Page 11 of Katabasis

“What does that mean?”

“Well—he’s quite hard on them, for the first thing. They tend to burn out quite fast. He doesn’t have a very good completion rate.”

“How bad is it?”

“I’d say about half don’t finish.”

Alice, who up until then had been blessed with kind and helpful professors, didn’t know how bad an advisor really could be. She thought, then, that if you didn’t get along with a professor, that was your fault. She thought, simply, that she would make sure she was in the half that did finish.

“But I want to work with the best in the field,” she said. “I want to get a job.”

This, Dr. Mills could understand. Good jobs in magick were increasingly hard to find.

Every starry-eyed undergraduate wanted to become a magician, but the market was simply not good.

On both sides of the Atlantic the conservatives were several years in power, and this meant funding cuts for universities, shrinking departments, vanishing opportunities.

Most schools had stopped offering magicians tenure when it became apparent that their researchers were more interested in the trivial and esoteric than producing anything useful or profitable or at least somewhat resembling the next nuclear weapon.

It was the age of technological revolutions, of quantum physics and cable television with more than three channels and personal computers.

Magick had been left behind. Magick was good only for dinner parties. Magick did not get you hired.

And there was no magick without the academy.

Universities supplied the chalk, the syllabaries, the pentagram repositories.

Universities published the journals, which determined which spells were valid and which ones weren’t.

Of course there was such a thing as hedge witches—typically PhD students who’d failed out, terminal masters, or college graduates who had never gotten into a graduate program at all.

And they weren’t entirely bereft of resources—many hedge witches scrounged up their own chalk, and organized amateur conferences, and published in poorly rated journals about their wonderful discoveries.

In fact, some of these discoveries were quite interesting.

The open secret, really, was that sometimes the hedge witches found stuff that even tenured professors couldn’t imagine.

But none of it was going to be published in Arcana , and so none of it had credibility.

“I’ll write you the best recommendation I can,” Dr. Mills had said.

“You have a good shot everywhere you apply—I’d feel good in your shoes.

But do be careful, Alice. At this stage it seems like all that could possibly matter is getting in.

Remember there is more at stake than your advisor’s approval, however. And there’s more to life than magick.”

Rich advice, Alice thought, from a man who was well on his way to tenure. She filed these words under “platitudes from adults who think they know better than you,” and then she promptly forgot them.

At Cambridge, the warnings redoubled. Graduate students, even those who weren’t studying magick, cast her sympathetic looks when she explained she was here to work with Grimes.

Other faculty members went out of their way to ask if she was coping all right.

And then there was Professor Grimes’s only other woman advisee, Olivia Kincaid, a puffy girl who seemed always to be crying during the first year Alice was at Cambridge and then was curiously absent during her second.

By Alice’s third, when Olivia should have graduated, she was bizarrely still in coursework.

“He is a monster,” Olivia told her in no uncertain terms over many pints of ale the first night they met. “He is simply a sociopath.”

“How so?” asked Alice.

“You’ll find out soon enough,” Olivia said, vaguely and dramatically, which impelled Alice to write her off as a drama queen.

Olivia took medical leave her fourth year, returned for three weeks of coursework, and then promptly disappeared. No one in the department had ever heard from her again.

Other students recoiled when Alice revealed who her advisor was, and she observed their fear with an immodest thrill.

Though she would never admit it, the idea of working with someone dangerous excited her.

Alice had dazzled her way through years of higher education by being a teacher’s pet; by miraculously succeeding where others had failed.

She relished the thought that her advisor might be harsh, impatient, even cruel to others—for that made his attentions to her worth all the more.

She liked being the exception to the rule.

Favoritism was well and fine if she was the favorite.

Anyhow, Professor Grimes’s cruelty was not random.

You only had to try hard enough, to grind through sleepless nights, to meet his every impossible standard so that he considered you worthy of respect.

This was fair. Wasn’t that just how academia worked?

How any competitive industry worked? The best students got the best jobs.

Alice, for much of her graduate career, considered Professor Grimes a necessary trial.

What didn’t kill you made you stronger—or at least gave you a thicker skin.

For most of her life she had been first in her class, and she saw no reason why the PhD should be different.

She only had three more years to go—and then two, then one—she only had to rub the sleep from her eyes and take a deep breath and survive every day and ignore every inconvenient truth until she had her diploma, until she was free.

And she’d nearly made it, too. That’s what made this whole mess that much more frustrating. The staircase had nearly held. She’d almost survived what no one believed she could, had almost tasted the rewards. If only she’d lasted just a little bit longer. She’d been so, so close.