Infinite Regress (42 page)

“It’s time for Alchemy,” Cabiria reminded her, rising from her bed. “Are you coming?”

“Yes,” Emily said. She had to set a good example for the younger girls, even though it was running her ragged. Classes—the few that were still running—in the morning, followed by endless work on the ancient spellware in the afternoon and working with her charges in the evening. “How are you coping with
your
charges?”

“Master Tor made me write out a thousand lines yesterday,” Cabiria said. “I gave one of the little brats lines to write, and she had the nerve to complain that her wrist was aching.”

“It probably was,” Emily said. She’d had to write lines once, a punishment from a professor for forgetting the difference between two potions ingredients; one which would complete the potion and one which would turn the mixture into a deadly poison. “A thousand lines is nothing to laugh at.”

Cabiria shrugged. “Neither is hexing one’s friends into a stupor because their snoring is too loud,” she said, picking up her bag. “Let’s go.”

Emily followed her out of the door and towards the alchemy classrooms. Professor Thande and his subordinates had spent the last couple of days cleaning up the mess left behind by hundreds of broken or spilled containers and making the rooms safe for students once again, but the classroom remained messy. Several workbenches had been removed, but not replaced. It looked as though they’d have to team up or share a number of workspaces. Emily couldn’t help thinking that would be a pain.

She nodded to Cabiria, then headed over to join Caleb, standing behind one of the workbenches. He looked tired, his eyes haunted; she knew she probably didn’t look any better. The long hot showers she usually took were gone, replaced by brief washes that didn’t leave her feeling any cleaner. Water had to be rationed, she knew, but it still bothered her. And it made her wonder just where the water had come from, originally. If Whitehall had been built on top of a spring, which was quite likely, was it still there?

“Hey,” Caleb said, quietly. “Did you sleep well?”

Emily shook her head. She’d hoped to spend more time with him, outside working on the ancient spellware, but one or more of her responsibilities consumed almost all of her time. Gordian had been wrong, she suspected. She was spending more and more time with her charges and she had a feeling that was true of most of the other mentoring students too. But then, they
were
trapped in a pocket dimension. The younger students needed extra support.

Caleb touched her arm, gently. “We’ll get out of this, somehow,” he said. “The spellware is finally starting to make sense.”

“Maybe,” Emily muttered back. “But every time I think I have a handle on it, something changes.”

She rubbed her forehead, feeling a headache throbbing under the skin. She was sure she could follow the logic of the original magician, but there were so many idiosyncrasies within the spellware that she was starting to think there
had
been more than one magician. It definitely behaved like a computer program, one created by several different programmers. Not for the first time, she wished she’d paid more attention in computing lessons at school. A nerd who’d studied computing would probably be able to use magic to make himself all-powerful.

Or at least make himself unbeatable
, she added, mentally.
He’d know far more about the underlying logic than me...

She looked up as Professor Thande strode into the classroom, wearing a shirt and trousers instead of his normal lab robe. As always, he reminded her of the Tenth Doctor, right down to the oddly maniacal smile and slight hints of insanity. But then, most alchemists were reputed to be slightly odd. The
really
intelligent and dangerous ones were told to take themselves off to isolated parts of the globe and do their experiments there, well away from innocent bystanders.

“Greetings,” Professor Thande said. “There is a problem, as you may have sensed, with the protective wards in this classroom. They don’t work. It is a
gross
inconvenience.”

Emily sucked in her breath. Alchemy was dangerous enough
with
the protective wards, ready to warn of lethal combinations or redirect the force of an explosion. Without the wards... she didn’t think she wanted to brew
anything
. But she doubted she’d have a choice.

“There is a secondary problem with a number of alchemical supplies,” Professor Thande continued, without giving them time to react. “The protective spells that should have kept them frozen until they were needed have failed. Decay has already set in. Therefore, I have decided to spend
this
class harvesting what can be salvaged from the supplies rather than brewing alchemical potions. Boring, I know, but necessary.”

