Tessili Revenge

by Robin Stephen

  Still, Liam searched. He couldn’t shake the feeling of building pressure – like a late summer storm gathering just beyond the horizon. The academy was tense, the orderlies vigilant. Only a week ago a student had vanished – not a junior or senior, but an initiate only recently introduced to spellwork. It wasn’t unheard of for a young student to disappear, but it hadn’t happened in a long time.

  Then, three days later, Liam had read a small announcement on the faculty board stating High Handler Nylan had retired.

  Liam could only guess at the implications. He knew very little about what the girls did on their opportunities. He was a cog in this great machine, only marginally more free than the girls he taught. While his own life was not in jeopardy on a daily basis, he too, one day, would reach the end of his time here. He’d attended retirement parties for other faculty members, seen the slick look of fear in the faces of the professors who’d grown too old to continue their work. Liam didn’t believe they left this place for a peaceful decline any more than he believed seniors graduated and went on to live full, happy lives in the outside world.

  As Liam stood frozen in his doorway, the form in his chair unfolded. He didn’t know who he’d expected, but it wasn’t this slender girl. As she stood, a ray of moonlight fell across her back, illuminating her light hair. “Jey?” He spoke the word in a low, hope-filled whisper.

  She smiled. Liam turned quickly to close the door. His heart was suddenly pounding, his mind scrambling. “You’re alive.” He made sure the latch was fastened. Then he turned, crossing the room to go to her, stopping when he was close enough to see her dark eyes. “Where’s Elle?” He glanced around the room as if he might find her standing in a corner.

  “Safe,” Jey said. “But I don’t have much time. You must listen.”

  And then she told him everything.

  ◈

  Nylan jerked the leash. The grubby girl on the other end stumbled to a stop. She didn’t look at Nylan, but sank to the ground in dull exhaustion.

  Nylan could smell the girl. She bore the musty scent of unwashed human, overlaid with a tang of blood and rot. He could smell himself as well. They were both filthy and exhausted. If they’d had much further to go, they might not have made it.

  He stood for a moment in the thick forest, all his weight resting on his good leg. His bad knee was alive with pain. Today his limp had become so severe he’d nearly fallen a few times.

  Still, Nylan felt only an overpowering swell of satisfaction as he stood in the small clearing and stared at the rock face before him. The stone was rough and gray, unremarkable except for the rune chiseled at eye-level, its edges as sharp and distinct as if it had been carved the day before.

  At last, Nylan was here. Although the place he now stood was less than half a day’s travel from the city of Deramor, it had taken him quite some time to pinpoint the spot. He had dragged the girl back and forth in sweeps for days. But his journey was over. He leaned on the strange stone cane he carried, the surface of which was carved with similar runes and signs, and a sense of triumph built in his chest. Success was his. He had achieved the goal he’d set out to accomplish so long ago.

  It hadn’t been easy. All the forces of the world had seemed to work against him. Nylan had sacrificed much to get here. He’d been stripped of his identity and his freedom alike when he’d been made a handler at the academy. Then it had been years of careful toil, calculated steps, and his first murder to allow him to achieve the position of High Handler at such a young age.

  From there, he’d thought it would be easy. With the seniors at his disposal, he’d set to work orchestrating the slow process of shifting the opinions of a populace. His strategy had been simple. Every time an order came from the Council to send a senior on an opportunity, Nylan had deployed the students as bidden, but also added an extra task of his own. It had worked beautifully for several years. He’d been on task, able to truthfully report he was on course to achieve what he’d promised.

  But the number of students at the academy was dwindling. Nylan had fewer seniors to work with every year. Worse, the more he used them, the more unstable they seemed to become.

  Finally, disaster struck. Three seniors had escaped. Nylan had nearly lost his position and his life alike. He’d begged for a chance to recover the seniors, and it had been granted. He’d regained some stature when he’d reported the threat neutralized. That lie had been easy enough to sell. It only took threatening the two students who’d been with him that day and using them to convince several guards and orderlies they’d seen the escapees die. The bodies of the girls and their little monsters, he’d explained, had fallen into the river.

