“Heorhiy Honchar!”

  The shouted name was not mine, but nevertheless, I turned from the tower steps, pausing to look over at the cluster of outbuildings that nestled within the low gray outer wall at the foot of the black tower keep of Xarakel. Most of the buildings were houses shaped like horseshoes, with tiny central courtyards, each marked with a statue of some kind of person or creature. A green-eyed boy on the cusp of adolescence crouched underneath a diaphanous cloth with silver threads in one of the courtyards, his back against a painted wooden statue of a griffin, as a tall, dark-haired wizard with the marks of a master walked by, not giving the boy a second look as he stomped by with a wand in hand.

  “Pay no mind to Master Stanislav,” Lieutenant Teushpa said with a wave of his hand, indicating his familiarity with the angry wizard. “He may sound as though he is out for murder, but it will doubtless be an ordinary disciplinary matter, some variety of the school’s common student mischief—half of those who are sent here are expelled from one of the other academies for misbehavior rather than directed here from the start due to their unpleasant affinities.”

  “Were you a student here after getting expelled elsewhere?” I asked, imagining the Cimmerian being sent here after failing to perform any real magic, perhaps the shame then driving him to replace his true face during his time in a place where the arts of manipulation of flesh were practiced. I still had not gotten any opportunity to ask him privately; his public answer had been simply to laugh and say that he was an illusionist, and I did not wish to call him a liar in front of too many of his men.

  Even now, with only Gulben, Johann, and Katya for witnesses, and Katya having tight enough lips as far as I was concerned, I did not wish to impugn his reputation in the eyes of Gulben and Johann. Especially since I had promoted Teushpa to the rank of lieutenant for his competence and courage, while Johann, in spite of his more demonstrable magical talents, remained a banneret. For now, Teupsha’s dubious claim to exceptional magical skills (as opposed to theatrics and sleight of hand) had drawn their respect, making Gulben wary of misusing her powers of enchantment on my men and inspiring Johann to generally obey his superior officer’s orders.

  Still, a relationship built on a lie is inevitably fragile. One cannot simply pretend to be a wizard and get away with it indefinitely any more than one can indefinitely get away with secretly skating nightly across a river; regardless of one’s careful stealth in exit and re-entry through windows, there will inevitably be a night sometime before the full arrival of spring when the ice can no longer withstand the weight of a ten-year-old boy carrying a goat on his back, and then there will inevitably be a cold reckoning and a scolding. Perhaps this would be Teushpa’s opportunity to hang up his skates and admit he had been responsible for the mysterious nighttime nibbling of the village wizard’s winter flower display, metaphorically speaking.

  “Oh, no, I was the teachers’ pet at my academy,” Teushpa said. “But after I returned from my first deployment of the war, the general and I and the other survivors—only he was a major back then—reported here for a detailed debriefing with some of the master wizards here. In any event, Stanislav is of no use to you—he is an alchemist first and a focus wizard with a knack for combat magics second, and Johann said you wished to consult a proper necromancer.”

  I glanced over at Johann. There had been few enough volunteers interested in accompanying us to the western side of the river to start with, but once Johann had declared that we were seeking necromantic expertise, our party had shrunk to a bare handful. Nor did I wish to force the issue with any of the men by declaring them to have volunteered without their having actually done so; I had complained so often to Vitold about such practices before my series of unfortunate promotions that I could not bring myself to abuse the term.

  “What about your friend, the one at the gatehouse?” I asked. “He had a well-thumbed text on anatomy, free of accumulated dust.”

  Lieutenant Teushpa frowned, showing that he had not cared to pay attention to the second shelf of the back room of the gatehouse office. “Perhaps an interest in mechanical analogues; Iosef—Master Bulan—is a thaumaturge by talent and arguably a war mage by virtue of his skill, very adept with the management and repair of mechs.” He raised a finger, thoughts flickering behind his eyes for a moment. “His wife is of the Sixth, by the way; we can expect that the head of that house will have a report of our visit soon after he speaks with her about it.”

  “Is that a bad thing?” I asked.

  “They were expelled from the capital some time ago when they fell out of favor. Their principal estate is in southern Khazaria, but they will have agents up the Kama all the way to the northern frontier; I don’t know who their allies might be now.” Lieutenant Teushpa frowned. “We may be presumed enemy agents by them if we are not careful; the wheels of the Empire turn on their own when Koschei neglects them, and I doubt there is a single heir’s house that does not hold at least two different secret plans for pressing their claim. Even the Sixth.”

  “The door opened,” Johann said, pointing up at the top of the stairs. “While you were talking.”

