As it turned out, the door to enter the clock tower was on the building's side and hidden under a network of glamour spells to make it look like the rest of the structure. Frankly, it all just looked the same as the rest of Angitia's hideous campus to my eyes.
Much of Angitia's architecture and geography are a bit more like suggestions than actual buildings. The school was originally built in 1900 with the clock tower in the dead center of a pentagon, with each side hosting a building where a different magical discipline was taught. Alchemy, demonology, elementism, mesmerism, and theosophy.
You'll notice I only took two of those subjects. Well, that's because twenty years later after the Unification Wars, Her Majesty's Royal Coven decided to re-categorize many of the mystical disciplines belonging to the same schools of magic and required all schools of sorcery to teach foreign languages to students so future generations of mages could still use spells concocted by the French and whoever else was recently conquered, and whose official language had changed to the Queen's English.
Angitia had to reorganize many of their buildings and faculty, which was hard as at that point not only had the mausoleum and library been erected outside the main pentagon like a pair of vestigial toes, but the seven halls had also erected their towers at different places around campus. The then headmaster of Angitia, one Giuliano Kremmerz, started building new classrooms at random and the resulting sprawling, disorganized campus we all knew and most sane people hated came to be.
Nothing had a real cohesive order, or sense that I'd identified, and I often got lost when trying to locate places around campus that I hadn't been to before.
I was also vaguely convinced that some of the buildings occasionally swapped places without warning. Excess magical energies were allegedly vented into the Labyrinth specifically to prevent that sort of shit from happening, but I was skeptical that it worked completely. Then again, most of the buildings at Angitia were built out of materials mined from inside the labyrinth for their various mystical benefits, so that might also be a factor.
Mason cheerfully led the way to the clock tower, having abandoned his previous reluctance to take us to Griffin's office since he "hadn't" been the one to tell us where it was.
I liked the boy well enough, but I was increasingly less sure that Mason wasn't addled.
When we reached the clock tower's base, I craned my head up to see the very top. The clock face read half past ten, or at least I think it did. Never quite figured out how clocks worked. Give me the sun on a cloudless day, though, and I could tell you exactly how long we had until supper time.
"I don't see a door," Sylas said, glancing over at Mason. "Is there a door?"
Sylas said it in the way that not so subtly implied he was suspecting we might need to play the ridiculous "guessing where something isn't" game again.
Mason pranced up to the brick side of the clock tower and knocked three times. A previously unseen door on the side swung open soundlessly.
Mason grinned at us. "Usually you need a faculty member or a head boy to let you in, but we student volunteers have our tricks."
"Is your trick that letting you know how to open the door is the only way you can get in to clean waste baskets and fetch people tea?" I asked as I walked past Mason and into the clock tower.
He frowned at me.
"Maybe? That would make sense, wouldn't it?" Mason asked.
He's an idiot, I thought. Or else this is just some sort of long plot of his to drive me to the threshold of madness.
The clock tower's interior reminded me a bit of the mausoleum or library, in the sense that it contained far more space inside than the outside suggested.The inside of the clock tower began with a large room and a desk behind a counter facing the door. There were several chairs against the room's walls, and a staircase spiraled out several steps off either side of the desk. Mason got ahead and confidently started up the left staircase.
"Most of the tower is dedicated to administrative offices," Mason said as we all huffed and puffed after him. "Alumni relations, financial offices, labyrinth maintenance, that sort of stuff."
After the first flight of stairs, I was felt vaguely winded. Mason turned a corner, revealing two other flights of stairs, and that time took the right.
"As you go further up though, you hit student organizations; like student council, the disciplinary committee, and the delvers club," Mason said, practically skipping up the stairs.
I rather wanted to lie down, but everyone else seemed unaffected by the ungodly amount of stairs.
"Disciplinary committee?" Rosamund asked.
"They're a group of students who make sure everyone on campus follows the rules," Sylas explained. "Mostly stuff about rushing Halls or stabbing your roommate to death in the middle of the night."
"Oh, so I should be worried about them then," I said flatly.
Sylas didn't even bother glancing back at me.
Mason took us up yet another flight of stairs, and at that point I was so close to vomiting in exhaustion and lying very still on the ground I didn't even notice which staircase we took.
"Now, when we hit the very tippy top floors, that's when we get to the teacher's offices," Mason said. "And at the very end, the headmaster's office."
I slumped against a nearby wall and took in deep, desperate breaths of air.
"Do you… mean to tell me that Professor Ogg walks up those blasted stairs every day?"
Sylas looked at me. "They weren't that bad, were they, Theo?" He had the nerve to sound confused. "Not half as bad as some of the training my grandfather and I did back home."
Oh, I hated him.
The four of us followed Mason onto the top floor of the clock tower, where the last flight of stairs abruptly ended on a large wooden door. HEADMASTER'S OFFICE was printed on the door in large, capital brass letters. The door appeared so suddenly I think I would have run into it if Mason hadn't held out an arm to forestall us all.