He paused. “Those of you who intend to follow alchemical careers will probably find it useful practical experience,” he added. “Follow me.”

Emily allowed Caleb to lead her towards a door that had just opened up in the side of the wall, leading directly into one of the storage chambers. The air smelled of earth and rotting vegetables, making her want to gag as she forced herself to keep breathing. Hundreds of harvested plants lay on the tables, dozens of tools placed next to them. Professor Thande paired them up—Emily was relieved to be staying with Caleb—and jabbed his fingers at the tables, splitting up the class.
Their
table was covered with roots that looked, very much, like green baby carrots. A small textbook—
A Guide to Plants of Alchemical Value
—sat next to them.

Professor Thande cleared his throat. “How many of you have harvested your own supplies before?”

Four students, including Cabiria, Melissa and Caleb, put up their hands. The others, including Emily, did nothing. Emily glanced at Caleb in surprise, then frowned as Professor Thande split up Cabiria and Melissa, ensuring that two experienced students were paired with two inexperienced students. She honestly wasn’t sure if she
was
experienced or not. She’d never harvested plants or suchlike for alchemy, but she
had
foraged for supplies during martial magic. But it was better to be safe than sorry.

“Do nothing until I speak to you individually,” Professor Thande ordered. He cleared his throat, loudly enough to silence two chatterboxes at the rear of the room. “Those of you who are content to purchase your supplies from an apothecary know, of course, that their supplies are often checked and rechecked before they’re bagged and sealed. Apothecaries know better than to risk supplying their buyers with something they haven’t checked carefully. It tends to lead to angry magicians blasting down their doors and demanding recompense.”

He smiled, then went on. “Here, you will be doing the preliminary harvesting yourself,” he added. “I will be giving each of you
precise
instructions for handling and preparing your supplies, then checking them afterwards. Those of you who offer me more than
five
flawed or otherwise imperfect ingredients will be cleaning caldrons for an hour after class.
Always
err on the side of caution. Cleaning caldrons is unpleasant and messy work, but trying to use poorly-prepared ingredients can be lethal.”

“That means we can put them out if we’re the slightest bit unsure,” Caleb muttered to Emily.

“Quite right,” Professor Thande said. The class tittered. “It is much better to throw away a perfect ingredient than try to use an imperfect one.”

He marched from table to table, demonstrating the correct way to harvest useful ingredients from the roots. When he came to Emily’s table, he forced Caleb to show Emily how to isolate the useful part of the root—the seeds within the vegetable—and then check them for impurities. Caleb pulled seven seeds from the root as Emily watched, but four of them had to be discarded into the bin. They washed the remainder carefully, then bagged and placed them at the far end of the desk.

“I’ll be checking your work afterwards,” Professor Thande warned. “Carry on.”

It was surprisingly difficult, Emily discovered, to cut into the roots without damaging the seeds—and even a simple cut could render the seed useless. Or worse than useless, as Caleb explained. A seed that leaked into the potion would trigger an explosion, if they were lucky, or poison the brew. It was much safer to throw out a seed if there was the slightest flicker of doubt about its validity.

She elbowed Caleb after cutting open the third root, only to discover that all of the seeds were rotten. “How do you know how to do this?”

“Mother would take us all harvesting,” Caleb explained. “We’d leave the city and stay in an inn, near the forest. The people there plant all sorts of alchemically-useful seeds and then sell access to magicians. She made a game of it, rewarding the one who brought the most useful ingredients back to her. I used to love it.”

Emily had to smile. “At least she was trying to teach you something useful...”

“She thought that depending on the apothecaries was asking for trouble,” Caleb said. He shrugged. “But it’s never easy to get fresh supplies in Beneficence. Unless you want something harvested from a fish.”

“Yuck,” Emily said.

She shuddered at the thought. She
had
killed and cut open small creatures for alchemical supplies, a gruesome process only made unpleasant by Professor Thande’s insistence that some supplies
had
to be harvested while the creature remained alive. Touching a live crab was hard enough, but dissecting it while it struggled under her fingers was worse.