  We all turned to look. A bald man with a goatee and master’s robes stood in the doorway at the top of the stairs, his arms crossed as he addressed the gathered group, looking first at red-haired Katya and auburn-haired Gulben. “Master Teushpa, I recognize. The rest of you I do not. Are you here for the Laskov twins?” Then he covered his right eye with a silver disk and stepped back, nearly stumbling as his attention snapped onto me. “And what—who are you?”

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  Teushpa shot the rest of us a quick glance that brought to mind his admonition to allow him to perform any and all necessary introductions before speaking, shading the truth. “These two gentlemen are here for a brief study of necromancy—a couple of years older than your usual student, but they are by no means unlettered; the one has some practical experience, and the other has studied at Vindobona. You do teach here, do you not?”

  “It does happen,” the man said drily. “Personally, I prefer to spend my time on my research. Some arts require close study of the world, rather than simply a vivid introspective imagination.” He speared Teushpa with a sharpened look before continuing. “Very well—I will give them the grand tour of the village while you speak with the dean.”

  “My name is Mikolai,” I said as the man turned back to face me, my real name slipping out in my native Slavonic. “I’m pleased to—”

  “Our residential students tend to come in batches—most are detected during regular assessments by traveling examiners,” the man said, stomping down the stairs past me, his voice entering a practiced cadence. “It is our normal practice to fill vacant houses one by one to put the new cohort in together so that they will learn more ably, most recently Griffin House. We crowd them, but as the cohort experiences attrition, the accommodations can become quite spacious. I graduated long ago, and I have my student house to myself.”

  “Wait!” I said, interrupting the monologue. I hastily followed after him, Johann and Katya trailing in my wake. “What is your name?” I asked.

  “My name is not important,” the man said, refusing to turn his head as he continued down the stairs. “Except as a vulnerability, which I shall certainly not expose to the powerful apprentice of a deadly and puissant mage.”

  A modest grin broke across Johann’s face as he mouthed the word “powerful apprentice,” tapping his chest with a fist. His proficiency with Slavonic had been substantially improving over the course of his journey.

  “Even a powerful apprentice foolish enough to give me his—at least the weak one is not foolish,” the man added, turning as he reached the bottom of the stairway. Johann’s grin slid off his face, and the nameless master looked at me and then Johann, his gaze sliding boredly past Katya as if she did not exist. “Given the reputation of the slayer of phantoms, I do not trust that any of you are who or what he says you are, but that name, when you spoke it, rang true. It is a name you were gifted and accepted. So, Mikolai and company—I will call you now Magnificat and Minificat, after your auras—what do you want to learn about necromancy? It is several arts in one.”

  “The manipulation of living flesh,” I said. “Such as a face.”

  The man grinned. “Technically, it is not necromancy to work upon the living; it is merely a shared art. Necro means dead, and the art of the dead has been taken to include work upon both corpses and spirits, though they are no more the same art than glamour and phantasm.”

  “A glamour is a phantasm of the person,” Johann interjected confidently. “I had that from Master von Trapp.”

  “I was still speaking, Minificat,” said the nameless master, turning his head to face a point precisely between us, Johann’s face visible to me momentarily in the silver disk over his right eye. “I was saying that it is technically not necromancy to work upon the living, for necromancy is taken to include all the arts of death and the dead. But fortunately for you, I am technically not a necromancer. Mine is only the art of the body, the living as much as the dead, transmutation and transformation, and perhaps eventually transubstantiation. Perhaps it would be simplest if I began the tour with my laboratory instead of Griffin House; I do half of my work at home. That is Mermaid House; it was originally Serpent House, but I redecorated to suit my interests once the last of my cohort had moved on.”

  “Very well,” I said. “I think I see it now.” The house with the carved wooden mermaid statue was not directly in my line of sight, but there were piecewise reflections in the diamond panes in one of the windows of what I presumed to be Phoenix House that, after correcting for their divergent angles, showed the image of a mermaid. I turned right and started to cut diagonally across a courtyard.

  The nameless man frowned, his head cocked at an angle, his right hand rubbing the silver disk over his right eye. “You have not divined the way. Yet you are correct. Most curious. Come, Minificat, I will show the two of you Mermaid House. Perhaps you might even stay in my guestroom; Griffin House is full up in any case, unless those redheads are taking the Laskov twins away for good. I expect they’re probably just here for a visit, though. Pity.”

  As he spoke, the nameless man beckoned to Johann, continuing to ignore Katya, who shot me a look that married confusion and offense.

  A Son of the Dragon posting on weekends.

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