"Here it is!" Mason said. "The one and only office of our esteemed Headmistress Tabitha Griffin, formerly of Her Majesty's Royal Coven and by all accounts forced to retire here after quite the scandal, according to Mama. Though she never told me what it was—"
Iroha brushed past Mason and pulled on the door. When it didn't budge, she tried pushing. "I think it's locked," she said succinctly.
"Of course it's locked," Mason said in confusion. "Why wouldn't it be? It's actually rather clever—"
Rosamund walked up beside Iroha and prodded at the door herself.
"I think there's an enchantment on it?" Rosamund offered. "I can feel a Working here."
"Yes, well," Mason said, seeming a bit annoyed that people were interrupting him. "The lock is mundane but expertly made, and on top of that, there's an enchantment on it to prevent any magical tampering. The only way to get in is with a key—"
"Does anyone have a hairpin?" I cut in, crouching down to peer into the door's iron lock. Mason huffed noise and Rosamund handed me one with a sigh that turned into a squawk of outrage as I bent the small piece of metal.
Putting my ear directly against the lock, I inserted the bent hair pin and gently worked it into the mechanism.
"You can't possibly think that you can—" Mason began, and the lock clicked open. I grinned in satisfaction and I opened the door with a slight push. What most people didn't realize, admittedly me included until relatively recently, was that doors wanted to be opened. It was almost their primary function in reality. Doors open and close. Same with locks, really. They lock and they unlock. So when you enchant a door to remain shut, you're basically telling it to go against the Narrative it fits into. Doubly so when that door has a lock on it.
Which was why placing an enchantment on a locked door not to open was about as effective as trying to plug a leak in your roof with a stray scrap of paper and cobwebs. It was really a much better idea to just hire a competent locksmith. I guess that's why I was able to override the enchantment locking the Library up the night I stole the grimoire.
So it finally made sense that lock picking was a skill Lord Woodman had insisted on me learning at the expense of my mystical knowledge. Luckily it had also been one of the few things I'd truly excelled at during my tutelage. Give me a thin piece of metal, and I can still open a pair of manacles blindfolded.
"Shall we?" I said, proffering my hand to my comrades in invitation to the headmaster's office.
Headmistress Griffin's office was less than inviting on the inside.
It was roughly the size of a classroom, with an ornate carpet atop a floor of smooth grey stones. There were no windows, and the walls had several paintings on them, which a closer look revealed to be of different scenes from Imperial history, ranging from the coronation of Elizabeth the First, to the Conquering of Munich.
A painting depicting an old man who I could only assume was Angitia's first headmaster, Sir William Wynn Westcott, hung behind a beast of a wooden desk at the room's far wall. Sir Westcott had a well-trimmed beard, portly gut, and the sort of chronically constipated expression I associated with Sylas when I'd annoyed him.
"Do you suppose we should just rip this thing off the wall and call it a night?" I offered. "Certainly seems big enough to count as being impressive. Especially to a bunch of drunken Lion Hallers."
Sylas walked up next to me and frowned at the portrait.
"I don't know how we'd get it out," he said. "It's larger than the door we came through."
"Huh," I said. "How do you suppose they got the thing up here in the first place? It almost takes up the entire wall. Ugly bugger, too, think the artist might have been drinking a bit while he was painting it."
"I don't know about that," Sylas said. "It looks a lot like the one in my grandparent's parlor. Sir Westcott was actually my great-great-grandfather, you know."
Of course he was.
Rosamund made an excited squeal, and Sylas and I turned to find her mooning over a marble bust in the far-off corner of the room. It was of a rather portly woman who I didn't recognize.
"Oh, this would be perfect!" Rosamund declared.
The rest of us approached to see what the big fuss was about. As I'd earlier suspected, it appeared to be a bust of an older stout lady. I was wondering if Headmistress Griffin collected ugly pieces of art depicting the elderly. Despite my immediate dislike of the sculpture, everyone else seemed enamored by it.
"It can't be genuine, can it?" Sylas said. "They only give these out to mages who've contributed significantly to the crown."
"It's got to be," Mason breathed, almost reaching out a hand to touch the sculpture. "They don't allow the likeness to be reproduced in any other way."
Iroha, evidently not caring about Mason's reservations about touching the bust, stepped forward and tried picking it up. She grimaced, adjusted her hands, and tried pulling on the statue again, only to be rewarded with the same result.
"There's a Working on it," Iroha said. "Something to keep it secure and preferably immovable, but I don't think it's a particularly strong spell or one regularly maintained."
"So we might be able to break it then," Rosamund licked her lips. "Sylas, you help me break whatever's holding it here. The rest of you should look around for anything else could use."
I almost asked Rosamund who died and made her the Eternal Queen, but Sylas had already moved to acquiesce to her demand and it felt childish to say it when other people were going along with it. So I took in a deep calming breath, which made Mason and Iroha eye me, and I turned back to Griffin's desk.
"There's bound to be something in this thing we can use instead," I muttered, and Iroha and Mason followed me. We opened drawers at random as Sylas and Rosamund fussed over the statue. I glared at them as I all but ripped a drawer from the desk.
"What's so impressive about that sculpture?" I asked Mason, who stared at me.
