Back To School - Power Without Responsibility -
~oOo~
Eren, Kiki, Pavel and Welspun return to their respective schools after the three weeks of Summer Break, each with a renewed sense of purpose. Waiting for them in their various message slots or mail boxes they each find two intriguing messages.
The first of these is the same for all of them: a letter from the headmaster of the Imperial College, announcing the reinstatement of the Joint Teaching programme. Joint lessons will commence this very afternoon, with a 'Perils of Sorcery' lesson with Father Emoliant, the Imperial College liturgist. Recalling their previous lesson. with this worthy, the apprentices can't help feeling a little apprehensive - especially Eren, Kiki and Pavel, who had all had an unwelcome first-hand experience of sorcery's perils. But each of the apprentices also has an additional communication to ponder.
Eren finds a neatly folded note from Adept Hermeclus, asking her to drop by his office when she gets a chance. She hasn't seen her sponsor since the beginning of last term, soon after her attempted abduction by two unknown men, aided and abetted by another apprentice, Vey. She had told Hermeclus about some (but not all) of her adventures and misadventures, and he had been sympathetic to her fears, even going so far as to place a warding glyph on her room and teach her some protective magic. But he'd also seemed aware that she was being somewhat circumspect in her tale and had shown a lot more interest in identifying her would-be-abductors than any of the other masters. He'd been away from the city for most of last term, so she wasn't sure how much he knew about Stockfish. Perhaps that was why he wanted to see her...
Kiki finds another letter waiting for her, this one from Salazari. It is rather terse, simply asking her to visit him "at your earliest convenience". Naturally there is no explanation of why the cartographer had failed to join them for Kiki's meeting with Stockfish - although the fact that Pavel had subsequently seen him locked in a cell at the Consistory Court gave them a pretty good notion - nor of why he hadn't been in touch with Kiki before now. Although, looking at the date on the letter, Kiki sees that it had been sent almost four weeks earlier, which means that it has been sitting in her mail slot since the end of last term.
Pavel finds a rather grubby envelope, with a familiar-looking seal that immediately sets his pulse racing. The last time he'd seen this seal had been on an envelope that Carrick had left him, with strict instructions not to open it except in an emergency. If this one has come from Carrick too, then it will be the first word he's had from his sponsor since the adept disappeared - more than ten weeks ago now. Ripping the envelope open excitedly, Pavel finds a small scrap of paper with one word scrawled on it: Praxis.
This is the name of the strange entity that he and Eren had discovered in the secret basement at Imperial College, which claimed to be the guardian of a mysterious organisation called the Tripartite Fraternity. This makes Pavel wonder if the note could instead be from Master Jayron, who he knows is a member of that Fraternity. But why would Jayron use the same seal as Carrick? The two adepts clearly have some sort of connection, but he'd never managed to discover its nature. And Jayron, like Carrick, had disappeared around the time of their fateful encounter with Stockfish. Did this mean that one of the adepts had returned?
Welspun finds a hastily-scribbled letter from Filmore, which reads: "Homework club! E missing, but left stats book. Library after?"
The text is uncharacteristically brief for his friend, who is normally inclined to be long-winded, but it manages to convey a lot of information that would not be apparent to the casual reader. The first two words, for example, immediately tells Welspun that the 'E' refers to Exalian - although he's not sure what Filmore means by 'missing'. 'Homework Club' is a phrase used by the anonymous authors of a book of mischievous petty magic spells, which Welspun and Filmore had helped Exalian to decrypt at the beginning of last term. And Filmore's mention of 'stats book' must refer to the encoded book itself, which is disguised as an unedifying reference work on statistics.
Welspun hadn't been able to help with the decryption work for most of last term, because the curfew and travel restrictions meant that he, as a student of the School of Tenebrous Wisdom, couldn't easily concoct an excuse to spend time with Exalian and Filmore, who are both Imperial college apprentices. He had, however, had continued his correspondence with Filmore and knows that Exalian had been making good - if slow - progress with the book. But perhaps now that the Joint Lessons were being reinstated, there would also be a lifting of the curfew...
~oOo~
Eren quickly decides that she is too busy to see her sponsor before lunch, it will have to wait until later, following the joint teaching session.
She then proceeds to putter about and try to find ways to kill time until then. She tries to ignore the feeling, but finally admits to herself that she is simply procrastinating, worried about what he'll have to say.
The benefit of her procrastination is that she gets her room picked up, and her new robes well brushed off, prior to class. Thinking about what happened to her rooms before, and not sure if the warding is still active, she puts the orb into its bag, in a secure pocket.
