My stepfather sighed sadly: “We should. But we have no money to move, Thomas, even if I immediately find a job after the move.”
“Then at least Lyuchik has to be sent away. To some boarding school or maybe to your relatives, if you have any.”
“I’m thinking about it.”
I put my honestly earned fifty crowns on the table. “Take this! When I’m back at Redstone, I’ll send you more. Think harder.”
He hesitated, but didn’t rush to take the money. Another helpless white on my hands!
“What now?”
“You are so concerned for the family, you do so much for the kids… and I have never apologized to you!”
“For what?” I did not understand.
“I invaded your house, took the place of your father… perhaps, you’re angry with me.”
I sighed. How typical for the white to apply his standards to everybody. And I thought he was an empath.
“Have you not been lectured about the psychological differences in the school of magic?”
“Yes I have, of course. I always tried to… well… to treat you with understanding…”
But he never understood me fully, anyway.
“If my father had spent enough time at home to be remembered. If you had come to our house when I was eight, not eleven. If you had tried to preach to me. If you had forbidden me to buy that damn moped. If you had bought those fucking bees before I left… Anyway, if you had done things differently, I would have hated you to the depths of my soul. But you hadn’t… I think blood parents also don’t always understand their children, but somehow they do well.”
He smiled.
“You have become more mature. Wiser.”
Just one thing left now: I had to find a job. Oh, money, money…
The day I was leaving for Redstone turned out to be noisy and senseless. On the eve of my departure, I went to the station and performed a little trick: I sold my express non-stop railroad ticket to one lucky guy. I was going to return to Redstone by suburban railroads, changing them at every town. It was not quite legitimate, but that way I would save an extra eighteen crowns. The bad thing was that the way back by the suburban railroad would take twice as much time.
My mother kept trying to shove a jingling worn-out wallet in my backpack, and I kept taking it out.
“Tommy, please, take it for your trip!”
“I don’t need money!” I was dead set on that. “You need it more. I can always make money in the city.”
If I only knew how!
At the last moment it turned out that the train I needed did not stop at the Wildlife Outpost, and Uncle Gordon had to give me a ride on his jalopy through two mountain passes. There were pros to it—no time for a teary parting, and cons—I did not manage to talk to Mom about my father again.
I started my irritatingly slow travel via local rail lines that departed rarely and stopped at every shabby station. Good thing that Mom had shoved some grub into my bag, and Joe had poured a calabash of mead of his own make (it was so much more fun to travel with that drink). It took me 26 hours to reach Ekkverh Junction. From there, trains to Redstone departed twice a day, and I had to waste another three hours between routes. Taking a nap at the station was fraught with troubles, and I did not want to squander money on a baggage locker, so I sat in the waiting room, hugging my backpack and dying of boredom.
At first, I entertained myself by visualizing a speech that I would be making in front of Quarters, who would certainly want to know what I was doing the whole summer. Should I tell him about the island and the quarantine? Then on my last penny left after the ticket purchase, I bought a local paper from a newsboy (you could put it under your ass, and the seat wouldn’t be so freezing cold) and read it from cover to cover. The contents of eight yellow pages captured the essence of provincial life: a harvest festival, local news, anecdotes, obituaries, ads, and crosswords (the latter turned out to be amazingly stupid).
I quickly looked through the ads: farmers selling cattle, furniture, tractors and equipment, unusually few suggestions to buy puppies and kittens, and an entire section at the end devoted to magical services. Three dozen wizards offered local townsfolk remedies for male potency, cockroach extermination, improving the tempers of horses, and the treatment of root rot in roses. Naturally, there were no dark magicians among them: which of us would voluntarily agree to live in the boonies? The dark mages are irresistibly attracted to big, crowded cities, full of amenities and devoid of insects. There was no work for NZAMIPS here as well, and I sympathized with the poor fellows who operated the local “cleaning” service—they must have been sent there for some mortal sin. However, if the situation in Ekkverh was changing the same as in Krauhard…
And then, as though an invisible hand squeezed my mind, the sense of a touch on the back of my head became so vivid that I turned around.
Surely, in this preserve of white magic, there wasn’t a single NZAMIPS’ office (perhaps, local farmers didn’t even know what that was). For the whole county, there was one on-site inspector, and he lived somewhere in Redstone. Hardly any of the locals knew the subtleties of the licensing of dark magicians and the limitations that NZAMIPS imposed on our practice—they used to pay cash after the work had been done without asking for a receipt or invoice. You couldn’t meet representatives of the government there even by accident, and a bit of competition wouldn’t hurt the local “cleaning” service.
I carefully pulled off a newspaper coupon for a free ad, took a pen from a news vendor and filled in: “A dark magician, specialist in the undead and otherworldly phenomena. Pricelist available. Warranty. Free consultation.” As a contact number I provided the phone of a girl I knew who worked in the answering services. She was the half-blind girl with well-developed vocal strength who was a secretary for three or four small companies that were too poor to keep a separate office. She was valued for her good telephone manners: the girl never asked stupid questions like: “Who are you looking for?” Another advantage—she lived near the university, not far from me to check for the news regularly.
Finally, I fell back into my old ways. As they say, you can’t wash the stripes off a zebra.
Part 2. PRIVATE PRACTICE
Chapter 7
Redstone University occupied two complexes or, as people said, “territories”. The new territory was located on the outskirts of town, across the river, and consisted of a noisy dormitory and laboratories for the Faculty of Alchemy, as large as factories. They say there were greenhouses and stables somewhere behind the dormitory, but I never dealt with that side of the university’s life.
The old territory and the heart of the university was the Redstone School of Magic, the first educational institution to teach dark and white magicians together—the pioneering attempt to reconcile the opposites. The founders of the university discovered a magic formula for the successful preparation of magic art specialists: joint education with ordinary people in some disciplines, like alchemy and pharmaceuticals. Nowadays such arrangement is considered standard, but in the past the innovation was regarded as revolutionary. Since then, the classic “apprenticeship” has fizzled out—graduates of specialized alchemical and magic institutions lagged seriously behind ordinary university graduates in their skills. It was assumed that the joint training allowed ordinary people to actually get acquainted with the logic of magic (an important life experience was presented at the right time in their lives) and helped magicians better integrate into the society. Also, the dark, being in the absolute minority, were unable to bully the white, which was a huge bonus for the latter. The Redstone school quickly grew into a university, regularly supplying society with talented alchemists, the mightiest white magicians, and the strongest combat sorcerers. Soon I will join them. This year, twelve dark students expressed an intention to undergo the Empowerment. If you trust statistics, among them there would be at least one master, a couple of generals, and one genuine archimage.