Chapter 46

“So, there I was,” declared Mr. Maki, his booming voice carrying through the whole classroom, “thrown from the deck of the Alabama by a cowardly demonic energy attack! Thinking quickly, I fired my Sonic Blade affinity straight down, creating a shockwave that stopped me in midair long enough to whip up my real plan.”

“I thought today’s lecture was supposed to be about increasing friction with magic,” I whispered to Mariko.

“I don’t mind,” she said from her seat next to me. “I haven’t decided if that qualifies as attack magic or not.”

We stopped for a moment as Mr. Maki’s gaze turned towards us. We had gotten quite good at having a conversation without harming his overinflated ego. One learns not to make the Divine Blade think that he’s being ignored. I wondered sometimes if the Wizard Corps had selected him to be a spokesman, or if he had volunteered for the job. However, he was so wrapped up in his war story that we were able to carry on with the occasional pause.

“Any magic is a weapon if you look at it the right way.”

“That’s nonsense. There are plenty of peaceful spells. Merlin’s Lantern is just a flashlight, for example.”

“You weren’t there when Rose lit a fire with it.”

Her eyes went wide. “Oh my! I forgot about that.” She shook her head. “That was a one off. Besides, there are plenty of other peaceful spells. What about healing magic?”

I shot her a cocky smirk. “You’re making it too easy, my dear! If you grow the new tissue wrong, you can cut off an artery or permanently seal somebody’s mouth shut.”

“Alright then, Mr. Literal. The design is what matters. You can use a chopstick as a paintbrush, but you wouldn’t want to.”

“That sounds you’re shifting the goalposts.”

Mariko puffed out her cheeks in an adorable pout. She had to know by then that only encouraged me. “Then I suppose you don’t want the muffin in my bag? I wouldn’t want you to think I was poisoning you.”

“Let’s not be hasty,” I said, perhaps a little too quickly. It had been weeks since she had baked, and I knew I would not have many more opportunities like that.

She waited a moment for Mr. Maki to turn his back before slipping me a still-warm package wrapped in tin foil. I hid it in my own bag; we were already taking a risk with our side chatter.

“It’s been forever since I baked anything,” she said. “It filled some extra time I had this morning now that I don’t have Paul. I hope I’m not rusty.”

“I’m sure it will be fine.” Once I had it, it was my turn to grin back at her. “Though, if you baked as richly as you did last time, this is slow motion heart failure. You see? Anything is a weapon.”

“You’re ridiculous,” she said, though her refined grin softened the blow.

I decided to press my luck a little further. “You’re looking like you’re in much better spirits.”

Her mouth turned into a thin frown. “I don’t know if I would go that far, but wallowing will only make everyone else worry.”

I didn’t have a smart response to that, so I decided to go back to listening to the war story.

“Thankfully, I was able to find a piece of driftwood to cling to. Then what should come at me but one of their demonic monsters, swimming through the water and carrying a whole squad of orcs!” Mr. Maki gestured wildly now as he paced, his eyes unfocused. He was half recounting the battle, and half reliving it. “The beast looked like a monitor lizard, only the size of a cement truck. At least, that’s what I think the poor beast was at one point. Lizards don’t usually spew green fire from their mouths or have six eyes.”

“What an exaggeration,” I said. “Meridraken only have four eyes.” The dumb beasts weren’t even especially useful. In the Old World, a fire breathing meridraken with a squad of orcs was the scourge of wooden vessels. Against the Anti-Demonic League, though? A waste of feed, if you asked me. They were sluggish on land, and a proper human boat could always outmaneuver them. Orc commanders saw them as status symbols, though, so there were always a few in any major action.

“What was that?” The class was laid out with the desks at five different levels, connected together by a set of stairs. Mr. Maki decided that he didn’t need any of that nonsense, and reached my level with Mariko in a single bound. I caught just a hint of magical manipulation about him, but I was not focused enough to see what he did. Since he didn’t cast a spell, it must have been a minute adjustment of his affinity.

I stifled a curse as he towered over me. Of all of the things for him to overhear, it just had to be my snark. I decided to own up to it. “Sorry to interrupt, sir. I saw a few up close in England. They only have four eyes.”

