A student blocked the walk to the administration building.

"Excuse me?" said Warren Oldham, standing close behind her. "Hey?" Snow melted on Warren's bald head and ran down his collar. The student ignored him and raised her hands, fingers twisted in a ritual gesture he couldn't identify.

"What's going on?" he asked, turning around. The man nearest him grinned happily. Warren had joined a crowd of onlookers, clustered behind one of the students surrounding the building. "Is it a protest?" he asked. The man shook his head.

"It's Wizardry Week."

"Oh!" said Warren, turning back toward the administration building. The student gestured again and stepped back onto his toes, and the building slid. Its walls split, silently, and slipped inward along a dozen fault lines. Viewed from above it would look like a star, Warren thought, or a flower. Its floors slid out in petals, the walls folding in between them, until the outer face of the building was buried in its center and the inside offices sat revealed on ledges of floor, high above the ground; the Vice President for Academic Affairs sitting, oblivious, in one of them, thoughtfully scratching his butt.

***

"I was right there," Warren said, with wonder and gratitude. He had always ignored Wizardry Week and its hijinks, but tonight he was an enthusiast. "We could put on a fine Week in the School of Magic," he said. "We have the potential. It's the spirit that's lacking."

"That's because magicians are always fighting with one another over principles," said Bill Navanax. "You know deep down you're not real men, and if you did anything so wussy as compromise we alchemists might come over and mate with your females."

"I'd like to see you mate with our females," said Warren, Navanax being self-identified as the gayest man on the faculty. "We could sell tickets."

Navanax grinned and stretched back in his chair, propping his long legs on the fireguard. He looked correct -- clean-shaven, his brown hair conservatively short -- he even wore a tie. Yet Bill Navanax did not look respectable. He looked like someone who had passed through respectability and come out the other side.

"No, really. I mean, look at it -- we make the rules up, over in Alchemy. In Wizardry, they build bridges with 'em. In Sorcery, they use 'em to take out people's livers. While you folks in Magic watch little dryads, and claim it's morally superior to not interfere in the arcane world. Face it, Warren -- all you've got is your dignity. You can't afford to be a nuisance."

"I'm not drunk enough for this conversation," said Warren. "Aren't you afraid I'll remember it in the morning?"

"No," said Bill, "because you can't afford to be a nuisance." Warren was offended; he would have left, if another alchemist hadn't come over from the buffet table. If he walked away now, Bill would tell the story his way and they'd commiserate about how hard it was for magicians to face the truth.

"May I join you?" Magister Vinca was the senior alchemist, a round little man the same shape as Warren, but with a more courtly air and a neat gray goatee. He was dressed, as always, in an old-fashioned suit and stock, and a thick gold watch-chain stretched across his middle.

"Please do," Warren said. "Bill's abusing me."

"He does that on Thursdays," said Vinca, settling himself comfortably and tucking the napkin around his belly. He addressed himself to his broiled salmon, dissecting it carefully. "On Mondays it's his colleagues, on Wednesdays, the department chair, and on Fridays, the world in general. It is an alchemist's duty to be corrosive."

"I was telling Warren why magicians don't dare have a Week, like the wizards."

Vinca raised his eyebrows. "About the purges? An unappetizing topic. I don't wonder he's peeved with you."

"What purges?" said Warren. "What are you talking about? Are we getting purged? I thought enrollments were up."

"I'm speaking historically," said Vinca, fixing him with a gleaming eye. "The magic purges happened two hundred years ago, when the academy was first being established as a formal entity supported by the government. They decided they didn't want magicians. Magicians, you see, being more loyal to the arcane than to the mundane world. Letting magicians set up on this mountain, it was argued, would mean no less than giving it over to the arcane creatures to do as they list."

"So they fired the magicians?" Warren asked. He thought of a chain of robed men trailing away through the lightly falling snow, disappearing into the valleys below Osyth, and felt cold himself.

"Two hundred years ago?" Vinca's voice was pitying. "You know better than that. They burned them." He dabbed at his mouth with the snowy napkin. "In the main quadrangle, where the alder trees are planted."