“I can be careful,” Call said. “How about you, Aaron?”
Aaron ran grainy hands through his blond hair and shrugged. “Anything is better than this. And if we finish faster than Master Rufus expects, he’ll have to give us something else to do.”
“Okay. Here goes nothing.” Tamara licked the tip of her finger and touched it to the pile of sand. A few grains stuck. Then she put her finger in her mouth.
Call and Aaron copied her. As Call jammed his wet finger into his mouth, he couldn’t help wondering what he would have thought if a week ago someone had told him he’d be sitting in an underground cavern eating sand. The sand didn’t taste bad — it didn’t taste like anything, really. He swallowed the rough grains down and waited.
“Now what?” he asked after a few seconds. He was starting to get a little nervous. Nothing had happened to Jasper at the Trial, he told himself. Nothing would happen to them.
“Now we concentrate,” Tamara said.
Call looked at the pile of sand. This time when he slid his thoughts toward it, he could sense each of the tiny grains. Minuscule pieces of shell sparkled in his mind, beside crystal pieces, and yellowish stones honeycombed with crags. He tried to imagine picking up the whole pile of sand in his hands. It would be heavy, and the sand would spill between his fingers and pool on the floor. He tried to blank out everything around him — Tamara and Aaron, the cold stone under him, the faint rush of wind in the room — and narrow his concentration down to the only two things that mattered: himself and the pile of sand. The sand felt completely solid and light, like Styrofoam. It would be easy to lift. He could lift it with one hand. With one finger. With one … thought. He imagined it rising and separating….
The sand pile lurched, spilling a few grains from the top, and then drifted upward. It hung over the three of them like a small storm cloud.
Tamara and Aaron both stared. Call fell back on his hands. His legs were prickling with pins and needles. He must have sat on them wrong. He’d been concentrating too hard to notice. “Your turn,” he said, and it seemed to him that the walls were closer, that he could feel the pulse of the earth underneath him. He wondered what it would be like to sink into the ground.
“Absolutely,” said Aaron. The cloud of sand broke apart into two halves, one composed of lighter sand, the other darker. Tamara raised her hand and drew a lazy spiral on the air. Call and Aaron watched in wonder as the sand swirled into different patterns above them.
The wall opened. Master Rufus stood on the threshold, his face a mask. Tamara made a little squeaking sound, and the hovering pile of sand crashed down, sending up puffs of dust that made Call choke.
“What have you done?” Master Rufus demanded.
Aaron looked pale. “I — we didn’t mean —”
Master Rufus gestured sharply toward them. “Aaron, be quiet. Callum, come with me.”
“What?” Call began. “But I — that’s not fair!”
“Come. With. Me,” Rufus repeated. “Now.”
Call rose gingerly to his feet, his weak leg stinging. He glanced at Aaron and Tamara, but they were looking down at their hands, not at him. So much for loyalty, he thought as he followed Master Rufus out of the room.
Rufus led him on a short walk through some twisting corridors to his office. It wasn’t what Call expected. The furnishings were modern. Steel bookcases filled one wall, and a sleek leather couch, big enough to nap on, stretched along the other. Tacked to one side of the room were pages and pages of what looked like scrawled equations, but with odd markings instead of numbers. They hung above a rough wooden workstation whose surface was blotched with stains and covered with knives, beakers, and the taxidermied bodies of weird-looking animals. Beside delicate, geared models that looked like mousetraps crossed with clocks, there was a live animal in a small barred cage — one of those lizards with blue flames running along its back. Rufus’s desk was tucked into a corner, an old rolltop that was at odds with the rest of the room. On top of it was a glass jar holding a tiny tornado spinning in place.
Call couldn’t take his eyes off it, expecting it to burst out of the jar at any moment.
“Callum, sit down,” said Master Rufus, indicating the couch. “I want to explain why I brought you to the Magisterium.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
CALL STARED. After two weeks of sand sorting, he’d given up on the idea that Rufus was ever going to be forward or direct with him. In fact, he realized, he’d given up on the idea that he’d ever really find out why he was at the Magisterium at all.
“Sit,” Rufus said again, and this time Call sat, wincing as his leg twinged. The couch was comfortable after hours of sitting on a cold stone floor, and he let himself sink into it. “What do you think of our school so far?”
Before Call could answer, there was the sound of rushing wind. He blinked, and realized it was coming from the jar on Master Rufus’s desk. The small tornado inside it was darkening and condensing into a shape. A moment later, it had taken the form of a miniature olive-green-uniformed Assembly member. It was a man with very dark hair. He blinked around.
“Rufus?” he said. “Rufus, are you there?”
Rufus made an impatient noise and flipped the jar over. “Not now,” he said to it, and the image inside became a tornado again.
“Is that like a telephone?” Call asked, awed.
“Something like a telephone,” said Rufus. “As I said before, the concentration of elemental magic in the Magisterium interferes with most technology. Besides, we prefer to do things our own way.”
“My dad is probaby really worried, not having heard from me in so —” Call started.
Master Rufus leaned against his desk, crossing his arms over his broad chest. “First,” he said, “I want to know what you think of the Magisterium and your training.”
“It’s easy,” Call said. “Boring and pointless, but easy.”
Rufus gave a thin smile. “What you did in there was very clever,” he said. “You want to make me angry because you think that if you do, I’ll send you home. And you believe you want to be sent home.”
Call had actually given up on that plan. Saying obnoxious things just came naturally to him. He shrugged.
“You must wonder why I chose you,” Rufus said. “You, the last of all those ranked. The least competent of all the potential mages. I suppose you imagine that it is because I saw something in you. Some potential the other Masters had missed. Some untapped well of skill. Maybe even something that reminded me of myself.”
His tone was lightly mocking. Call was silent.
“I took you on,” Rufus continued, “because you do have skill and power, but you also have a great deal of anger. And you have almost no control at all. I did not want you to be a burden on one of the other mages. Nor did I want one of them to choose you for the wrong reasons.” His eyes flicked toward the tornado, spinning in its upside-down jar. “Many years ago, I made a mistake with a student. A mistake that had grave consequences. Taking you on is my penance.”
Call’s stomach felt as if it wanted to curl up inside him like a kicked puppy. It hurt, being told that he was so unpleasant he was someone’s punishment.