Until about six weeks ago, Morrigan had been a greysleeve – a scholar of the Mundane Arts, just like Hawthorne, Anah, Mahir, Arch, Francis and Thaddea. Overseen by Scholar Mistress Dulcinea Dearborn, the School of Mundane Arts was the largest of two educational streams in the Wundrous Society, comprising three departments: the Practicalities on Sub-Three, Humanities on Sub-Four, and Extremities on Sub-Five.
The School of Arcane Arts was much less populated, but still had its own dedicated three subterranean floors, deep beneath the red-brick five-storey building of Proudfoot House and only accessible to Arcane scholars.
They were much harder to navigate than the orderly Mundane floors. They weren’t divided into three departments so much as countless covens, workshops, clubs, labs, top-secret mini-societies and top-top-secret guilds dedicated to various esoterica – none of which seemed to acknowledge their own existence, or each other’s. There were an awful lot of locked doors and unanswered questions in the Arcane school, but in the past six weeks Morrigan had learned to simply go where her timetable sent her and nowhere else – certainly not, for example, down a mysterious fog-laden hallway that hadn’t been there the day before. Detours like that were guaranteed to make you late for class.
Dearborn had been furious to learn that Murgatroyd had swiped Morrigan from the Mundane into the Arcane Arts. Not, of course, because she had any warm feelings towards her – just the opposite, really. Dearborn didn’t think she should be in the Wundrous Society at all; she couldn’t tolerate the idea of Morrigan learning anything more than the absolute bare minimum. It would be so like the icy, silver-haired Scholar Mistress, she thought, to sabotage her education from afar.
‘You’re being paranoid,’ Cadence said when Morrigan mentioned it later that afternoon. They were lurking in a hallway on Sub-Seven waiting for Lam, so they could all head to their final class of the term together. ‘Anyway, why would you want to talk to Murgatroyd? Personally, I try to avoid it as much as possible.’
Morrigan found that most people tried to avoid the unsettling Mrs Murgatroyd as much as possible, and with good reason … but she still preferred her to Ms Dearborn.
‘Look at this.’ She sighed and held out her timetable, pointing to that morning’s roster of lessons. ‘Peering Into the Future. Finding Your Familiar. Yesterday it was Opening a Dialogue with the Dead.’
‘You said you loved that class! You love spooky stuff.’
‘I did,’ she admitted. ‘I do. I just don’t know why Murgatroyd keeps putting me in all these weird subjects, when she’s the one who said I should be learning –’ Morrigan paused, glancing around to make sure nobody could overhear. She lowered her voice a little ‘– the Wretched Arts.’
A brief look of discomfort crossed Cadence’s face. She knew as much as Morrigan did about the Wretched Arts – which was to say, not very much at all.
Morrigan knew the Wretched Arts were the tools of the so-called ‘accomplished Wundersmith’, and that she’d have to learn how to use them if she was ever going to understand what it really meant to be a Wundersmith. She’d picked up a few little scraps, and she’d been practising them on her own. But there was only one other person in the entire realm who could properly wield the Wretched Arts … and it was an uneasy feeling indeed, to have something so important in common with him.
‘I just mean … I’m not a clairvoyant!’ Morrigan went on. ‘Or an oracle, or a sorcerer, or a witch, or …’
‘Yeah, I know, you’re a mighty Wundersmith. Dry your eyes, mate,’ Cadence replied quietly. She spotted Lambeth emerging from her transcendental meditation class in her usual daze and waved to get her attention.
There weren’t nearly as many Arcane students as Mundane, but with teaching staff, graduates, academics and researchers, as well as visiting members of the Royal Sorcery Council, the Paranormal League and the Alliance of Nevermoor Covens, the Arcane halls were usually busy. Today they were filled with junior and senior scholars celebrating the end of term, in ways that most of them were strictly forbidden to do so outside the School of Arcane Arts. Illusion scholars could practise their craft anywhere in Wunsoc, because illusion – in the words of Murgatroyd – was ‘a bunch of tediously innocuous trickery’. (Morrigan thought this freedom was wasted on the illusion scholars, because they mostly used it to gross people out, creating false images of dog poo and scurrying rats in the hallways. Even Hawthorne, who loved grossing people out, was unimpressed with their efforts, declaring them ‘unimaginative in the extreme’.)
But if a junior scholar was caught practising – for example – sorcery or witchery anywhere outside of the Arcane floors, they’d almost certainly regret it. Some of Murgatroyd’s favoured punishments included cutting the arms off winter coats, shaving eyebrows, and dangling people by their ankles over the side of the footbridge above Proudfoot Station.
In the Arcane halls, however, nothing was off-limits.
This afternoon, in some sort of bizarre end-of-term celebration, a group of sorcery scholars had stolen a case of unlabelled elixir bottles from the Witchery Wing and were shaking them up, daring each other to drink them, and howling at the results, either with laughter or pain. One of them burned her throat breathing piping hot steam for a solid minute, one burst all the capillaries in his eyeballs, and another fell deeply and publicly in love with the first inanimate object he laid eyes on – a fire extinguisher.
‘Lam, hurry up, will you,’ Cadence groaned as she saw their friend dawdling several metres behind.
‘Stop,’ Lam said, holding up one hand. Morrigan and Cadence both halted instantly, just before they reached the intersection of two long hallways.
Lam was a gifted short-range oracle … which meant she had visions of the future, but only the immediate future – mere moments ahead. Unit 919 had realised by now that heeding Lam’s warnings often helped them avoid some minor disaster like stubbed toes or spilled tea. Sometimes it even saved lives, as Morrigan had learned last Hallowmas night, when she’d deciphered Lam’s cryptic predictions and shut down the illegal Ghastly Market – just in time to save Cadence and Lam from being auctioned off to the highest bidders.
If Morrigan hadn’t figured it out, someone would almost certainly have paid a lot of money to steal Cadence’s knack from her … but Lam’s fate could have been much, much worse. Because their friend Lambeth Amara was, in fact, the Princess Lamya Bethari Amati Ra, of the Royal House of Ra, from the Silklands in the state of Far East Sang. She’d been smuggled into the Free State illegally from the Wintersea Republic to trial for the Wundrous Society, just like Morrigan – but unlike Morrigan, her family had been in on the plan, and if their treason against the ruling Wintersea Party was ever discovered, they could face execution. Nobody in the Republic was even supposed to know the Free State existed.
Unit 919 had vowed to keep Lam’s secret. There were certainly others out there who knew – Lam’s patron, of course, and Miss Cheery and the Elders. A few wretched people who’d escaped the destruction of the Ghastly Market and scurried away into the night. But there was a feeling in Unit 919 that if they buried the secret between them and never said it aloud, they could protect Lam from anyone who might wish her harm.