Faculty of Fire Read online

  “What are they arguing about?” I enquired as we set off towards the Craftsmen, who were still absorbed in their quarrel.

  “You’ll never believe it,” said Nick, talking in a whisper. “Something quite incredible happened …”

  “Aha,” Serge put in. “About an hour ago someone came into the yard of the Academy wearing a loose robe with a hood that hid their face. Everything started as usual: the speech of greeting then the beginning of the first test. The hooded person passed it and became affiliated to the element of fire, then passed all the other tests without any problem.”

  “What’s so unusual about that?” I asked.

  “Nothing. Except that when they asked this person to reveal their face at the end of the tests, the person turned out to be …”

  “A vampire,” said Anna, interrupting Serge.

  “Yes, a vampire,” Serge went on. “And not just a vampire, but an extremely pretty female vampire.”

  I stared at Serge in amazement, trying to digest what I’d just heard. A vampire had come out in broad daylight and come here, of all places, to enrol in the Academy! It was simply incredible, they had no right to come out on the streets of the capital before midnight. And there had never been a single case of a vampire enrolling in the Academy. It wasn’t even a matter of vampires not having any abilities in the Craft, they had their own unique abilities. But none of those bloodsuckers would have dared to come here, to the Academy!

  “And how could this vampire show her face before the sun had set?” I asked.

  “That’s just it!” said Serge, raising his forefinger in the air. “That’s the other strange thing. The vampiress turned out to be a member of the Clan of Noos.”

  “The day clan?” I exclaimed in amazement.

  “Precisely. As far as I’m aware, not even the Craftsmen have any reliable information about that clan.”

  “But …” I said, about to ask more questions, but I received a sudden nudge in the side from Nick. Apparently we’d moved too close to the Craftsmen who were arguing about that very subject.

  “It’s outrageous!” the fat man said. “We cannot possibly permit such sacrilege!”

  “She passed all the tests,” Romius said calmly. “The girl has a perfect right to study in the Academy, and not a single one of the rules that you, my dear colleague, are so fond of quoting, says anything that could prevent her being enrolled.”

  The other two Craftsmen nodded in agreement.

  “But … but …” the fat man wailed desperately. “It’s not right …”

  “There’s nothing to be done, my friend,” Romius said in a surprisingly friendly voice, laying his hand on the other man’s shoulder. “We didn’t create these rules, but we are obliged to follow them.”

  The fat man waved his hand thorough the air and set off towards the tower, muttering under his breath.

  “Poor Shins,” Romius sighed. “And after all, he has good reason to feel indignant. This is a really serious problem. Well, we’ll come to that later, I still have work to do here.” He turned to the pupils. “Who took the young man’s musicale for safekeeping when he suffered his sunstroke?”

  Serge remembered that he had my musicale – he took the device out from under his livery and handed it to me.

  “Listen, that’s good music. Where did you get it?” he asked in a whisper.

  “It’s mine,” I said, feeling rather embarrassed as I took the round object commonly known as a musicale.

  “Let me copy it later,” he whispered to me, and walked away towards the other pupils.

  Romius beckoned to me, and we set off towards the doors of the tower.

  “Put on the same music you were listening to when you saw … what you saw,” he said.

  “Okay,” I answered readily and switched on the musicale.

  It started paying that pleasant melody.

  “Well now, do you see anything?” Romius asked impatiently.

  I shook my head as I looked carefully round the almost empty yard.

  “Look over there, where that group of people has gathered, there should be some free prisms above them,” he prompted.

  I cast another weary glance round the yard and switched off the musicale.

  “I can’t see them. So how did I manage to pass the test before? Maybe I imagined it all, and I really did have sunstroke?” I asked my uncle sadly. “There’s no point in me coming to study in the Academy. I always knew I didn’t have any ability for the Craft.”

  “We’ll see about that,” he said in a perfectly expressionless voice. “But for now go on home. I’ll see you this evening in the ‘Golden Half Moon’ for the enrolment day celebrations. And by the way, I’ll confiscate that muse of yours for the time being, we have to work out just what kind if music that is …”

  I meekly handed the muse over to Romius, shook his hand and turned to leave.

  “Yes, and another thing,” said Romius. “Say as little as possible about what happened. The Craftsmen saw it, after all, we can see all the prisms in the square, but they don’t need to know about our conversation. I’ll deal with them myself. But you tell everyone else that you just barely managed to separate out the sphere of fire, and then you fainted from the strain.”

  I looked round in surprise, but Romius had already set off towards one of the four groups standing in the far corner of the yard. Even Romius didn’t seem particularly interested … strange …

  There was nothing left for me to do but wave goodbye to my new friends and go home. It was only when I was already outside the gates, on the Square of the Seven Fountains, that I realised how incredibly tired and hungry I was. That was hardly surprising, after all, evening was already falling, and I hadn’t eaten anything all day long.

