Irina Syromyatnikova - My Path to Magic

“Gorchik, as you were!” the weary sergeant ordered and decisively took a seat beside the driver.

Rispin pushed on Gorchik with his hip, the compacted people compressed to the limit. And we were off. Personally, I was happy at how everything turned out; I even began to doze off again, and only Gorchik, sandwiched in from both sides, angrily sniffed and almost pinched us in annoyance.

“Drop me off at the school,” I asked Clarence.

“No need to,” the lieutenant advised. “Yesterday I warned Mrs. Hemul; it’s all under control. And the perimeter is working; the gates will stay locked until 11 a.m.”

I asked about the time—there was more than an hour before the school’s opening—and I had to agree: showing up looking like I had a sleepover in the bushes would discredit the image I had created. And to stay awake for another two hours was beyond my strength.

“I’ll be waiting for you in the office at seventeen hundred!” the sergeant shouted at our parting.

“It won’t work,” I warned him honestly. I would be sleeping, no matter what.

“Well,” he displayed some compassion, “then tomorrow at ten hundred—no excuses!”

And they drove off. With a short delay, I began to feel resentful. Geez, he wasn’t even my commander! And he wasn’t at home! What right did the guy have to order me? But, on second thought, I decided that to learn about the plans of the long-awaited “cleaners” was absolutely necessary; hence, I had to go. But I would stop their every attempt to benefit at my expense! If the dark mages cut their way to higher status, they become absolutely unbearable.

In the mansion, the tender-hearted Mrs. Parker released Max from the bathroom. Either she was a secret necromancer or believed that the dark magician’s dog had the right to be strange, one way or another. Mrs. Parker recognized in the preservative solution a remedy against fleas, and she washed and brushed Max’s coat with a special homemade lotion that kept its hair not just shiny, but also tangle-free. With the thought that I ought to get the magic recipe from her, I fell into bed and slept for almost twenty-four hours.

Mrs. Hemul watched the assistant principal walking around his office, and tried not to display her concern. Mr. Fox no longer cast even a shadow of sympathy—rather, he frightened her. Where did he hide such a chasm of complexes and prejudices, and why hadn’t she noticed them before? All his quirks and reservations from the last six months now acquired a much more sinister meaning.

“It’s the dark mage’s fault!” Mr. Fox insisted feverishly. “Our troubles started after his arrival.”

Long ago, at the time of the Inquisition, it was proved that the occurrence of supernatural phenomena did not depend on the will of the dark, but on the properties of the environment. The arsenal of dark magicians has plenty of abominations, but guests from the other world are not part of it. But Fox rejected the truisms straightaway, and to reach out to his common sense was getting more and more difficult.

“Even if it is so, would you prefer that the breakthrough occur in his absence? We had lived for ten years without any supernatural manifestation; it was too long even for the capital.”

“Who told you that?” Mr. Fox frowned in annoyance.

“Lieutenant Clarence came to see us yesterday. We talked.”

It was the young policeman, pale from shock, who told her about the need to lock the ward-off perimeter—not the experienced assistant principal, too busy buying train tickets to carve out a minute and call to warn her. In the morning the whole school had seen an ugly scandal: Fox yelled at her for not unlocking the gate for him to leave. The assistant principal did not accept the directrix’ explanation that, if she unlocked the perimeter, they wouldn’t be able to repeat the reactivation sooner than in four hours - he needed to go. Mrs. Hemul cowardly regretted that she hadn’t let Petros out of the gate with suitcase earlier. They would have already been freed from the presence of Fox, who created problems for everyone, but the assistant principal hadn’t informed her about his intention to take Petros out of the school, either.

“You have to forbid unauthorized persons from accessing the school territory!”

“No, I don’t. I have invited experts from NZAMIPS to check the ward-off perimeter. After repairing the fence, some signs need to be replaced. In addition, I will arrange for a safety lecture. Do you think Mr. Tangor will agree to help?”

“It’s irresponsible!”

“Irresponsible to repair the perimeter?”

“That insolent dark…”

“Saved Mihandrov. Did you want to say that?”

The mention of the young dark magician produced a strange reaction in Mr. Fox: he winced, grimaced, and began to shake his head. The white in general tolerate stress poorly, but that show looked more like a nervous breakdown. How else could one explain that, in rushing to save one child, he had forgotten about the fate of a hundred others?

“Nobody asked him about that!”

“Exactly. He showed concern for others, voluntarily and knowingly. His behavior must become a model for us.”

“Do you blame me for something?”

“Yes, I do. Your duty as a teacher is to take care of the children. What have you done for that?”

“You are too young, girl; you still have much to learn. There are times in life when we must act decisively to save at least somebody. You’ll lose plenty of people before it settles in your pretty little head!”

Mrs. Hemul smiled - a healer specializing in disaster medicine learns of inevitable casualties in the first place. Five years of experience, and no one better than she could walk the fine line between dead and barely alive, which would also die if left without help. She remembered the terrible fire at the Hotel “Palladium”, a train crash near Turik, hundreds of smaller incidents; only the birth of her twins made her change the career path. But she never treated people like lifeless flesh, even if they had only fifteen minutes left to live. It seemed that Mr. Fox conceitedly considered as “inevitable victims” the entire boarding school.

“Have I missed something? Someone has died?”

It seemed he did not understand the meaning of her words.

“Mihandrov needs a dark magician. I was right, and you were mistaken.”

Mr. Fox broke into an incomprehensible monologue about purity of thought and harmony of being. Interesting that yesterday he didn’t even intend to call and warn her; on the contrary, if he could, he would have left without saying a word. Mrs. Hemul felt nauseous at the sound of his voice, but she patiently listened, occasionally pointing out errors in his reasoning. A white experiences unbearable difficulty trying to insist on something, unless he is obsessed. She wanted to calm down the tension, forgive his sins, and send him off, but it was better to let him make noise in her office than run around the school scaring students and staff.

She needed to get rid of that man, quickly and under any pretext. Unfortunately, having learned that NZAMIPS experts had eliminated the urgent threat, the assistant principal abruptly changed his mind and came into her office with strange fabrications about the inevitable evil. He seemed confident that it was Mrs. Hemul who ought to behave differently. Oh, yes! On the director’s desk there was already a report, demanding rather than requesting the Board of Trustees to fire the inadequate assistant principal. In a few minutes a courier, called for that purpose, would take it to Artrom. It would be even better to talk to the trustees personally, but Mrs. Hemul could not leave the school while Fox was there. Her intuition literally screamed for caution in dealing with the mage-practitioner. She was doing that for the sake of the children, and the assistant principal wouldn’t get young Petros either, even if Mrs. Kormalis wouldn’t return home at all.