“It isn’t that bad,” Caleb said. “You get to eat what’s left of the fish afterwards.”

Emily grimaced as she cut into the next root, then removed all five of the seeds and inspected them. Four should be usable, she decided, so she cleaned and bagged them up before dumping the fifth seed and the remains of the root into the bin. Caleb was already dissecting his seventh root, moving with a practiced skill she could only admire. His hands no longer shook. She smiled to herself, knowing better than to call attention to it. He might lose his concentration if she did.

“Very good,” Professor Thande said, once the last of the roots had been seeded. “I will inspect your work now, then we’ll move on to the next set of ingredients.”

He moved from table to table, eying the bags with a sceptical eye. Emily braced herself as he told Pandora and Cirroc that they would be cleaning caldrons after class, but he merely picked out three unsuitable seeds from their bags. Caleb breathed a sigh of relief as Professor Thande checked Melissa’s work, then headed back to the front of the classroom. For once, he wasn’t smiling.

“Four of you are going to be cleaning caldrons,” he said. “But all of you, save Melissa and Johan, had at least one bad seed in your bags. What would have happened, I ask you, if that seed had been allowed to pass inspection?”

Emily swallowed as Caleb answered. “There would have been an explosion,” he said. “Or a poisoned brew.”

“Quite,” Professor Thande agreed. “There are easier ways to poison yourself, if you wish to try.”

Emily sighed, inwardly, as Professor Thande started to hand out more ingredients for them to dissect and prepare for use. He strode up and down the classroom, after telling them precisely how to cut open the roots, pointing out mistakes with a grim coldness that surprised her. But a glance at the textbook told her that a single mistake with
these
roots would ruin the entire brew...
and
that the roots were very expensive. Professor Thande had been forced to watch as several thousand gold coins worth of supplies rotted away in front of him.

Just having us do the work is going to cost him
, she thought.
Normally, he’d do it himself
.

She felt unclean, her hands and robes covered in dirt, as the class finally came to an end and they made their escape. Thankfully, they wouldn’t be scrubbing caldrons for the next hour, unlike too many others. Emily wasn’t sure if she’d erred too much on the side of caution or not, but at least it had spared them an unpleasant detention. The only problem was that she wasn’t sure if there was enough water to clean their hands before they went to the next class.

“It could have been worse,” Caleb said.

Emily glanced at him. “How?”

“When I was eight or nine, Croce was seven and Karan was six,” Caleb said. “Marian was four and having a particularly bad time of it, for some reason. Mother took us harvesting, as always, but she didn’t have the energy to supervise us as closely as she would have done normally. Croce and Karan were sent out to pick mushrooms rather than look for anything she could use for magic—the people there use mushrooms for just about everything.”

He sighed. “They picked a whole bunch of them, then decided—because they were children—that uncooked mushrooms were safe to eat,” he added. “Both of them got very sick before mother managed to force some purgatives down their throats, which didn’t make them feel any better for a long time afterwards. I always think of that when I harvest, just to remind myself to be careful.”

Emily shuddered. Sergeant Miles had taught her class a great deal about testing unfamiliar plants to see what was safe to eat, but it required a considerable amount of mental discipline to keep from eating as much as possible. If she was starving, she doubted she’d have the patience to wait to see if there were any ill-effects before she started to stuff herself in earnest. Thankfully, she’d never had to try.

“They must have had a very bad time,” she said, sympathetically.

“They did,” Caleb confirmed. “Mother grounded them for the rest of the trip; she wouldn’t let them leave the house unless she escorted them. They threw a big fit as soon as they got home, whining to father about how mother was so mean to them. Father was
not
amused.”

“He wouldn’t have been,” Emily agreed. Poisonous mushrooms could be lethal. Better to be grounded than poisoned. “What did Casper say?”

“Complained that it had ruined his life,” Caleb said. “He was...
friendly
... with a girl in the nearest village, you see.”