It was so off-bounds that, deep inside, he didn't really believe that the plan was going to work. Something was going to fail on the way, and in the evening he'd masturbate in the shower, thinking of what could have been.

Nonetheless, he didn't go for the lecture hall in the new wing as he'd normally do. He passed by the Clock Tower and went into the Entrance Hall, and then out of the Academy's grand front doorway. He was carrying with him a stick - and if anybody'd been paying attention, they'd find the way he carried it rather strange. It was flung over his shoulder and balanced with his hand, as if it were a good deal heavier than it should have been.

The Academy had grown gradually, each century adding its own architecture to its make-up. The elaborate iron-and-glass latticework of the Great Conservatory, a true pride of modern engineering, was therefore united in a single building with the well-worn original castle. Niko often wondered at how all of this somehow seamlessly fit together.

And this grand, stately complex stood... kind of in the middle of nowhere, really. The Vallnord Town itself was several miles down the road. There was a new, small train station a ten minutes' walk away. Several villages surrounded the Academy, and some woodland, and behind it rose the low mountain, on whose peak, in the crevices, damp dirty snow would still lurk even in late May.

Well, medieval places of magical learning were always close to nature. And so by inertia, half a millennium later, a grand piece of cityscape was now lost absurdly in the countryside. Yet there was another purpose to this. Remember: students of magic are a potentially dangerous breed. If they stayed in the cities, like those good-for-nothings that studied law and medicine and the natural sciences and loitered around cafes shouting politically subversive slogans at each other... well, let's just say that a student demonstration is easier to deal with if nobody in it knows how to launch a half-decent fireball. Let the young mages remain cloistered safely away, and only think of their studies and the good of their country.

Neither his studies nor the good of his country were on Niko's mind as he circled the Academy through its front lawn, speckled with picnicking students and faculty. He turned the corner of the medieval wall at his left-hand side, which after a minute or two suddenly merged into a newer, neater building with large window; its architects had clearly been more concerned with comfort, and far less concerned with trebuchets.

This was the outer wall of the women's dorm.

There was nobody here, in the shade. Downslope, several houses were clustered in a sort of a small village - mostly inhabited by the faculty's families. It was quiet, and obscured by trees.

He pondered the wall. A powerful enough mage might be able to just walk right through it. Actually, this seemed like exactly the kind of magic where a focus would help. Niko smiled. Professor Fink would have no problem getting into his girl's bed.

Alas, Niko was a mere first-year student, and to reach his girl's bed, he'd have to resort to a simpler trick.

He crouched under a juniper, took off his black uniform jacket, swatted a mosquito, and waited.

*

"Right, watch it, this thing is expensive!" The two enchanters unloading the massive iron censer from the handcart indicated with their rolling eyes that yes, they knew that.

The lead of the banishing team was a young woman in short black curls, who seemed to be exactly as cranky as the old bald caretaker. The two were standing in front of the women's dorm, and had been trying to outlecture each other for the past ten minutes. It was very difficult for the enchanters to cleave their way into the conversation and ask if the alarm was down yet.