Faculty of Fire Read online

  I must admit, I had no idea what kind of misunderstandings could arise between the faculties, but somehow I realised that the division into faculties was very important. And there must be some reason why we were given rooms on separate floors.

  “And now would you please proceed into the Academy building, where your guides are waiting for you …” – there was another odd mechanical chuckle, “… as they say, abandon hope all who enter here.”

  Scene 7

  After walking through the familiar monotonous corridors with the strange lighting, we reached a teleport hall. This was a different hall, not the one from which I had travelled to Romius’s study. That room had only a few teleports, but there were about thirty of them in here!

  The entire crowd of about two hundred people was divided into several slowly moving streams, each of which ended at a teleport.

  “What was it that voice said about clothes?” I asked Chas in a quiet voice.

  He grinned spitefully from ear to ear.

  “That’s just another of your head glitches, I expect.”

  One of the Craftsmen immediately hissed at him: “Young man, stop chattering.”

  Chas shut up, but he couldn’t keep quiet for long.

  “From what I know, we’ll be living on the same floor,” he whispered to me. “So we should try to get rooms close to each other.”

  I must say, Chas’s eyes were blazing ecstatically all the way to the teleports, and that gave his face a kind of childish and stupid look. I didn’t think I’d ever seen my oldest friend look that way before.

  “Yes, we should,” I agreed. Then I suddenly remembered what Nick had told me and asked. “By the way, what are atoms?”

  “Atoms? Er … well, they’re these little things that the things we’re made of are made of.”

  This explanation took my breath away for a moment.

  “Well … they’re obviously something very small,” I concluded.

  “You can’t even imagine how small,” Chas confirmed, turning away from me. “Look, Liz’s little friends have gone through a different teleport, so we won’t see them again.”

  “Why won’t we?” I asked in surprise.

  “Well, think about it,” said Chas, scratching his head thoughtfully. “All the different elements have different teachers and they live on different levels. Where are we going to meet them?”

  “You know,” I said, scratching my head too, “I somehow have the idea there’s more to life in the Academy than classes and dumb-ass sitting around in your room.”

  Chas swore.

  “Yes, I was just fantasising, I suppose. I don’t really know anything about what life’s like inside the Academy. But let’s hope that strange voice was exaggerating when it talked about being slaves and all the rest of it.”

  I suddenly realised Chas wasn’t listening to me. “Hello-o!”

  I slapped my friend on the shoulder, but he still didn’t take any notice of me.

  “Will you look at that! I’ve never seen a real teleport working before,” he murmured, gazing spellbound at the people disappearing into the teleports.

  I glanced at the teleports: okay, so the people who stood on the round platforms disappeared, okay, so the way they disappeared was beautiful. Not all at once, but from the top down up. As if some cosmic eraser worked its way down from the top of the head to the heels and the person was rubbed out.

  “I wonder what principle they work on?” Chas said, but I couldn’t tell if he was talking to me or himself. “Lots of people think it’s a matter of copying you or splitting you up into atoms.”

  “That’s all nonsense,” I replied automatically. “I was told those rumours are well wide of the truth.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Er … er …” I said, feverishly running through all the possible answers I could give, but I couldn’t come up with anything better, so I told the truth. “It was one of the senior pupils that I happen to know.”

  “And when did you manage to get to know people like that?” Chas rumbled. “And even more interesting – why didn’t you bother to introduce me to them?”

  I was just about to promise Chas quite sincerely that I would introduce him to all the pupils from senior classes that I had ever seen, but just in the nick of time our turn came to stand on the round surface of the teleport.

  “I’ll talk to you about this again,” Chas promised as he stepped onto the low platform.

  The moment my friend disappeared, a slim, supple figure flitted past me.

  “Pardon me, young man, may I go ahead of you?” the girl asked, flashing her fangs flirtatiously, and stepped into the teleport.

  I stood there for a while, batting my eyelids in amazement and trying to understand why Alice needed to go through in front of me. Then I realised that Chas and I had been at the end of the queue. In fact, only a moment earlier there hadn’t been anyone behind us at all. I was the last person in the queue!

  I looked round anxiously and came nose to nose with the Craftsman who had shown us to the teleport hall.

  “Did you see a girl in a black robe?”

  “A girl?” I asked, knowing perfectly well who he had in mind, but without the slightest idea of what he wanted Alice for. “I don’t think so, I’m the last in the queue, and my friend was in front of me. Ask the pupils at the other teleports,” I said, vaguely waving a hand in the direction of the waiting crowd.

