The Necromancer

Chapter 3

From there things happened very quickly. Harry was shown to a room that held six smaller beds and one larger. There were more children there, one little girl with olive skin that only stared at the floor, utterly mute, a pair of girls with dark hair that stuck together and ignored everyone else, a girl with blond hair and freckles that looked at Harry with large, hopeful eyes, and a boy who greeted Harry in perfect English.

“Wait, you can understand me?” Harry asked in astonishment.

“Yeah. I’m Roy, I’m from Singapore,” the boy said with a huge smile.

“I’m Harry, and I’m from England,” Harry said with an equally wide smile, and from that moment on he and Roy were inseparable. The small, blond girl usually tagged along with them and Harry soon learned her name was Rindyll, and just like that, for the first time in his life, Harry had friends.

Harry had been right that the place he found himself in was a school and the first lessons he and his friends got was learning to speak the local language, known as Santireen, which was the dominant language spoken in Santika, the world they now occupied.

At first their teacher simply showed them lots of drawings of items and she would tell them the Santireen word for it. The children would repeat the word many times and then learn how to write it on a piece of slate with a small chunk of chalk.

Yes, Harry was already learning how to write and he couldn’t have been more excited. Soon enough they picked up the language and were able to converse in simple sentences and they were given more diverse subjects to learn, like learning their numbers and studying runes, which were funny little symbols that had all sorts of strange meanings. They also learned about all sorts of plants and what they could do, and all the animals that lived around them.

The school was an amazing place. They were served three hot meals a day in the dining hall. In the morning and afternoon they got warm porridge made from boks, a starchy tuber that grew readily in the vast, lush forests that surrounded the city. In the mornings the porridge was usually mixed with different kinds of dried or fresh fruit and nuts, and in the afternoon it was made with bone broth and things like mushrooms, vegetables and a few times a week some meat.

In the evenings they usually had boks balls, either steamed or fried, served in a sauce that was oftentimes quite spicy but Harry learned to love that soon enough. There were many kinds of vegetables, raw and cooked, served alongside them, and a couple times a week there would be meat, usually a bit spicy as well.

And once a week they had pintas night. A pinta was a deep-fried pancake made from boks, rolled up and filled with a sweet and spicy mixture of meat and vegetables and they were just about everyone’s favourite food. No one was every late for dinner on pintas night, and Harry soon learned that the worst punishment Master Karakas could hand out was to deny you any pintas but serve you a bowl of watery porridge instead while everyone else got to enjoy them.

Harry learned that lesson quickly the first time he didn’t finish a chore on time because he got distracted playing in the springs.

Harry had never had such delicious food in his life, not to mention such regular meals, and every time he sat down to eat he felt an overwhelming sense of gratitude for the genie who had brought him there.

The school, which was led by Master Karakas, the man whom Harry had met the day of his arrival, was located at the top of a city built in a valley with a river running through it, surrounded by mountains and dense forests. Almost every day of the week huge thunderstorms formed near the end of the day and rain poured down for a few hours. The city was called Misty Springs because all this water caused numerous springs to run all around the valley, including several behind their school.