  Nylan had been restored to his position, but his task, the task he’d gone to the academy to carry out in the first place, was in danger of failing. And his long-time employer, the High Priest of Masidon, also Nylan’s father, was not happy. The critical vote was only a few weeks away. Nylan had been unable to deploy seniors to sway several key members of the council.

  Nylan and his father had long ago hatched the plan Nylan had worked tirelessly to achieve for the majority of his life. Using the Academy and its secret magical forces the church kept hidden from the world, Nylan had agreed to keep his own existence a secret, and also help the High Priest establish the House of Merchants and win appointment to its head, giving him more power in Masidon than either the King or the Queen. In return, the High Priest would give Nylan the map to the mythical grotto where the Tessilari had hidden their riches before they’d fallen.

  The agreement had always seemed fair enough to Nylan. But as his plan fell apart piece by piece, Nylan realized he needed a different way of getting what he wanted. Fortunately, he’d always been a quick thinker with an ability to conceive of alternative solutions.

  With failure imminent, Nylan decided not to wait. In retrospect, he was a little shocked it had taken him so long to realize how strong a hand he held. When he understood the vote might not be cast in his father’s favor, he sent a senior to the High Priest’s mansion. She returned with the document Nylan now clutched in his free hand: the map Nylan had devoted his life to possessing.

  Nylan looked down at it now, a strange thrill shooting through his chest. It was only a copy, but whomever had made the duplicate had taken pains to reproduce the damage the original had sustained. Much of the thick paper was blank. There had once been a headline, but only the letters ILARI remained towards the right edge. A few more incomplete words had been faithfully reproduced as well.

  Fortunately, what had been lost appeared not to be very important. The center of the scroll was intact. A sentence started out of blankness “… vault can only be opened by one of the Tessilari.”

  Below was a map, an illustration of the rune that would mark its location, and a description of the spell that would be needed to open the stone.

  It was enough.

  Nylan jerked the leash again. The girl moaned, but did not rise. He lifted the rope he wore around his own neck. At its end hung a small cage. A tessila lay inside the cage, weighed down by one of the heavy harnesses the academy had devised to keep the ridiculous creatures from killing themselves when separated from their students. The tessila in the cage was in even worse shape than the girl. It had refused to eat since being taken captive. While Nylan had worked around this by forcing a brillbane solution down its throat with a syringe, the beast was all but comatose. It seemed to be willfully imposing death upon its body.

  He raised the cage, his threat implicit, and the girl struggled upright with another moan. “The spell,” Nylan said, handing her the page.

  He’d made the girl prove she could understand and execute the spell before he’d kidnapped her. She’d been a promising initiate, capable of casting spells but young enough to be less dangerous than the juniors and seniors. Still, Nylan felt his chest constrict with fear as she stumbled towards the rune. He limped after, holding her leash, leaning heavily on his weapon.

  The girl reached th
e stone and set her hands on the rune. She glanced over her shoulder at him, touching a depression in the stone that had been carved out to form a small ledge. “My tessila needs to sit here, outside of the cage. He has to touch the stone.”

  Her voice was a small, broken thing. Nylan looped the end of the leash about his wrist so he could work the catch on the cage and lift the weighted creature out. He set it on the ledge, making sure to keep his body between it and the girl.

  The girl stared at the little beast with a kind of desperate hunger. He gave the leash another jerk to remind her of her task. Her neck under the collar was bloody. Yellow puss had soaked into the collar of her dress. He could smell the infection. But it didn’t matter. As soon as she opened this vault for him, he would kill her creature, which would mean she would die as well.

  The girl dropped her eyes to the rune.

  It happened very quickly, then. She did nothing that he could see, made no noise or gesture. But the rune began to glow. A moment later, a fine crack appeared in the cliff face. A rumble started deep within the rock. A slab slid aside, revealing a hidden chamber.

