The Bones

“The bones!” yelled Crispin from the top bunk. “We forgot about the bones! Why didn’t we show Professor Nightseed the bones?!”

“What?” I asked, shaking off sleep and fumbling for my axe. “Who are we fighting?”

“Of course,” said Olive, her eyes flashing awake. “I was sure she was holding something back.”

I got out of bed and stretched my feathers. “Alright then, what are we waiting for?”

Olive and Crispin answered in unison. “Breakfast!”

---

Crispin decided that he would guide us to the cafeteria using only his highly attuned sense of smell. He justified this waste of time by explaining that he had already made such impressive progress this morning before we even got out of bed.

“I’m getting… wafts of porridge, blueberries, maple syrup… and… pancakes?” Crispin muttered to himself as he sniffed down the corridors.

Surprisingly, we arrived at the cafeteria moments later.

“I never doubted your nose for a second, Crispin,” said Olive jubilantly. “Now, do you smell anything kinda sus’?”

I fetched myself some porridge and seated myself beside the Divination Professor, Corvax Revayne. He acknowledged me with a glance but did not speak. We ate in silence.

At the buffet, Crispin was eyeing up the pancakes while Olive loaded ten eggs onto her plate.

“That’s a lot of eggs,” observed Crispin observantly.

“I’ve got two more in my pockets,” whispered Olive.

Inspired by this act of delinquency, Crispin decided to see how many pancakes he could fit into his cooking pot. He fooled the magical spatula that was handing them out by moving his tray back and forth as if he was a whole succession of hungry students, before unceremoniously dumping the pancakes into his pot.

“Help me out here, Olive,” said Crispin. “Keep the rest of the line distracted!”

Olive thought for a moment and delivered the following short-form poem.

Eggs are good
From this fine deli
They are best
When in my belly

Poached or fried
Or in their shelly
Eat them quick
Or they’ll get smelly!

She finished with a stage whisper that carried across the whole cafeteria.

“I love eggs.”

Beside me, Corvax Revayne nodded sagely. “Just as my vision foretold.”

---

Once we had the morning trivialities out of the way we took the next bridge to the tower of Necromancy. It was still early before the first lectures so the door was shut. Crispin rang the bell which manifested as a blood-curdling scream that echoed through the tower.

“Good morning,” said Professor Glinda Nightseed, hurrying to greet us.

“Bones!” said Crispin animatedly.

Glinda coughed. “I think I’m going to need a little more information than that.”

“We’re not entirely satisfied with our discussion yesterday,” I explained. “You know more about this mystery than you’re letting on, and we’re here to get to the bottom of it.”

“Well,” said Glinda, unruffled. “If you think I’ve been dishonest then come on in and we’ll talk.”

Inside the kettle was on over an unnatural green flame which cast eerie shadows on the walls. Floating candles lit the rest of the otherwise quite homely tower.

“What do you know about these?” asked Olive, presenting Glinda with the bone fragments we had found outside Figory Figgins’ room.

Glinda swept a pair of pince-nez onto her beak and examined the bones. She peered closely at their surface, sniffed them, and straighted up to give her verdict.

“Birdfolk,” said Glinda, “and old. The owner is no longer living.”

She held her hand briefly over them.

“Familiar necromantic energy. I suppose I should correct my earlier assertion to owners. These bones have come from multiple servitors, possibly combined into one.”

“That’s what I asked last time,” said Crispin.

Glinda shrugged. “Last time you didn’t have any evidence to support your theories.”

“If someone was practicing this kind of necromancy, wouldn’t you have been able to detect it?” asked Olive.

“The observable strength of necromantic energy is inversely related to the observer’s distance from the event,” Glinda explained using a patient tone usually reserved for her first year students. “To notice necromancy above the baseline noise of the natural world, it would need to be either a very large spike or we would need to be very close to the source. And, as I told you on your visit yesterday evening, I have observed no such spike.”

Olive was still not satisfied. “Is there some way of masking this kind of magic from your attention?”

Glinda looked at Olive over the top of her glasses. “Well, I suppose it would be harder to detect necromancy if it were performed somewhere with a high baseline level of magic. The best place to hide magic would be either far away or among other powerful sources of magic.”

We looked at each other. We already knew where to find the most magical artifacts in the same place.

“Glinda,” I said, “I must apologise. You weren’t holding anything back. We just weren’t asking the right questions.”

---

We approached the library at a run.

“It must be going on there,” said Olive. “That’s where Jell Platena saw the servitors going in the middle of the night and all the magical tomes down there would hide the necromancy from Professor Nightseed!”

“It’s time for action,” said Crispin, clutching his pot of breakfast leftovers.

I narrowed my eyes. We’d been down in the library for days and we hadn’t stumbled on anything overtly suspicious. What could we do now to smoke out the necromancer?

Down in the library we walked quickly to Mordane who was perched in his usual seat at the librarian’s desk. An ethereal light glowed from many torn fragments of parchment that floated in the air before him. As we approached we could see him making small dexterous movements to nudge the correct pieces into place. It was like assembling a delicate paper jigsaw puzzle.

“We have to find out if he’s seen anything,” Olive whispered to us as we neared the desk. “There’s no way anything could be going on down here without his knowledge.”

“Hello, Mordane,” said Crispin amiably, snacking on a leftover rasher of bacon from his cooking pot. “Are you hungry?”

Mordane did not answer.

“What time do you go for lunch?” Olive asked.

“Not. Just. Yet.” Mordane pleaded. The parchment fragments wavered in the air as his concentration drifted. “Later. Busy.”

“Not to worry,” said Crispin. “I’ve brought you a snack!”

It all happened so fast. Crispin already had his hand in the pot before we realised what he was doing. He pulled the warmest, stickiest, syrup-covered pancake from his stash of leftovers and tossed it onto the desk. It glided through the air like an edible discus, passed straight through the lattice of floating paper and landed with a splat. Pieces of parchment immediately adhered to its sticky surface.

Mordane Swiftgale cried out in disbelief.

“What have you done?” he screamed. “What were you thinking?”

“Perhaps you would prefer an egg?” offered Olive.

“I’d prefer not to have a pancake in the middle of my painstaking work!”

Behind us we heard the clicking and clattering of bone feet on stone. Two servitors had appeared from the shadows and were standing behind us. Another three were approaching from behind bookshelves further back in the library.

Mordane breathed deeply and gathered himself. He flicked a few gestures in the air and murmured a spell. A glittering shell formed over the parchment, pancake and all. The servitors backed away and one-by-one returned to their tasks.

“When something is out of containment, they come,” said Mordane breathlessly. “Like me, they do not tolerate defacement of scholarly work.” He drew himself up and glared down at Crispin. “You. I have had enough of your bumbling incompetence and endless tomfoolery. Until now, you have studied here as a special guest of the Avium but your actions today prove, without a doubt, that you are undeserving of such an honour.”

“But—” Crispin began.

“The Mapach must leave,” hissed Mordane. “Right this moment or I will summon the Dean and demand that all the Defenders of Alderheart are removed not just from the library but from the Avium itself!”

“Please hold on just a moment,” said Olive. “He really didn’t mean any harm, he’s just like that. He’s friendly and he really loves breakfast.”

“It was very clear that I was working,” said Mordane. “You’re a bard. How would you react if someone slapped a pancake on a set of priceless ancient bongos?”

Crispin looked at his feet dejectedly.

“Get him out now,” Mordane reiterated. “He is no longer welcome in this library.”