  The sun had almost dropped behind the horizon, tinting the cloudless sky with its red glow. As a matter of fact, the sky above the golden city is always cloudless, the faculty of air keeps a careful eye on the weather and arranges rain only on certain days for the sake of variety.

  The square was still packed with people, I could hear the calls of street vendors selling pies, buns and other kinds of food. I couldn’t help licking my lips, but I still decided to wait before I bought anything and make my purchase in a more expensive district. My social standing required it, and the habit of eating costly and delicious food had been painstaking developed in me since early childhood.

  As I expected, the mood of the crowd had changed fundamentally. When I walked this way earlier in the day, the people were tense as they waited for their turn, and they were jostling each other nervously, but everything was different now. Everyone was gradually relaxing and getting into the mood for celebration. The enrolment was usually over before sunset. Of course, the entire city couldn’t take the tests at the Academy, that was the privilege of the Great Houses and rich families, who lived in the centre of the city. The others had to make their way to branches of the Academy located on the outskirts. There were about ten of them in all. It was actually owing to the Academy that Lita had become the richest and largest city in the world. The “gilding” of our city alone was worth an incredible fortune. People actually came to the Academy enrolment from other cities and even from the Borderland.

  I glanced around, hoping to see Chas or my aunt and the girls. Unfortunately, they were nowhere to be found and I had to go home on my own.

  The hunger started gnawing at me again, and I bought a few meat pies from a trader. Thanks to the Emperor’s efforts, it had been getting harder and harder to buy any kind of meat. And the price of meat dishes had risen substantially, making them the food of the select few.

  I wandered through the streets of the golden city, savouring the delicious pies and breathing the fresh air (that was thanks to the Craftsmens’ efforts). The fog in my head was slowly dispersing and taking all my thoughts with it. I wandered homewards, unburdened by any attempt to think, without trying to focus my attention on anything. Just once I felt that strange prickling sensation in my
temples again. It reminded me of the feeling I’d had in the morning – that I was being observed with evil intent, only the pain was sharper now. It passed in an instant, before I even had time to get frightened. I glanced around and didn’t notice anything suspicious this time either. And how could I possibly find something suspicious in such a huge crowd? Just to be on the safe side, I tried to reach home as quickly as possible. No, it wasn’t actually fear that I felt, I was just taking sensible precautions …

  Surprisingly enough, there was no one at home. My aunt and her nieces had either not got back yet, or they’d gone to one of the society receptions organised in honour of enrolment day at the Academy. Unlike me, they simply adored that sort of thing.

  As usual, I’d forgotten the crystal for the house, and I had to climb in through the second-floor window again. The protective spells were supposed to defend the house against any intrusion, but I’d figured out that if you left the second-floor window open, the protective spells were powerless. I was usually careful to leave the window of my room open for times like this.

  I jumped, hauled myself up on to the windowsill and stood on it, clinging to an almost invisible crack in the wall. The window was slightly open, as usual, and it was easy for me to pull it wide open and jump into my room.

  When I turned round to close the window, I heard a quiet voice behind me: “Stop there.”

  I stood, perfectly still.

  “Close the window slowly and turn round,” said the quiet voice.

  I closed the window and turned round very slowly.

  There was something sitting on my holy of holies – my bed. This something was wearing a loose brown robe with a hood and pointing a small crossbow at me.

  I must admit that at first I was so surprised, I didn’t even know what to say.

  “Er … are you comfortable?” I asked eventually.

  “What are doing here?” a voice asked from under the hood.

  My guest was whispering so quietly, I couldn’t even tell if the “something” was a he or a she.

  “Er, hmm, I live here,” I replied, casting a quick glance round the room.

  I couldn’t see any signs of a search or a robbery: the rubbish that littered the floor was still where it had been. The only table was still crammed with various different muses. The only change was the strange something dressed in a loose robe that had appeared on the bed.

  “People who live in a house usually don’t climb in the window,” the something observed.

  It was quite right, of course.

  “But I forgot my keys,” I said, rather more confidently this time.

  “But of course, you all forget your keys. So now I’ll take you to the guards, and you can tell them all about it,” the something in a loose robe said mockingly.

  Suddenly I found all this very funny. It was sitting in my house, in my room, on my bed, threatening me with the guards, and menacing me with a crossbow, when dodging crossbow bolts was one the things you were taught during the first year of studying the Art. I couldn’t help myself, I laughed.

  “Are you crazy?” the something asked.

  “Yes,” I replied happily. “And I don’t much like having a crossbow aimed at me.”

  As I said it, I jumped forward quickly, dodged the bolt and knocked the crossbow out of my uninvited guest’s hands.