  Nylan felt a swell of triumph, a giddy rush of satisfaction that coursed through him like a drug. For a moment he forgot his shattered knee, his long years of toil, his lost youth.

  The plan, of course, had been for the High Priest and his bastard son to open this door together. It was rumored the riches and artifacts within were powerful and sophisticated, that they would give a man the gifts of a god. This was even better. Nylan wouldn’t have to share.

  But first things first. Nylan must neutralize the last remaining threat. He lifted his hand towards the half dead tessila, intending to end its pitiful life.

  Nylan’s hand was raised, fingers only a bare inch from the ledge where the tessila lay, when a streak of light shot out of the dark space beyond the door. It was a strange light, murky and purple, and somehow cold. It hit Nylan in the chest. He discovered with surprise he could not longer move. For a moment, he stared into the darkness, seeing nothing, frozen in place. Then he saw a shift, and a glow, more purple light illuminating a hunched, spectral form.

  Nylan was dimly aware of the tessila inching its slow way to edge of the ledge, and falling. It tumbled through the air, wings limp. The girl darted forward, catching it before it hit the ground. She jerked against the collar then, throwing the entire weight of her small body against the leash. Nylan, immobile, felt the rope unloop from around his wrist and fall free. Before he could register this or react in any way, the girl scurried away into the trees.

  Nylan had eyes only for the creature that hunched in the purple shadows. It moved towards him, resolving out of darkness. The purple beam of light that had hit him and frozen him, he could now see, originated from a withered, claw-like hand. A thought erupted in his mind – a thought that was in his head but somehow not his. The mind it seemed to come from was an ancient, craggy thing. Hungy hungry hungry need eat need servant wait use this one hungry.

  Fear flowed though Nylan. It came with the sick realization that he had been wrong. Frantically, he tried to recall the partial words that had been on the scroll. He remembered, belatedly, seeing the letters “iod” and “ainment.”

  Understanding crystalized in Nylan’s mind, too late to do him any good. Diod. Two of something.

  The histories said the Tessilari had faced an army. The thoughts that now seeped into Nylan’s head told him otherwise.

  There had been only two diods. The Tessilari had destroyed one, breaking their own strength in the process. The other diod, they had trapped here.

  And Nylan had just set it free.

  ◈

  Jey hopped the creek that ran through the quiet woods, almost smiling at the familiar sounds of the babbling water. She felt a strange swell of nostalgia. The route she was following was a familiar one. How many times had she walked this way, carrying a bundle of brillbane and listening for sounds of pursuit?

  She now remembered the days she and Elle had lived at the cheesery to hide from the academy with a kind of quiet wonder. They’d been terrified, hunted, and alone. They’d also been completely naïve. It seemed to Jey she’d been a different person then.

  Now, the dawn was just beginning to fade the night from the sky. Jey was returning from her second visit to Professor Liam. She knew she couldn’t go to him too often. It was hard to resist the pull, though. He’d told her the academy had declared Jey and Elle dead, Nylan was retired, and all the efforts of the orderlies, guards, and handlers were focused inward, on the current students. This meant it was child’s play for Jey to slip in and out of the faculty compound undetected.

  It had been a relief to find Professor Liam unharmed, to know that he hadn’t suffered for what he’d done to help them. As Jey walked around the base of old, cracked oak, she thought of two other people who might have been declared guilty by association.

  She didn’t know what had become of Holdam and Biala – the older couple who she and Elle had lived with at their cheesery. The night Lokim had finally convinced them to flee, Elle had nearly exhausted herself altering Holdam and Biala’s memories. Only moments later, the academy’s agents had arrived. The girls had never had an opportunity to go back and see if the couple had survived.

  Jey’s footfalls began to land a little faster. The forest around her thinned. At last, she stepped onto a lane. In the distance, she saw an orchard. Across the road from the fruit trees stood an archway, the familiar gates flung open.

  From here, nothing looked any different. Jey drew her cloak in more tightly, ready to cast a passive echo spell should encounter some early tradesman on the road. She wouldn’t speak to anyone, she promised herself. She would just look in to see if Holdam and Biala were safe.

