Past Tense (Schooled in Magic Book 10) by Christopher Nuttall Page A

, she thought, as they walked into a small room. They will have cleared or triggered all the traps in this section, surely?
    “I have no idea what this room was, once upon a time,” Wolfe said. He closed the door behind them, but made no move to cast a privacy ward. Was that technique still to be discovered too? “But it will suffice as an office, for the moment.”
    Emily nodded. Someone had set up a rickety-looking wooden table and a single chair that seemed to be on its last legs, but otherwise the room was bare. The only source of light was a torch, burning merrily against the stone wall. It made her realize, again, just how lucky she’d been to live in a world where electric power was cheap and simple. Castles without magic were dark and gloomy places.
    Wolfe motioned with his hands towards the table, which was covered in ancient books and pieces of parchment. One of the rolls of parchment was unrolled, with the four corners held in place by small stones. Emily took a look at the writing; her eyes widened as she realized she was looking at spell notations. Very primitive, compared to what she was used to, but clearly a step in the right direction. She took a step forward, wondering if Wolfe would seek to bar her from studying the parchment, yet he made no move to stop her. His eyes merely watched as she bent over the table, slowly tracing out the notations.
    “You’ve seen something like it,” Wolfe said. It wasn’t a question. “What do you make of this?”
    Emily hesitated, unsure how much she could say. It was hard to be certain—there were plenty of differences between the spell notation in front of her and the techniques she’d been taught by Professor Lombardi—but it looked as though Master Wolfe had been trying to unlock the secret of tapping a nexus point. She couldn’t think of any other explanation. The spells he’d detailed required a power source an order of magnitude more powerful than any living sorcerer.
    “You’re trying to tap the nexus point,” she said, carefully. There was no point in pretending to be an idiot. She’d shown too much command of magic. “How long have you known the point was here?”
    “There were stories of nexus points,” Master Wolfe said, vaguely. “I’ve always wondered what one could do with a great deal of power.”
    “Anything,” Emily said.
    She studied the diagrams for a long moment, slowly working her way through them. They were flawed—she could see a number of serious problems that Wolfe would have to overcome—but she could recognize the bare bones of what would eventually become the control room. The control room they’d discovered under Whitehall. It had a long way to go ...
    Perhaps too long , she thought. Master Wolfe had done a good job, but his proposed network of spells was far too inflexible to control a nexus point. And yet, the nexus point was tapped in this time.
    “Your tutor clearly had some idea of what to do,” Master Wolfe said. He picked up a roll of parchment and unfurled it. “The spells you used to tap the nexus point worked .”
    “Imperfectly,” Emily said, as she studied the parchment. Master Wolfe was clearly brilliant, perhaps the smartest man she’d ever met. He’d not only copied the work she’d done, with assistance from the commune, but used it as a starting point to devise his own spellwork to control the nexus point. “It nearly killed me.”
    “But it worked, once you had help,” Master Wolfe said. “Your tutor must have been truly brilliant. Master Stark? Master Joffre? I know that both of them chose to withdraw from society to carry out their own research, rather than taking more apprentices. One of them could have taught you.”
    Emily shook her head, wordlessly. It was tempting to claim she’d studied under one or both of them, but Master Wolfe had known the two men he’d mentioned. He’d catch her in a lie and then she’d be in real trouble. She considered, briefly, telling him the truth, yet