He looked at me quizzically. “I’m more surprised you knew the term in Demontongue.”

I carefully considered how to answer him. I decided to play for sympathy. It tended to make humans shy away from further questions. “When the Horde invaded England, I wasn’t… entirely successful in evading their patrols. I was captured and made to tend to one of those beasts for a time. I didn’t understand most of what they said, but I learned that word very well.”

He nodded, seemingly satisfied. “Well, raise your hand the next time you have something to add. Now quiet down and pay attention. That goes for you too, Ms. Yamada. You two aren’t as good at pretending to be on task as you think.”

“Yes sir,” we replied in near unison, though Mariko stuttered.

We seemed to have broken the spell of his story after that, since he wrapped up his recounting of the battle in a less colorful way. That earned me a few annoyed looks from students who I’m sure would rather have had story time than memorize runic stanzas about friction. They weren’t the easiest, since the spell involved a fair deal of real-world mathematics.

I thought I had gotten away with it until it came time for Mrs. Perera’s Races of the Horde class. She had much more energy than Mr. Maki did. She had not been deployed with the other teachers, given her decrepitude. She did not launch into one of her typical lectures. Instead, she assigned some readings from our textbook, but called me to the front of the room, and to be sure to bring my book bag with me.

“I have a job for you, Mr. Marlowe.”

“Oh? What’s that?”

“Asahi told me something very interesting today. Do you speak you-know-what? That’s an unusual talent.”

My heart skipped a beat, before I remembered that I had nothing to fear from Neci Perera. We were brothers in holy arms, after all. “A bit, ma’am.”

“You may have noticed that I’m not as young as I used to be. I won’t be here forever.”

“What? Perish the thought. You don’t look a day over thirty.”

She chuckled. “I wish Father Time was that easy to sweet talk. Speaking of which…” She cleared her throat, and in a louder voice she declared, “Mr. Marlowe, you’re missing that assignment on anti-goblin fighting techniques from last week. What’s your excuse?”

“I…” She winked at me and I caught on. “It must have slipped my mind, ma’am.”

“I expect better from you.” She closed her eyes and focused her energies, and the students outside of a small bubble around her desk froze in place. I was glad to be let in on her slowed time affinity for once; I was less likely to get groped by the dirty old woman.

“Let’s have some privacy, Holy Brother Mockingbird, so we can cut the crap.” Mrs. Perera pulled a thick, paper notebook from her bag and tossed it onto the middle of the table. It was well used, with colored bookmarks sticking out in all directions. “I’ve been writing a dictionary of Demontongue, and I want it to be as complete as possible. Asahi said you used a demonic name in class. Have you been holding out on me?”

More than she could possibly imagine. “Perish the thought, my dear. I didn’t know anything about your little project. I’ve been teaching some demonic spells to our dear Holy Sister Shrike, so if anybody has been holding out on you, it’s her.”

Mrs. Perera frowned disapprovingly. “You have? Dumb little bitch went behind my back. That’s completely idiocy.”

I shifted uncomfortably. “What do you mean?”

She got up and started pacing, using her cane for support. “I know you’re a reformed demonkin, Mr. Marlowe, but there are taints that you can’t remove. We want to keep humanity pure; if we learn demon magic and become exactly like them, we’ve gained nothing.”

That was quite the declaration, given the Brotherhood’s crimes, but I couldn’t disagree with her about demonic magic’s deleterious effects. Mariko’s nerve damage and Haru’s coma certainly made a fine case for that, and my demonic aura had been noticed on medical examinations. I didn’t see it as a problem, per se, but it seemed to exact a toll on humans without the benefit of my demonic blood.

“I don’t see what the fuss is,” I said, trying to act nonchalantly. “A tool is a tool. We used demonic fabricata to test my truthfulness. Our little club is no stranger to using the enemy’s tools.”

“That’s different,” she said. “A spell isn’t a hammer. Magic is more personal than that. When you cast a spell, you’re taking your spiritual essence and putting your stamp on reality, and the demonic spells corrupt you over time. It’s why the Headmaster and we other first-generation wizards had to create our own set of human runes. The demonic stuff is effective, but casting it twists you.”

