The Alchemists Academy: Stones to Ashes Book 1 by Kailin Gow Page A

rather battered vase, and several rows of rusting filing cabinets.
    Wirt tried the handle, and unsurprisingly found it locked. He tried the transportation spell. It was only in the second that the spell took hold that Wirt saw the faint sheen of a spell around the door, presumably a magical barrier of some kind. All he could do by that point was hope that his luck with that kind of barrier would hold. It did. One moment Wirt was standing in the corridor outside, and the next, he was in Urlando Roth’s office.
    Wirt doubted that he would have long before the teacher showed up. Breaking through that barrier must have set off some kind of alarm, at least. The best he could do was search as quickly as possible. Wirt decided to start with the filing cabinets. At least they were not locked like the door. He opened drawers, flicking through the files in the hopes that something would catch his eye. Nothing did. Wirt wished Spencer was here. This was where he would have come in useful. Spencer  would probably have known just what they needed to look for, and might even have been able to make some sense of a filing system that appeared to be more of a store everything unit than an actual filing cabinet.
    Wirt pulled out a couple of files and looked them over, but he didn’t learn much about the missing chalice. On every other events going around at school, he learned too much. He learned all about the school’s budget deficit patterns over fiscal years in a dozen dimensions. He learned all about the school’s list of magical objects. They all seemed to be well-guarded and intact, except for the magic chalice.
    In desperation, he turned to Urlando Roth’s desk. There was not much on it. The bouquet of flowers sat in quite the most hideous vase Wirt had ever seen, a grey, stubby vase with knots and crevices that seemed to drag down the beauty of the blooms within it by its very presence. The card on them read “to my darling A, a present”, which only said to Wirt that the teacher had a middle name. Urlando Adam Roth? Urlando Adrian Roth? It didn’t really improve matters, though it did make Wirt wonder who would send the accountant flowers.
    The other pieces of paper on the desk turned out to be essays which had not been graded. One was on “the probabilities of magical chaos”, while the other was about “predictive magic”. Wirt had more sense than to try and read them, in case his head exploded.
    It was time, he suspected, to get out of there. Wirt took a last look around, trying to see if he had missed anything, and then started to concentrate on the hallway outside. He saw the door start to open, and mumbled the words to the Transportation spell as quickly as he could. Wirt’s last sight, before he transported past him and ran for the transport tube, was of a red-faced and out-of-breath Urlando Roth (Aidan? Albemarle?) rushing in with all the anger of someone who had just had their personal space broken into. Wirt was very, very glad that he had gotten away in time.

 
    Chapter 13
     
    I t took some effort to locate the others, because it turned out that the school had more than one library where they had arranged to meet. As a result, before he found his friends, Wirt found himself passing through a large open space filled with shelves littered with ladders propped against them, through a room with a multicolored stone floor where scrolls peeked out of pigeonholes nestled in the walls, and even through a library that looked like a garden nursery filled with small trees growing in tubs.
    He finally found Spencer and Alana in a circular reading room overstuffed with oversized armchairs, where a sticky blob of greenish goo sat in the middle of a stone pit, spectacles perched incongruously on a vaguely nose-like protrusion.
    “Where are the books?” Wirt asked, and Alana held up a thin folder.
    “If you ask the librarian, it will fetch what you want. Actually…” she turned her attention to the green blob, “could