  My guest fell backwards in surprise and I quickly pounced on the figure floundering in the loose robe and pinned it down against the bed. Grasping the hands firmly and holding the legs down with my own just to be sure, I was finally able to get a look at the face.

  Well, how about that!

  In my surprise I almost let go of my opponent’s hands. The person hiding under the hood was an incredibly beautiful girl with frightened eyes and charming long fangs. Her red eyes and equally red lips looked very pretty against the background of her white skin and the long dark hair scattered across the pillow. Did I say pretty? I’d never seen a more beautiful creature in my life.

  “Er, this is first time this has happened to me,” I said with the most charming smile I could manage. “A girl climbs into my bed of her own free will without even bothering to introduce herself.”

  I relaxed too soon, and almost got a knee in highly undesirable spot. Fortunately my defensive reflexes were fast enough for me to block the blow with my own knee.

  “Aren’t you ashamed, girl?” I asked in the same sweet tone of voice. “I haven’t touched you and you fire your crossbow at me. By the way, you’ve ruined my favourite picture,” I added, spotting out of the corner of my eye that the bolt had stuck right in the centre of a picture of a beautiful boat sailing down a river past the green bank of one of the ancient gardens of the city. The bolt had hit the boat full on.

  I was trying to use humour to conceal the confusion I was beginning to feel. If she was a real vampires, she could quite easily tie me in a knot … The mastery of the Art is in their blood, and no human can fight on equal terms with a hereditary vampire. But then, this was a strange kind of vampire. The only thing I could see in her eyes was fear …

  “Calm down, I won’t do you any harm,” I said hastily, suddenly starting to feel guilty, “only promise to behave yourself,”

  She nodded in agreement. That was when I noticed that the girl’s face was covered in scratches. Judging from her rapid breathing, she was very tired and could have been involved in a serious fight. That would explain why she was so weak …

  “Then I’ll let you go, and we can have a quiet talk,” I said, vaulting off the bed in a beautiful reverse somersault. You have to show off for a girl.

  The vampiress sat up on the bed, glancing in fright from me to the crossbow that I’d thrown into the far corner of the room.

  “What are you doing here in my room?” I asked, breaking the silence.

  “So it really is your room?” my guest asked in a surprisingly calm voice.

  “It was mine this morning,” I said with a smile.

  The girl clearly did not share my amusement.

  “But why come in through the window?” she asked, moving gently across the bed in the direction of her weapon.

  “I told you, I forgot my keys,” I replied, picking the crossbow up off the floor so that my visitor wouldn’t be tempted. “What were you doing here, honey pie?

  My visitor bit her lip: with her fangs it looked rather frightening, and yet somehow defenceless at the same time …

  “I was hiding,” she replied eventually.

  I raised one eyebrow enquiringly.

  “… My … my relatives were looking for me.”

  “Aha, and you were fighting them off with a crossbow.”

  She looked at me reproachfully.

  “No, it’s just that it’s best for ... my kind not to leave home without a weapon. You know, we’re not very well liked.”

  I had to agree with her there. Vampires and other nocturnal inhabitants of the city and its outskirts were anything but popular, quiet the opposite in fact. If anyone shot a vampire in the night, it wasn’t regarded as a crime. The vampires, faceless shadows and other creatures lived their own life, beside the life of the city, but separate from it. Everyone tried not to mention them, unless it was a matter of murder or other crimes. Then all the suspicion and accusations were directed at the poor outcasts. But then, were they really all that innocent and to be pitied?

  “It’s just … I don’t want to be an outcast, like all the others!” she said with sudden fury in her voice.

  “That’s understandable,” I said thoughtfully. “If you’d like to, please be my guest. You can stay as long as you need to,” I told her with a wink.

  “That’s not a good idea,” the beautiful stranger said with surprising firmness. “If you have no objections, I’d better be going.”

  I gave her a mocking look.

  “And how are you going to get past me?”

  Suddenly I heard footsteps downstairs and my aunt’s deep voice called.

  “Zach, are yo
u home already?”

  “Yes,” I shouted, distracted from the girl for a moment.

  When I turned back, the vampiress wasn’t on the bed any longer. Somehow or other, she had managed to slip out of the room. The only reminders of my charming visitor were the open window and the miniature crossbow in my hands.

  I shrugged, deciding not to fill my head with other people’s problems, and went to delight my aunt with my news.

  I’d got into the Academy!

  Scene 4

  Incredibly enough, my aunt didn’t seem at all enthusiastic about my wonderful news. “Glad to hear it,” she replied, giving me an icy glance, and went off to her room. And the girls took absolutely no notice of the good news either. So there I was, all on my own, feeling happy for my own beloved self, because no one else could be bothered.