~oOo~
The mood amongst the students of the joint class when they gather in the appointed classroom later that day is mixed. Most of them are happy that the joint teaching experiment has resumed, especially those that had made new friends amongst the apprentices from the other Schools, but no-one's really looking forward to this particular lesson.
As they wait for Father Emoliant to arrive - a little more quietly this time, mindful of their last encounter with the Imperial College liturgist - most of the whispered conversations concern the missing member of the class. Exalian's absence had already been noted by many of his Imperial peers during the morning, but it had been a topic of intense speculation over lunch and they were keen to share the host of rumours that had been flying around. Many of these are just wild speculation, including a grimly popular theory that he has suffered the same fate as the unfortunate Fabian [1]. Where all of the rumours concur, however, is that no-one has seen or heard from Exalian since the end of last term.
Welspun is deep in conversation with Filmore. His friend and correspondent tells him that he'd seen Exalian at the very end of last term, when the other apprentice had given him the 'Homework Club' book for 'safe-keeping'. This had been a bit of a surprise - Exalian had always been loath to let the book out of his sight - so Filmore couldn't help asking him why. At this point Exalian had seemed suddenly uncomfortable, muttering something about helping his master with a project and not being sure when he'd have time to look at the book again. It was only later that Filmore had realised why this explanation seemed so unconvincing: Jayron, Exalian's master, had been absent from the college for weeks.
Eren is too distracted to listen to the whispers. She's happy to see Kiki and Pavel again, but feels more than a little uncomfortable to be in a room with Vey. She'd done her best to avoid him all last term and he had seemed to be doing the same, but they will find it hard to avoid each other in the joint class. She still isn't sure why she hadn't told the masters about the boy's role in her attempted abduction - or the time that he'd held a knife to her throat. Actually, she had told one of the masters, she suddenly remembers: Jayron. But she hadn't seen him since the time he'd hidden her and Pavel in the secret basement beneath the college. And no-one - with the possible exception of her sponsor, Adept Hermeclus - had seemed interested in the attempted abduction.
Then a familiar voice silences all of the whispered conversations.
"Good afternoon, class," Father Emoliant intones as he enters the room. "It gives me great pleasure to welcome you all back to this grand educational enterprise. I trust that you all had a pleasant Summer Break? Excellent. Now, last term, before our lessons were interrupted, I spoke to you about the Wizardly Virtues that should guide you in your studies. Today we shall consider the first of the Vices that imperil you, both as apprentices and in your future as adepts. This lesson is entitled 'Sorcery: Power Without Responsibility'."
The basic thrust of the liturgist's lecture is all-too-well-known to the students: sorcery is dangerous and evil, because it is a corruption of the pure magic taught by the Schools, which is exercised under the holy auspices of the Churches. Sorcery is an insidious evil, because it can be superficially indistinguishable from true wizardry, leading the unwary to believe that it is no different. Sorcerers are dangerous, because their exercise of magical power is unchecked by the moral framework that guides the actions of the true adept. Worse still, once they have deviated from the true path, sorcerers are almost inevitably drawn deeper and deeper into perfidy by the seductive promise of unfettered power that the forbidden magic seems to offer.
Emoliant's elaboration of this last element of the familiar litany is where he starts to lose his students. He maintains that all unsanctioned magic is inherently dangerous to the student of wizardry, because it has the potential to lead them down the path of sorcery. The magic granted to worshippers by the Churches is obviously exempted from this condemnation, and the liturgist grudgingly concedes that certain other organisations might conceivably provide their members with wholesome magic. But he is unreserved in his condemnation of Alchemy and Petty Magic, which he describes as a "perfidious canker that has infected the student bodies of Syran's schools", as well as "witchcraft and pagan devilry, which have no place in an institution devoted to Holy Reason".
"Your masters have seen fit to turn a blind eye to these degenerate magicks in the past," he continues. "Dismissing them as harmless distractions that apprentices invariably put aside once they have reached a sufficiently advanced stage in their studies. But I believe that recent events, most notably the unmasking of a vile sorcerer within this very institution, have revealed the dangers of this misguided permissiveness. For that reason, I am confident that the Ecumenical Council, with the full backing of the Headmaster, will be announcing a new initiative to rid these hallowed halls of all unsanctioned magic. And I sincerely hope that these measures will soon be approved by the other Schools..."
~oOo~
[1] Fabian: the apprentice who was murdered last term