  Walking quickly now, Jey reached the archway and ducked through. The yard opened around her. Ahead lay the house, its painted wooden door colorless in the tentative dawn light. The fresh scent of clover filled the air. Around back, she knew, stood the small room she and Elle had lived in, the cheesery itself, and the animal pens.

  Jey paused in the yard, suddenly uncertain. It was too early even for Holdam to be stirring. He’d be asleep, which meant she’d need to break into his house and creep into his bedroom to learn anything. She chewed her lip for a moment, standing in the quiet yard. A light breeze stirred her hair. She felt suddenly very alone. Phril was dozing on his brillbane bush far away, though he could return to her at any time. The silver stitchring was a cool presence against the skin of her chest.

  Jey was on the verge of changing her mind, of turning to go, when a sudden light flared in the dim dawn. It came not from the front windows, but from the kitchen at the back of the house. Jey could see the light reflected on the pale wall that encircled the cheesery. Encouraged, she drew up to the house.

  She’d been expecting to see Biala, hair tied back in a gray braid, stooping over the oven as she stirred up the fire. What she actually saw sent a ripple of shock and confusion through her. The emotion was so forceful, Phril woke up in a heartbeat and launched himself off his bush. He burst through the stitchring and tangled in Jey’s shirt, where he clawed and hissed. Jey’s vision darkened slightly and her mind felt momentarily cloudy as the working of the spell on the stitchring drew the considerable pull of energy it required. She blinked, freed Phril, and tried to convince herself she hadn’t seen what she thought she’d seen. She looked through the window again.

  But the girl was still there, seated on a stool in Holdam and Biala’s kitchen. She was young and slight, probably not yet 10. And she wore the unmistakable blue gown of an initiate of Tessili Academy.

  Holdam and Biala were there as well. Biala wore a faded house-coat. Holdam was fully dressed, but his cheeks were rough with stubble. There were visible tear tracks on Biala’s face, and Holdam looked both angry and scared.

  Phril hissed at the sight of the girl. He stalked down Jey’s arm to draw closer to the window. Then he went still as Jey noticed where the attenti
on of all three people was directed.

  A tessila lay on the table in an inert heap. It was immobile in a way that was entirely unnatural for one of the temperamental creatures. Jey looked more critically at the girl, this time noting that her dress was filthy and ragged, the skirts torn to ribbons. Her hair was more of a tangle than a braid. And Jey also saw how the girl sagged on her stool. Her eyes, blank and glazed over, were fixed on her inert tessila.

  ◈

  Jey had no illusions as to how well her decision was going to go over with the Tessilari. She hadn’t technically even been authorized to visit Professor Liam. Her place among the Tessilari was not a comfortable one. For nine months she’d been pushing them to do something about the academy, all the while fearing she’d given away too much freedom for the security of the hidden valley. Now that she was back out in the world, being able to take action without first asking permission felt liberating.

  Still, she was walking a fine line. She hadn’t been forbidden to visit Liam, but she didn’t doubt the Tessilari would issue such an order if they learned of her late-night activities. She could only imagine they’d be even less happy if she revealed herself to two citizens of Masidon.

  But the girl was in bad shape. The tessila seemed even worse. The strained looks on Holdam and Biala’s faces showed that they did not know how to help. How could they?

  Jey made her decision, and began to move. Consequences be damned, she was here, and she was going to help. She crept around the side of the house to the back and tried the latch on the door that led into the kitchen from the yard. It turned easily.

  Jey pushed, and stepped inside.

  Holdam and Biala both jumped and spun as the latch clicked. Biala’s face blanched as Jey stepped in and closed the door behind her. Holdam’s reaction was more surprising. He glanced about the room, darted to the side, and grabbed a cleaver from its hook on the wall. He placed himself squarely between Jey and the girl on the stool, his plain, solid face a sudden mask of rage. He spoke, his normally friendly voice grating out in low a growl. “We’ll not be giving her up again.”