Free Work Experience (Schooled in Magic Book 4) by Christopher Nuttall Page B

Lady Barb said. She looked around, her gaze moving from shelf to shelf. “My father loved this room. He designed it personally.”
    Emily nodded, sipping her drink.
    “You did very well, for a beginner,” Lady Barb added. She looked up, meeting Emily’s eyes. “I would suggest that you don’t try again for several days, though. And don’t discuss this with anyone else. If Jade asks you what you were doing, tell him that I was forcing you to brew.”
    “I won’t,” Emily promised. The Kava made her feel better, although her magic felt weak and wan inside her. She couldn’t help wondering just how long it would take to regenerate. Her palm itched and she glanced at it, seeing two faint scars where Lady Barb had cut her. “What happened to the blood?”
    Lady Barb smiled and passed her the knife. Emily tried to cast a cleansing spell, but it refused to work properly. Lady Barb shook her head, then offered Emily a cloth. Emily cleaned the knife carefully, admiring the way the light glimmered off the silver blade, then put the cloth in her pocket. She knew better than to leave samples of her blood lying around, particularly after Shadye had used one to control her.
    “Sit here until you feel better,” Lady Barb urged. “I can find you a book, if you like, or we can chat...”
    “Batteries,” Emily said, as something clicked in her mind. “That’s why you showed me the ritual.”
    Storing magic wasn’t easy, if only because it tended to leech out into the surrounding atmosphere. The only way to lock it in for longer than a few hours was to use wards or dedicated spell-structures, which had to be carefully configured...and still tended to lose magical energy over a long period of time. Building semi-permanent wards was Fifth and Six Year level at Whitehall. But even wards weren’t raw magic.
    Emily had reasoned that the magic wouldn’t flow away if the magic had nowhere to go. If a pocket dimension was used as a storage space, the magic would be trapped. But her first experiments had been halted and while she’d done some theoretical work, she’d never been able to create a pocket dimension of her own. And she hadn’t worked out how to insert magic into the dimension.
    But the ritual might work, she saw now. All she would have to do was concentrate, cut her own palm and emit magic into the pocket dimension. It would be stored there...
    “Very good,” Lady Barb agreed. “And how do you plan to use it?”
    Emily hesitated, realizing Lady Barb was right. Necromancers went insane because they channeled vast amounts of power through their minds. If she drew on a battery, she would be running the risk of being driven insane by her own power. Coming to think of it, could she draw on someone else’s power from another battery? What if it was that, rather than contact with their own magic, that drove necromancers insane?
    But it was something she didn’t dare try to test.
    “You could probably use it like a modified ritual,” Lady Barb said, after a moment. She stood up, pulled a book from the shelves and opened it, looking for a particular chapter. “You’d have to set up the spell-structure, rather like using a wand, then open the hatch and let the power flow. But if it failed...well, you might end up with an explosion. Or a wave of wild magic.”
    Emily frowned. The whole concept sounded obvious to her. “No one ever tried this before?”
    “Not as far as I know,” Lady Barb admitted. “But you know how easy it is to hide something in this world – and how many sorcerers keep secrets.”
    The Mimic , Emily thought. Everyone had believed that they were living creatures – and why not, in a world that included dragons, demons and gorgons. But they were actually spells, the most elaborate and complex spells Emily had ever seen. Someone had created them, built them up piece by piece, then sent them out to wreak havoc. And no one had had the slightest idea what their creator had done until Emily had