Ascendancy of the Last - Lisa Smedman [28]
Now Q'arlynd wasn't so sure.
"This lesson is over," he announced, waving a hand above the floor. The pentagram disappeared in a puff of smoke, leaving the smell of melted candle wax behind. "Go."
The students scurried from the room.
Q'arlynd closed his eyes and activated his master ring a second time. Piri came instantly into view; the apprentice hadn't bothered to remove his ring. He'd probably assumed Q'arlynd would be much too busy to scry him. Piri stood next to a narrow column of stone: one of the posts in the shimmering walls of force that caged the deepspawn the Breeder's Guild tended. His face and hands glinted with an oily, greenish tinge: the quasit demon, stretched skin-thin, that he'd bonded with, years ago. His hair stood up in stiff spikes, white and hard as bone. He held a wand in one hand, and stood back to back with another of Q'arlynd's apprentices: Eldrinn, son of Master Seldszar, the master who would be nominating Q'arlynd's school for admission to the Conclave in just a few moments' time. Eldrinn also held a wand in his hand.
"Mother's blood," Q'arlynd swore. "They're dueling."
Little wonder his apprentices had chosen this moment for their duel. Q'arlynd had expressly forbidden mage duels in an effort to preserve the fragile harmony within his school. More often than not, duels led to serious injury. Sometimes death.
The injury or death of a student or teacher was something most masters took in their stride. They encouraged backstabbing and betrayal among their apprentices, believing that it flensed the meat from the bone, allowing only the best to survive. Q'arlynd held a different view. Any student accepted into his school was warned that any debilitating attack or suspicious death would be traced to its root. And then that student would be expelled.
The same rules applied to the five apprentices who served as the school's teachers.
Q'arlynd glanced at the water clock in the corner of the lecture hall. He was supposed to be appearing before the Conclave just a few moments from now. He tapped his foot impatiently, inclined to leave bad enough alone-until he noticed the femur that lay on the ground between the two apprentices as a dividing line.
This was no mere grudge match. It was a duel to the death.
Eldrinn had a determined look on his face, but his tight grip on the wand betrayed his tension. He was a mere boy, a half-drow with ash gray skin. He wore his usual spider-silk shirt and ornately embroidered piwafwi, but his waist-length hair was unbound. He'd either been tricked or goaded into leaving behind the contingency clip that could save him from whatever Piri's wand hurled at him.
The timing was too coincidental. The absence of seconds and a jabbuk duello to oversee the duel was equally telling. Someone must have manipulated Piri or Eldrinn into this. Someone powerful enough to have ensured that Master Seldszar wouldn't divine, ahead of time, that his son was about to enter into a potentially fatal duel.
If Eldrinn died, however-no, when Eldrinn died-Seldszar would learn of it immediately. Whoever had maneuvered the two apprentices into this would certainly see to that. Once alerted to his son's death, it would take the master diviner less time to learn the circumstances than it took most males to draw breath. Then Q'arlynd's school would suffer the consequences. Contrary to all that was natural, Seldszar actually cared for his son. He'd blame Q'arlynd for the boy's death-and would point accusingly to Q'arlynd's