  The Craftsman nodded and walked to the next teleport, but he gave me one last glance to make sure he would remember my face. I got the feeling I’d have to answer for my little lie.

  I quickly stepped into the teleport, hoping to be transported out of reach of all my problems.

  “Ah, there you are!” said Chas, attacking me almost before I stepped down off the teleport. “And there was I thinking you’d changed your mind and gone back home.”

  “You know, I was going to,” I confessed. “But this Craftsman came running up and persuaded me to stay. He said without me there wouldn’t be anyone to keep an eye on you. And if you weren’t watched very carefully, the entire Academy would soon be ruined in no time and simply fall apart.”

  Chas flashed a toothy white smile: “You guessed my plans. Now I’ll have to kill you and feed the body to Liz’s little friends.”

  “Why do that?”

  “It seems the obvious thing to do. They remind me of jackals somehow. Nature’s garbage collectors.”

  “Ah …” I said, nodding in agreement, and finally noticed that we were all alone in the corridor. “But where are all the others?”

  “They’ve been shown to their rooms,” Chas said with a shrug.

  “And what about us? Are we going to live in the corridor?”

  “Now that’s an idea, why not?” Chas chuckled. “But actually, I’ve already found out where we have to go, only you took so long getting here … I decided to wait for you, but no one else waited for me.”

  “Well, well,” I said, feeling rather sad for some reason. “The mysterious Academy seems to work just like an ordinary hotel.”

  “Just you wait, not long ago they called us slaves, didn’t they? Now they’ll transport us to cauliflower plantations or something, that’ll teach you. Just be glad it’s a hotel, and not a barracks, like that camp run by the School of the Arts.”

  I shuddered, remembering how we lived in that barracks for months – the very thought of it made me feel itchy. There wasn’t even a bathroom, just a single communal shower. As for the food – it was best not to remember that. And living five to a room was an absolute nightmare.

  “Sissy,” said Chas when he saw my reaction. “Blue blood, that’s your problem. But that’s enough reminiscing, let’s go and take a look at our rooms.”

  I liked that idea, and we set off to the far end of the corridor where Chas told me our rooms were – numbers 5113 and 5115. The first two figures indicated the floor, and the second two the number of the room.

  Chas immediately announced that
number 5115 was his room, and I could take “lucky” thirteen. I just shrugged off this injustice, because, I must confess, I was more concerned about something else – I was trying to come to terms with the physical fact that I was on the fifty-first floor. What kind of view would there be from my window? I’d probably be able to see all the castles of the vampires, and even all the islands in the Rainbow Sea. And the Academy had eighty-eight floors. From the top floor you could probably even see the Tabernacle Caliphate with all its tents and the mountain wyverns’ nests.

  There was no need for keys. The moment I walked up to the door of my room it opened.

  The room wasn’t anything special. Just an average medium-sized room, although if my aunt had seen it, she would certainly have said an apartment like this was unworthy of my very presence, and actually living in it was entirely out of the question. And on the subject of my aunt, how could she possibly justify drugging me like that? When I got back home, I was going to have a very serious talk with her – what a way to treat a beloved nephew. And I could still get into trouble because of her … although I wasn’t quite sure who with …

  I walked over to the window that took up half the wall and stopped, dumbfounded. I realised the fifty-first floor wasn’t the tenth – which was the highest I’d ever been – but I wasn’t prepared for this … I could survey the entire city from a height way up above the birds … the clouds were hanging below me, at about the level of the fortieth floor.

  I automatically staggered back a step.

  If you fell from that height, your whole life could easily flash past before your eyes … you’d have enough time to grow old on the way down. And when you finally landed, there’d be nothing but a damp spot left on the ground.

  I backed away a few more steps from the window. I didn’t feel any sense of awe, just the ordinary fear of a creature born to crawl that comes face to face a genuinely immense height.

  I cast a more critical glance round the modest room where I was going to spend at least three months. I wondered where the washroom was.

  Someone knocked impatiently at the door.

  “Who is it?” I asked automatically.

  “The introductory lecture for the course starts in exactly one hour in auditorium 3333,” a voice said outside.

  I hurriedly opened the door in order to find out more about our future timetable, but when I looked out into the corridor, all I saw was Chas looking out of the next room.

  “He ran off. Did you hear that? We’ve only just moved in, and already they’re driving us to the plantations.”

  “What plantations?” I asked, puzzled.

  “Oh come on,” said Chas. “We’re going to dig through the fields of knowledge with spades, uprooting the weeds of false ideas and creeds.”