“If you say so, ma’am.” I had to fight to keep a grin off my face. Proving that there’s truth to Horseshoe Political Theory, Mariko and a bloody Holy Sister had similar outlooks on the nature of magic.

“I do say so!” She jabbed a wrinkled finger at me forcefully, but she winced and rubbed her lower back before making her way back to her chair. “I’ll use it in a bootleg fabricata, but I won’t take it into myself. I need to watch my health.”

“Of course not,” I said. “You’ve still got the best years of your life ahead of you.”

She shot me an angry glare. “You’re a shameless flatterer, Marlowe.”

“Say the word and I’ll stop,” I said in a sly tone.

She pointed her cane at me. “Don’t you dare! It’s more than I get from my useless husband these days. Anyway, we got off topic. I’m interested in the spoken language, not the runes. Take the dictionary with you. Add in any words that I’m missing, and correct anything you think is off.”

How fantastic, another responsibility, and one that could only implicate me if I were found out by the authorities. “Surely you’re the expert,” I said. “What could I possibly know that you don’t?”

“I’ve never broken bread with demonkin,” she said, sliding the dictionary across her desk to me. “You have. I’ve also never heard of a ‘Merry Draken’ before. So, you have at least one word to add in.”

“I’m trying to keep my cover, though,” I countered. “It’s bad enough that you all know about my past. What if somebody sees me running around with a High Demonic to English dictionary?”

“I’ll say you’re helping me proofread it,” she replied. “I won’t imply you’re adding to it if you don’t.”

So much for that escape route. “Very well. I’m glad to help, ma’am,” I said as I reluctantly stowed the notebook in my bag.

“Of course you will,” she said. “You’re a good boy. Well, good enough, at least.” She grunted in concentration again and the world came back to life. “Make sure you get that missing homework to me by the end of the week,” she said, just loud enough to be heard. “And take care of that reference book!”

“Of course, ma’am. It won’t happen again.” I gave a shallow bow in the Japanese style (even the foreign-born teachers seemed to expect the gesture) and returned to my desk.

It would turn out that Mrs. Perera had the start of a fairly decent dictionary going. There were a few thousand words, which was a few thousand more than I had expected any human to have grasped. We didn’t exactly keep up regular correspondence with the human realms, though we knew what humans were saying.

It was rather lopsided. The Grim Horde had captured human records by the truckloads, and we had the dwindling numbers of human slaves to educate us in their tongues, so demons tended to speak at least one human language decently. Goblins absorbed new languages like a sponge, so there were whole linguistic guilds whose members acted as teachers and translators. Mother had seen that I was educated in English, and I had picked up a smattering of her native Ukrainian, and I had learned to read French while in the care of Girdan the Fair. There hadn’t been much else to do in the old palace of Versailles where he set himself up.

Neci Perera had none of those advantages, which made her grasp of our lingo impressive. The first section of the book was a rough approximation of our grammar, and a decent guess at that. I skimmed past that and focused on the dictionary. After some internal debate, I decided that my advice would be two steps forward, and one step back. I gave her a few dozen real words and their meanings. Basic things, like our numerical system (she had been missing our words for seven, fourteen and any number higher than twenty-five), a few insults and curses, and some place names. She seemed to think that we had renamed Rome, “Romomagnan,” which was complete gibberish. They might as well know that their doom came from Pandemonium.

However, I didn’t want to seem too knowledgeable. They thought me a demonkin, but being demonkin didn’t mean that you were constantly conversing with devils. It simply meant you had an unpatriotic admiration for them. I doubted that Harriet Oswald would have been able to read Fera’s letters, no matter how good she was.

So, I made some notes in the margins where I questioned the meanings of words she had defined correctly, and I threw in a few improper spellings in among my additions. The trick was to be useful enough that she didn’t think I was shirking, but not so useful that she thought I was holding out on her. I wanted this to be a one-time assignment. I completed the exercise that night, but I would wait a few days before returning it. It was much like a husband who knows how to do laundry spoiling a load so he wasn’t asked to do it again.