"Are you serious?" he said finally.
And the way Mason said it, his eyes in complete and utter bewilderment, made me realize I just made a critical error in my question. Before I could figure out what I could say to salvage the situation, Mason continued.
"That's a bust of Queen Victoria the Eternal herself. The original likeness was made on Walpurgis 1888, before she took to wearing the black veil and the silver crown," Mason said. "Receiving it is one of the highest honors any magician can dream of getting, like being awarded the Silver Star of Sorcery or being allowed to join the Red Branch."
"Oh," I said.
I hadn't heard of the other two either.
"Of course," I said. "I'm sorry. I'm having a hard time thinking tonight."
As we continued shifting through the desks' different drawers, I couldn't help but wonder if Mason was still looking at me. Eventually I looked up to focus my eyes on Sylas and Rosamund, gnawing at my lip and hoping the two of them would finish soon. The longer we stayed in the office, the higher the odds were that we'd be caught.
***
"Do you suppose these could work?"
I looked up to see what Mason was looking over. It had been the better part of an hour, and my back was hurting from leaning over to shift through Griffin's papers. I'd made a point to put them back exactly as I'd found them, but there were a lot of them and it was slow going boring work. Mostly it was what appeared to be bills, and the odd letter I tried not to read.
Mason held up what looked to be several watercolor paintings on some scraps of paper.
I frowned and walked over to him to get a better look. "What are those?"
"I think they're watercolors Headmistress Griffon must have done, paintings of—" Mason's brow furrowed. "Men wrestling?"
"Nude men wrestling." I corrected, and couldn't help but take one of the watercolors from Mason to get a better look. A well-muscled man wearing only a Lion skin cloak bent over a younger man, grinning as he pressed his torso into the younger man's bare back.
Suddenly I felt hot. "They—uh, certainly are detailed."
"What do you suppose they are doing?"
Iroha had, at that point, decided to also stop watching Rosamund and Sylas, and had come over to peer over my shoulder. "It is rather obvious what they are doing," she said dryly. "I once stumbled across a similar collection in my father's study, though his pieces involved cephalopods."
I turned to stare at Iroha, and she blinked at me.
"Cephalopods are the broad term for species such as octopi and squids," she explained.
"Really?" Mason said, and I could hear him flipping through more paintings to scrutinize. "I didn't know there was a word for both. Say I've never really understood what the difference was between an octopus and a squid. They both have tentacles and live in the ocean. Though I do suppose they taste different."
"An octopus has eight tentacles, while a squid only has seven."
"Ah, that makes sense."
Are they—are they messing with me? They have to be messing with me right now.
Rosamund grunted as she attempted another spell to make the bust of Queen Victoria budge from its place in the pedestal, a Working of movement and stone melding. She held a conduit in one hand, an oversized four-leaf clover. Had she formed a circuit with it?
The four-leaf clover clenched tightly in Rosamund's fist, burst into flames and she dropped it to the ground with a shriek of displeasure, frantically stomping on the fire with her shoe.
While everyone else had turned to watch the display, I quietly slipped one of the watercolors depicting two men wrestling in the nude into one of my coat pockets. Surely Headmistress Griffin had so many, she wouldn't miss one going astray.
There was an odd sucking noise that made me turn to look at Sylas and Rosamund. The two of them had placed their hands on the bust of Queen Victoria and were pulling while chanting something in… some language I honestly had no hope of identifying. There was a sort of pop, and the statue was freed from its pedestal.
I half-expected some security spell to be triggered immediately.
Giant talking dogs, stone owls, and giant spiders who I still believe probably could talk but chose not to, had left me with a fair bit of wariness when it came to escapades I was on going horribly sour at the best possible moment.
I wasn't the only one with that thought, because Iroha and Mason tensed up next to me by the desk as Sylas and Rosamund balanced the queen's bust between them. But as the seconds ticked on by and no horrible monstrosity from the pits of a child's nightmare graced us with its multi-fanged presence, I felt myself relaxing a bit.
"Come on then," I said, closing all the open drawers in the headmistress' desk. "Let's get that thing back to Lion Hall then, before whatever passes for a watchdog here realizes we've been up here stealing things."
"Things?" Iroha asked.
"Nothing," I said quickly. "Forget about it."
Mason drummed his fingers on the desk and watched me in a way I didn't like. There was a furrow in his brow, like I was a problem he couldn't figure out. I'd always thought Mason was sharper than he first appeared, but I wasn't eager to test that against the holes in my knowledge about sorcerous topics that would surely make my entire facade fall apart if poked at too much.
I clapped my hands. "Let's go!" I repeated, more emphatically. I'd get Mason liquored up at whatever party the Lion Hallers were throwing in honor of the stolen items the Hall would receive that night. I was reasonably sure a few fingers of scotch and whatever nobles had instead of beer would be enough to make the entire night just another blurry memory to Mason Albright.
With that plan set in my mind, I hustled our group out of the headmaster's office, ensured the door was closed behind us, and with Iroha and I holding a Working of stealth over our little group, we struck off across campus doing our best to hide our stolen prize.