  I strained my brain to follow my friend’s high-flown analogy. He was so fond of using flowery language, although most of the things he said actually came down to pretty simple, practical ideas. It was just a shame he wasn’t capable of expressing those ideas in a more accessible form.

  “Have you looked out the window?” Chas asked me in the meantime. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” I agreed, with a slight shudder. “Just a little bit scary.”

  “Don’t be silly, it’s not frightening at all. When we learn to levitate, floating down from the fiftieth floor will be my favourite stunt.”

  “Listen,” I said – I’d just had an interesting idea. “Come in for a sec.”

  Chas trotted up to me. He was clearly overflowing with energy and didn’t know what to do with it.

  “Look out the window and point to the sun.”

  What good are friends if they can’t read your thoughts? Chas instantly knew what I wanted to do.

  “My sun’s there,” he declared, pointing crudely at the window with his finger.

  “And mine’s there,” I said, standing beside him and pointing with my hand … a lot further to the right.

  “You need to get treatment,” Chas announced. “The only comfort I can offer you is that the effects of hypnosis usually don’t last very long …”

  I sighed in relief.

  “From a few hours to a few years,” he concluded.

  “What!”

  “What’s the problem?” Chas asked dismissively. “So the sun will rise a bit earlier for you than it does for normal people. What harm does that do you?”

  “Get out of here,” I said, offended.

  “Don’t let a little thing like that get you all hot and bothered,” my friend reassured me. “We’re in the Academy, do you understand that?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “All right. Now, how would you like me to show you the very best cure for any hypnosis?”

  “What is it?”

  “Raise your right arm.”

  I did as he said.

  “And now lower it quickly and say: “To the dragon’s lair with it!”

  “To the dragon’s … ah, you and your stupid jokes!” I roared, but I really did start feeling a bit better, and I couldn’t hold back a grin.

  “See, I told you it would help. It’s a tried and tested remedy,” Chas declared. “Okay, you do what you like, but I’m going to sort out my things.”

  “Knock when you’re ready to go to the lecture,” I muttered as I closed the door behind him.

  It was important for me that he didn’t forget, otherwise I’d never find room 3333 – I hadn’t figured out the teleport system yet. Or rather, no one had explained to me how to tell where each of the teleports led to. I could only hope that Chas already had all the information we needed somewhere in that enquiring mind of his.

  I barely had time to take my spare musicale out of the inside pocket of my rather sorry-looking jacket before there was another knock at the door.

  Following my recent experience, I opened it quickly, before this visitor could disappear as well.

  But I needn’t have worried, far from disappearing, this visitor actually walked into my room the moment I opened the door.

  “Your clothes,” the young man in blue livery explained.

  Before my eyes there appeared a heap of strange yellow fabric. As far as I could guess, when this floppy-looking cloak was unfolded and then fastened back together, it should became a comfortable set of livery like the ones the Craftsmen wore. But I still didn’t have a clue how to do that.

  “E-e-er …” I began.

  “Just a moment, I’ll show you,” the young guy said helpfully.

  A little while later I was all dressed up and ready for anything. I almost asked the young guy if he would come the next day to help me get dressed again, but I really didn’t want to appear stupid. No matter how many times he showed me what was attached where, I still didn’t understand a thing, so all I could do was add a few more questions to the list that I was intending to ask Chas, as the person I knew who was best-informed about the Academy. Of course, somewhere in this eighty-eight-floor tower there were people who must know more than Chas did … only how could I get to them?

  The young guy who brought my clothes had left behind a set of spare cords, strings and other little bits and pieces. Why couldn’t they fasten everything with buttons and zippers, like normal people did?

  After sitting there for a while, staring stupidly at the floor, I decided to call for Chas. As I opened the door, I saw my friend emerging from his room.

  “You know …”

  “It’s kind of dull round here,” we both said at the same time and laughed.

  “How do you like the new clothes?” Chas enquired, running one hand over his yellow livery rather suspiciously.

  “All those strings and stuff, it’s terrible. Tomorrow morning I’m sure I’ll get tangled up in this third-rate off-cut,” I complained.

  That’s not what I meant,” Chas said with a frown. “And the cloth isn’t third-rate at all. It’s just kind of strange.”

  I shrugged. If Chas said it was strange, then it was strange. Although it looked
a lot like ordinary silk to me.

  We set along the corridor towards the teleports.

  Oh, yes, about those devices.

  “Do you know how to use the teleports?” I enquired.

  “How would I know?” asked Chas, surprised.

  That panicked me a bit.

  “Why wouldn’t you know? You’re the expert on everything to do with the Academy …”